Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 23, 2020

IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Bruce Schneier joins the effort to bring the Solid data-ownership protocol to the main-stream; Snap chat set to offer in-app mental health tools; A Youtube video about the possibility that photosynthesis uses a quantum-mechanical search technique; and a Steem essay on the topic of mycotoxins or mold toxins

---

Fresh and Informative Content Daily: Welcome to my little corner of the blockchain

Straight from my RSS feed

Whatever gets my attention

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak^*, StemGeeks.

1. Video Friday: Africa's Lake Kivu Drone Challenge - Videos in IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos this week include: Five highlight videos from Rwanda's Lake Kivu Challenge, a drone forum that took place earlier this month - Last year, Rwanda became the first country in the world with more drone air traffic than manned air traffic; Three videos from the DARPA Subterranean Challenge's Urban Circuit (which began on Feb. 20); Boston Dynamics' Spot quadruped pulling a rickshaw on Adam Savage's Tested (skip ahead to about 22:14); A mini-robot from Malaysia that stands vertically, balances on two wheels, and demonstrates visual tracking as well as carrying objects; Two robots that are learning to cook hot dogs; a robot that moves like a snake; and many more. It's worth clicking through to scan the list this week.
   
   Also from the post, here is Ascento 2, a robot with legs and wheels:
   


2. Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me - Bruce Schneier announces that he has begun working with Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's company that is working to bring Solid to the main-stream. In making the announcement, Schneier notes that the move is consistent with his writings over a period of time, where he has compared today's data ownership to feudalism, argued that the Internet of Things converts cybersecurity into a public safety issue, and called for tech workers to pursue technology in the public interest. He then moves on to describing Solid, which is model for data ownership, where data that's generated by a person or their devices "lives in a pod" and the person can grant granular access to that data to specific people or devices. On the importance of Solid, Schneier says:

   I believe this will fundamentally alter the balance of power in a world where everything is a computer, and everything is producing data about you. Either IoT companies are going to enter into individual data sharing agreements, or they'll all use the same language and protocols. Solid has a very good chance of being that protocol. And security is critical to making all of this work. Just trying to grasp what sort of granular permissions are required, and how the authentication flows might work, is mind-altering. We're stretching pretty much every Internet security protocol to its limits and beyond just setting this up.

   This is a good follow-up to Jennifer Zhu Scott's TED Talk, Why you should get paid for your data which was included in yesterday's post, Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 22, 2020


3. Snapchat will now offer mental health tools in the app - A beta version has been released by Snapchat containing a tool called, "Here for you". The tool is intended to connect users with mental health resources, based upon their in-app activity. For example, if a user searches for "anxiety" they may be directed to "chill pill", which provides a set of videos that have been designed to reduce anxiety. As of now, it is unclear whether the tool will get much use, but it is believed that users of the service trust it more than other services when searching for sensitive content. Along the same lines, Facebook and Instagram have both hired, "safety policy managers" who are responsible to, "share data about how users talk about suicide and self-harm and provide mental health resources on the site."


4. Quantum Biology [Part 1] - How Plants Use Quantum Mechanics - This video is the beginning of a series to discuss the emerging and speculative field of quantum biology. This episode discusses the possibility that plants make use of quantum mechanics in the performance of photosynthesis, the process where by plants synthesize usable energy out of light, or photons, with nearly 100% efficiency. Under classical mechanics, biologists and chemists have been unable to explain how photosynthesis achieves its astonishing rate of efficiency. It relies on a sort of a search process, and under classical rules, most of the particles would not be able to find the destination to be converted to usable energy, leading to a terrible efficiency rate. Researchers now believe, however, that the particles might make use of quantum superposition in order to search all paths at the same time and avoid "falling out" of the conversion process. This claim has been controversial, however, because current understandings lead quantum physicists to believe that under real-world conditions such a wave would collapse due to collisions with other particles well-before it could find its target. In 2007, however, an MIT quantum physicist published Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems, which confirmed that wave-like behavior is observed during the process of photosynthesis. The science is still uncertain, but that conclusion has now been repeated in a number of other experiments.
   
   Here is the video:
   
   
   

   The existence of quantum search algorithms in nature was also covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 17, 2019, which included the article, An important quantum algorithm may actually be a property of nature.
   
   -h/t RealClear Science Videos



5. Steem @sco: Mycotoxins - A toxicologist who posts on Steem writes here about toxins that can occur in the food supply. Ironically, the author suggests that there is more study, safety testing, and journalism relating to synthetic substances than of natural ones. This leads to the ironic situation where the author believes that natural toxins are actually more of a threat to most people than synthetic additives. In support of this point, the author draws attention to the existence of mold toxins, also known as mycotixins. Molds are ubiquitous, meaning that they grow under almost any conditions, and they grow with properties that enable them to actively harm the plants that they grow upon, in order to permit penetration. A side effect of this is that they can also be toxic to other organisms (like people!). The author says that there are over 400 known substances that are produced by mold. Of that number, the article asserts that only 8 are regulated by the EU, and there is insufficient information about most to know whether they harm humans or not. From these facts, the author infers that most harmful toxins are not even searched for in foods. Further, because of the small dosage that can be harmful, even the toxins that are regulated are still very difficult to monitor. To avoid these naturally occurring toxins, the author suggests cooking food that is as fresh as possible, avoiding processed foods (especially in developing nations), and immediately putting any moldy food into the trash. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @sco.)

---

In order to help bring Steem's content to a new audience, if you think this post was informative, please consider sharing it through your other social media accounts.

This post will also appear on my pre-Steem blog, chescosteve.blogspot.com.

---

And to help make Steem the go-to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.

Beneficiaries

• Cited author(s) - sco - 10%
• Experimental - penny4thoughts - 18%
• Posting and/or scheduling service (steempeak.com) - steempeak - 5%
• Steem/RSS services (steemrss.com) - torrey.blog - 5%
• STEM curation - steemstem - 5%

---

About this series

---

Sharing a link does not imply endorsement or agreement, and I receive no incentives for sharing from any of the content creators.

Follow on steem: remlaps-lite, remlaps
If you are not on Steem yet, you can follow through RSS: remlaps-lite, remlaps.

---

Thanks to SteemRSS from philipkoon, doriitamar, and torrey.blog for the Steem RSS feeds!