Lots of nice second hand xeon workstations going cheap. Given the cost of memory they are often a bargain. The only catch with the Dells for example is the lame but also proprietary power supplies.

The furry paw of diplomacy. Now the nerd in me wants to see a graph of the Panda Index as a measure of Chinese opinion about other countries It’s the cuddly side of a relationship in contrast to darker clouds on the horizon.

Not a disease as such but a condition. Sepsis aka blood poisoning, is a significant one for older folk. A fast heartbeat with low blood pressure, rash etc. It can be rapidly deadly but is not so easy to identify. About Sepsis warning signs

Treatment early enough definitely saves lives so it’s worth knowing about

Open shell is a helpful solution that replaces some of the problems in the windows UI at least for the start menu.

OpenShell github

It’s pretty easy to customize most things.

I’ve updated the Illustration.

Seems like they got it straight from the university press release here. I guess we can cut them some slack for using a bit of AI given the recent job losses at that university. They are reported to have lost around 4000 full time staff places in the last year, part of Australia’s recent cut backs to universities that don’t get much international reporting. That’s may hurt their ability to do quality research. Professor Archer noted that "quite clearly, from the many fascinating animals that we’ve already found in this deposit since 1983, we know that with more digging there will be a lot more surprises to come,”. So lets hope they continue to get support.

But the workaround is complex and only temporary. Well Firefox has easier profiles now so really thats the last straw as far as chrome goes. It’s easy enough to migrate.

From the interview: The main takeaway is that humans are special, but so are birds and reptiles. So our brains are amazing, but bird brains are even as amazing. We have neurons other species do not have. But the chicken, even the chicken, they do have neurons that we don’t have. So evolution has found so many different ways to generate complex brains, not just only one direct pathway from amphibians to humans. In this case, the tree of intelligence is a tree. It’s not just a single branch.

Tau seems like the only remaining target for treating alzheimers so it good to see a new drug thats active in that space. Antiamyloid treatments have been ineffective. Interesting that it strenthens healthy tau structures rather than reducing overall levels of this useful/vital molecule Compared to this drug https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/apr/first-gene-silencing-drug-alzheimers-disease-shows-promise for example

Its a nice bit of tech. 73M in construction costs. The focal plane instrumentation alone weighs 10 tonnes. It includes 5,000 small computer controlled fiber positioners. The entire focal plane can be reconfigured for the next exposure in less than two minutes while the telescope slews to the next field. The DESI instrument is capable of taking 5,000 simultaneous spectra of different Galaxies

Also, for those concerned that Human brains have shrunk over the last thirty thousand years, there is good news: A large-scale study published in March 2024 by researchers at UC Davis Health found human brains have been getting larger over the last few decades. Study participants born in the 1970s had 6.6% larger brain volumes and almost 15% larger brain surface area than those born in the 1930s. This steady increase for people born after the 1930s, is believed to be due to better nutrition. https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/headlines/human-brains-are-getting-larger-that-may-be-good-news-for-dementia-risk/2024/03