Hopefully Interesting

Someone made a map of all the languages of Europe arranged by lexical distance.  Looking at it you might wonder why English is considered Germanic but apparently our grammar is distinctly Germanic despite the number of French words we've absorbed. A lot of the time I tend to just look at the income tax when thinking about progressive or regressive taxation but this blog post  reminded me that there are a lot of good and services that have specific taxes attached to them and they tend to disproportionately be things consumed by poor people.  A lot of other good stuff there too. Some Italian scientists basically just sprayed some spiders with water that had carbon nanotubes in it and found that they made silk  stronger than any known material .  That's mad science for you. Remember those bright spots on Ceres?  As Dawn gets closer we're getting  better pictures .  It's looking for like ice. Our robot made the news ! There's this thing cal...

I noticed The Tech , MIT's student newspaper has a front page article on a call for MIT to divest from fossil fuel companies and various faculty members weighing in.  There was some back and forth in it but the thing that I think is most important about divestment wasn't mentioned by any of the participants.  To put it baldly: divestment doesn't accomplish anything. Now, US universities have about $415 billion dollars in investments between them.  The ten biggest oil companies have a market capitalization of 1,800 billion between them.  So you might think that all universities divesting could lower the stocks of the gas companies by 20% or so.  Except the denominator you want is actually all the money everyone is investing in all stocks, or about $65 trillion .  So without the investments of the universities you'd only expect their stocks to go down by half a percent. In economics there's something called the efficient market hypothesis which is sort...

The most exciting stuff over the last month has probably been everything that's happened in genetic engineering via a tool called CRISPR, described in detail  here .  This technique has apparently only been around for a couple of years but it's making big waves.  In the  blog post  where I heard about this some scientists in the comments were predicting that we'd see this used on humans soon and sure enough it seems that the rumors were right and some scientists had  altered non-viable embryos . In other genetic engineering news, some scientists have altered rice  to preform photosynthesis in the more efficient way that corn does Oh, and some people are hoping to use CRISPR to turn elephant embryos into Woolly Mammoths too. In Mars news there are apparently  belts of glaciers  running around the planet.  Also this is a really pretty mineral vein formation . And elsewhere in space, this person did a very good job of putting all th...