Speedysnail

Pink Mist

Music consumption has unintended economic and environmental costs.

A new kind of metasurface uses the sun to clear foggy screens.

The pink lakes of Australia.

A hundred years of climate anomalies in thirty seconds.

How much ice has Greenland lost to climate change?

The Guardian changes the language it uses about the climate.

A new piece of climate change SF by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Ian McEwan displays his ignorance of SF while promoting his own. Sad.

“Violent attacks are winning, and infections are unchecked.”

The last is my MetaFilter post on the Ebola outbreak in the Congo:

Ebola is out of control in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the second-worst outbreak in history. The WHO says the national and regional risk levels are very high, and with the number of new cases increasing in recent weeks, the UN is strengthening its response. Neighbouring countries are considering using an experimental vaccine which has shown impressive results in the DRC itself, but the challenge there is dispensing it: health workers are met with mistrust, and work in constant fear of armed attack, with some having to lie about being doctors in order to treat people.

It’s a perfect storm of a horrific disease meeting a poor, remote, war-torn population, right on the borders of half a dozen neighbouring countries. If it breaks out into Uganda, any international response has to be split, and becomes far more complicated.

Apparently an adaptation of one of the most terrifying non-fiction books I’ve ever read, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone [interview with Preston], has just started on the National Geographic Channel. Here’s a National Geographic article on the current outbreak.

27 May 2019 · Weblog