Week 13/2021 finds

I don’t aim to bring the latest, just the things I found interesting. This week includes topics ranging from the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the weight of air, hope you enjoy them.

This is a super interesting read of the progress of an idea. From the aristotelic horror vacui to measuring atmospheric pressure. It is the history of technological progress built on scientific knowledge: how come that pumps can only bring water up to a certain height?

Cell phones have a limited life not because of the hardware they are built on, but because they stop receiving software updates. The problem is that even if manufacturers such as Fairphone tries to break this nonsense, chip manufacturers like Qualcomm stop supporting processors after few years. This nonsense must stop if we want a more sustainable future.

Overview of the effectiveness of Oxfrod/AstraZeneca’s vaccine. The numbers are close yo 79% after looking at the data from Chile, Perú, and the US. However, there is a bit of controversy regarding the handling of the communication from the lab. They definitely need to do better on that front, especially considering how badly they looked when they used the wrong doses during the clinical trials.

Looking at the distribution of relatedness of modern hunter-gatherers groups it is possible to model the impact that gender equality has. Groups that are male-dominated show fewer connections with unrelated individuals, while groups with power shared between males and females show more diversity in their composition.

This can lead to believe that ancient hunter-gatherer groups had an equal distribution of power. In turn, this distribution could explain the emergence of cumulative culture and other social features that would not arise in less diverse groups.

The history of how a digital artist managed to get his art sold at Christie’s for 69 million dollars. The podcast explores how collectors assign value and how something that can be infinitely copied can still be valuable thanks to the emergence of NFT (non-fungible tokens).

This short read on Techcrunch is a good summary of the story behind the podcast.

Women warriors were more than an ancient myth. New genetic studies reveal that women were buried alongside men with weapons. In the past, there was a common belief that men were the only warriors, but new research is shining light on these misconceptions.

La nota se basa en un trabajo realizado en Argentina, pero que probablemente pueda ser extrapolado a otros países. Debido a la pandemia, más y más chicos están pasando horas encerrados. La falta de acceso a espacios al aire libre está generando un aumento en la miopía de niños.

La nota en La Nación y el preprint (que no leí)

La historia de Oliver Perrottet, un suizo que llegó por azar a Lima en los años 70, se enamoró de la ciudad y diseño el primer mapa de transporte público. Es muy interesante cómo ciudades inmensas generan islas de pertenencia de las que es difícil salir.