ReHacked #78: How to fight microplastic pollution with magnets, A Compass for the Politics of Collapse, Australian police can now hack your device and more

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How to fight microplastic pollution with magnets - BBC Future #nature

Microplastics are found in our clothes, cosmetics and cleaning products. One load of laundry can release an average of 700,000 microplastic fibres. Less than a millimetre in length, these fibres make their way into rivers and oceans, where they are eaten by fish and even corals. Because of their tiny size, microplastics are able to pass through filtration systems, making it very difficult to avoid them.

One 2018 study, plastic contamination can also be found in bottled water, with 93% of 259 bottled water samples the scientists examined containing microplastics.

According to recent research, we constantly inhale and ingest microplastics during our daily lives. One study in 2019 by researchers at the University of Newcastle found that globally people ingest an average of 5g of plastic every week – the equivalent of a credit card. The impact that this diet of microplastics has on our health, however, is still poorly understood.

Chemicals used in plastic have, however, been linked to a range of health problems including cancer, heart disease and poor foetal development. Studies have found that human exposure to microplastics could cause oxidative stress, inflammation and respiratory problems.

A Compass for the Politics of Collapse: A Short Straightforward Introduction — Conjure Utopia #society #futurism #longread

The word “collapse” appears more and more often in recent political debate. Online, in the media, in the Academia, and in radical political circles, Collapse is gaining more and more visibility. Notably, the concept has yet to be claimed by a specific political party. Instead, Collapse has triggered a wide variety of voices from all over the political spectrum to participate in a discourse weaving politics, philosophy, different scientific disciplines, design, fiction, and technology.

Apple and Google must allow developers to use other payment systems, new Korean law declares - The Verge #internet #bigcorp

South Korea has passed a bill written to prevent major platform owners like Google and Apple from restricting app developers to built-in payment systems, The Wall Street Journal reports. The bill is now expected to be signed into law by President Moon Jae-in, whose party championed the legislation.

The law comes as a blow to Google and Apple who both require in-app purchases to flow only through their systems, instead of outside payment processors, allowing the tech giants to collect a 30 percent cut. If tech companies fail to comply with the new law, they could face fines of up to 3 percent of their South Korea revenue.

Australia: Unprecedented surveillance bill rushed through parliament in 24 hours. #privacy

Australian police can now hack your device, collect or delete your data, take over your social media accounts - all without a judge's warrant.

Extreme ironing - Wikipedia #fun

Extreme ironing (also called EI) is an extreme sport in which people take ironing boards to remote locations and iron items of clothing. According to the Extreme Ironing Bureau, extreme ironing is "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt."

Journal of Controversial Ideas #science #ideas

The Journal of Controversial Ideas offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive. The journal offers authors the option to publish their articles under a pseudonym, in order to protect themselves from threats to their careers or physical safety.  We hope that this will also encourage readers to attend to the arguments and evidence in an essay rather than to who wrote it. Pseudonymous authors may choose to claim the authorship of their work at a later time, or to reveal it only to selected people (such as employers or prospective employers), or to keep their identity undisclosed indefinitely. Standard submissions using the authors’ actual names are also encouraged.

The Art of Not Taking Things Personally | by Dave Bailey | Aug, 2021 | The Founder Coach #psychology

‘Emotional generosity’ is the ability to see past behaviours that we don’t understand and proactively look for compassionate ways to explain them. It’s easy to do this for young children. If they start crying or throwing a tantrum, we wonder whether they are hungry, or tired, or hurt. Sadly, it’s harder to do this for adults — and especially our co-workers. And yet a more generous interpretation of their difficult behaviour often ends up being right.

Amazon asked FCC to reject Starlink plan because it can’t compete, SpaceX says | Ars Technica #space #engineering

Amazon's attempt to block proposals for the next-generation Starlink system is a "delay tactic" and a continuation of Amazon's strategy of "hinder[ing] competitors to compensate for Amazon's failure to make progress of its own," SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday.

"Amazon's track record amply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind," SpaceX told the FCC in its filing. Approving Amazon's request would hurt consumers by denying them "access to faster-moving competition," SpaceX said.

The Red Warning Light on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Space Flight | The New Yorker #space #longread

On July 11th, nearly a minute into the rocket trip carrying Richard Branson, the British billionaire, to space, a yellow caution light appeared on the ship’s console. The craft was about twenty miles in the air above the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, and climbing, travelling more than twice the speed of sound. But it was veering off course, and the light was a warning to the pilots that their flight path was too shallow and the nose of the ship was insufficiently vertical. If they didn’t fix it, they risked a perilous emergency landing in the desert on their descent.

Riding rockets is dangerous stuff. Around 1.4 per cent of Russian, Soviet, and American crewed spaceflight missions have resulted in fatalities. The foremost commercial space companies—Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin—must, over the coming years, bring that number down. Their profits depend on making frequent and safe human spaceflight a reality. “A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson has said.

How to study effectively | Psyche Guides #learning #psychology

• You can’t rely on intuition about how well your studying practices are working for you. Intuitive judgments of learning are often inaccurate and tend to produce an inflated perception of progress.
• Avoid defaulting to habitual, passive approaches to studying such as rereading and highlighting sources. These do not take advantage of the reconstructive nature of memory, and make it more tedious and less effective.
• Systematic engagement with the meaning of your source material is the key to successful studying.
• Rather than cramming your studying into an extended session before the exam, it’s much more effective to distribute the time you have available for studying over a larger number of shorter sessions.
• When you are studying similar topics that might be easily confused, it’s a good idea to interleave your studying – to alternate between the topics during your study sessions. This can help you identify the differences between the topics and reduce the chances of them being conflated.
• You should view self-testing as an integral part of your studying. One way to do this is the read, recite and review (3R) method: read a section of text, set it aside as you try to recall its content in your own words, and then check your recall, repeating as necessary.

Rogue antibodies involved in almost one-fifth of COVID deaths #health

Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue antibodies, known as autoantibodies, are also present in a small proportion of healthy, uninfected individuals — and their prevalence increases with age, which may help to explain why elderly people are at higher risk of severe COVID-19.

The findings, published on 19 August in Science Immunology, provide robust evidence to support an observation made by the same research team last October. Led by immunologist Jean-Laurent Casanova at the Rockefeller University in New York City, the researchers found that around 10% of people with severe COVID-19 had autoantibodies that attack and block type 1 interferons, protein molecules in the blood that have a critical role in fighting off viral infections.

“The initial report from last year was probably one of the most important papers in the pandemic,” says Aaron Ring, an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in this work. “What they’ve done in this new study is really dig down to see just how common these antibodies are across the general population — and it turns out they’re astonishingly prevalent.”

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