A weekly collection of links lovingly curated by Colin Wright.
The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai
“For more than half her life, Latifa had been devising plans to flee her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the leader of Dubai and the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Mohammed is an ally of Western governments, celebrated for transforming Dubai into a modern power. Publicly, he has placed gender equality at the heart of his plan to propel the U.A.E. to the top of the world economic order, vowing to “remove all the hurdles that women face.” But for his daughter Dubai was “an open air prison,” where disobedience was brutally punished.”
“A Courtroom Is a Really Lousy Place to Decide Science”
“Complicating matters is the fact that a significant portion of the judiciary has inconsistently applied the rules for admitting expert witnesses. Federal judges are supposed to act as gatekeepers that consider whether there’s more than a 50% chance that the expert’s opinion is reliable, a standard known as the preponderance of the evidence. But one recent study of more than 1,000 federal court opinions determining the admissibility of expert testimony in 2020 found that in 13% of cases, the standard for admissibility used was less stringent than the law demands, and judges actually presumed that the expert’s testimony would be admissible.”
Africa Fell In Love with Crypto—Now, It’s Complicated
“Chiamaka, a former product manager at a Nigerian cryptocurrency startup, has sworn off digital currencies. The 22-year-old has weathered a layoff and lost savings worth 4,603,500 naira ($9,900) after the collapse of FTX in November 2022. She now works for a corporate finance company in Lagos, earning a salary that is 45% lower than her previous job.”
Gene Therapy Reverses Vision Loss In Primates By Making Their Eyes Young Again
“Non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) is a condition caused by decreased blood flow to the optic nerve, resulting in sudden, significant, and usually permanent loss of vision in the eye. Scientists aren’t sure what causes NAION, but most of the 6,000 Americans diagnosed with it every year are over the age of 50. There’s no known treatment, and people who develop NAION in one eye are at risk of developing it in the other.”
Octopus Time
“Our experiences of time are likely different, too. We think about the passage of time through our terrestrial experience of unidirectional motion through space – our metaphors of time are almost all grounded in the way our bodies move forward through the environment. Given this fact, how would an octopus, who can easily see and move in all directions, conceptualise time? Current research methods may be able to take us only part of the way toward an answer, but it’s far enough to consider a radical possibility: if we became more like an octopus, could we free time, metaphorically speaking, from its constraints? Could we experience it as multidimensional, fluid and free?”
David Popa Renders Ephemeral Portraits On Ice Floes
“After a decade of living in Finland, David Popa has established a fruitful creative collaboration that would be impossible in his native New York City. The artist frequently works on land and sea, particularly the fractured ice floes of the Baltic, to render large-scale portraits and figurative murals that draw connections between the ephemerality of human life and the environment. Whether depicting his wife or newborn child in intimate renderings, he highlights the inevitability of change as time passes, seasons transition, and the climate warms.”
Why Champagne Has Stable “Bubble Chains” and Other Carbonated Drinks Do Not
“Champagne's effervescence arises from the nucleation of bubbles on the glass walls. Once they detach from their nucleation sites, the bubbles grow as they rise to the liquid surface, where they burst. This typically occurs within a couple of milliseconds, and the distinctive crackling sound is emitted when the bubbles rupture. The bubbles "ring" at specific resonant frequencies, depending on their size, so it's possible to "hear" the size distribution of bubbles as they rise to the surface in a glass of champagne.”
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