Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 1, 2019

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(Edited)
Authored by @remlaps

Protecting glaciers with blankets; New evidence about the arrival of humans in North America; Telegram expected to release software on September 1; Pharmacological rejuvination for aging mice; Unpatched iPhones susceptible to hacks just from visiting web sites; A Steem tutorial in IPv4 routing
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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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  1. Switzerland Has a Unique Way of Trying to Save a Prized Glacier: Wrap It in Blankets - Every summer, the Rhône glacier, in Switzerland is covered under gigantic fleece blankets in order to protect them against melting. The blankets are colored white, in order to maximize light reflection and minimize melting. This is done for environmental reasons, and also because the area's economy depends on the tunnels beneath the glacier - known as the Blue Ice Grotto to attract tourists.

  2. Oldest Evidence of North American Settlement May Have Been Found in Idaho - Archaeologists have been analyzing finds in Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, since the 1960s. The site sits at the junction of the Rock Creek and the Salmon River in western Idaho. Now, a new study used carbon dating to estimate that artifacts from the site are between 15,280 and 16,560 years old. A prominent theory is that people settled the Americas by crossing a land bridge from Asia, then passing through an ice-free corridor that opened about 14,800 years ago. However, the age of these objects may show people in the middle of the continent hundreds of years before the ice-free corridor opened, suggesting that the first settlers arrived in mid-latitude regions by boat, not through the ice-free corridor. Another theory was that the "Clovis" people were the first settlers, but they arrived just 13,000 years ago. Older settlements have been found in Chile, and across North America. The study's authors argue that tools from the site are similar to those from ancient Japan, but others are unconvinced, saying that human remains are genetically distinct from those of the Japanese, and even arguing that the dating of the objects is not consistently old enough to close the ice-free corridor paradigm. h/t archaology.org

  3. Telegram Will Release Code for Its TON Blockchain on Sept. 1 - According to the terms of it's 2018 ICO, Telegram's Telegram Open Network or TON will have a mainnet ready by October 31. The project remains secretive, and the only operational node at the moment is Telegram's own testnet node. That is expected to change, however, on September 1, when the company releases the code necessary for others to run their own nodes. Citing unnamed sources, Russian web site Vedomosti is saying that the company will release: "code for the node itself as well as instructions for deploying a node.". A leaked whitepaper says that TON will use proof-of-stake and "infinite sharding". Last year's ICO raised at least $1.7 billion.

  4. Rejuvenation of brain, liver and muscle by simultaneous pharmacological modulation of two signaling determinants, that change in opposite directions with age - In 2005 researchers rejuvenated older mice by establishing a shared circulatory system between old mice and young mice, which suggests that systemic mechanisms are at play which can be modulated by future interventions. Now, the same researchers have identified a pharmacological process that can trigger the same sort of rejuvenation. In particular, the process: "robustly enhanced neurogenesis, reduced neuro-inflammation, improved cognitive performance, and rejuvenated livers and muscle in old mice" h/t Daniel Lemire

  5. STEEM ‘Visiting hacked site was enough’: Google says it discovered major iPhone security exploits - After an emergency iOS update, Google Zero is revealing that a group of compromised web sites made use of 14 exploits to install a monitoring implant on - potentially - any iPhone that just visited the sites. The company estimates that the sites receive hundreds of visitors per week. iOS users are advised to apply the latest updates, because unpatched devices are still exposed to these vulnerabilities. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @rt-international)

  6. STEEM STEEM Course: IPv4 Routing Primer (Part 2) - Continuing a series on IPv4 routing (here is part 1), @joshman reviews variable length subnet masking (VLSM) and classless interdomain routing (CIDR) to explain why routing devices are needed in IPv4. The combination of those two concepts provides flexibility, enabling the efficient routing of traffic for networks of a single address or millions of addresses, but it means that packet delivery is not as straightforward as we might, at first, imagine. It's noteworthy that @joshman's post is also set with @null as a beneficiary so it will burn 4% of rewards. (A 10% beneficiary has been applied to this post for @joshman)

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It's a bit misleading to claim that evidence 'now' pushes back human presence in the Americas to more than 15kya. I am surprised the Clovis First gatekeepers have yet recourse to such pretense given the far earlier dates many digs have revealed. AFAIK, no one reasonably disputes the 130kya date for evidence of human predation found in CA not long ago.

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Thanks for the feedback! That may have just been a misunderstanding on my part. Are you referring to the "and now", here?

Older settlements have been found in Chile, and now, also in North America.

The article didn't mention any pre-Clovis settlements (or I missed the mention) in N. America, so I assumed this was the first. I can remove that "and now" if there were already others.

The Clovis part was a small portion of the article. I'm not well informed on the topic, but my impression from that article was that the idea of Clovis people as the first humans in North America was already out of favor before this find, and this is just more evidence to the contrary. The main thrust of this article was the claim that people migrated to mid-latitude N. America before the opening of an ice-free corridor, which happened about 14,800 years ago, implying that they must have done it by boat.

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American archeology is a rabbit hole of epic proportions, and insofar as you are not particularly familiar with it, your assumption that the cited article was more or less factual is understandable.

For most of a century, the Clovis First theory was jealously kept by gatekeepers that destroyed the careers of anyone that reported earlier evidence of human presence in the Americas. As a result American archeology is a case study in how scientific research is politicized and controlled via grants.

Many digs revealed much earlier human presence, such as Meadowcroft, and more than I can list here. Many scientists reporting factual evidence have had their careers destroyed, because well funded proponents of the Clovis First theory's funding was threatened by evidence it was false.

Meadowcroft was one of the first successful at breaking the stranglehold, due to the refusal of the embattled researchers to back down in the face of demonetization and the probative evidence dug. For some decades now the floodwalls of gatekeepers have been gradually broken down, and I was expressing surprise that the article seemed to claim this dig provided novel evidence of pre-Clovis human presence.

Actual research has shown that presence long ago, and the field seems to yet lag reality.

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(Edited)

Now that you mention it, I think I just posted about one in Pennsylvania that was older than 13,000 years, not too long ago... Yep - Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 21, 2019. 19,000 years - and it was Meadowcroft. Link

The newly uncovered site adds to the story of human occupation in Western Pennsylvania — a story that stretches back at least 19,000 years, to the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Washington County.

Totally slipped my mind when I was reading the article about Idaho, though.

Edited to add: Interesting that the Meadowcroft date not only predates Clovis, but it also predates the ice-free corridor, so the Idaho find doesn't seem to be novel on that front, either. Unless there's something else that I'm misunderstanding.

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