ReHacked #65: How many numbers exist, Dutch crime reporter shot dead, SpaceX will soon fire up its massive Super Heavy booster for the first time and more

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How Many Numbers Exist? Infinity Proof Moves Math Closer to an Answer. #science

In 1900, the mathematician David Hilbert put the continuum hypothesis first on his famous list of 23 math problems to solve in the 20th century. Hilbert was enthralled by the nascent mathematics of infinity — “Cantor’s paradise,” as he called it — and the continuum hypothesis seemed like its lowest-hanging fruit.

To the contrary, shocking revelations last century turned Cantor’s question into a deep epistemological conundrum.

The trouble arose in 1931, when the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel discovered that any set of axioms that you might posit as a foundation for mathematics will inevitably be incomplete. There will always be questions that your list of ground rules can’t settle, true mathematical facts that they can’t prove.

As Gödel suspected right away, the continuum hypothesis is such a case: a problem that’s independent of the standard axioms of mathematics.

Dutch crime reporter De Vries dies after being shot in street #crime

Celebrity Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries has died just over a week after being shot in a busy Amsterdam street, his family and his employer RTL Netherlands said on Thursday, prompting an outpouring of grief and anger at home and abroad.

De Vries, 64, was well-known for his television programmes, in which he often worked with victims' families and tirelessly pursued unsolved cases. He had received threats in the past from the criminal underworld in connection with his work.

SpaceX will soon fire up its massive Super Heavy booster for the first time #engineering #technology

SpaceX seems to have gone a long time without launching—or blowing up—a rocket at its South Texas launch site. A little more than two months have passed since the company launched its SN15 Starship prototype to an altitude of 10 km before safely landing the vehicle on May 5.

The SpaceX engineering team apparently got the data it needed from that test flight, because the company scrapped plans to fly its next prototype (the SN16) in favor of moving toward higher flights. Accordingly, activity at the so-called "Starbase" facility near Boca Chica, Texas, has focused on building up capabilities for an orbital launch attempt of the Starship system.

Delta pilot sues the airline for allegedly stealing an app he designed #software #copyrights

A Delta pilot has sued the airline for $1 billion, accusing it of trade secrets theft over a communications app he developed a few years ago. According to Bloomberg, Captain Craig Alexander pitched the QrewLive app, which he reportedly developed with $100,000 of his own money, to the company as a way for crew to easily communicate in case of disrupted flights. However, Delta turned him down and then launched what he says is an identical tool a few years later.

The Is This Prime? game #fun #science

Why autoimmunity is most common in women #health #science

When Rhonda Voskuhl was a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the mid-1990s, it was common knowledge among clinicians that multiple sclerosis (MS) — an autoimmune disease that affects the brain and spinal cord — was about twice as common in women than in men. Today, she says, the ratio is closer to 3 to 1.

Many of her colleagues saw the sex discrepancy as an inconvenience, says Voskuhl, now a neuroimmunologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of the interdisciplinary Organization for the Study of Sex Differences. Researchers working with animal models would order only male or only female mice to avoid the hassle of dividing their data by sex.

SQLBolt - Learn SQL - Introduction to SQL #learning #programming

Welcome to SQLBolt, a series of interactive lessons and exercises designed to help you quickly learn SQL right in your browser.

‘Hubble is back!’ Famed space telescope has new lease on life after computer swap appears to fix glitch #science #space #technology

The iconic but elderly Hubble Space Telescope appears to have been resurrected again after a shutdown of more than a month following a computer glitch. Science has learned that following a switch from the operating payload control computer to a backup device over the past 24 hours, Hubble’s operators have re-established communications with all the telescope’s instruments and plan to return them to normal operations today.

“Hubble is back!” Tom Brown, head of the Hubble mission office, emailed to staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute at 5:56 a.m. “I am excited to watch Hubble get back to exploring the universe.”

Greenland suspends oil exploration because of climate change #politics #economy #energy #futurism

The left-leaning government of Greenland has decided to suspend all oil exploration off the world’s largest island, calling it is “a natural step” because the Arctic government “takes the climate crisis seriously.”

No oil has been found yet around Greenland, but officials there had seen potentially vast reserves as a way to help Greenlanders realize their long-held dream of independence from Denmark by cutting the annual subsidy of 3.4 billion kroner ($540 million) the Danish territory receives.

Tesla patent reveals Elon Musk's 'table salt' lithium extraction process that could slash costs #technology

Tesla has applied for a new patent that is revealing the lithium extraction process that Elon Musk vaguely described as “using table salt to basically extract lithium from ore” during Tesla’s Battery Day last year.

It could cut costs by more than 30%, according to the automaker.

During Tesla’s Battery Day last year, the automaker unveiled a lot of new technologies that it couldn’t spend a lot of time explaining.

One of those was that Tesla has developed a new lithium extraction process that Drew Baglino, SVP of engineering at Tesla, claimed would “result in a 33% reduction in lithium cost.“

Why the U.S. once set off a nuclear bomb in space #history

The results from the 1962 Starfish Prime test serve as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation.

Fasting lowers blood pressure by reshaping the gut microbiota #health

At Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. David J. Durgan and his colleagues are dedicated to better understand hypertension, in particular the emerging evidence suggesting that disruption of the gut microbiota, known as gut dysbiosis, can have adverse effects on blood pressure.

"Previous studies from our lab have shown that the composition of the gut microbiota in animal models of hypertension, such as the SHRSP (spontaneously hypertensive stroke-prone rat) model, is different from that in animals with normal blood pressure," said Durgan, assistant professor of anesthesiology at Baylor.

Short Guide to Iraq #history #culture

War and Navy Departments

Washington, DC [1943]

“Neuroprosthesis” Restores Words to Man with Paralysis #technology #health

Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen.

The achievement, which was developed in collaboration with the first participant of a clinical research trial, builds on more than a decade of effort by UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, to develop a technology that allows people with paralysis to communicate even if they are unable to speak on their own. The study appears July 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Word gap: When money’s tight, parents talk less to kids #psychology

Three decades ago, child development researchers found that low-income children heard tens of millions fewer words in their homes than their more affluent peers by the time they reached kindergarten. This “word gap” was and continues to be linked to a socioeconomic disparity in academic achievement.

While parenting deficiencies have long been blamed for the word gap, new UC Berkeley research implicates the economic context in which parenting takes place — in other words, the wealth gap.

The findings, published this month in the journal Developmental Science, provide the first evidence that parents may talk less to their kids when experiencing financial scarcity.

“We were interested in what happens when parents think about or experience financial scarcity and found evidence that such strain could suppress their speech to their children,” said study senior author Mahesh Srinivasan, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

Into the Zone: 4 days inside Chernobyl’s secretive ‘stalker’ subculture #culture

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has long been a tourist hotspot. Now, in the face of this commodification, young Ukrainian men are breaking into the highly contaminated wilderness to explore illegally. This is the world of the stalkers

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