Humans

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The Kaomoji are coming? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Kaomoji are, of course, Japanese-style emoticons, first imported to U.S. internet shores by anime forum posters. Why use kaomoji? They’re more elaborate and more expressive — and also more practical: You don’t need to tilt your head to the side to read them.

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Measuring crop yields from space

A research team, led by Kaiyu Guan, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy, & Environmental Sciences, has developed a method to estimate crop yields using satellites that can measure solar-induced fluorescence, a light emitted by growing plants. The team published its results in the journal Global Change Biology.

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David Attenborough – Humans are plague on Earth

“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times.

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How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution

The Western microbiome, the community of microbes scientists thought of as “normal” and “healthy,” the one they used as a baseline against which to compare “diseased” microbiomes, might be considerably different than the community that prevailed during most of human evolution.

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Russia and the Curse of Geography

But it’s helpful to look at Putin’s military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders’ longstanding attempts to deal with geography. What if Putin’s motives aren’t so mysterious after all? What if you can read them clearly on a map?

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Judged by your accent

Earlier that year he had held a fake class for about 60 undergrads at the University of Georgia, in front of whom he placed either a photo of a Caucasian professor or a Chinese professor. In both of these photos, the professors were dressed similarly, with matching hairdos, and were seen standing in front of identical chalkboard backdrops. Each was accompanied by the same voice, which was a woman from Ohio reciting two articles in The New York Times. The only difference between the two professors was their face, which gave away their nationality.

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Media Trafficking in Cuba

Smuggled hard drives. Satellite dishes hidden in fake rooftop water tanks. Market-driven distribution methods. A 26-year-old kingpin. It’s only a matter of time before this is the subject of a TV series – and distributed in the same way of course to complete the circle.