Ninjazzon

While the majority of the world's reefs are now under threat or even damaged potentially beyond repair, a new study reported in the journal Current Biology on March 8 offers some encouraging news: efforts to restore coral reefs not only increase coral cover, but they can also bring back important ecosystem functions, and surprisingly fast.

"We found that restored coral reefs can grow at the same speed as healthy coral reefs just four years after coral transplantation," says Ines Lange of University of Exeter, UK. "This means that they provide lots of habitat for marine life and efficiently protect the adjacent island from wave energy and erosion."

"The speed of recovery that we saw was incredible," she says. "We did not expect a full recovery of reef framework production after only four years."

The work by Lange and her international colleagues represents the first reef carbonate budget trajectories at any coral restoration sites. The study was conducted at the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Program in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the largest restoration projects in the world.

There hasn’t been a lot of good news out of EA lately, but here’s some: the company just launched a bunch of classic games on Steam. The new (old) releases include nine games in total, spanning franchises like Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and SimCity.

Here’s the full list:

Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection

SimCity 3000 Unlimited

Populous

Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods

Populous: The Beginning

Dungeon Keeper Gold

Dungeon Keeper 2

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack

The Saboteur

THe Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitious, long-term, important, and if it works, the effect will repay the cost many times over. This video takes a quick look at some of the work being done on the wall in Senegal.

Why is this needed?

Extension developers are constantly getting offers to buy their extensions. In nearly every case, the people buying these extensions want to rip off the existing users.

The users of these extensions have no idea an installed extension has changed hands, and may now be compromised.

Under New Management gives users notice of the change of ownership, giving them a chance to make an informed decision about the software they're using.

On June 5, 1981, journalists from around the world gathered at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to watch as the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to reach Saturn. In the aftermath of this historic event, the main attraction wasn’t NASA’s staff. It was fellow journalist Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle had something none of them had ever seen before: a portable computer, the first mass-market one in history.

“There were over 100 members of the science press corps packed into the Von Karman Center (the press facility),” Pournelle wrote in his regular column for Byte magazine a few months later. “Most had typewriters. One or two had big, cumbersome word processors…nobody had anything near as convenient as the Osborne 1.”

Just six years earlier, the Altair 8800 had been unveiled at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. There, Steve Jobs recognized that the future of computing lay in the consumer market, not the hobbyist. But Jobs was not alone. He stood alongside someone who would go on to become a “frenemy” of sorts. Like Jobs, he was intensely charismatic. Like Jobs, he had a near-supernatural ability to sense what consumers wanted before they knew it themselves. And, like Jobs, he knew how to sell his ideas to the world.

Supermium is a drop-in replacement for Google Chrome with privacy and usability enhancements, optimized for legacy and modern Windows systems alike. Supermium is developed by Win32 (win32ss on GitHub).

A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in. Here's a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.

An incomplete and infuriating list

What did the year 2000 look like in 1900? Originally commissioned by Armand Gervais, a French toy manufacturer in Lyon, for the 1900 World exhibition in Paris, the first fifty of these paper cards were produced by Jean-Marc Côté, designed to be enclosed in cigarette boxes and, later, sent as postcards. All in all, at least seventy-eight cards were made by Côté and other artists, although the exact number is not known, and some may still remain undiscovered. Each tries to imagine what it would be like to live in the then-distant year of 2000.

14509 books in 5 bullet points. Browse summaries of thousands of books and add new items to your reading list.

Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Each credit card purchase, personal medical diagnosis, and preference about music and books is recorded and then used to predict what we like and dislike, and—ultimately—who we are.

This often happens without our knowledge or consent. Personal information that corporations collect from our online behaviors sells for astonishing profits and incentivizes online actors to collect as much as possible. Every mouse click and screen swipe can be tracked and then sold to ad-tech companies and the data brokers that service them.

In an attempt to justify this pervasive surveillance ecosystem, corporations often claim to de-identify our data. This supposedly removes all personal information (such as a person’s name) from the data point (such as the fact that an unnamed person bought a particular medicine at a particular time and place). Personal data can also be aggregated, whereby data about multiple people is combined with the intention of removing personal identifying information and thereby protecting user privacy.

Sometimes companies say our personal data is “anonymized,” implying a one-way ratchet where it can never be dis-aggregated and re-identified. But this is not possible—anonymous data rarely stays this way. As Professor Matt Blaze, an expert in the field of cryptography and data privacy, succinctly summarized: “something that seems anonymous, more often than not, is not anonymous, even if it’s designed with the best intentions.”

Shrinking the computer chip is one of humanity’s greatest scientific feats. It has enabled the processing power that has digitalised almost every aspect of our lives.

To understand how the latest chips work and where technological breakthroughs are being made, we need to travel beyond objects measured on familiar scales.