Post by faskew on Apr 3, 2018 8:03:58 GMT -5
Unfortunately, Wired News online has gone pay-to-view. (Fortunately, it's very cheap, so even I can afford it.) Anyway, I can't just post links from there any more, since I'm not sure who can see the articles. So I've put together some quotes from articles that got my attention this morning.
Wired has a 3-month free trial now, if anyone is interested. And these subjects may be available from other sources.
A New Way to Dispose of Corpses—With Chemistry
"Alkaline hydrolysis is a clean, green method for dissolving a body into its chemical building blocks; the runny remains just wash down the drain. Bones are ground up into powder and scattered."
"In the course of about four hours, the strong alkaline base breaks down everything but the skeleton into the original components that built it: sugar, salts, peptides, and amino acids. DNA unzips into its nucleobases—cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine. The body becomes a sterile watery liquid that looks like weak tea."
Has the potential to replace cremation as an alternate to burial, which puts toxic chemicals into the soil and water tables.
Witches, Frog-Gods, and the Deepening Schism of Internet Religions
The internet is being used to form new religions. Or at least new versions of old religions. Some people in the alt-right have possibly moved from Pepe the Frog as a mascot to worshiping Kek, a frog god of darkness and chaos. But since it's impossible to tell when people on the internet are joking, who knows.
Mini Brains Just Got Creepier—They’re Growing Their Own Veins
"The first human brain balls—aka cortical spheroids, aka neural organoids—agglomerated into existence just a few short years ago. In the beginning, they were almost comically crude: just stem cells, chemically coerced into proto-neurons and then swirled into blobs in a salty-sweet bath."
"Then they started growing up. The simple spheres matured into 3D structures, fusing with other types of brain balls and sparking with electricity. The more like real brains they became, the more useful they were for studying complex behaviors and neurological diseases beyond the reach of animal models. And now, in their most human act yet, they’re starting to bleed."
Wired has a 3-month free trial now, if anyone is interested. And these subjects may be available from other sources.
A New Way to Dispose of Corpses—With Chemistry
"Alkaline hydrolysis is a clean, green method for dissolving a body into its chemical building blocks; the runny remains just wash down the drain. Bones are ground up into powder and scattered."
"In the course of about four hours, the strong alkaline base breaks down everything but the skeleton into the original components that built it: sugar, salts, peptides, and amino acids. DNA unzips into its nucleobases—cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine. The body becomes a sterile watery liquid that looks like weak tea."
Has the potential to replace cremation as an alternate to burial, which puts toxic chemicals into the soil and water tables.
Witches, Frog-Gods, and the Deepening Schism of Internet Religions
The internet is being used to form new religions. Or at least new versions of old religions. Some people in the alt-right have possibly moved from Pepe the Frog as a mascot to worshiping Kek, a frog god of darkness and chaos. But since it's impossible to tell when people on the internet are joking, who knows.
Mini Brains Just Got Creepier—They’re Growing Their Own Veins
"The first human brain balls—aka cortical spheroids, aka neural organoids—agglomerated into existence just a few short years ago. In the beginning, they were almost comically crude: just stem cells, chemically coerced into proto-neurons and then swirled into blobs in a salty-sweet bath."
"Then they started growing up. The simple spheres matured into 3D structures, fusing with other types of brain balls and sparking with electricity. The more like real brains they became, the more useful they were for studying complex behaviors and neurological diseases beyond the reach of animal models. And now, in their most human act yet, they’re starting to bleed."