Digging the world's artifacts
You never know when you’ll get a black eye. These tips, as illustrated in the infographic below, may come handy.
While most of the tips seem obvious — use cold compression, take an anti-inflammatory, see the doctor if still bloody — others like massaging the eye and eating pineapple and oranges to reduce swelling come as a surprise.
Ever had a black eye? Tell us on Twitter how you treated it.
Scientists are developing a vaccine to help treat Lyme disease.
Humans can get Lyme disease through the transmission of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium from the bite of an infected tick.
Called VLA15, the vaccine works by stimulating the immune system to make antibodies that ward off 6 of the most common types of Lyme-causing bacteria in the tick’s gut.
Valneva, the biotech company in France developing the vaccine, is currently in phase II of testing. Writes the Scientific American:
The Food and Drug Administration gave VLA15 fast-track designation in July 2017. Valneva completed initial safety studies in a Phase 2 clinical trial and, according to a company press release , VLA15 “had no associated safety concerns.” The company is now working to determine the dose. Based on current estimates, Lingelbach said Valneva plans to test the vaccine in a clinical trial of at least 15,000 people, and it should be available in four or five years.
There is a second immunity being developed to prevent Lyme disease as well.
Called Lyme pre-exposure prophylaxis (Lyme PrEP), it works by sending a single antibody as a vaccine and is known to have fewer side effects than the VLA15.
The new vaccines build off the original Lyme disease vaccine called LYMErix developed twenty years ago. But production stopped due to fears of the side effects.
Unlike other viruses, Lyme disease is hard to treat since it pervades the body’s tissue in addition to the blood. Joint pain, heart palpitations, muscle weakness, and confusion are some of the symptoms of Lyme disease.
In a worst-case scenario, the bacteria can even dominate the entire central nervous system, producing disastrous effects on the human body.
Should the airport be the hub of the city?
According to photographer Giulio Di Sturco, the post-modern city is one of the aerotropolis, where the city, business, entertainment, and nature activities are all centered around the airport.
Di Sturco’s ongoing project Aerotropolis, The Way We Will Live Next explores the emergence of globalized architecture and generic spaces happening in Singapore, Bangkok, and Songdo, South Korea.
“These cities capture the breadth of themes running through civilization, from the re-appropriation of the natural landscape to our unquestioning faith in technology, set in the backdrop of architecture refined in elegance and logic,” writes Di Sturco.
“It is the post-modern city. A vision, or perhaps a mirage, it is a window of opportunities to solve the dilemma of modernity: reconciling economic development and sustainable growth.”
 is the gateway for Southeast Asia. It has the world's tallest free-standing control tower (434 feet), and the world's 4th largest single-building airport terminal (6,060,000 square feet). Suvarnabhumi is the 6th busiest airport in Asia, and the busiest in the country, having handled 47.9 million passengers in 2011, and is also a major air cargo hub, with a total of 96 airlines. On social networks, Suvarnabhumi is the world's 2nd most popular place where Instagram photos were taken in 2011.<br />
Global logistics giant DHL launched its 22-million-dollar hub at Bangkok`s new international airport as part of the company`s strategy to boost its growth in Southeast Asia. DHL`s 12,000 square meter (129,000 square feet) cargo facility at Suvarnabhumi is five times larger than its former facility at the old Don Muang airport and has the capacity to handle more than 23,000 pieces per hour, the company said.</p>
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Just in time for Halloween, NASA has posted a photo of the sun that looks like a massive flaming jack-o’-lantern.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shot the photo earlier this month.
The fiery slits in the image reveal the most active parts of the sun.
Writes NASA:
Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The active regions appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy — markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two sets of wavelengths at 171 and 193 angstroms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance.
Melbourne, often ranked as one of the world’s most livable cities, is looking to construct neighborhoods where people will never have to use a car.
The city is creating “20-minute neighborhoods” that make going from home to the office, school, grocery, or doctor’s office no more than 20 minutes away.
Whether on foot, bike, or trolley, Melbourne residents will be able to get around the city to their most visited spots with even needing to dial up Uber.
From New York City’s Times Square to Barcelona and Hamburg, cities are reversing the automobile obsession for more traditional and healthier transportation needs.
Google confirmed that it has officially achieved achieved quantum supremacy with the 54-qubit Sycamore processor.
Writes Engineering Director Hartmut Neven on Google’s blog:
Today, the scientific journal Nature has published the results of Google’s efforts to build a quantum computer that can perform a task no classical computer can; this is known in the field as “quantum supremacy.” In practical terms, our chip, which we call Sycamore, performed a computation in 200 seconds that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years.
IBM has downplayed the innovation saying that the the classical computer can run the same simulation in 2.5 days.
Writes the IBM Research Blog, “We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced.”
IBM also said that Google “failed to fully account for plentiful disk storage” in a traditional supercomputer to exaggerate the supremacy of its machine.
Both Google and IBM make valid points, with the objective takeaway being how quantum computing will make its way into everyday tasks and how much more potential there is in classical computing.
Either way, the 54-qubit Sycamore processor is a far cry from the 5MB hard drive that IBM released in 1956 that weighed over a ton.
Yongqing Bao’s photo of a fox surprising a marmot in the Qilian Mountains in China won the top prize in the 2019 Wildlife Photography Awards.
The photograph entitled “The Moment” is a suitable title of a freeze-frame that foreshadows the fox’s imminent attack.
What makes the marmot’s palpable shock more extraordinary is that the animal had just ventured outside for a hunt of its own after spending 6 months in hibernation.
Writes the Natural History Museum in London which hosts the prestigious annual awards show:
This Himalayan marmot was not long out of hibernation when it was surprised by a mother Tibetan fox with three hungry cubs to feed. With lightning-fast reactions, Yongqing captured the attack – the power of the predator baring her teeth, the terror of her prey, the intensity of life and death written on their faces.
As one of the highest-altitude-dwelling mammals, the Himalayan marmot relies on its thick fur for survival through the extreme cold. In the heart of winter it spends more than six months in an exceptionally deep burrow with the rest of its colony. Marmots usually do not resurface until spring, an opportunity not to be missed by hungry predators.
Check out more of the best wildlife photos of 2019 here.