Hello all you squishy eyeballers, welcome back! I hope you enjoy the articles I found interesting superfood today. Our first story comes from Tennessee where the governor there has proposed a program that would allow high school graduates free tuition at community colleges. It looks like it may be funded by the state's scholarship fund's surplus that's sourced from the state lottery. I think it's great that the governor isn't just letting the lottery money just sit there and is providing an opportunity for people to make their lives better.
Following that, here's the equally unlikely story of sanity prevailing in a public sphere, over in Calgery, Canada, health officials have told students unvaccinated against measles to stay home. With all the crazy anti-vaccine talk going around I think it's great that public officials have taken the logical and correct stance to dramatically slow down or stop the spread of certain diseases. I can only hope those who choose to be vectors for preventable diseases think about the effect their ignorance can have on the immunocompromised or anyone who happens to be pregnant. It's known that prenatal exposure to measles could significantly damage the fetus.
Speaking of protecting yourself from communicable diseases, according to an article over at neowin.net, the number one paid app in the Google play store is a scam application pretending to protect you from a slightly different threat, computer viruses. It seems the author of the app followed the template that some commercial anti-virus companies operate with, sell the fear. In a textbook case of the placebo effect, the app got a number of positive comments as to its effectiveness after it was purchased, with one commenter even indicating that their phone seems to run faster after it installed.
In other news of people faking things, CBS has admitted it faked the car noise in a report on Tesla's electric car. This was obvious to anyone who knows about Tesla's car technology because the car is pretty much silent. I understand that the piece was quite positive on Tesla so this error is most likely chalked up to someone who thought the audio track was messed up and 'fixed' it.
In additional public mess ups, Russian television host Dmitry Kiselyov has been forced to cancel his planned family holiday in far northern Norway because he doesn't have a visa. Mr. Kiselyov recently went on a broadcast show and 'reminded' his viewers that Russia is the only country in the world that can nuke the U.S. into oblivion, so of course Norway would welcome him with open arms. The whole thing is a bit confusing though because it seems he didn't actually apply for a visa. The whole drama seems a bit artificial to me.
Continuing with artificial creations, biomedical engineers at Duke university have created a self-healing artificial muscle. According to the article, the engineers observed the muscle through a window on the back of a living mouse having modified the muscle to produce florescent flashes as the muscle contracted and grew stronger. This is an important first step in our ability to repair actual muscle injuries and while the current study is too small to scale up for fixing human muscles, hopefully they're not too far away.
In more engineering advancement, one that can be used a bit faster than the research at Duke, Seagate has announced a 6 terabyte hard disk drive that can be used at an enterprise level for everything from cloud data centers to centralized storage. This is a good sign that spinning magnetic media is not yet dead and still packs an economical punch in the price per megabyte vs flash storage. I'm really happy to see the data sheet says the drive comes with a 5 year warranty, but will it cost less than an arm and a leg?
Moving away from science and technology back into the realm of I'll-do-what-I-want-because-I-know-better-than-you, a French organic wine grower seems to be in a bit of hot water (or would that be wine?) over his refusal to spray his grapes with a pesticide. Granted, you can't claim to be organic if you spray your grapes, but if you're surrounded by non-organic farms, some of the pesticide is going to make its way over to your farm. So once more, by not spraying his farm, it becomes a refuge for disease and can affect not only him, but everyone else in the region. Since the wine grower refusing the pesticide cultivates his farm using "biodynamic" methods, he is essentially claiming that he doesn't need to treat his grapes because of a magical connection to the universe.
Finally, speaking of connections, over at the washington post it seems that our habitual behavior of scanning and skimming things online have started to infiltrate our reading of things offline as well. I would tell you more about the story, but I only skimmed it. I do find it a bit incredulous though and think it's a matter of training your mind's attention span.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading and remember, keep those eyeballs squishy!
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