Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 22, 2019

IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Unconventional superconductivity is possible in graphene; An alcohol producing bacteria can cause liver damage; Facebook suspends or bans tens of thousands of applications from about 400 developers; and a TED talk with expert insights on depression

Note: I will be on the road on Sunday, so it is likely that there will be no posts in this series on Monday.

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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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Video Friday: Roller-Skating Quadruped Has Best of Both Worlds Mobility - IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes a quadruped with wheels, from the DARPA Subterannean Challenge; A NASA video about soft robotic systems; NimbRo in the adult-sized RoboCup soccer competition; AI Hide and Seek (which supplements coverage from Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 18, 2019); A cooler-sized personal autonomous caddy; A robotic hand that can catch objects that are tossed in its direction; CMU videos of the history of their autonomous vehicle and drone research; and more.
Here is the OpenAI hide and seek video:https://youtu.be/kopoLzvh5jY

STEEM Superconductivity in Graphene - In this article, @thefairjournal posts a children's animation and a layman's summary of the Nature article, Unconventional superconductivity in magic-angle graphene superlattices. Conventionally, superconductivity - a phenomenon by which electricity moves without energy loss - requires a pure material to be cooled very close to absolute zero. On the other hand, unconventional superconductivity may achieve the same result with mixed materials, at higher temperatures, and it has different physical properties. The authors of the Nature article (first author: Yuan Cao) found a way to make unconventional superconductivity work by using two layers of graphene that are twisted at a particular angle. The material could be tuned by applying electric currents at various strengths, which improves on previous methods, which required very strong magnetic fields for tuning. The discovery still requires very low temperatures, but leaves open the hope that similar advances may be possible at still higher temperatures.
Here is the children's animation:https://youtu.be/4L8-TjwULCU

(A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @thefairjournal.)

Alcohol-Producing Gut Bacteria May Harm Livers—Even if You Don't Drink - In a study, a team found that even tea totalers can experience liver damage from alcohol because certain strains of Klebsiella pneumonia can produce large amounts of alcohol in the gut. It is not known how some people cultivate this strain, or how it interacts with the gut microbes, but it is treateable with antibiotics.

Facebook suspends tens of thousands of apps in ongoing privacy investigation - In a blog post on Friday, Facebook VP of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong described the action, saying it was an update on a project that was launched in March, 2018, in response that Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook information to build profiles of users for the Trump campaign. The tens of thousands of applications were associated with about 400 developers. Some were suspended, and others were banned, and the company has taken legal action against some of the groups. The article closes with this: "Friday’s revelations suggest that the scope of the privacy controversies may be bigger than company officials have previously acknowledged. Now would be a good time for readers who use Facebook to review the apps they’ve installed and delete any that request large amounts of data or don’t provide a meaningful benefit."

This could be why you're depressed and anxious - In this TED talk, Johan Hari discusses his discussions with experts about the causes of depression and ways to resolve it. Noting that there is scientific evidence for at least 9 different causes of depression and anxiety, he argues that at its core, depression is caused by unmet needs, and the best way to treat it is to find what the need is and to resolve it. Additionally, he suggests two of the main reasons for increasing depression in the western world: (i) As we go about disbanding our tribes, we are the loneliest society in human history; and (ii) We're trained to look for happiness from things like money and status, which is bound to lead to disappointment. In short, "Junk values don't meet your psychological needs."

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Fundraising for the Rustin Golden Knights Marching Band by @rgkmb-unofficial

About this series

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