Saturday, May 18

Tag: explains

An Electrical Engineer Explains – How 5G Puts Airplanes At Risk
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TECHNOLOGY

An Electrical Engineer Explains – How 5G Puts Airplanes At Risk

New high-speed cellphone services have raised concerns of interference with aircraft operations, particularly as aircraft are landing at airports. The Federal Aviation Administration has assured Americans that most commercial aircraft are safe, and AT&T and Verizon have agreed to hold off on installing their new cellphone antennas near airports for six months. But the problem has not been entirely resolved. Concerns began when the U.S. government auctioned part of the C-band spectrum to wireless carriers in 2021 for US$81 billion. The carriers are using C-band spectrum to provide 5G service at full speed, 10 times the speed of 4G networks. The C-band spectrum is close to the frequencies used by key electronics that aircraft rely on to land safely. Here’s why that can be a problem. Ke...
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An Agriculture Expert Explains What Bio-engineered Food Is
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ENVIRONMENT

An Agriculture Expert Explains What Bio-engineered Food Is

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines bioengineered food as food that “contains detectable genetic material that has been modified through certain lab techniques that cannot be created through conventional breeding or found in nature.” If that definition sounds familiar, it is because it is essentially how genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are defined – common vocabulary many people use and understand. On Jan. 1, 2022, the USDA implemented a new U.S. bioengineered food disclosure standard. Shoppers are seeing labels on food products with the terms “bioengineered” or “derived from bioengineering” printed on a green seal with the sun shining down on cropland. More than 90% of U.S.-grown corn, soybeans and sugar beets are genetically modified. This means that many processed foo...
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A Food Chemist Explains Sweet Science – The Difference Between Sugar, Other Natural Sweeteners And Artificial Sweeteners
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HEALTH & WELLNESS

A Food Chemist Explains Sweet Science – The Difference Between Sugar, Other Natural Sweeteners And Artificial Sweeteners

A quick walk down the drink aisle of any corner store reveals the incredible ingenuity of food scientists in search of sweet flavors. In some drinks you’ll find sugar. A diet soda might have an artificial or natural low-calorie sweetener. And found in nearly everything else is high fructose corn syrup, the king of U.S. sweetness. I am a chemist who studies compounds found in nature, and I am also a lover of food. With confusing food labels claiming foods and beverages to be diet, zero-sugar or with “no artificial sweeteners,” it can be confusing to know exactly what you are consuming. So what are these sweet molecules? How can cane sugar and artificial sweeteners produce such similar flavors? First, it is helpful to understand how taste buds work. Taste buds and chemistry The “taste map”...
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A Waste Expert Explains What Pay-As-You-Throw Means
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ENVIRONMENT

A Waste Expert Explains What Pay-As-You-Throw Means

Pay-as-you-throw is a policy that charges people for the amount of trash they toss out. It’s also sometimes called variable-rate pricing or pay-as-you-waste. Many cities and towns around the world, including over 7,000 in the U.S., have pay-as-you-throw waste policies. Examples include Seattle, Berkeley, Austin and Portland, Maine. Large cities often require residents to purchase special trash bags or stickers so that they pay separately for every bag of trash. Or people may have to sign up for a certain level of waste collection service, which limits how much garbage they can set out on the curb. Pay-as-you-throw is one of local governments’ most effective tools for reducing waste, controlling waste disposal costs and giving residents an incentive to participate in recycling and compos...
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A Cybersecurity Expert Explains The Latest Internet Vulnerability (Log4j) How Bad It Is And What’s At Stake
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TECHNOLOGY

A Cybersecurity Expert Explains The Latest Internet Vulnerability (Log4j) How Bad It Is And What’s At Stake

Log4Shell, an internet vulnerability that affects millions of computers, involves an obscure but nearly ubiquitous piece of software, Log4j. The software is used to record all manner of activities that go on under the hood in a wide range of computer systems. Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, called Log4Shell the most serious vulnerability she’s seen in her career. There have already been hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of attempts to exploit the vulnerability. So what is this humble piece of internet infrastructure, how can hackers exploit it and what kind of mayhem could ensue? What does Log4j do? Log4j records events – errors and routine system operations – and communicates diagnostic messages about them to system administr...
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An Economist Explains What Is The Fed Taper And How The Federal Reserve Withdraws Stimulus From The Economy
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BUSINESS

An Economist Explains What Is The Fed Taper And How The Federal Reserve Withdraws Stimulus From The Economy

What is the Fed taper? An economist explains how the Federal Reserve withdraws stimulus from the economy. Tapering refers to the Federal Reserve policy of unwinding the massive purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities it’s been making to shore up the economy during the pandemic. The unconventional monetary policy of buying assets is commonly known as quantitative easing. The Fed first adopted this policy during the 2008 financial crisis. Normally, when a central bank wants to reduce the cost of borrowing for companies and consumers, it lowers its target short-term interest rate. But with its target rate at zero during the 2008 crisis – at the same time that there was no inflation and the economy was still hurting – the Fed was no longer able to cut rates further. And so...
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A Cybersecurity Researcher Explains How To Trust Your Instincts – Identify Phishing Emails And Foil The Attacks
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TECHNOLOGY

A Cybersecurity Researcher Explains How To Trust Your Instincts – Identify Phishing Emails And Foil The Attacks

Rick Wash, Michigan State University An employee at MacEwan University got an email in 2017 from someone claiming to be a construction contractor asking to change the account number where almost $12 million in payments were sent. A week later the actual contractor called asking when the payment would arrive. The email about the account number change was fake. Instead of going to the contractor, the payments were sent to accounts controlled by criminals. Fake emails that try to get people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, such as send money, run dangerous programs or give out passwords, are known as phishing emails. Cybersecurity experts often blame the people who receive such messages for not noticing that the emails are fake. As a cybersecurity researcher, I’ve found that most pe...
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A Complex Systems Scientist Explains: What Is Chaos?
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SCIENCE

A Complex Systems Scientist Explains: What Is Chaos?

Mitchell Newberry, University of Michigan Chaos evokes images of the dinosaurs running wild in Jurassic Park, or my friend’s toddler ravaging the living room. In a chaotic world, you never know what to expect. Stuff is happening all the time, driven by any kind of random impulse. But chaos has a deeper meaning in connection to physics and climate science, related to how certain systems – like the weather or the behavior of a toddler – are fundamentally unpredictable. Scientists define chaos as the amplified effects of tiny changes in the present moment that lead to long-term unpredictability. Picture two almost identical storylines. In one version, two people bump into each other in a train station; but in the other, the train arrives 10 seconds earlier and the meeting never happens. F...
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An Expert Explains Wicca The Modern Witchcraft
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IMPACT

An Expert Explains Wicca The Modern Witchcraft

RELIGION Helen A. Berger, Brandeis University Wicca and witchcraft are popping up in pop culture these days, from teenage witches on TikTok to a Marvel comic superhero called Wiccan. It has even led The New York Times to ask: “When did everyone become a witch?” Wicca, an alternative minority religion whose adherents, regardless of gender, call themselves witches, began in the U.K. in the 1940s. Wicca and Witchcraft are part of the larger contemporary pagan movement, which includes druids and heathens among others. All these spiritual paths, as pagans refer to them, base their practices on pre-Christian religions and cultures. Ever since Wicca arrived in the United States in the 1960s, it has been growing – sometimes by leaps and bounds, and other times more slowly. It is estimated that...
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A Cybersecurity Expert Explains What Pegasus Is , And How The Spyware Invades Phones And What It Does When It Gets In
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TECHNOLOGY

A Cybersecurity Expert Explains What Pegasus Is , And How The Spyware Invades Phones And What It Does When It Gets In

Bhanukiran Gurijala, West Virginia University End-to-end encryption is technology that scrambles messages on your phone and unscrambles them only on the recipients’ phones, which means anyone who intercepts the messages in between can’t read them. Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo are among the companies whose apps and services use end-to-end encryption. This kind of encryption is good for protecting your privacy, but governments don’t like it because it makes it difficult for them to spy on people, whether tracking criminals and terrorists or, as some governments have been known to do, snooping on dissidents, protesters and journalists. Enter an Israeli technology firm, NSO Group. The company’s flagship product is Pegasus, spyware that can stealthily enter a smart...
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