Month: July 2026
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Crowding Together
Crowds are usually something you want to avoid, although by their definition, you often can’t. But crowds are something that event organizers and technologists often look for. A crowded talk, event, or website is often a good thing. Crowdsourcing is a natural extension of the positive aspects of crowds. We use it, for example, any…
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A Tale of Two Earthquakes
On June 24, at 8:10am Pacific time, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck Northern California. Later that day, at 6:04pm local time, a back-to-back quake, magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, struck northern Venezuela. The first quake did little damage; the second was devastating. Both quakes triggered similar mobile phone-based alert-system warnings. But how those systems detected the…
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Prototyping Life
Scientists at the University of Minnesota have created, from scratch, a prototype of a living cell. It’s not quite life, but almost. From an ingredient list consisting of basic chemicals, a team led by Dr. Kate Adamala created “SpudCell,” a synthetic single cell that performs many of the key aspects of what we consider life: feeding,…
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More from Alan’s Bookshelves, part two
Continuing where we left off, here, top to bottom, are the atoms on the second of Alan’s two office bookshelves.
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