Lulz

In Africa, one might find some significant challenges to growing forests, forests that can find a plethora of benefits to communities that could sustain them. Well, thanks to some Italian architects, Africa might have an unexpected solution. Many of you may have heard of vertical farming, but have you ever heard of vertical foresting? Well, in Africa, that is exactly what is happening.
Africa’s First Vertical Forest to Be Developed in Egypt – Truth Theory
Excerpt:
In August 2019, Italian architect and urban planner Stefano Boeri unveiled plans for the first vertical forest in Africa. Three buildings will be designed, each 30 meters tall and 30 meters wide. The buildings will be cube-shaped and seven stories tall. They will also be covered with pollution-absorbing trees and plants to help reduce carbon emissions in the desert east of Cairo.
Stefano Boeri Architetti estimates the buildings will have planted terraces containing 350 trees and 14,000 shrubs. Over 100 species will help cleanse the air from impurities. One of the three buildings will be a hotel while the other two will house apartment units.
The project will be located in Egypt’s New Administrative Capital. As DeZeen reports, the vertical forest is intended to be the administrative capital of the country and will contain the government departments and foreign embassies.

A promising super-duper powerful bioreactor could aid in the assault against excess carbon in the air. A new bioreactor can do what whole forests might struggle to do, eat that carbon and clean that air.
This New Bioreactor Has The Ability To Capture As Much Carbon As An Acre Of Trees – Truth Theory
Excerpt:
In the bid to look for cleaner fuel alternatives, a tech company from Austin has come up with a unique solution. They have designed an ingenious bioreactor that utilizes algae to convert CO2 into oxygen. And not just any small amount. It can put out nearly 2 tons of oxygen each year- a feat achieved by 400 trees!
Hypergiant Industries used artificial intelligence to develop the Eos Bioreactor. The AI optimizes carbon capture, algae growth and output. Algae is 400x better than trees when it comes to sequestering carbon.

Perhaps someday you will be able to have precious data stored in your very cells. If you want to hold on to an audio recording of a lost loved one, well, that data might be implanted in your cells, available at a moment’s notice of being scanned to recover the audio for play.
Storing data in everyday objects – Science Daily
Excerpt:
Living beings contain their own assembly and operating instructions in the form of DNA. That’s not the case with inanimate objects: anyone wishing to 3D print an object also requires a set of instructions. If they then choose to print that same object again years later, they need access to the original digital information. The object itself does not store the printing instructions.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have now collaborated with an Israeli scientist to develop a means of storing extensive information in almost any object. “With this method, we can integrate 3D-printing instructions into an object, so that after decades or even centuries, it will be possible to obtain those instructions directly from the object itself,” explains Robert Grass, Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences. The way of storing this information is the same as for living things: in DNA molecules.

Walmart Apologizes For “Let it Snow” Sweater Depicting Santa Doing Cocaine – Truth Theory
Excerpt:
The items in question were edgy versions of the popular “ugly” Christmas sweaters that are often worn ironically during the holiday season. Unfortunately, some Walmart customers couldn’t take a joke and complained about some of the shirts, prompting a response from the company. One of the sweaters featured a picture of Santa cutting out lines of cocaine with the caption “Let It Snow,” which is a reference to a slang term for cocaine.
The product description on the site for the sweater read, “We all know how snow works. It’s white, powdery and the best snow comes straight from South America. That’s bad news for jolly old St. Nick, who lives far away in the North Pole. That’s why Santa really likes to savour the moment when he gets his hands on some quality, grade A, Colombian snow. He packs it in perfect lines on his coffee table and then takes a big whiff to smell the high quality aroma of the snow.”

Exciting excitons could pave the way for solids to be manipulated with sound. Maybe one day you can whistle your shirt to be blue or….gulp…..plaid, that day (please don’t whistle plaid, though…remember, just because you CAN, doesn’t……).
Those excitons within can be manipulated, but you have to have all the conditions just right for that change to occur. Well, that finicky nature of the change within the exciton may be un-finicked, if you will, by a new breakthrough.
Controlling the optical properties of solids with acoustic waves – Science Daily
Excerpt:
One of the main challenges in materials science research is to achieve high tunability of the optical properties of semiconductors at room temperature. These properties are governed by “excitons,” which are bound pairs of negative electrons and positive holes in a semiconductor.
Excitons have become increasingly important in optoelectronics and the last years have witnessed a surge in the search for control parameters — temperature, pressure, electric and magnetic fields — that can tune excitonic properties. However, moderately large changes have only been achieved under equilibrium conditions and at low temperatures. Significant changes at ambient temperatures, which are important for applications, have so far been lacking.
This has now just been achieved in the lab of Majed Chergui at EPFL within the Lausanne Centre for Ultrafast Science, in collaboration with the theory groups of Angel Rubio (Max-Planck Institute, Hamburg) and Pascal Ruello (Université de Le Mans). Publishing in Science Advances, the international team shows, for the first time, control of excitonic properties using acoustic waves. To do this, the researchers launched a high-frequency (hundreds of gigahertz), large-amplitude acoustic wave in a material using ultrashort laser pulses. This strategy further allows for the dynamical manipulation of the exciton properties at high speed.
This remarkable result was reached on titanium dioxide at room temperature, a cheap and abundant semiconductor that is used in a wide variety of light-energy conversion technologies such as photovoltaics, photocatalysis, and transparent conductive substrates.

Blue bloods, it would appear, suffer from the annoying malady of degenerating DNA when your stock divides among itself only, so to speak. When you go all (insert cliched American South stereotype here involving being your own grandpa, but add trumpets and fox hunts) you tend to get some…issues.
Facial deformity in royal dynasty was linked to inbreeding, scientists confirm – Science Daily
Excerpt: from Science Daily
The “Habsburg jaw,” a facial condition of the Habsburg dynasty of Spanish and Austrian kings and their wives, can be attributed to inbreeding, according to new results published in the Annals of Human Biology.
The new study combined diagnosis of facial deformities using historical portraits with genetic analysis of the degree of relatedness to determine whether there was a direct link. The researchers also investigated the genetic basis of the relationship.
Generations of intermarriage secured the family’s influence across a European empire including Spain and Austria for more than 200 years but led to its demise when the final Habsburg monarch was unable to produce an heir. However, until now no studies have confirmed whether the distinct chin known as “Habsburg jaw” was a result of inbreeding.

This little story got little attention in some of the bigger sites that cover such stories. It caught my eye because of this statement, “This study shows that aggression doesn’t just depend on who you are and who you’re interacting with but also depends on your previous interactions. That’s the unique part.”
The statement is based in a study involving fruit flies. In and of itself, a statement that, especially in a clinical, proportional contextual setting (if you will), one can find nothing but banality in.. But that statement, set against the context of the age’s conflicting governing standards, due process versus bad crime/bad thought prevention, from scientists today should at least raise a few hairs, though don’t lets’ grab our bugout bags and head for metaphorical Valhalla just yet. Still…..
In a peaceful land, this study exists as an intellectual curiosity. In a land at war with itself, this study offers dangerous justifications for authoritarians, justifications for expanding one’s stigmatization of those who think wrongly to extend to those who may have been previously affiliated with them. All of the actors in the chain towards violence have a measure of ‘sin’ to atone for, so to speak.
Here is the key excerpt from the story, followed by the newspoem ‘inspired’ by this story:
Fighting fruit flies: Aggressive behavior influenced by previous interactions – Science Daily
Excerpt:
The study is the first to show that effects of an earlier aggressive encounter carry over in time and across different social groups but not necessarily in expected ways, said Julia Kilgour, lead author and a PhD student in the Department of Integrative Biology.
The study was published recently in the journal Behavioral Ecology.
“This study shows that aggression doesn’t just depend on who you are and who you’re interacting with but also depends on your previous interactions. That’s the unique part,” Kilgour said.
In different settings and from one encounter to the next, the schoolyard bully might turn passive or the mild-mannered office worker might unexpectedly lash out at a colleague.
“Aggression is a plastic trait,” said Prof. Andrew McAdam, who co-advised Kilgour along with integrative biology professor Ryan Norris. “Someone may be aggressive with one partner and not another.”
NewsPoem:
On Fruit Flies Mapping Human Aggression
Aggress.
Ate.
The date. The froth finite.
A Fruit cracks, the juice
Evaporates in a sheet of flies.
From this, the root,
The froth, the known,
We make machines based on the fortune of the projected numbers.
Now, all of our kids have daily supplements.
The froth, the known.
I am speaking to you, friend, don’t do this fruit thing to your neighbor.
Rage is the counter to the loss.
Rage.
Is the counter.
To the loss.
To let go.
The fruit fly is not a machine that knows you.