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People in small village of Jaškovo celebrate after re-claiming Guinness world record with line of almost 9,000 baked strudels

‘If it’s taking longer, ask yourself why.’

Mice turning tiny steering wheels to move shapes on a screen have helped scientists produce the first brain-wide map of decision-making at single-cell resolution in a mammal. In two Nature papers published Sept. 3, an international team of 22 groups, co-led by three Princeton University neuroscience labs, charted the activity of more than 600,000 neurons as mice performed a decision-making task. The resulting dataset offers an unprecedented view of how distributed neural networks work together across the brain to guide behavior.

Classic essay about how software routinely bumbles human names.

Wouldn't it be great if the plants in your home could do more than just sit there looking pretty? Researchers at South China Agricultural University in the city of Guangzhou have found a way to upgrade them into soft glowing night lights in a range of hues, with the use of nanoparticles.

For years, researchers have puzzled over how two ingredients for life first linked up on early Earth. Now, they’ve found the “missing link,” and demonstrated this reaction in the lab.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20250827153505/https://www.404media.co/scientists-make-breakthrough-in-solving-the-mystery-of-lifes-origin/

Socialists accept that some degree of inequality may be inevitable in a complex society. But there’s one kind of inequality that’s intolerable: the kind where resources are allocated according to factors that individuals can’t control.

The origin of the Bill of Rights was less a principled and honorable declaration of the founders’ commitment to fundamental liberties and more a compromise to get the states to ratify the new Constitution of the United States.

Of special interest to Americans, of course.

A large balloon lands in a residential street lined with cars and telegraph poles and wires.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40728002

S4 E18. Will an AMR500 supercharged Kubota diesel Honda insight outrun a stock Honda insight? [16:05]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40733183

How Indonesian Instant Noodles Became a Nigerian Sensation [19:37]

A landmark church in Sweden began a two-day journey to its new home on Tuesday, 19 August, time-lapse video shows. The Kiruna Church has been relocated to save it from ground subsidence and the expansion of the world's largest underground iron ore mine. It was slowly moved down an Arctic road, part of a 30-year project to relocate thousands of people and buildings from the city in the country's far north. The 600-tonne, 113-year-old church was lifted from its foundations and onto a specially built trailer. Kiruna Church is one of Sweden's largest wooden structures, often voted its most beautiful. It will travel three miles to a brand-new Kiruna city centre at a speed of 500 metres/hour.

A half century ago ago, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word “fractal” and pioneered a new type of geometry.

As if hard vacuum, intense cosmic radiation, corrosive dust, meteors, and temperatures whiplashing hundreds of degrees between night and day weren't enough, personnel at future Moon bases will be at significant peril from moonquakes.

Archeoplasty is a project that tells the story of plastic pollution through the finds that the sea returns, transforming them into a concrete testimony of our impact on the environment.

The site is in Italian, but it can be translated using the translation feature in Firefox.

Interactive visualization of technological history

Abstract:

Groups that argue for postponing the necessary action and groups that deny climate science altogether come from different traditions, but can also co-exist and arguably even strengthen each other. This chapter investigates the case of Norway, where the dominant view on oil and gas production – which acknowledges that climate change is primarily caused by humans, but says that Norway can both produce more oil and gas and contribute to saving the planet – exists side by side with a more classical denialist position. The chapter shows how these views co-exist even within the Norwegian far-right Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet), which comes from a classical denialist position but needed to officially accept the Norwegian fossil ideology of delay in order to be accepted by the Conservative Party as a governing coalition partner. When in government, between 2013 and 2020, denialism nonetheless remained a strong tendency within the party. It is argued that these two positions can so easily co-exist in a government and within a party because they share a common view on business friendliness and nationalism, and even more important: the two positions are in Norway grounded on more or less the exact same policy for oil and gas extraction.

This point, for example, highlights a phenomenon that few have on the radar:

One international poll published in 2019 compared denialism in 28 countries, and put Norway at the top, together with Saudi Arabia (Smith, 2019).

Perhaps also interesting is this 2024 doctoral thesis by another researcher about the situation in Sweden: Fuelling Denial The climate change reactionary movement and Swedish far-right media Fuelling Denial.

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Synchron shows a man navigating an iPad using only his brain, made possible by a BCI implant and Apple’s new native brain input support.

To keep solar power stations from getting lazy, Sandia National Laboratories scientist John Sandusky is looking to give heliostat mirrors a side hustle. At the National Solar Thermal Test Facility he's experimenting with getting them to hunt for asteroids at night.

According to Forbes, as of early March, 2023 there were 2,640 billionaires worldwide, 735 in the U.S. alone. These billionaires have each amassed at least one billion dollars worth of assets, including stocks, real estate, and cash — many of them much more than that.

But just how big is one billion? A number that large is hard to conceive of. Well, it's 1,000,000,000; ten to the ninth power; one-thousand millions. That might help some…but not much. How big is a million? Hard to say when we're just imagining it in our head or looking at figures on a page.

Wealth is also fairly abstract. What can one dollar buy? And how is a dollar earned? And what about one billion dollars…

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