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Science and Technology links (January 9th 2021)
- The Earth is spinning faster and faster: The 28 fastest days on record (since 1960) all occurred in 2020, with Earth completing its revolutions around its axis milliseconds quicker than average.
- We are soon getting a new Wi-Fi standard called Wi-Fi 6: it supports data transmission at over 1 GB/s, nearly three times the speed of previous standards.
- Eli Dourado predicts:
By the middle of the decade, augmented reality will be widely deployed, in the same way that smart watches are today. Glasses will be computing devices. Every big tech company has a glasses project at a relatively mature stage in the lab today. The need for the glasses to understand context could result in much smarter digital assistants than today’s Siri, Alexa, and so on.
I agree with Dourado.
- Vitamin D3 may reduce the risk of developing advanced cancer.
- High-tech running shoes improve elite marathon performance.
- In our brains, neurons are connected toghether by their dendrites. It seems that, at least in human beings, large dendrites are capable of computation on their own.
- A study of 145 journals in various fields, spanning 1.7 million authors, revealed that there was no obvious bias against authors with female names and, in fact, female authors might even be slightly favored by referees. Such a study does not show that sexism does not exist. It does not show that journals have never been biased against female authors.