Archive for January, 2019
Meth and Murder: Tijuana Is One of the Deadliest Cities on Earth
January 30th, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times: Tijuana, a city of 1.8 million that not long ago was celebrating a major reduction in violence, is in the grip of an unprecedented homicide crisis. A record 2,518 people were killed here in 2018 — nearly seven times the total in 2012. With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is […]
Smart Coolers: Now Your Groceries See You, Too
January 30th, 2019Via: The Atlantic: Walgreens is piloting a new line of “smart coolers”—fridges equipped with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and make inferences on their age and gender. On January 14, the company announced its first trial at a store in Chicago in January, and plans to equip stores in New York and San Francisco with […]
Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones
January 29th, 2019Ah… It de-identifies the location of cellphone users. Mmm hmm. Via: The Intercept: Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building […]
Nobel Peace Prize Winner: Obama Spoke at Boeing Retreat After Firm Gave Millions to Library Fund
January 28th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Boeing Co. lined up a surprise motivational speaker for an executive retreat in Arizona this month: former U.S. President Barack Obama. He was the second former U.S. president in two years to offer up leadership tips to managers gathered for Boeing’s annual desert planning session. George W. Bush addressed the group last year, […]
U.S. Military Eyes Tiny Nuclear Reactors for Deployed Troops
January 28th, 2019Via: DefenseOne: Getting fuel to remote operating bases is a big problem for the U.S. military. In 2008, during the height of combat in Iraq, the Government Accountability Office estimated that more than 900,000 gallons of fuel went to bases for basic power needs like lighting and refrigeration (on top of the 6.7 million gallons […]
Frozen Doom? Antibiotic-Resistant Superbug Genes Found in the Arctic
January 28th, 2019Hmm. Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO Giants Know Something We Don’t: No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the […]
Gene Modified Chickens ‘Lay Medicines’
January 28th, 2019Via: BBC: Researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute have genetically modified chickens to produce human proteins in their eggs. They hope the project will one day lead to lifesaving drugs that are much cheaper to make. The team modified the genomes of the chickens so their eggs contain large amounts of high quality […]
Another EV Giant Enters The Battery Business
January 27th, 2019Via: OilPrice.com: German auto maker giant Volkswagen has just upped its bet on electric vehicles (EVs) by announcing it will begin manufacturing batteries and charging stations for those cars, which the company plans to also start mass producing soon. The Wolfsburg-based company said it would invest 870 million euros (about $985 million) by 2020 to […]
Army’s Long-Awaited Iraq War Study Finds Iran Was the Only Winner
January 27th, 2019The arms industry and the mercs did ok, too. Via: ArmyTimes: A two-volume Army study of the Iraq war is a deep examination of the mistakes and success of the war effort that also takes aim at critics who would slough off the conflict as they shift to near-peer threats. The study, commissioned by former […]
Hacked Russian Documents: Dark Side of the Kremlin
January 26th, 2019Via: The Hill: A group of transparency advocates released a massive number of hacked and leaked Russian documents on Friday in what is being viewed as retaliation against Russia’s sharing of hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. The documents, totaling 175 gigabytes in data, were shared on DDoSecret website […]
