Benign By Design

Nanomaterials tend to have magical properties. The most famous nanomaterial yet is graphene, which is a sheet of carbon molecules, holding on to each other in a way neither nature nor man has ever seen. Not only does this nanomaterial form itself in a way that is new, but it has properties that are just as novel. (See this jacket that was covered in graphene and sold to the public just for the chance that regular people may discover something that scientists haven't yet.)

Being that graphene, and most nanomaterials, are such a surprise, and that because of their magical properties they are becoming ubiquitous in our environment, it might be a good idea to figure out what these things do once we unleash them into the biosphere. 

Just in time, here come some ideas about what this stuff does as it persists in our environment. The Center for Sustainable Nanotech shows us that the way nanoparticles are coated makes the difference in how they behave in biological systems.

Certain particle-coatings were found to form fatty sheaths that make the particles stick to each other. These little fat bubbles are really called fragmented lipid coronas, and like most things nano, they have never been seen before.

Some coatings make the fat-corona and some don't, and now that we are beginning to understand, the scientists want us to consider this in future applications of the wonder material.

Professor of chemistry in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Franz M. Geiger gets all the credit for the lingo by the way, "Benign by Design."


Notes:
Study provides insight into how nanoparticles interact with biological systems
Oct 2018, phys.org

Pro Posteri

Everything gets old. Everything lives, dies,and then shits itself. Even the internet.

I had never heard of linkrot until today. However, I have always considered posterity and the preservation of information to be an important consideration and practice, be it for the creative individual, or the common cultural enthusiast alike.

As stated in the bio, this website is for the purpose of a personal content-addressable archive. This has already  become more useful as the internet, by way of your search results, transitions from a thing that looks the same for everyone to a thing that looks different depending on who you are.

Already feeds are tailored to your behavioral profile. Everything you see is alpha-beta'd to infinity. In common language, the United Airlines homepage looks way different depending on whether you're you or you're me.

That being said, boy was it a surprise to learn that someone out there had a way better and way more ambitious idea than me. They are the creators of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and they have way stronger devotion to posterity than I.

Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive gave a talk at the 2018 Online News Association conference, detailing this careful and insatiable machine that gorges on terabytes of our cultural data daily (via Ars Technica).

What's more exciting, that they're archiving physical things like vinyl records and microfeche, or that they're archiving the entire internet, everyday. What? They have robots that have repaired over 6 million pages lost to linkrot. They screenshot the Google homepage every ten minutes*.

Or is it more exciting to know they've been at it for 22 years? Has the internet even been aorund for 22 years?? (Yes. AOL remembers).

Great quote taken from Ars comments section:
The Internet Archive isn't trying to merely scrape the web. It's trying to ensure that we have a record of the past that we can rely on in the future. -source

We may not readily notice its effects in our daily lives, but we should appreciate nonetheless that such obsessive, compulsive behavior exists. Our world changes faster than we do as individuals, and our memories change even faster than that. Without an unconditionally comprehensive, enduring, and accessible repository of our cultural artifacts, it becomes too easy to perpetuate the failings of lessons we have already paid for.

You would think as the good consumerists, Americans would not stand for such highway robbery. Then again, according to the Internet Archives donations, many people recognize it as a fair deal.

*Fun fact: Stephen Wolfram (Alpha) also screenshots his desktop every ten minutes, and that's not the end of his compulsive archiving behaviors. I revered this guy, only a little, bit before I discovered this. Now he's in the pantheon.


Notes:
The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders—I like to say we’re archivists”
Oct 2018, Ars Technica

They even have video games for goodness sake! It's called the Internet Arcade.

They offer other services, like comparing side by side the same page at two different times, or architectural diagrams that show how a site's structure has changed over time.


Post Script:
NSFW - leave it to the comments section to remind us that we can use this to view vintage porn. Leave it to me to remind you if you are now on archive.org, fantasizing along with an adult film from 1998, of let's say a 25-year-old couple, consider that they are now 45 years old. That's not strong enough. Get a video from the 70's. Those actors are now over 70.
[comments section]

On Science Communication

Science isn't easy. It can be repetitive and tedious, but it's not easy. Writing about it is even harder.

We're skimming through a grocery list of the worst scientific disciplines to research and write about, as compiled by the writers of Ars Technica, a science-slanted popular news outlet.

Note that this list is more about what science writers don't like --reading-- about, not writing. And most of the problems here come from the discrepancy between how passionate the writers feel about their subject matter, and its impenetrability.

Space exploration
Paleontology
Batteries
Astronomy
Theoretical physics
Archeology
Quantum optics e.g. time crystals

The reasons for this lamented impenetrability are succinctly summarized by an actual scientist, in the comments section:

Professional scientist here. I'm currently writing a review paper, and I'm on a bit of a deadline crunch, so naturally I'm procrastinating here on Ars. And regarding your accusations of the dryness and joy robbing nature of the primary literature, I have just one thing to say to you...

You're kinda right. I mean, sure, there's a reason that it's written this way, but yeah, I get it. I'm plowing through many papers in my field and I understand the details well, and I definitely get excited at many passages that would put most people to sleep. But many simply put me to sleep.

I think the reason for this is three-fold: 1) precision of language is important; 2) making precise language varied and interesting is much more work than allowing it to remain dry, so many authors don't do it; 3) there are some details that specialists need to communicate to each other that aren't exciting no matter how hard you try. ¯\_(?)_/¯
-jjemerson

This is a great explanation, and supports the need for this very specific type of communicator in our society, the science writer. Alan Alda thought it was so important that he created an entire school to attend this need.


Notes:

Here are the subjects our reporters enjoy covering the least
Sep 2018, Ars Technica

Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University