NTM

Space junk: a recycling station could be cleaning up in Earth orbit by 2050

2019-07-26T12:14:00.003-07:00

There are about 22,000 large objects orbiting the Earth, including working and broken satellites and bits of old rocket from past space expeditions. If you include all the equipment dropped by astronauts while floating in space and the debris from colliding satellites down to around 1cm in size, there are about one million bits of space junk in Earth’s orbit.

These numbers are likely to be underestimates. With more satellites and rockets launching each year, collisions with space junk are becoming more likely. Losing a satellite could mean your TV reception is poor or the weather forecast is a bit less reliable. But it could also mean aeroplanes can’t navigate properly and people aren’t made aware of a tornado that’s bearing down towards them.

A long-term solution is needed to clean up space. The Gateway Earth Development Group is a collection of academics from universities around the world who propose turning this potential catastrophe into a resource. By 2050, Gateway Earth – a fully operational space station with a facility to recycle old satellites and other junk – could be up and running.

Earth’s orbits

There are two main orbits that satellites exist in. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is about 200 km to 1,000 km above the Earth and is where the International Space Station orbits the planet every 90 minutes, along with thousands of other satellites. At 36,000 km, the forces acting on satellites cause them to stay in the same place within their orbit. This is called Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO). Satellites here are stationary above a single point on Earth, making them useful for weather forecasting and communications.

The International Space Station floats in orbit around Earth. Could a similar structure be designed to house a space junk recycling facility? Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock

LEO is very crowded, and there is a risk of collisions here which could create a shower of debris so wide it collides with other satellites, creating more and more debris in a chain reaction. Eventually the entire orbit could become so full of debris it’s unusable. A lot of debris already litters LEO, but technology is being developed and tested to remove it. The situation is more tricky for GEO, though.

In GEO, when a satellite comes towards the end of its life, the owners will attempt to put it in a higher “graveyard” orbit where it’s left to drift about 300 km to 400 km away from an internationally agreed protection zone. But only about 80% of all satellites that reach the end of their life in GEO actually make it to the graveyard orbit. The other 20% need dealing with as a matter of urgency – and that’s where a recycling facility in space could help.

Recycling in space

The graveyard orbit is effectively an abandoned junkyard with no caretaker. Flashes of bright light have been seen in there and it’s believed satellites are colliding or exploding from unused fuel or degraded batteries, these debris have the potential to fall back to GEO, threatening satellites there.

The law currently isn’t on the side of a collective solution to space junk. Even if an out-of-control satellite is heading towards one that’s functioning and worth billions of dollars, international agreements forbid action to remove it without the owner’s permission, even if a space drone could intervene and take it to the graveyard orbit.

By repairing, repurposing or recycling satellites and “space junk” at a facility in Earth’s orbit, this material could help build future spacecraft or exploration outposts, like a base on the moon. Using what’s already floating around up there means there are no launch costs and using those resources will reduce space junk. It’s the equivalent of building a home in the UK from local materials rather than importing bricks from Australia.

Read more: How to build a moon base

Recycling satellites could provide not just raw materials for more construction in space, but a revenue stream to fund it. My research showed that an orbit 150 km further out that GEO Gateway Earth would have access to the whole of GEO. From there whole satellites could be taken by space drones into the floating recycling centre for a tune-up if needed.

Providing these services could bring in over USD$8 billion per year, but the space laws that would govern this work are outdated and need revising. Luckily, this is something the UN are already working on, and our members are working with them to overcome barriers.

A computer-generated image of satellites in GEO and LEO, excluding the debris which vastly outnumbers satellites. NASA Orbital Debris Program Office

If these satellites are no longer serviceable, the shell could be used for other purposes. Some of the recycled materials from space junk could be ground down and used to 3D print radiation shielding for Gateway Earth. Studies have shown that the efficiency of solar panels from disused satellites only drops to about 24% after 15 years, so these could be gathered and used to power the station.

Some of the most advanced cameras ever built are in space. These could be refitted onto Gateway Earth or new satellites to scan space for asteroids that could collide with Earth. As the business of deploying and using satellites is set to grow at a phenomenal rate, having an outpost in orbit that can manage all of them will become vital.

Gateway Earth has plans to generate further revenue in future by acting as a space hotel, a satellite and spacecraft construction facility and a fuelling hub for spacecraft travelling between planets. We need a space equivalent for the plastics wake-up call that people heard from Blue Planet 2. There is still time, but plans for cleaning up Earth’s orbit need to be acted on now. Over the next ten years, 150 new GEO satellites are planned which will increase the risk of collision significantly.

WordCamp Central America Organizers Prepare Proposal for 2020 Event in Managua, Nicaragua

2019-07-26T12:14:00.001-07:00

Managua, Nicaragua – image credit: CostaRica.org

WordCamp Europe’s continuing success has inspired other parts of the WordPress world to work towards getting their own regional camps off the ground. With a little help from WCEU mentors and inspiration from WordCamp Nordic’s proposal, WordCamp Asia is now officially on the schedule for February 21-23, 2020, in Bangkok, Thailand. WordCamp Central America is on deck to be the next new regional WordCamp with a proposal targeting 2020 for an inaugural event in Managua, Nicaragua.

Members of the Central American community began discussing the possibility of a larger event at the most recent WordCamp Managua 2019. For the past five years, Central America has been home to a growing number of local WordPress communities, with 12 meetups across five countries and a total of more than 4,000 participants as of July 2019. Meetup organizers have hosted more than 230 events since 2014, averaging four events per month.

In the working proposal, a document that was forked from the Nordic and Asian WordCamp proposals, organizers outlined why the timing is right for a regional camp in Central America:

The local WordPress communities have also experienced an exponential growth. In the last five years the local WordPress Meetup groups have increased fivefold. Moreover, the collaboration between the Central American communities is more active than ever; sharing experiences and resources, members attending events in neighboring countries, giving talks and volunteering in WordCamps.

This can be explained not only by the relative closeness of our countries, but also by the shared culture, values and identity of the Central American people.

We believe that hosting a Central American WordCamp will further strengthen the bonds between the local communities and give birth to new initiatives and collaborations between the local WordPress Meetup groups.

San José, Costa Rica, has the largest local WordPress community with more than 2,000 meetup members and 750 attendees at recent WordCamps. Managua, Nicaragua, the second largest community, was selected as the first host city due to its central location, direct flights from all major cities in the region, and wide availability of bus services. It is also one of the most affordable capital cities in the region and does not require visas for citizens of other Central American countries.

Organizers are planning a three-day event, beginning with Contributor Day, with four tracks during the main conference days. They are eyeing early October 2020 to avoid conflicts with other WordCamps that are frequently attended by the local community.

WordCamp Central America’s proposal has not yet been officially submitted but if it is approved, the event would be a strong addition to the region’s growing technology sector. It also has the potential to expand and amalgamate the local communities through shared knowledge and experience.

If you want to get involved, check out the proposal in progress and join the dedicated Slack workspace to participate in discussions.

Pure altruism – the connection that explains why we help strangers

2019-07-25T21:12:00.001-07:00

Just over two years ago, my home city of Manchester suffered a terrorist attack. Waiting in the arena foyer after an Ariana Grande concert, a young man detonated a bomb strapped to his chest, killing 22 people and injuring several hundred. But in the midst of the senseless savagery of the attack, there were many stories of heroism and selflessness.

An off-duty doctor who was walking away from the venue ran back into the foyer to help the victims. A woman who saw crowds of confused and frightened teenagers guided around 50 of them to the safety of a nearby hotel where she shared her phone number on social media so that parents could come and pick their children up.

Taxi drivers across the city switched off their meters and took concert-goers and other members of the public home. As one paramedic at the scene commented: “There was an unbelievable amount of people doing what they could to help … I saw people pulling together in a way I have never seen before.”

He added: “The thing I will remember more than any other is the humanity that was on display. People were catching each other’s eye, asking if they were okay, touching shoulders, looking out for one another.”

Such acts of altruism are almost always a feature of emergency situations. In a London street in 2015, a cyclist was trapped under the wheel of a double decker bus. A crowd of around 100 people gathered together, and in an amazing act of coordinated altruism, lifted the bus so that the man could be freed.

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The question of why human beings are sometimes prepared to risk their own lives to save others has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. According to the modern Neo-Darwinian view, human beings are basically selfish, the “carriers” of thousands of genes, whose only aim is to survive and replicate themselves.

Under this view, it makes sense to help people who are closely related to us genetically, such as family members or distant cousins, because what may seem like self-sacrifice actually benefits our gene pool. But what about when we help people to whom we are not closely genetically related, or even animals?

A variety of different explanations to account for this have been put forward. One suggests that perhaps there is no such thing as “pure” altruism at all. When we help strangers (or animals), there must always be some level of benefit to ourselves, such as making us feel good about ourselves, or gaining the respect of others.

Or perhaps altruism is an investment strategy: we do good deeds to others in the hope that they will return the favour (known as [reciprocal altruism]. It could even be a way of demonstrating our resources, showing how wealthy or able we are, so that we become more attractive and enhance our reproductive possibilities.

Rooted in empathy

I don’t doubt that these reasons apply sometimes. Many acts of kindness may be primarily (or just partially) motivated by self-interest. But is it naive to suggest that “pure” altruism can exist as well? That in the very moment when an altruistic act takes place, our motivation is purely to alleviate another person’s suffering?

In my view, pure altruism is rooted in empathy. Empathy is sometimes described as the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. But in its deepest sense, empathy is the ability to feel, not just to imagine, what others are experiencing. It is the ability to actually enter the mind space of another person (or being) so that you can sense their feelings and emotions. In this way, empathy can be seen as the source of compassion and altruism.

Empathy creates a connection that enables us to feel compassion. We can sense the suffering of others and this gives rise to to an impulse to alleviate their suffering, which in turn gives rise to altruistic acts. Because we can feel with other people, we are motivated to help them when they are in need.

Connected. Shutterstock/vectorfusionart

As I suggest in my book, Spiritual Science, it is wrong to think of human beings as completely separate entities, made up of selfish genes that are only concerned with their own survival and replication. The capacity for empathy suggests a deep interconnection between us.

There is a sense in which we are part of a shared network of consciousness. It is this which makes it possible for us to identify with other people, to sense their suffering and respond to it with altruistic acts. We can sense other people’s suffering because, in a sense, we are them. So we feel the urge to alleviate other people’s suffering – and to protect and promote their well-being – just as we would our own.

In the words of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:

My own true inner being actually exists in every living creature …[This] is the ground of compassion … and whose expression is in every good deed.

In other words, there is no need to make excuses for altruism. Instead, we should celebrate it as a transcendence of seeming separateness. Rather than being unnatural, altruism is an expression of our most fundamental nature – connection.

Learn How to Build a Headless WordPress App with WPCasts’ Free Crash Course

2019-07-25T19:30:00.001-07:00

Alex Young, creator of the WPCasts video tutorials site, has published a free crash course that offers a brief introduction to using WordPress as a headless CMS. The 28-minute tutorial covers the basics of setting up a bare bones React application that uses WPGraphQL to query ACF data.

Young begins by installing four plugins: WPGraphQL, WPGraphiQL, Advanced Custom Fields, and WPGraphQL for ACF. He demonstrates how to use WPGraphiQL, which provides a GraphiQL IDE inside the WordPress admin, to test GraphQL queries before adding them to the app and check to ensure ACF data is being queried.

Young gave a walkthrough of installing Create React App to quickly get a simple app up and running. When asked on Reddit why he didn’t use Next.js or Gatsby, he said he just wanted to present the concept with something that might already be familiar to developers.

“If I were going to launch this into production I would use Gatsby,” he said. “In this tutorial I used CRA since it’s a very simple install and I figured most people have used it before. I’ll eventually do a more in-depth and real-world example in the future. But I hope this video helps people understand the basic concept of using WP as a Headless CMS.”

Young has produced 18 videos since launching WPCasts on YouTube in March 2019. Although the channel has a corresponding website with more videos available for monthly and yearly subscribers, Young said he thinks it is important to release some introductory content for free.

“I am a self-taught developer who relied heavily on YouTube, blogs, and individual developers creating free learning material (Chris Coyier, Wes Bos, etc.),” he said. “So by creating free content, I feel like I can help developers who are just starting out and need those resources just like I did.”

Young’s day job at Clearlink involves managing about approximately 20 WordPress sites with different purposes and features. He said he hopes to move these sites to a headless setup over the next few years.

His WPCasts project is still very new but Young said he has received helpful feedback from the community that he is incorporating into future videos. The headless WordPress crash course tutorial seemed to hit at the right time when these setups are gaining popularity. His tutorial has been enthusiastically received, passing 600 views on YouTube in less than 24 hours.

“I feel like Headless WordPress is the future of WP development,” Young said. “With powerful frameworks like Gatsby and Next, we have the best of both worlds – a fast and extendible frontend, and a CMS that has proven itself year after year.

“With tools like WPGraphQL, ACF, and others, WordPress will be my tool of choice for the foreseeable future. I hope that the tutorials I’ve made and future tutorials will help others see the power of WordPress and break the misconception that WordPress is ‘just a blogging platform.’”

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8 Best Prank Links to Send to Friends

2019-07-25T17:09:00.001-07:00

Table of Contents

Life has become busy due to coping up with the fierce competition in the market. We work day and night to make profits. We are forgetting to take out some time to have fun and enjoy. If you don’t have much time to go out, you can prank with your friends using your laptop. Yes, there are many prank links to send to your friends that may fool them. Prank links mean there are websites created online which you can use to prank with your friends even by sending them via email or there are prank links for WhatsApp as well.

True friends are those who never take things in a bad way so you can prank with your good friends only. Don’t ever try to prank with the people who take things seriously. Moreover, always take care that by pranking, you are not playing with anyone’s feelings. Anyway, let’s have those 8 Prank Links to Send to Friends.

8 Prank Links to Send to Friends to Fool Them

Shadyurl

I have tried many prank websites, and I found this prank link to send to friends for making them fool. This is the best one out of those. Just visit Shadyurl.com, and enter any website link, and click Submit.

It will change your link into a shady looking link which if you send to your friend, they will be in suspicion whether to click or not. It actually works like URL shortener as well but it makes them look shady. Try it out on your friends, and see their reactions, you will enjoy for sure.

Fakewhats.com

FakeWhats.com is a website where you can create fake conversation along with all settings which will exactly look like a real WhatsApp chat. You can create such fake WhatsApp chat fake WhatsApp chat using any of your friend’s name or anyone and show that to your friends to prank with them.

There are so many options, use all of them to customize the conversation to make that look even more authentic one.

Moreover, you can use this prank website in many ways to prank with your friends. This is the best prank links for WhatsApp.

Hacker Typer

You must have seen in the movies, hackers typing on black colored screen with green text, and it looks so amazing. If you want to show someone that you can do that type of thing as well, Hacker Typer is the best tool for that. Just start typing, and it will look like a hacker is typing. You can show this to your friends and troll them.

Enjoy fooling your friends.

Geek Typer

Geek Typer is pretty similar to the Hacker Typer but it gives you customization options to choose a theme for the screen for typing. There are many themes out there, you just have to select one and start typing.

You can even customize the color of the background and text to give it more hacking kind of feel. Doing this, and typing in such a way in front of any of your friend may give him a sign that you are a professional hacker. That is really a nice way to prank with your friends.

Love Calculator

Love Calculator is a website where you can register and get prank link to send to your friends which will show them a love calculator. Now, when they enter their and their partner’s name, all the details will be emailed to you. And, they will come to know about this prank as when they submit, they get the message that it was a prank; your and your partner’s name is emailed to <email address>.

This is one of the funniest ways to prank to your friends as with the fun, you get know your friends’ lovers names as well.

Shit Express

Shit Express is a website from where you can send anyone the poop of any selected animal. Yes, this is one of the best prank links to send to your friends so that they prank with their other friends by ordering poop of an animal. That is a real fun sending a smelly gift to someone you want.

News of Future

News of Future is a trolling website where all the news publications are of the future. You can this prank link to your friends and troll them as they will be blown away with the contents published on this website.

Greatbigstuff

Greatbigstuff is a prank website actually from where you can buy regular things irregular size. For example, if you want to buy a pen, it will be of huge size. You can just order something for your friends and troll them, or you can send this website to your friend so that he can troll others. This is one of the best prank links to send to your friends for having fun.

Conclusion

These are the best prank links to send to friends to troll them and help them find these links so that they can prank with others. There are hundreds of websites which you can use to troll your friends. But, always remember not to hurt anyone’s feeling while playing a prank with them.

My favorite is the Hacker Typer since I am a fan of hacking movies, and seeing codes being typed on black & Blue screen is fun and refreshing for me.

Which is your favorite one?

Internet jokesters call for people to storm Area 51 to find aliens – here's some science to consider

2019-07-25T14:24:00.001-07:00

Millions of people have signed up to a tongue-in-cheek Facebook event to storm the US military base “Area 51” on 20 September to discover whether aliens are inside. While the organisers said it was a joke, the US military wasn’t amused, responding it would “discourage anyone from trying to enter the area”.

It’s no wonder. Despite the humorous nature of the event (there are some amusing comments on the page), there will be those who take this seriously and could get themselves arrested or injured. So to help further discourage anyone who is seriously pondering whether there are aliens hidden in the base, let’s take a look at the chances that there could be, according to science.

Area 51 is a military training range at Groom Lake, Nevada, and for decades has been at the centre of a conspiracy theory that the US government is hiding evidence of extraterrestrials visiting the Earth.

wikipedia, CC BY-SA

The idea that aliens exist has been around as long as people have understood that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. As a child I remember reading “real life stories” of people claiming they had been abducted by aliens, and my main question was, “why are nearly all these abductees American?” While it is highly likely that something traumatic happened to these claimants, there is absolutely no evidence of any of them being abducted by extraterrestrial beings.

Instead, the popularity of UFO sightings, space missions and sci-fi TV shows likely contributed to the rise in such claims in the 1960s, before they started declining in the late 1990s. That said, the odd entertaining story to do with aliens does still appear today.

Area 51 conspiracy

The idea of Area 51 storing an alien vessel has its roots in Roswell, New Mexico. In 1947, a farmer there found unidentified material in his fields. The US military claimed this to be from a weather balloon, although many years later admitted that this was actually from a top secret military project to detect sound waves from an atomic blast.

Only a few years later, the then-secret Area 51 began testing its first spy planes. Local residents noticed these high altitude flyovers and attributed them to UFOs. Then in 1989, a man called Robert Lazar claimed that he worked on alien technology at Area 51, which is at the heart of the modern conspiracy theory. It should be noted that, although Lazar claims to have a Masters degree in physics, his stated institutions do not list him as a former student. This latest Facebook event comes only six months after the release of a Netflix documentary about Lazar.

Back gate area 51. wikipedia

Like those of other prominent conspiracy theorists, Lazar’s statements have led to an enduring false belief that has the potential to cause harm. As such theories go, this is at least more probable than the idea of the Earth being flat, lizards wearing people suits to take government positions, or space pirates.

The odds

So what are the chances of alien life being present elsewhere in the universe? And how likely is it that they could visit us here? Most scientists agree that, given the vast size of the universe, there must be other life out there somewhere.

When astro-biologists look for signs of life in the solar system, they are looking for the traces left behind by basic organisms. Methane could be one such trace, which explains the excitement over the detection of methane plumes on Mars. If emitted regularly, methane could indicate carbon-based microbial life.

When assessing the chances that we will encounter advanced aliens, the most common approach is the Drake equation. Presented in 1961, it provides an estimate of the number of technologically advanced civilisations we could communicate with in our galaxy. The equation relies on seven variables multiplied together.

One of these – the average rate of star formation in our galaxy – can be estimated reasonably well. Another – the fraction of stars with planetary systems – we are working on. However, the five other variables, which include the average number of planets that can support life per star, the proportion of planets where life can become a civilisation and the fraction of civilisations that have the technology to transit the universe are all completely unknown.

Attempting to estimate any of these is in fact impossible, as we know of no other planets with life on that we can compare to our own. Do we only consider Earth-like planets, or do we also consider planets where silicon-based life (rather than our carbon-based) could thrive?

Investigators have come up with answers to the Drake equation, ranging from us being alone in the universe to there being several thousand other civilisations out there. However, the lack of knowledge about the parameters makes the equation pretty useless at present, in my opinion.

Searches for advanced extra-terrestrial life have mainly focused on looking for noise in radio or microwave signals which could indicate transmitted messages. These longer wavelengths of light are dispersed less when passing through interstellar gas and dust than visible or infrared light would be. So they are a good medium for transmitting such messages. But, to date, we haven’t found any.

Scientists are also considering using active radio telescopes for sending messages to space, something the late physicist Stephen Hawking stated could be dangerous as alien civilisations may respond with hostility.

But while we can’t rule out other life in the universe, it is virtually impossible that there could be alien visitors already on Earth. For them to visit us, they would have to detect us first. And we can assume that they would do this in the same way that we are looking for them, using radio noise.

As a planet, we have only been emitting man-made radio waves for the last 100 years. As radio waves travel at the speed of light, only aliens within 100 light years of us could even know we are here. Considering the diameter of the Milky Way is 105,000 light years, we haven’t even begun to be detectable to most of our local galaxy, let alone the universe.

Ultimately the idea of storming Area 51 is a foolhardy one, as there will not be anything to see except a military response. Although it is likely there are aliens out there somewhere in the universe, they definitely aren’t here on Earth.

Curious Kids: how high could I jump on the moon?

2019-07-25T07:37:00.001-07:00

How high could I jump on the moon? – Miles, aged five, London, UK.

If you were lucky enough to go to the moon, you’d be able to jump six times as high there as you can here on Earth. Try it: jump up and imagine you’re on the moon. Six times further up you’d go (better not look down).

How does that work? Well, it’s all to do with gravity, that mysterious force that pulls you down when you jump up, and makes sure the people living on the other side of the Earth don’t just fall off.

Gravity doesn’t stick you to the ground like glue, or pull you back to earth like an elastic band. What you’re actually feeling is space changing shape. You can do an experiment to show how it works. You need a towel, an apple or an orange, a pea and four friends.

Get your friends to each hold a corner of the towel so that it is nice and flat. Ask your friends to close their eyes. Then place the fruit in the middle. Your friends will know when you did so, because they felt the towel pull at their hands. This is because the fruit has got “mass” – it’s made of stuff.

Now place the pea somewhere on the towel and let go. You’ll see it rolls towards the fruit in the middle – not because the fruit pulled at it, but because the fruit changed the shape of the towel, and the pea noticed that.

Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation, which gives children the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.com. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll do our very best.

Anything with mass changes space in this way. You do, too – just a tiny amount. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the moon orbits around the Earth, since our planet is so much bigger.

But wait – it’s not just size that matters, mass does too. The moon is just over a quarter of the size of the Earth. But if it had the same mass, then the moon’s gravity would be about 14 times stronger than Earth’s and you’d hardly be able to jump at all.

If that same mass was squeezed down to the size of a village, it’d become a black hole, and we’d all be sucked into it.

But the moon is made of similar stuff as the outer bits of the Earth, which are less dense and float on top of the heavier core in the middle, like oil floats on top of water.

This means the moon actually has 80 times less mass than Earth. So, the gravity on the moon is (80 divided by 14) six times as weak. And that’s what makes it so easy (and fun) to hop around on – just like the Apollo astronauts used to do.

US National Archives/Giphy

But beware: when you come down after your record-breaking jump, the landing will feel just as hard as it does on Earth.

Up, up and away?

Although you can jump very high on the moon, you’ll be happy to know that there’s no need to worry about jumping all the way off into space. In fact, you’d need to be going very fast – more than 2 kilometres per second – to escape from the moon’s surface.

The fastest jumping human being ever was Javier Sotomayor, who reached a speed of 7 metres per second, and a height of 2.45 metres (he was nearly 2 metres tall already).

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If Sotomayor had jumped on the moon, he would have been able to jump over a house – but he wouldn’t have gone any faster. The speed at which you jump does not depend on the strength of gravity – it depends on your muscle strength (and skill). So he wouldn’t have been able to jump off the moon, either.

What about fleas? They would be able to jump well into space, surely? Nope. They can’t even reach the same speed as humans when they jump. That’s why a flea on Earth couldn’t jump 2.45 metres high. They do jump many more times their own height, of course – but then, they are really tiny.

The highest jumping animal in the world is the white-tailed jackrabbit. They can jump over six metres in the air, and would certainly get a speeding ticket if caught jumping in town. On the moon, a white-tailed jackrabbit would easily jump over a ten-storey flat – but still not shoot off into space.

People would love to go back to the moon. If they get serious about it, it will happen. Wouldn’t you love to be one of them?

Children can have their own questions answered by experts – just send them in to Curious Kids, along with the child’s first name, age and town or city. You can:

Here are some more Curious Kids articles, written by academic experts:

WPCampus 2019 to Livestream Sessions Thursday, July 25 – Saturday, July 27

2019-07-25T02:46:00.001-07:00

WPCampus 2019 kicks off tomorrow at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, for its fourth year running. The niche WordPress conference is focused on accessibility and WordPress in higher education. All sessions, with the exception of the workshops, will be live streamed with captioning, beginning at 2PM PDT on Thursday, July 25.

The event includes a mix of general development topics, such as building themes with WP Rig 2.0, managing custom plugin deployments, and building custom Gutenberg blocks with ACF. It also features a variety of sessions on using multisite in higher education, along with topics related to university website design and management, such as mobile accessibility, information security, and using WordPress for individual digital asset management. Check out the full schedule for more detailed descriptions of sessions.

It’s important to note that the schedule references sessions in Pacific Daylight Time. However, a timezone selector on the schedule page will allow you to see the each session’s corresponding time for your location. Visit 2019.wpcampus.org/watch on July 25th to watch live for free. Those watching remotely can also jump in on the #WPCampus Twitter hashtag to engage with others attending and watching the event.

To the moon and beyond 4: What's the point of going back to the moon?

2019-07-25T00:49:00.001-07:00

It’s been 47 years since the last time a man stepped on the moon, and yet now a host of countries – from the US, to Russia and China – are racing to send astronauts back there, and set up base.

In the fourth episode of The Conversation’s To the moon and beyond podcast, we delve into why there’s a renewed drive to put humans back on the surface of the moon. What’s there to go back for? And what are the practical, legal and ethical questions facing those who want to set up a base there – and potentially start mining the moon.

We find out that while no one country owns the moon – a principle set out in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 – the question of who owns the resources on the moon is more complicated. Tanja Masson-Zwaan, an assistant professor of space law at Leiden University in The Netherlands, explains that another international agreement, the Moon Treaty, which entered into force in 1984, has only been ratified by 18 countries, and by none of the major space powers. The big sticking point is the principle that the moon and its natural resources are the “common heritage of mankind” – the exact meaning of which is unclear.

Does it mean that everything that a company could have in profits from exploiting resources in outer space has to be split among all countries? What exactly it means is unclear and that is why many states don’t don’t like it and will not ratify it.

Masson-Zwaan says that while a new international treaty is unlikely, a new set of guidelines are needed to govern exploitation of the moon’s resources.

Part of the attraction of going back lies in what’s under the moon’s dusty surface. Katherine Joy, a Royal Society university research fellow at the University of Manchester in the UK, explains some of the elements that could potentially be found on the moon – from water and oxygen to Helium 3 – and what they could be used for.

The great question we have next is not so much in terms of how can we go to mine the moon but first of all we need to understand the potential resources and where they’re located, how they’re accessible and we need to also develop the technology to be able to detect them and extract them to make them into usable products.

She explains that she’d love to get her hands on a piece of water ice from the moon’s surface back in her lab – but that this might not be so simple as no mission so far has plans to bring one back cryogenically.

But even if a country or company could overcome the many technical hurdles of mining on the moon, there’s no global police force able to punish those breaking any new rules. We asked Frans von der Dunk, professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US, whether he could envisage a space war breaking out and what it might look like.

It will probably start first on the level of a trade war … but that can already do a lot of damage to everyone around. But if things further escalate as we’ve seen in the past, economic wars can also then escalate into real fighting and I can only say I hope that never happens.

He also discusses some of the other questions raised by mining on the moon – including whether it’s ethical that those who can afford to go and mine the moon do it, and those who can’t, don’t.

And even if all these practical and legal challenges are overcome, what would it actually be like to live there? Frédéric Marin, an astrophysicist at the University of Strasbourg in France, explains just how inhospitable it would be to live in an environment with such low gravity, covered in abrasive dust. And Rowena Christiansen, a medical educator and doctor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, talks through some of the side effects that spending prolonged amounts of time in space can have on the human body.

Your muscles start to lose mass because they don’t have to work against gravity anymore and that includes the heart, which is basically just made up of muscle. And also your bone mineral density tends to decrease.

To the moon and beyond is a global collaboration between different editions of The Conversation around the world, hosted by Miriam Frankel and Martin Archer. You can listen via The Conversation, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts by hitting the “Listen and Subscribe” button at the top of this page. And please do give us a review on Apple Podcasts.

Credits:

To the moon and beyond is produced by Gemma Ware and Annabel Bligh. Sound editing by Siva Thangarajah. Thank you to City, University of London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios.

Picture source: An imagined base on the moon, by Naeblys via Shutterstock.

Music via Free Music Archive:

Even when we fall and Western Shores by Philipp Weigl. Di Breun, Pencil Marks and Li Font by Blue Dot Sessions. Space Travel by Borrtex, Vagus by Lee Rosevere and Hallon by Christian Bjoerklund.

And As time passes marimba and sound effects via Zapslat.

Archive footage: Apollo 11 and 17 audio from NASA.

WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields Now Available for Free

2019-07-24T18:25:00.001-07:00

The WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields plugin is now available for free on GitHub after a short time as a commercial product. Jason Bahl, creator and maintainer of the WPGraphQL project, released the extension in April 2019 with a pricing tier ranging from $49/annually (for one site’s support) to lifetime subscription options.

Bahl created the plugin with the hopes of generating enough revenue to one day fund his efforts working on WPGraphQL full-time. Now that he has joined the Gatsby team to work full time on WPGraphQL, he has the time and resources to make the ACF extension available for free.

The plugin allows developers to interact with their ACF data using GraphQL queries. It works with both the free and pro versions of ACF and WPGraphQL v0.3.2 or newer.

“When I first started working on the core WPGraphQL plugin, I thought it would be awesome to have meta fields automatically exposed to the WPGraphQL Schema,” Bahl said.

“Since WordPress core doesn’t have a fields API, developers turn to plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields, Metabox.io, CMB2, Carbon Fields, Field Manager, or one of the many other metabox solutions for WordPress.”

ACF is by far the most popular among these solutions with more than a million active installs. (Metabox.io has roughly half the user base with 400,000+ installs and CMB2 is the next most popular at an estimated 200,000 installs). Bahl started working towards supporting ACF a few years ago but didn’t have a production use case for it and left it untouched until demand for the plugin increased.

“In the latter half of 2018 and early 2019 I got many requests via Slack, Twitter, and Github for a quality ACF extension, and I also noticed the top search terms on the WPGraphQL website were ‘ACF’ and ‘Advanced Custom Fields,’ he said.

“I initially wanted to release the plugin as a free plugin, but there’s only so much I can do for free. Maintaining WPGraphQL on the side of my full-time job was already time consuming and I thought if I was making income I could support it better.”

Since the plugin’s initial release on April 19, Bahl reports there have been 85 licenses purchased, which enabled him to devote more time to the project. Now that he is no longer attempting to self-sustain his projects, he and the Gatsby team decided the best course of action would be to make it free so that more of the community can benefit from the project. He anticipates being able to provide the same level of support since the plugin’s launch with more of his time allocated to focusing on the WPGraphQL ecosystem.

Performance is the most common reason that necessitates developers using ACF to implement WPGraphQL on their sites. It offers staggering performance gains over using the WP REST API to query ACF data, as shown in the example below:

Good call. . .I need to market the performance side better. . .here’s an example of a REST API call using ACF to REST API and using WPGraphQL for ACF to select specific fields.

*REST:* 24.8 KB, 1.22s
*GraphQL*: 1010 b, 377ms (not even 1kb payload!!!) pic.twitter.com/0qS52bvlEY

— GraphQL for WordPress (@wpgraphql) April 19, 2019

“When developers try to build “headless” applications with WordPress, they often run into pain points with the WP REST API, and they turn to WPGraphQL to ease those pains,” Bahl said.

“Many developers were registering ACF fields to their WPGraphQL Schema by hand, and that can be a tedious process if you have hundreds of fields. A plugin like WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields saves developers a lot of development time, and allows them to take advantage of the features of GraphQL that make headless WordPress development a pleasant experience.”

WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields can be found on GitHub and support and feature requests are handled through Github issues. The plugin is also available on packagist.org for those who want to include it in projects using Composer.

Developers with general questions can join the WPGraphQL Slack workspace or the project’s online community on Spectrum. Bahl is active in both communities, helping developers find answers to their questions about using WPGraphQL to build headless applications.

How to build a moon base

2019-07-24T18:07:00.001-07:00

Half a century after humans first walked on the moon, a number of private companies and nations are planning to build permanent bases on the lunar surface. Despite the technological progress since the Apollo era, this will be extremely challenging. So how should you get started?

The conditions at the lunar surface are extreme. The moon has a 28-day rotation period, resulting in two weeks of continuous sunlight followed by two weeks of darkness at most latitudes. As the moon lacks any significant atmosphere to distribute heat from the sun, temperatures during the day can rise to 130°C. Meanwhile, the coldest nighttime temperatures have been recorded as -247°C.

The lack of a protective atmosphere also means there’s little protection against harmful cosmic radiation. This means moon inhabitants would have to construct buildings with walls sufficiently thick to block radiation from coming in and use cumbersome spacesuits when leaving the facility. The walls must also be strong enough to withstand the pressure differences between the outside and inside and to cope with the impact of micrometeorites – tiny specks of rock and dust crashing onto the surface at high speeds.

These considerations mean that, when we expand the first bases and start actually building structures on the moon, lunar concrete, which is a mixture of sulphur and aggregate (grains or crushed rock – normal concrete is aggregate, cement and water) would be a good option. That’s because it’s non-porous, strong and doesn’t require water, which is in short supply on the moon.

To the moon and beyond is a new podcast series from The Conversation marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landings and looking ahead to the future of space exploration and the moon’s place within it. Listen and subscribe here.

Another problem is the low gravity on the moon – only a sixth of that at Earth. Over time, this can cause problems such as muscle and bone loss. Any permanent lunar settlement must minimise these risks, for example by making exercise a requirement.

Although few space agencies have released any details about their plans yet, we can probably assume that the first bases on the moon will have to be pre-built and transported to the moon from Earth, so they can be used right away.

Artist’s impression. European Space Agency (ESA), CC BY-SA

Any such base must reliably maintain breathable air, meaning oxygen must be provided and carbon dioxide must be removed. The International Space Station (ISS) uses electrolysis to break water down into oxygen and hydrogen and vents captured carbon dioxide into space.

Power sources

An essential ingredient for any base is a power supply. The ISS typically supports six astronauts when fully crewed and requires 75kW to 90kW of power for everything from life support and powering scientific equipment to water recycling. Depending on the number of lunar colonists and the tasks they carry out, this power requirement could be considered an absolute minimum.

One option would be to use solar panels. But if the base is located in equatorial regions, then solar panels will only produce power for 14 days consecutively, followed by two weeks of darkness. Colonists would therefore have to store power in batteries and use it during the dark period. If the base was placed in the north or south pole, however, solar panels would receive constant sunlight.

MORE ON THE MOON AND BEYOND

Join us as we delve into the last 50 years of space exploration and the 50 years to come. From Neil Armstrong’s historic first step onto the lunar surface to present-day plans to use the moon as a launchpad to Mars, hear from academic experts who’ve dedicated their lives to studying the wonders of space.

Nuclear reactors are a more reliable alternative to solar power. In recent years there’s been a lot of interest in miniaturised fission reactors. The problem is that even small reactors can weigh several tonnes, which is a problem given that they’d need to be transported from Earth. There is also the risk that we made end up spreading nuclear material on a currently pristine location.

Another possibility are radioisotope thermal generators. These produce energy by generating an electric current from the temperature difference between a radioactive material and a cooler external environment. On Earth, these are not very effective as room temperature is fairly warm, but in the shaded areas of the moon it gets very cold. These devices have often been used as a power source for deep space probes, which travel too far from the sun to harness solar energy. But for lunar colonisation, a very large number would be required as they are not very efficient at converting heat into electricity.

Each potential power source has its advantages and disadvantages but the solar panels are the best option if you can place them in the right location.

Food and water

Clearly, the inhabitants of a lunar base would have to survive on a primarily plant-based diet. Meat and other foods would have to be provided by supply ships, as agriculture requires a large infrastructure in place to be practical. It is, however, theoretically possible to grow plants in lunar soil – computer models show tomato and wheat could germinate.

You can grow plants in lunar soil. NASA

The plants will require substantial amounts of space to be able to provide enough food – the base must be made big enough to accommodate for this. While many nutrients for crops are available in lunar soil, the absence of nitrogen, which is essential for plant growth, remains a significant challenge. There are also high levels of metals such as aluminium and chromium, which can be toxic to plants.

We can remove some of these problems by using a technique known as hydroponics – growing plants in water rather than soil, with LED lights providing artificial sunlight. For example, this can be performed in an internal windowless room.

A disadvantage of hydroponics is the amount of water required. Water can easily be recycled using current techniques from sink and shower runoff, sweat and urine, although inevitably some will be lost and need topping up. Luckily it is possible to extract modest amounts of water ice from the moon – especially at the poles.

The final major consideration for any future lunar colony is health and safety. The potential risks of exploration are well documented. We have trouble recovering ill people in inaccessible locations such as the Antarctic – where medical support is limited in the summer months and virtually non-existent in the winter months. This suggests that a lunar base would have to be medically self-sufficient, requiring more weight to be sent to the moon in the form of medical equipment and trained personnel.

Ultimately we have the technology to make a lunar base viable, but no amount of innovation can completely negate the risks involved. Whether such a base goes ahead or not will depend on this calculation perhaps more than any other. The question is whether we as a society have the stomach for lunar settlement, as well as lunar lettuce, or not.

Neven's Law: why it might be too soon for a Moore's Law for quantum computers

2019-07-24T11:19:00.001-07:00

A new disruptive technology is on the horizon and it promises to take computing power to unprecedented and unimaginable heights. And to predict the speed of progress of this new “quantum computing” technology, the director of Google’s Quantum AI Labs, Hartmut Neven, has proposed a new rule similar to the Moore’s Law that has measured the progress of computers for more than 50 years.

But can we trust “Neven’s Law” as a true representation of what is happening in quantum computing and, most importantly, what is to come in the future? Or is it simply too early on in the race to come up with this type of judgement?

Unlike conventional computers that store data as electrical signals that can have one of two states (1 or 0), quantum computers can use many physical systems to store data, such as electrons and photons. These can be engineered to encode information in multiple states, which enables them to do calculations exponentially faster that traditional computers.

Quantum computing is still in its infancy, and no one has yet built a quantum computer that can outperform conventional supercomputers. But, despite some scepticism, there is widespread excitement about how fast progress is now being made. As such, it would be helpful to have an idea of what we can expect from quantum computers in years to come.

Moore’s Law describes the way that the processing power of traditional digital computers has tended to double roughly every two years, creating what we call exponential growth. Named after Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, the law more accurately describes the rate of increase in the number of transistors that can be integrated into a silicon microchip.

But quantum computers are designed in a very different way around the laws of quantum physics. And so Moore’s Law does not apply. This is where Neven’s Law comes in. It states that quantum computing power is experiencing “doubly exponential growth relatively to conventional computing”.

Exponential growth means something grows by powers of two: 2¹ (2), 2² (4), 2³ (8), 2⁴ (16) and so on. Doubly exponential growth means something grows by powers of powers of two: 2² (4), 2⁴ (16), 2⁸ (256), 2¹⁶ (65,536) and so on. To put this into perspective, if traditional computers had seen doubly exponential growth under Moore’s Law (instead of singly exponential), we would have had today’s laptops and smartphones by 1975.

Quantum computers may be developing much faster than conventional ones. Agnese Abrusci, Author provided

This enormously fast pace should soon lead, Neven hopes, to the so-called quantum advantage. This is a much-anticipated milestone where a relatively small quantum processor overtakes the most powerful conventional supercomputers.

The reason for this doubly exponential growth is based on an in-house observation. According to an interview with Neven, Google scientists are getting better at decreasing the error rate of their quantum computer prototypes. This allows them to build more complex and more powerful systems with every iteration.

Neven maintains that this progress itself is exponential, much like Moore’s Law. But a quantum processor is inherently and exponentially better than a classical one of equal size. This is because it exploits a quantum effect called entanglement that allows different computational tasks to be done at the same time, producing exponential speed ups.

So, simplistically, if quantum processors are developing at an exponential rate and they are exponentially faster than classical processors, quantum systems are developing at a doubly exponential rate in relation to their classical counterparts.

A note of caution

While this sounds exciting, we need to exercise some caution. For starters, Neven’s conclusion seems to be based on a handful of prototypes and progress measured over a relatively short timeframe (a year or less). So few data points could easily be made to fit many other patterns of extrapolated growth.

There is also a practical issue that, as quantum processors become increasingly complex and powerful, technical problems that are minor now could become much more important. For example, the presence of even modest electrical noise in a quantum system could lead to computational errors that become more and more frequent as the processor complexity grows.

This issue could be solved by implementing error correction protocols, but this would effectively mean adding lots of backup hardware to the processor that is otherwise redundant. So the computer would have to become much more complex without gaining much extra power, if any. This kind of problem could affect Neven’s prediction, but at the moment it’s just too soon to call.

Despite being just an empirical observation and not a fundamental law of nature, Moore’s Law foresaw the progress of conventional computing with remarkable accuracy for about 50 years. In some sense, it was more than just a prediction, as it stimulated the microchip industry to adopt a consistent roadmap, develop regular milestones, assess investment volumes and evaluate prospective revenues.

If Neven’s observation proves to be as prophetic and self-fulling as Moore’s Law, it will certainly have ramifications well beyond the mere prediction of quantum computing performance. For one thing, at this stage, nobody knows whether quantum computers will become widely commercialised or remain the toys of specialised users. But if Neven’s Law holds true, it won’t be long until we find out.

AI's current hype and hysteria could set the technology back by decades

2019-07-24T04:32:00.001-07:00

Most discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) are characterised by hyperbole and hysteria. Though some of the world’s most prominent and successful thinkers regularly forecast that AI will either solve all our problems or destroy us or our society, and the press frequently report on how AI will threaten jobs and raise inequality, there’s actually very little evidence to support these ideas. What’s more, this could actually end up turning people against AI research, bringing significant progress in the technology to a halt.

The hyperbole around AI largely stems from its promotion by tech-evangelists and self-interested investors. Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared AI to be “probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on”. Given the importance of AI to Google’s business model, he would say that.

Some even argue that AI is a solution to humanity’s fundamental problems, including death, and that we will eventually merge with machines to become an unstoppable force. The inventor and writer Ray Kurzweil has famously argued this “Singularity” will occur by as soon as 2045.

The hysteria around AI comes from similar sources. The likes of physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk warned that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. If AI doesn’t destroy us, the doomsayers argue, then it may at least cause mass unemployment through job automation.

The reality of AI is currently very different, particularly when you look at the threat of automation. Back in 2013, researchers estimated that, in the following ten to 20 years, 47% of jobs in the US could be automated. Six years later, instead of a trend towards mass joblessness, we’re in fact seeing US unemployment at a historic low.

Even more job losses have been threatened for the EU. But past evidence indicates otherwise, given that between 1999 and 2010, automation created 1.5m more jobs than it destroyed in Europe.

AI is not even making advanced economies more productive. For example, in the ten years following the financial crisis, labour productivity in the UK grew at its slowest average rate since 1761. Evidence shows that even global superstar firms, including firms who are among the top investors in AI and whose business models depends on it such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, have not become more productive. This contradicts claims that AI will inevitably enhance productivity.

Current AI is good at finding patterns in large datasets, and not much else. Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

So why are the society-transforming effects of AI not materialising? There are at least four reasons. First, AI diffuses through the economy much more slowly than most people think. This is because most current AI is based on learning from large amounts of data and it is especially difficult for most firms to generate enough data to make the algorithms efficient or simply to afford to hire data analysts. A manifestation of the slow diffusion of AI is the growing use of “pseudo-AI” where a firm appears to use an online AI bot to interact with customers but which is in fact a human operating behind the scenes.

The second reason is AI innovation is getting harder. Machine learning techniques that have driven recent advances may have already produced their most easily reached achievements and now seem to be experiencing diminishing returns. The exponentially increasing power of computer hardware, as described by Moore’s Law, may also be coming to an end.

Related to this is the fact that most AI applications just aren’t that innovative, with AI mostly used to fine-tune and disrupt existing products rather than introduce radically new products. For example, Carlsberg is investing in AI to help it improve the quality of its beer. But it is still beer. Heka is a US company producing a bed with in-built AI to help people sleep better. But it is still a bed.

Third, the slow growth of consumer demand in most Western countries makes it unprofitable for most businesses to invest in AI. Yet this kind of limit to demand is almost never considered when the impacts of AI are discussed, partly because academic models of how automation will affect the economy are focused on the labour market and/or the supply side of the economy.

Fourth, AI is essentially not really being developed for general application. AI innovation is overwhelmingly in visual systems, ultimately aimed for use in driverless cars. Yet such cars are most notable for their absence from our roads, and technical limits mean they are likely to remain so for a long time.

New thinking needed

Of course, AI’s small impact in the recent past doesn’t rule out larger impacts in the future. Unexpected progress in AI could still lead to a “robocalypse”. But it will have to come from a different kind of AI. What we currently call “AI” – big data and machine learning – is not really intelligent. It is essentially correlation analysis, looking for patterns in data. Machine learning generates predictions, not explanations. In contrast, human brains are storytelling devices generating explanations.

As a result of the hype and hysteria, many governments are scrambling to produce national AI strategies. International organisations are rushing to be seen to take action, holding conferences and publishing flagship reports on the future of work. For example the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research claims that AI is “transforming the geopolitical order” and, even more incredibly, that “a shift in the balance of power between intelligent machines and humans is already visible”.

This “unhinged” debate about the current and near-future state of AI threatens both an AI arms race and stifling regulations. This could lead to inappropriate controls and moreover loss of public trust in AI research. It could even hasten another AI-winter – as occurred in the 1980s – in which interest and funding disappear for years or even decades after a period of disappointment. All at a time when the world needs more, not less, technological innovation.

WordCamp Asia Set for February 21-23, 2020, in Bangkok, Thailand

2019-07-24T01:24:00.001-07:00

The first ever WordCamp Asia has launched a teaser website and announced February 21-23, 2020, as the dates for the event. This will be the first regional WordCamp for the continent, which is home to 127 WordPress meetup chapters with 73,000 members across 23 countries, according to stats from lead organizer Naoko Takano. After four years in planning, and 137 WordCamps in 18 Asian countries and 52 cities, the region is finally ready to collaborate on a larger event that will bring its many diverse communities together.

“We hope that this first flagship event in the region can help the WordPress and open source community to grow even further,” Takano said. “We are really excited to be working on creating a place where community members can learn from and get inspired by each other.”

The organizing team has a vision to make the WordCamp welcoming, nurturing, and experimental. They are working to make it an inclusive, affordable, and interactive event. WordCamp Asia’s three-day program will begin with Contributor Day, followed by two days of presentations with an estimated 1,000 attendees.

Organizers have already put out the call for media partners, including magazines, newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, bloggers, influencers, WordPress enthusiasts and freelance journalists. The call for speakers will be open until mid-November 2019. Check out WordCamp Asia’s roadmap to get an idea of what to expect as the preparations continue.

New Experimental Plugin Brings the Block Editor to WordPress Comments

2019-07-23T17:03:00.001-07:00

Block Comments is a new experimental plugin from Tom Nowell that replaces WordPress’ default comment form with a trimmed down version of the block editor. Nowell gave a presentation at WordCamp Europe 2019 about using blocks outside the editor, including on the frontend. Block Comments is one example he brought to life using the block list component along with some wrapper components.

The result is a comment form that offers the same UI as the WordPress editor but with a limited set of blocks appropriate for commenting and no block sidebar panel. This includes text-based and embed blocks, along with image upload via URL. It defaults to the paragraph block when the commenter clicks inside the form. Here is an example of using the block editor for a reply on the Twenty Nineteen theme:

For the most part, Block Comments should fit in with the style of the active theme, as shown below with an example using the Astrid theme. Nowell recommends users watch out for occasional clashes between the editor UI CSS and the theme’s CSS, since it is still early beta software.

Incorporating the block editor into commenting could make formatting easier for commenters with more options for expressing themselves. The plugin includes blocks for lists, quotes, code, embeds, headings, pre-formatted text, and other formats, all with Gutenberg’s built in preview. Commenters can immediately see how the comment will appear without having to struggle with using the correct format tags.

“I see it as a much more flexible form of those Tiny MCE visual comment forms,” Nowell said. “Except instead of just putting a toolbar on top and showing you bold and italic in-line, you can do more.”

Nowell said replies and threading work exactly the same with Block Comments enabled. The UI for the comment form is the only thing that changes, but the commenting system remains the same.

Bringing the block editor to comments is not yet on WordPress’ roadmap. The UI is different from the comment forms users have become accustomed to over the years of commenting on the internet. Some commenters may find it confusing if this is their first experience with WordPress’ block editor. For those who have used WordPress 5.0+ previously, the Gutenberg-powered comment form brings a little more unity to the front and backend posting experiences.

“It’s certainly not for every comment form, but I can see it being very useful in some situations, such as P2 blogs,” Nowell said. “As Gutenberg itself improves, it will too.”

Block Comments is currently available on GitHub where users can report any issues or conflicts. It is recommended to be used with the Gutenberg plugin installed for best results. It also doesn’t play well with the Classic Editor plugin, since that plugin removes the block editor hooks and styles.

I would not be surprised to see this experiment further developed for P2-powered blogs or even Jetpack comments , if the idea catches on. These avenues would provide a good testing ground for such a feature before it might be considered for WordPress core.

The Best Android Keylogger App – Buying and Setup Guide

2019-07-23T08:48:00.001-07:00

There are several situations where you may require the services of a keylogger. Perhaps you find yourself conflicted about what your children do with your Android phone when you leave it with them.

However, the common reason for deciding to use an Android keylogger is to spy on a cheating spouse. So, if you are looking for a way to keep tabs on your spouse or kids, look no further.

Android surveillance apps with keylogger feature provide a great solution. An Android keylogger lets you capture all the keystrokes on the target device.

In this article, I will showcase Cocospy, which is the best surveillance app with a powerful keylogger feature.

Cocospy – The Ultimate Android Keylogger

Cocospy is a 100% secure and legit spy app. You can rely on app with full certainty since millions of users are doing so across more than 190 countries.

This reliable and leading phone surveillance app has a remarkable customer satisfaction rate of 96%. Equipped with a user-friendly interface, the brilliant design of this app lets have an enhanced surveillance experience.

What’s more, you don’t have to burden yourself with technical knowhow. Setting the app is easy and fast. This way, you will be able to start monitoring an Android phone in a matter of minutes.

What makes Cocospy app a worthwhile Android keylogger

Cocospy is the best Android phone surveillance app available today. The app lets you track everything including keystrokes on the target Android device.

You will not only be able to track any suspicious activities but also you will gain access to all their login credentials. The best thing is you don’t have to be close to the Android device to track each keystroke.

Although it uses cutting-edge technology, no technical know-how is required to use this app. The keylogger feature in this phone surveillance app lets you capture more than you bargained for.

For instance, the app will record all login credentials the target individual logs into using the target Android device.

With Cocospy, spying on your cheating spouse or monitoring your children activities on Android devices is a breeze.

How to remotely track keystrokes on an Android device

To make use of the best Android keylogger available, take the following steps:

Step 1: Visit Cocospy official website and register for an account. While at it, subscribe to a package that suits your needs.

Step 2: Download and install the app on the target device. The installation wizard will take you through the process. After installation, the app’s icon will disappear.

Step 3: After setting up the target device. Now, login to your Cocospy dashboard and navigate to the Keylogger feature at the bottom of the left panel.

What makes the app different from others?

Cocospy capabilities and experience in the surveillance market makes it the best Android Keylogger app. Cocospy lets you capitalize on cutting-edge technology to spy on your target with ease.

Below are some of the things that make it different.

No Rooting required

You won’t have to root the target device to use this app. Neither will you face any glitches nor cope with hidden conditions.

Most Android surveillance apps require rooting of the target device to enable third-party app surveillance and other advanced features. Engineers at Cocospy made this possible through cutting-edge technology.

Safe and secure

Cocospy does not infringe on your privacy nor does it track data on the target’s device. The spy app is free from malware and virus. So, it is safe for your target since it does not steal data from the target device.

Also, since ‘No Rooting’ is required, the app protects the device from malware attacks that arise from a compromised device.

Legitimate Spy App

Cocospy is a legal surveillance application and can be used by anyone for surveillance purposes. You are required to inform the target device user they are being monitored.

Primarily, the app is developed to help parents monitor children activities. Also, employers can use Cocospy on their official Android devices to track the activities of employees.

100% undetectable app

Cocospy is a true spy app since it operates in stealth mode. The icon will automatically disappear after installation. The spy app surveillance activities continue in the background.

The small 2 MB footprint of the app ensures it never takes a lot of space. Also, it doesn’t use so much battery power. Essentially, it does not affect the performance of the target Android phone to arouse any suspicion.

Compatibility

Cocospy is compatible with all Android devices running Android 4.0 and above.

Cheap

With Cocospy, you get three pricing packages to choose from. You may opt for a monthly package before you buying a long-term premium package.

Most striking features

Just so you know what makes this app the king in Android phone surveillance, check out some of its features.

Keylogger feature

As already explained, the keylogger feature lets you find out what your target individual types on the target Android device. After accessing that information, you can figure out their passwords, and have complete access to their phone!

Social App monitoring

Once you have the passwords of the target individual, you will be able to access all your target’s accounts. This lets you access their social media accounts such as Facebook, Tinder, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

As such, you will be able to see all their conversations with other people and even access their profiles.

GPS Tracking

This feature is important if want to monitor your children. The feature gives you real-time information on the whereabouts of your children at any given moment.

Conclusion

Cocospy is a reliable and reputable Android phone surveillance app. If you want a reliable Keylogger to track each keystroke on a target Android device, look no further. Rest assured this app will deliver.

Twitter is right to have special rules for Donald Trump – it's recognising that not all tweets are equal

2019-07-22T18:34:00.001-07:00

Twitter recently decided that rule-breaking tweets from influential politicians would be hidden behind a warning. Journalists were quick to label the new policy the “Trump rule”. But it wasn’t long before the rule was put to the test and found lacking.

Recent tweets by Donald Trump, which have widely been condemned as racist, were not hidden, and Twitter declared they didn’t violate the company’s policies.

The internet is often hailed as a democratic space, offering opportunities to everyone to contribute to public debate. Twitter’s new rule now introduces a two tier system, with the political influencers treated differently from regular users. Does this make sense or should the same standards apply to everyone on social media?

To shed light on this issue we can turn to ideas of one of the most eminent philosophers of the 20th century: John Rawls. While Rawls is best known for his Theory of Justice (1971), he also wrote extensively on the rules that should govern political debate and the public justification of political decisions.

Of course, our political world has changed very significantly since Rawls’ time. A significant portion of political debate has now moved online, to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This move has had profound effects on the way in which political issues are debated and on how democratic institutions operate. The question of what a healthy public debate would look like in a democratic society remains the same, however.

Twitter justifies its new policy as an attempt to protect “the health of the public conversation”. On its blog, the company explains that it sees the contributions from politically influential figures as especially important in this regard. “By nature of their positions these leaders have outsized influence and sometimes say things that could be considered controversial or invite debate and discussion. A critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable.”

Rawls’ views about a healthy sphere of public debate lends support to policies that single out the contributions from influential political figures. In his book Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls proposed a concentric circles model of the public sphere, with those closer to the political decision-making process positioned closer to the centre. He used this model to argue that the sphere of public debate is not a level playing field. The closer a contribution to public debate is to decision making, the more important it is that it complies with responsible standards.

Rawls’ focus was on the place of religious views in the political sphere. He thought that upholding freedom of religion and the freedom to voice even very controversial ideas was of particular importance in settings that are not closely linked to political decision making, for example in the context of a family or a church gathering.

The new rules try to balance freedom of speech with tackling bad behaviour. pathdoc/Shutterstock

Contributions to political debate, by contrast, should aim to avoid being based on very controversial assumptions and should conform with core democratic commitments to the equality and liberty of all citizens. Government representatives and candidates for political office should exercise special care in upholding these standards, for example when defending a particular political decisions or policy proposals.

The focus of the new Twitter policy is different. It is concerned with balancing respect for the demands of freedom of speech with respect for its rules against abusive behaviour. Because it allows tweets that violate its rules to remain accessible, the policy as it stands is even at risk of further watering down the standards that apply to the contributions of influential political figures. The recent controversy over Trump’s racist tweets shows just how much more needs to be done.

But insofar as the new policy aims to manage the special status of social media contributions by influential political figures, it is a step in the right direction. More ambitious attempts to protect the health of political debate will hopefully follow. And Rawls’ model remains helpful in this regard, as it allows us to grasp why it makes sense to subject different social media contributions to different standards.

Upholding political standards

Many contributions on social media, even if they are very widely shared, occur in contexts that are quite removed from political decision making. If you use social media to post a picture of your outfit of the day, for example, the standards of responsible political decision making are of limited use to guide what you should post.

Other contributions to social media are more directly political. Among them are general contributions to political debate, for example a discussion about Brexit in a large group of Facebook friends, or #metoo or #blacklivesmatter tweets. But also among them are those posted by representatives of government or candidates for political office, that is by people with especially close links to political decision making.

Because a healthy sphere of public debate is a key feature of a well-functioning democracy, both types of political contributions should aim to uphold, not undermine, the standards of responsible political decision making. But for contributions from influential political figures, this is especially important. Because their posts carry so much weight in both public and political debate, they pose a much greater threat to both.

For this reason, special rules for Trump and his fellow world leaders make sense. But we need social media policies that can really deliver this.

The Current War: there were also dynamic women who made electricity a success

2019-07-22T11:46:00.001-07:00

The history of electricity, as many narratives about spectacular inventions told in popular culture, is a story dominated by men. The Current War, the new film that charts the ruthless competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse in the 19th century to be the first man to bring electricity to the masses, falls into the same Hollywood trap. Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and produced by Martin Scorsese, Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon play Edison and Westinghouse, while Nicolas Hoult stars as Nikola Tesla.

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When we saw the film trailer we both greeted the film’s male-centered premise with a certain amount of eye-rolling. We have been working as part of an international network to reframe the history of electricity away from just heroic manly tales, and to highlight the role of women in promoting electrical energy. While men may have been the most visible “inventors” of the new technology, many relied heavily on women to persuade people to “allow” electricity into their home by domesticating it into a safe and elegant illuminant. Our aim is to write these women back in.

The invisible force of electricity was terrifying to many in the 19th century. There were reports of death by electric shock, circulated with glee by the gas companies, who were keen to see off any new competition. And as we showed in the recent BBC Four documentary, Victorian Sensations, women found themselves unconvinced that either their faces or their homes benefited from being illuminated by the powerful glare of electricity.

Happy Thought (Electric Light) by George du Maurier, 1889. ‘The electric light, so favourable to furniture, wallpapers, pictures, screens &c., is not always becoming to the female complexion. Light Japanese sunshades will be found invaluable.’ National Galleries Scotland

Convincing women

This is why women were needed to “sell” the benefits of the new technology to women. As they increasingly became the definitive household managers and arbiters of household taste in the 1880s, they took on a key role in purchasing lighting equipment and commissioning designs for their homes.

The last quarter of the 19th century saw the popularisation of the idea that domestic décor was an expression of a woman’s personal character, linked to the concept of the home as a reflection of and influence on a person’s morality, as well as the importance of cleanliness. Guidebooks suggested that interior design was a public reflection of a woman’s personal taste; as such, the fear of “getting it wrong” opened up an opportunity for the development of professional decorators to assist and help avoid faux pas. While at first, the majority of these “experts” were men, it soon became clear that women were influential in the privacy of the home, and would respond well to being guided by professional women.

And yet the role of women in the journey of the move to electricity remains hidden. Our work draws on examples of women active as electrical engineer’s spouses. These collaborative women were indispensable to the process of electrification, but were written out of history by male-centered engineering heroism.

J.E.H Gordon, aka Alice Brandreth.

Among such professional women were the spouses of electrical engineers, such as Alice Brandreth, better known under her married name as Mrs J.E.H. Gordon. Following the introduction of indoor incandescent lighting in the 1880s by Swan, a Briton, and Edison, an American, Gordon’s Decorative Electricity of 1891 was essential reading for women wondering whether to electrify their homes. Gordon was also a capable engineer in partnership with her spouse James Gordon.

Mary Eliza Haweis: author of The Art of Decoration, in 1881. Wikipedia

We also looked at one of the early professional women decorators, Mary Eliza Haweis. In The Art of Decoration, she produced one of the earliest examples of a woman advising women on electric lighting in England.

Given its publication in 1881, at the very earliest period of electrification, and only a year after William Armstrong first lit up the Victorian house of Cragside using Joseph Swan’s lightbulbs, it’s unsurprising that Haweis starts her chapter on lighting with the statement: “Until the electric light is more manageable than is now is, there are two ways of lighting rooms – gas or lamps and candles.”

By 1900, efficient lighting still remained a luxury in the UK and so Haweis and Gordon’s popular messages remained as projects of glamorisation for a while longer. Indeed the UK’s Women’s Engineering Society was co-founded by seven eminent women, mostly “engineers-by-marriage”, exactly 100 years ago in 1919 – this centenary is an important moment to reflect on the importance of these truly electrifying women.

As Canadian historian Ruth Sandwell reminds us, we have a rich and growing analysis of men’s inventions, men’s labour, and men’s planning and development of systems for financing, organising, selling, running, repairing, and maintaining the new networks of power, particularly electricity, oil, and gas.

Yet despite the energy of the movement to better recognise women’s achievements today, we find current histories have left little room for recapturing or theorising women’s energetic relationships with their kin, environments, or society, nor have they set out how these changed over time.

So while it is great to see the history of electricity having a light shone upon it by Hollywood – as ever it would be better if the histories of women as well as men were told.

How to stroke a cat, according to science

2019-07-22T04:59:00.001-07:00

Many of us will have experienced that super friendly cat who seems to love being stoked one minute, only to bite or swipe at us the next. It might be easy at this point to blame it on the cat, but what’s likely happening here is that we’re just not stroking them right.

To understand why this might be, we first need to know a bit more about kitty’s ancestry. It’s likely that the domestic cat’s ancestors (the African wildcat) were regarded as mere pest control, but modern day cats are often treated as our valued companions or even “fur babies”.

This social shift in the human-cat relationship is thought to have occurred around 4,000 years ago – a little later than “man’s best friend” –- the domestic dog. Although this might seem like a sufficient amount of time for a species to fully adjust to increased social demands, this is unlikely to be the case for your feline friend. Domestic cats also display relatively modest genetic divergence from their ancestors, meaning their brains are probably still wired to think like a wildcat’s.

Wildcats live solitary lives and invest considerable time and effort communicating indirectly – via visual and chemical messages – just to avoid having to see each other. So it’s unlikely that domestic cats inherited many complex social skills from their relatives.

Humans on the other hand, are an inherently social species – favouring proximity and touch during displays of affection. We are also drawn to infantile looking features – large eyes and forehead, a small nose and round face – this is why most of us find the faces of cats so cute. It’s not surprising, then, that our initial reaction when we see a cat or kitten is to want to stroke, cuddle and smush all over them. Though it should also come as no surprise that many cats can find this type of interaction a little overwhelming.

Cat affections

Although a lot of cats do like being stroked, and in certain contexts will choose us over food, human interaction is something they have to learn to enjoy during their comparatively short sensitive period– between two and seven weeks old.

When it comes to human-cat interactions, the characteristics of humans are also important. Our personalities and gender, the regions of the cat’s body we touch and how we generally handle cats, may all play an important role in how the cat responds to our affections.

And while some cats may react aggressively to unwanted physical attention, others may merely tolerate our social advances in exchange for the good stuff (food and lodgings). That said, a tolerant cat is not necessarily a happy cat. Higher stress levels are reported in cats that are described by their owners as tolerating rather than actively disliking petting.

How to stroke a cat

The key to success is to focus on providing the cat with as much choice and control during interactions as possible. For example, the choice to indicate whether they want to be petted or not, and control over where we touch them, and how long for.

Due to our tactile nature and love of cute things, this approach may not come instinctively to many of us. And it will likely require a little self-restraint. But it could well pay off, as research shows interactions with cats are likely to last longer when the cat, rather than the human, initiates them.

From top left: Levi, Noa, Charlie, Simon and Chris, Rocket and Luna, Smokey Joe, Barry and Pod.

It’s also really important to pay close attention to the cat’s behaviour and posture during interactions, to ensure they are comfortable. When it comes to touch, less is often more. This is not only true during veterinary handling, but also during more relaxed encounters with people.

As a general guide, most friendly cats will enjoy being touched around the regions where their facial glands are located, including the base of their ears, under their chin, and around their cheeks. These places are usually preferred over areas such as their tummy, back and base of their tail.

Signs of cat enjoyment:

• Tail held upright and choosing to initiate contact.

• Purring and kneading you with their front paws.

• Gently waving their tail from side to side while held in the air.

• A relaxed posture and facial expression, ears pricked and pointed forwards.

• Giving you a gentle nudge if you pause while you’re stroking them.

Signs of dislike or tension:

• Shifting, moving or turning their head away from you.

• Remaining passive (no purring or rubbing)

• Exaggerated blinking, shaking their head or body or licking their nose

• Rapid, short bursts of grooming.

• Rippling or twitching skin, usually along their back.

• Swishing, thrashing or thumping tail.

• Ears flattening to the sides or rotating backwards.

• A sharp sudden turn of their head to face you or your hand.

• Biting, swiping or batting your hand away with their paw.

Whether cats make good “fur babies”, then, is very debatable. Lots of cats do like being touched, but lots probably don’t – and many tolerate it at best. Ultimately though, when it comes to cats, it’s important to respect their boundaries – and the wildcat within – even if that means admiring their cuteness from afar.

How geological maps made the Apollo moon landings worthwhile

2019-07-19T16:22:00.001-07:00

I still remember a cartoon in a newspaper in July 1969, just before the first Apollo moon landing. It showed the ground crew reminding the astronauts as they boarded their rocket, “Don’t forget to bring back some rock!” This was a nod to an old holiday cliché – people who went to the seaside were often asked to bring back some “rock”, referring to rock candy. It wasn’t very funny, but it does demonstrate that, once the race against the Soviets was won, the point of it all was to find out about the moon’s geology.

The scientific value of landing on the moon would have been diminished without studies to establish the context of the landing sites. The primary consideration was to touch down somewhere safe, but rocks collected from these places would have conveyed much less information had effort not gone into working out the nature of, and more importantly the relationships between, the rock units from which the samples were collected.

This was done by making detailed geological maps, using the same principles that geologists use on Earth.

Cartography vs. geological mapping

Telescopic observers had already begun to draw general maps of the moon’s near side (which is all that can be seen from Earth) in the 1600s. These were essentially exercises in cartography, documenting what the moon looks like. Soon names were being marked to label individual features, but this was just a convenient way to identify them. It wasn’t based on any actual understanding.

By contrast, geologists make maps to gain insight into the history of a region. They distinguish tracts of terrain of which the ages – and therefore possibly origin and composition – can be deduced to be different. This is usually achieved by working out what is on top of what (younger layers will generally be on top of older layers) and cross-cutting relationships (younger features can cut across older ones, but not vice versa).

Hackman and Mason’s map of the moon. Arrow locates Copernicus crater. USGS

The first published attempt to use these principles on the moon was a 1960 study by geologists Robert J. Hackman and Arnold C. Mason. It was based entirely on telescopic observations, and showed the dark patches – the “maria” – lumped together as all of the same age in yellow, overlying “pre-maria” terrain, thought to be older, in brown. The youngest unit was called “post-maria rocks”, shown in green, which was interpreted to be craters and ejecta from them that were formed after the maria.

Left: Shoemaker’s prototype Copernicus geologic map. Right: the same area, on the same map projection, based on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images. USGS (left) and LROC (right)

With only three age categories, this map was very basic, and was soon superseded by more detailed studies. In 1961, geologist Gene Shoemaker circulated a prototype geology map of the area around the crater Copernicus. Shoemaker divided the materials he could see on the surface into five age classes and further subdivided some of these according to texture – such as “smooth” versus “hummocky”. He also offered interpretations for each of his units, such as “probably chiefly crushed rock” and “probably volcanic flows”. He even included cross sections indicating what structures may lie below the surface to a depth of several kilometres.

H.H. Schmitt, N.J. Trask, and E.M. Shoemaker, Geologic map of the Copernicus quadrangle of the moon, published 1967. USGS

Shoemaker collaborated with two colleagues to publish a considerably more detailed map of the same area in 1967. This was based on photographic images obtained by ground-based telescopes, supplemented by visual observations made using the 24-inch Lowell refracting telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona, to check fine details. The first-named author of this map was H.H. Schmitt, more commonly known as Jack Schmitt, who as the Apollo 17 Lunar Module pilot in 1972 became the first – and to date, only – professionally qualified geologist to walk on the moon.

Landing site maps

Part of the Apollo 11 landing site geologic map published in 1970 at a scale of 1:25,000. The stripey background is an artefact of the photographic strips used as the base map. USGS

Subsequent lunar maps began to use pictures obtained by spacecraft orbiting the moon ahead of Apollo 11. Maps were made of all the proposed Apollo landing sites, including some that were never visited. At first, these relied heavily on photographs taken by the five Lunar Orbiter uncrewed lunar satellites. Later Apollo landing sites were mapped with the aid of pictures taken during earlier Apollo missions.

Part of a pre-mission geologicial map covering the Apollo 17 landing site (David H. Scott and M. H. Carr), and published at a scale of 1:250,000. The area shown is 45km east to west. USGS

Although the moon walkers discovered that some of the geology mapped from orbit had been misinterpreted, each unit did prove to be genuinely worth investigating so that time on the surface was better spent than by blundering around at random. For example, the Cayley Plains where Apollo 16 landed were thought to be volcanic, but turned out to be an equally interesting unit made of welded lumps of older rock fragmented by impacts.

Geological mapping continues today, even on bodies where there is no prospect of human visitors in the forseeable future. The United States Geological Survey, which published the Apollo maps, has since published maps of at least parts of every other rocky planet and several smaller rocky or icy bodies. In Europe, an effort is underway to prepare the first detailed geological maps of the whole of Mercury in preparation for the 2025 arrival of BepiColombo in orbit about the planet.

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Some of those maps are being disseminated by the European Commission project Planmap, which is also preparing immersive 3D virtual environments of potential landing sites on the moon and Mars for astronaut training.

Ultimately, we have the Apollo missions to thank for a lot of our geological knowledge about the moon. The geological maps and the rock samples they enabled astronauts to bring back to Earth have given us invaluable information about the history of the moon, even though some of the haul has yet to be studied, 50 years on.

The 'Mandela effect' and the science of false memories

2019-07-19T09:35:00.001-07:00

There’s a theory doing the rounds online that nuclear research experiments caused the world to shift into an alternate reality where Donald Trump became president. This might sound stupid, but some people genuinely believe it to be true. And to back up their theory they cite the “Mandela effect”, a phenomenon that supposedly occurs when large groups of people believe something happened even though evidence shows it isn’t true.

The name of the theory dates back to 2010, when numerous people on the internet falsely remembered Nelson Mandela was dead. It was widely believed he died in prison during the 1980s. Mandela was actually freed in 1990 and passed away in 2013 – despite some people’s declarations they remember clips of his funeral on TV.

Psychologists say these collective misremenberings can be mostly put down to memory distortions and what’s known as “the misinformation effect”. This is where information you learn after an event can interfere with the way you recall it. So in the case of Mandela’s death, the passing of Steve Biko – another prominent South African anti-apartheid activist who died around this time – possibly caused this misperception.

Despite psychologists explaining why such misrememberings happen, some people claim these differences arise from the movement between parallel realities, which cause us to remember things incorrectly. This is based on the theory that within each universe alternative versions of events and objects exist.

Numerous examples of the Mandela effect continue to pop up all over the internet – with many people adamant their memories are correct. Below are three classic examples of the “Mandala effect” we’ve debunked.

The Ford logo

When looking at the Ford logo, most people don’t recall or notice the flourish at the end of the “F”. Some people claim this embellishment was not there originally and has been added. This is despite the fact that the additional loop has been part of the Ford logo since the early 1900s.

Yes, it really does look like this. Shutterstock

Explanation: This occurs because our previous experiences shape our expectations of how things should look. So, if we presume something to be a certain way, this is most likely how we will remember it. In the case of the Ford logo, most “Fs” we see in the world are without the embellishment. So noticing the curl is surprising.

JFK assassination

Mandela effects also arise when we jump to conclusions without properly looking at historical material. People frequently say the number of people in the limousine at the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy has altered because of the movement between parallel realities.

And indeed, there is a common misconception there were four passengers – two in the front and two in the back. But the car actually contained six people: the driver, secret service agents Bill Greer and Roy Kellerman, Texas Governor John Connally, the first lady of Texas, Nellie Connally, President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy.

President Kennedy with his five passengers. Walt Cisco/Dallas Morning News

Explanation: The perception that passenger numbers have changed is attributable to photographs and films taken from different angles, and ignorance of the car’s design. The limousine has two auxiliary jump seats, which remained in position when the car housed additional people – so the car could seat four or six passengers. The agents in the front seats and a partition often obscured the front two passengers from view.

Forrest Gump

If you’ve ever watched the film Forrest Gump, chances are you remember that famous line about a box of chocolates, right? Most people seem to recall this line as “Life is like a box of chocolates”, but in reality in the film Tom Hanks actually says “Life was like a box of chocolates”. Supporters claim this is evidence that we have entered a time shift, with our memories glitching and recalling different versions from another parallel universe.

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Explanation: The truth is both versions of the line exist. Promotional material included the more familiar “is” phrase, while the film version actually includes the “was” version. The contradiction arises from the fact that people are unaware that different versions exist.

Ultimately, the Mandela effect exists because the internet is a powerful tool for spreading misinformation and people will engage with material because of interest and intrigue rather than concerns about accuracy and authenticity – as can be seen with the rise of fake news and disinformation.

More articles about memory, written by researchers:

Cigarette butts are the forgotten plastic pollution – and they could be killing our plants

2019-07-19T02:46:00.001-07:00

It’s amazing how quickly people have ditched plastic straws thanks to campaigns to discourage us from using such “pointless plastic”. Yet rarely do we hear about a much more common source of plastic pollution.

Cigarette butts or filters are the most littered item on the planet. An estimated 5.6 trillion cigarettes are smoked each year, out of which two thirds are improperly disposed of. That’s [4.5 trillion butts] each year. Since the 1980s, cigarette butts have accounted for 30% to 40% of all litter found in coastal and urban litter clean-ups.

They are a common eyesore on our streets, our parks, our beaches and in our waterways. Many smokers admit to littering cigarette butts, possibly because they believe them to be benign or biodegradable and somehow do not consider them as litter. But as well as taking much longer to break down than most people think, discarded cigarette butts may significantly damage surrounding plant growth, as our new research suggests.

Cigarette butts are composed of thousands of cellulose acetate fibres and, although biodegradable, take years to disappear from the environment. Cellulose acetate fibres, like other microplastics, are also a common contaminant found throughout the world’s ecosystems, even accumulating at the bottom of the deep sea.

Used filters also contain thousands of chemicals that can kill plants, insects, rodents, fungus and other lifeforms, and some of which are known carcinogens. There are many reports of young children and pet dogs accidentally swallowing cigarette butts, and they’ve even been found in wild animals such as seabirds and turtles. Ingestion can cause vomiting and, in some cases, convulsions. The leachates from cigarette butts can be toxic to aquatic organisms such as bacteria, crustaceans, worms and fish.

Unknown risks

Yet despite the prevalence of cigarette butts as litter in our parks and green spaces, our understanding of their effects on life on land is very limited. There are reports that some birds use them to line their nests. The pesticide nicotine is thought to reduce the number of nest ectoparasites, which is beneficial for the birds’ offspring. But this may also reduce their health in the longer term.

Urban habitats are particularly at risk from this type of litter. In surveys of the three largest parks in Cambridge, my colleagues and I found an average of 2.6 butts per square metre, with a maximum of 126 butts per square metre found near park benches (despite having ashtrays nearby). The burning question for us was, given that cigarette butts are often tossed onto the ground, what effect do they have on the plants in the park?

To answer this question, we conducted an experiment, adding cigarette butts to pots with either grass (perennial ryegrass) or clover (white clover) seeds to see how their development was affected. We tested butts from smoked and unsmoked regular and menthol cigarettes, as well as butt-sized wooden dowels to compare the effect of simply having an inert object on top of the soil.

Plant growth around a wooden stick versus plant growth around a cigarette butt. Danielle Green, Author provided

We found that cigarette butts reduced the germination and shoot length reached by grass and clover by up to 25% and reduced the amount of root biomass of clover by almost 60%.

Although this was the first study showing how smoked and unsmoked cigarette butts may affect plant development, others have found that smoke can cause similar depressive effects on germination and growth. In fact, in the early 1900s, Mabel Elizabeth Dibbel completed a master’s thesis entitled “The effects of cigarette smoke on the seedlings of Vicia sativa”. Dibbel found that blowing puffs of smoke on seedlings retarded their growth and distorted cell structure.

More research needed

Despite scientific awareness of the issue of cigarettes and plants for over 100 years, this remains an under-researched topic. But given the importance of plants as our primary producers of food, not to mention their role in making our environment more pleasant, there is clearly a need to reduce cigarette butt litter.

Some have suggested banning the filters outright, claiming that the health benefits are only minimal and not enough to justify their existence. Perhaps less drastic would be a cigarette butt deposit scheme, in which manufacturers were forced to offer money in exchange for returned butts.

Regardless of the solutions, it is clear that cigarettes’ 39-year reign as the world’s number one litter item needs to come to an end. The first step will be raising awareness that cigarette butts are an environmentally harmful litter item that needs to be properly disposed of.

Apollo 11 made us believe we could do anything – the truth is it could hasten our downfall

2019-07-18T06:24:00.001-07:00

The Apollo project gave us the astonishing spectacle of a blue marble rising over the sterile surface of the moon. Of course, the moon was already known to be uninhabitable. But being shown something in high-resolution colour photography makes a stronger impression than being told it by the experts. Our planet appeared in the photos as a small, vulnerable object amid surroundings utterly inimical to life. They showed, in a way that no scientific report could, the importance of keeping the Earth habitable, boosting the environmental movement.

But the moon landings affected many people in precisely the opposite way. No other public project has been such a spectacular success. The aim was so simple and concrete that everyone could immediately grasp it. Kennedy’s commitment to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” was made before the US had even put a man into orbit. Yet it was achieved just eight years later – barely half the time it takes nowadays to build a new railway across London. “Top that,” the Americans can easily say. Fifty years on, no one has.

The trouble with spectacular successes is that they breed complacency. The moon landings reinforced the belief that technology will always be able to solve our problems. Everyone knows the saying, “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can…” All we need is the will to do it. And a lot of money, of course. But not as much as you might think: the entire Apollo programme, over 12 years, cost about £120 billion in today’s money. That’s how much the US spends on its military in 11 weeks (and Britain in three years). If technology can do that, what can it not do?

This faith in technology has given us a false sense of security. Every day we hear urgent warnings about antibiotic resistance, soil depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity and of course climate change. These imminent catastrophes are the result of our own behaviour. The obvious solution is to change that behaviour: to stop abusing antibiotics, destroying tropical forests, burning fossil fuels, and so on. Yet we don’t.

Part of the reason we don’t is the expectation that technology will save us. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can develop new antibiotics, replenish the soil and restore the tropical forests. We can stop climate change by building machines to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. (And anyway, we can build walls to keep out the rising seas.) All we need is better politicians.

This sense of security is unwarranted. Technology cannot do everything. Once an ecosystem has been completely destroyed or a species has gone extinct, nothing can bring it back. No new Apollo programme will ever enable us to raise the dead after they have turned to dust. Some things are simply impossible – not for lack of money or technical know-how, but because of the laws of nature.

Political obstacles

And just as our sense of security overestimates the power of technology, it underestimates the political obstacles. It’s not just that large public science projects are out of fashion. The moon landings had the advantage of drawing on national pride: they served to demonstrate the superiority of the US over other countries – the Soviet Union in particular.

President John F. Kennedy sends his historic message to put a man on the moon in May 25, 1961. NASA

Combating antibiotic resistance, deforestation, and climate change, by contrast, requires all countries to work together. And these projects are unlike the moon landings in being essentially altruistic: one country’s expenditure benefits all inhabitants of the planet equally, whether or not they have contributed themselves. The selfish can get a free ride.

A further obstacle is that solving problems we have created for ourselves is not the sort of thing that easily inspires greatness. No one likes cleaning up after the party. It was easy to excite people about the first moon landing because it was such a great spectacle. We could watch it on TV in real time, from blast-off to splashdown. Like a good mini-series, it lasted just eight days. Averting catastrophe is not like that – especially when the problem cannot be shown in a simple stunning image.

Saving the planet doesn’t make compelling TV. There is no dramatic start or end point. And if the mission succeeds, the result will be only more of the same: the absence of catastrophe. What could be more boring? In democratic societies at least, addressing global problems will always be a hard sell. That’s why Kennedy’s contemporary heirs have done so little.

The success of the moon landings is no reason to expect technology to save us from ourselves. I fear it will make catastrophe more likely. Technology can help, but we need to know its limits. We’d be better off forgetting about rocketry and remembering the image of our planet as a tiny oasis in an inhospitable universe.

How to Repost a Video on Instagram Without App?

2019-07-18T05:29:00.001-07:00

Table of Contents

Have you been wondering how to repost a video on Instagram? Instagram is mainly used for marketing purposes nowadays. Maybe you are someone who has an Instagram account for your business and liked someone’s post. In case you are wondering how to repost videos on Instagram, this post can be much helpful for your needs. We will focus on how to repost a video on Instagram without app in this post.

What is Reposting on Instagram?

Well, if you are well versed with Instagram, you know what a repost on Instagram is. In essence, posting content from someone else’s profile is referred to as reposting. Akin to a retweet on Twitter, it differs from a retweet as a repost cannot be done from within the Instagram app. This can even help you make your Instagram profile popular.

Of course, that should not mean you cannot repost a video on Instagram. There are several third-party options available for the task. However, we will first check whether there are any options to repost a video on Instagram without the app, before moving on to other options.

How to Repost a video on Instagram without App?

Well, there isn’t a direct option available on Instagram to repost a video. However, you can opt for the manual methods and opt for reposting a video on Instagram without an app or third-party option. The workaround can be a little elongated procedure but has been widely used if you are looking to check out how to repost a video on Instagram without app.

The Instagram Stories is a good option to help you repost a video on Instagram. In fact, it has been considered to be an excellent option to repost a video on Instagram. However, you will only have it on your profile for 24 hours.

The steps would be as explained here:

Step 1 – Get the original poster tag you

When someone posts a video, they need to tag you in their video, which will let you find the video in your profile. This method will not need any sort of permissions from the original profile as they will be notified when they tag you that you will be able to repost it.

Step 2 – Check your notification that you are tagged

You should find the notification that you have been tagged on the upper right corner of your main feed. If you have been getting private messages, you know where you should look out for. Just click on this notification.

You should find the information on the video and the profile which has tagged you. Just under the info, you should find the option to Add this to Your Story. Click on the link and the video will be added to your story.

Please note that the option will only work when someone else has tagged you in their video. Otherwise, you will not be able to repost a video on Instagram without app. If you have been looking on information on how to repost a video on Instagram without app, this is the only way possible – at least as of now.

How to repost videos on Instagram using apps?

Well, if the above disclosure disappointed you, we would want to assure you that there is nothing you need to worry about. Of course, there are no options on how to repost a video on Instagram without app, but you can use a few best repost apps for Instagram. These apps can be quite helpful for you to save Instagram videos.

Here are a few best repost apps for Instagram that can be used to repost a video on Instagram.

DownloadGram

DownloadGram is an excellent and the best repost app for Instagram. This is one of our most favourite among the best repost apps for Instagram. It is a completely free app and can help you repost and save videos on Instagram without hiccups.

Since DownloadGram downloads the entire video, it can work in an excellent manner to post it on other social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. The app does not need you to sign up for the service, which makes it yet another excellent feature. DownloadGram is a web app and thus would be a perfect choice on any of your platforms.

Repost

Repost is yet another excellent and best repost app for Instagram available both on Android and iOS. The free app can be a perfect option for reposting your favourite Instagram videos. The steps involved are quite simple and easy to work with.

Whenever you find a video that is worthy of reposting, just click on the three-dot menu and choose the Share option. Launch the Repost for Instagram app from the share options available, make adjustments in the watermark and other elements and then post the video on your own Instagram profile.

Take care when you are reposting a video on Instagram

Reposting an Instagram video on your profile may not be as easy as it would appear. There are a few rules that you need to focus on. Of course, if you do it right, it can help you build a better brand image – whether you are an individual Instagrammer or have been running a profile for your business.

Make sure that you always give proper credits whenever you repost a video on Instagram. Ensure that you are always reposting a video that is indeed valuable. This can help you keep your profile in good standing. One of the excellent options would be to use the hashtag #regram to make it more obvious enough.

Whenever you repost a video on Instagram, make sure you are not editing it in any way. Your aim should be to repost a video in the original form. That way you would remain someone’s good books. Decreasing the resolution or cropping the image if any may not be an issue though. In case you feel the need to crop, trim or edit the video, it may be a good idea to ask for permission from the original poster of the video.

Instagram rules make it specific that whenever you repost a video on Instagram, you need to take the requisite permission from the original contributor. You can request for the permission by commenting on the post, sending in a direct message to the original contributor or even getting in touch with them through email or other available means.

In Conclusion

Well, that should be enough information to help you repost a video on Instagram. Observe proper precautions and ensure that you stay on the right side of the law. While there is not much of an option available on how to post a video on Instagram without app, the repost apps featured here should help you get your task done. Most of the third-party apps even let you download and save Instagram videos onto your local storage.

Repost any Instagram video only after following the proper precautions, and that would ensure that your profile stands no chance of being on the wrong side and offend someone’s creativity.

To the moon and beyond 3: The new space race and what winning it looks like

2019-07-17T23:43:00.001-07:00

From Algeria to Vietnam, there are 72 countries with some sort of space programme. And the new space race involves a number of private companies too, that are becoming increasingly crucial to national missions.

In the third episode of To the moon and beyond, we find out who some of the key players are in this new space race, what they are competing for and what winning looks like.

Space exploration has long been driven by competition. As we heard in the first episode of this podcast series, the success of NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon was driven by the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. After the US had won this space race, they soon stopped sending manned missions to the moon because of the cost and the risks involved.

But, for all the similarities with 50 years ago, John Horack, who holds the Neil Armstrong chair in aerospace policy at Ohio State University in the US, says today is very different.

There are still significant national prestige and pride factors associated with spaceflight. But there are many many things going on in space that have absolutely nothing to do with national prestige. They’re about economics. They’re about philanthropic activities, they’re about testing new business models. So it’s less of a race and more of an explosion.

Still, only three countries have successfully sent astronauts into space: Russia, the US and China. And one of the most exciting developments in space exploration, which took place earlier this year, was China’s successful Chang’e 4 mission. In January 2019, Chang’e 4 made a soft landing on the mysterious far side of the moon – the first time this has been done.

Yang Gao, professor of space autonomous systems at the University of Surrey, tells us why this was a remarkable feat of engineering. She also explains some of China’s plans to conduct scientific research on this south side of the moon – where there is evidence of an abundance of hydrogen and water ice.

These are really very exciting for us because those resources can potentially provide in the future the life support for human habitation or long-term existence on the moon, instead of us transporting those resources from Earth.

China’s success seems to have put rocket boosters under the US government’s space plans. Donald Trump’s administration has talked a lot about increasing NASA’s budget in order to send a manned mission to the moon in the next five years, looking to use it as a base for exploring Mars and beyond.

As well as new countries getting involved in space, the explosion of space activity that’s taken place in recent years has come from a number of commercial players entering the fray. The world’s first space tourist was an American billionaire called Dennis Tito who paid US$20m for an eight-day trip to the International Space Station in 2001. But the space tourism industry is still struggling to get off the ground. We talk to Louis Brennan, a business professor at Trinity College Dublin who researches space businesses, about whether the industry will ever take off.

If you imagine civil aviation and the way civil aviation evolved from being one which very few people partook in to one in which it became an activity engaged in by the masses. If space were to evolve in a similar way, space travel, then one could envisage these companies becoming quite profitable.

It’s not just tourism, though. There are myriad opportunities to make money through space now. Brennan talks us through the business models of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Both are successfully reducing the costs of space travel by developing reusable rockets. And riding on their coat tails are a number of other new and innovative companies.

So for all the talk of a new space race, today’s competition doesn’t to be a zero sum game where some groups win and others lose. From scientific projects to business endeavours, we find out how different countries and businesses are collaborating to push the boundaries of human discovery.

Credits:

To the moon and beyond is produced by Gemma Ware and Annabel Bligh. Additional reporting by Johnathan Gang. Sound editing by Siva Thangarajah. Thank you to City, University of London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios.

Picture source: SpaceX Falcon rocket, SpaceX on Unsplash

Music via Free Music Archive:

Even when we fall and Western Shores by Philipp Weigl. An Oddly Formal Dance and Bedroll by Blue Dot Sessions. Canada, by Pictures of the Floating World, and Awake by Scott Holmes.

And As time passes marimba via Zapslat.

Archive footage:

Dennis Tito making history, BBC World Service,
Fifth meeting of the National Space Council, NASA, President Trump announces plan to send NASA back to the moon, PBS Newshour,
Dark side of the moon: China’s Chang’e 4 probe makes historic landing, by Guardian News,
Chinese Chang’e-4 lunar probe makes first landing on far side of the moon, CGTN, The International Space Station: The next hot tourist destination, Al Jazeera,
The New Space Race,Google Lunar XPRIZE,
Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft to Enter Moon’s Orbit, i24NEWS English. Apollo 11 and 17 audio from NASA.

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