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Witness 1.8 billion years of tectonic plates dance across Earth’s surface in a new animation

theconversation.com · Dec 21

The first time Earth’s geologic record – information found inside rocks – has been used to create an animation of this kind.

Shared by @topstories and 38 others.

Tomas Ekeli (@tomasekeli) · Dec 21

🔁 @coreyspowell:

For your weekend relaxation: 1.8 billion years of plate tectonics in 72 seconds.

Fun to locate your hometown (or ancestral town) and track where it's been over the years...or how long it's even existed as a physical location.

https://theconversation.com/witness-1-8-billion-years-of-tectonic-plates-dance-across-earths-surface-in-a-new-animation-238209 #science #earth #nature #history

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Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 6 Years

popularmechanics.com · Dec 20

Scientists are on the verge of a dental miracle.

Shared by @topstories and 20 others.

skry (@skry) · Dec 20

🔁 @bruces:

"Japanese researchers are moving forward with an experimental drug that promises to regrow human teeth"

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Worth reading

Project Code Named: VirtuScope

thedigitalocean.wordpress.com · Dec 20

This was a fun, challenging and at times very slightly frustrating build. Come check out our new website dedicated to all things Cyberdeck at the cyberdeck.cafe Is it The Future Yet? Cyberpunk isn&…

Shared by @topstories and 14 others.

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 (@blogdiva) · Dec 20

🔁 @nixCraft:

This tiny Linux-powered computer is giving me major heart eyes! 😍 https://thedigitalocean.wordpress.com/deck/

#linux #opensource #3dprinting

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The facts about a planet facing climate disaster are clear. Why won’t this Labour government face them? | Jeremy Corbyn

theguardian.com · Dec 20

Labour seems gripped by a form of denialism. The danger is real and incremental change won’t avert it, says Jeremy Corbyn, independent MP for Islington North

Shared by @gombang and 18 others.

Richard Michael Blaber (@rmblaber1956) · Dec 20

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/20/planet-climate-disaster-labour-government. The reality is even worse than Jeremy Corbyn states here - which makes his question even more pertinent.

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The Ugly Truth About Spotify is Finally Revealed

honest-broker.com · Dec 19

A year-long investigation by an independent journalist is very alarming

Shared by @cwicseolfor and 75 others.

Joachim (@joachim) · Dec 20

🔁 @tk:

h/t https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally

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The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly

harpers.org · Dec 18

Spotify’s plot against musicians

Shared by @RealGene and 64 others.

Preston Maness ☭ (@aspensmonster) · Dec 20

🔁 @jalefkowit:

"According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening?"

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

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18-Year Study Of 82,297 Adults Finds Cycle Commuting Halves Chance Of Early Death

forbes.com · Dec 20

Billionaires famously want to live longer. They should jump on bicycles, not spacecraft.

Shared by @Npars01 and 22 others.

Fight the Right (@Nigel_Purchase) · Dec 20

🔁 @elliots:

18-Year Study Of 82,297 Adults Finds Cycle Commuting Halves Chance Of Early Death
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2024/12/18/18-year-study-of-82297-adults-finds-cycle-commuting-halves-chance-of-early-death/

#Forbes #BikeTooter

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Cory Doctorow’s prescient novella about health insurance and murder: ‘They’re going to be afraid’

theguardian.com · Dec 20

The parallels between the science fiction writer’s five-year-old story and present-day events are startling

Shared by @dgoldsmith and 22 others.

Sensible Crone (@susiemagoo) · Dec 20

🔁 @joecardillo:

“We have historically done things about oppressive corporate systems that are destroying people’s lives, and we’ve done them, if not in living memory, at least not that long ago,” @pluralistic says, speaking of the trust-busting movement to break up Standard Oil and other monopolies in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“Corporate power was significantly more dystopian than it is today, and we figured out how to deal with it..."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/20/cory-doctorow-radicalized-novella-healthcare-ceo-killing

Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈⧖ (@dgoldsmith) · Dec 21

🔁 @cdarwin:

Cory Doctorow’s prescient novella about health insurance and murder: ‘They’re going to be afraid’

Five years ago, the science fictionwriter Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to followers of the past few weeks’ news.
In "Radicalized", one of four novellas comprising a science fiction novel of the same name, Doctorow charts the journey of a man who joins an online forum for fathers whose partners or children have been denied healthcare coverage by their insurers after his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer and denied coverage for an experimental treatment.

Slowly, over the course of the story, the men of the forum become radicalized by their grief and begin plotting
– and executing
– murders of health insurance executives and politicians who vote against universal healthcare.

In the wake of the 4 December shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which unleashed a wave of outrage at the US health system, Doctorow’s novella has been called prescient.
When the American Prospect magazine republished the story last week, it wrote:
“It is being republished with permission for reasons that will become clear if you read it.” But Doctorow doesn’t think he was on to something that no one else in the US understood.

When he learned of the shooting, Doctorow’s first thought was one of horror
(“I grew up in the anti-nuclear proliferation movement, I don’t want anyone to shoot anyone ever”)
then of fear
(“I hope he doesn’t have a copy of my book with him”).
But from the alleged shooter’s Goodreads account, it appears that Luigi Mangione, who now faces charges of murder as an act of terrorism in New York, never read Doctorow.

👉 “I feel like the most important thing about that is that it tells you that this is not a unique insight,”
Doctorow said,
“that the question that I had is a question other people have had.”

In one part of the story, a man whose young daughter died after an insurance company refused to pay for brain surgery bombs the insurer’s headquarters.
“It’s not vengeance. I don’t have a vengeful bone in my body. Nothing I do will bring Lisa back, so why would I want revenge?
This is a public service.
There’s another dad just like me,”
he shares in a video message on the forum.
“And right now, that dad is talking to someone at Cigna, or Humana, or BlueCross BlueShield, and the person on the phone is telling that dad that his little girl
has. To. Die.
Someone in that building made the decision to kill my little girl,
and everyone else in that building went along with it.
Not one of them is innocent, and not one of them is afraid.
They’re going to be afraid, after this.”
“Because they must know in their hearts,” he goes on.
“Them, their lobbyists, the men in Congress who enabled them.
They’re parents. They know.
Anyone who hurt their precious children, they’d hunt that person down like a dog.
The only amazing thing about any of this is that no one has done it yet.
I’m going to make a prediction right now, that even though I’m the first,
I sure as hell will not be the last. There’s more to come.”

In the story, this was indeed only the beginning of the violence.
But in real life, Doctorow imagines very different solutions to the crisis of American healthcare.

“We have historically done things about oppressive corporate systems that are destroying people’s lives,
and we’ve done them, if not in living memory, at least not that long ago,”
he says, speaking of the trust-busting movement to break up Standard Oil and other monopolies in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“Corporate power was significantly more dystopian than it is today,
and we figured out how to deal with it, and it’s not like the political movements and the organizing that they undertook to get that done were the lost arts of a fallen civilization.”
The movement that brings single-payer healthcare to the US, Doctorow believes, will be a trust-busting one.

👉 “People don’t know that they’re all angry about the same stuff right now,” he says,
noting higher costs at grocery stores and tech monopolies.
“They’re actually all angry about the same thing.
And when they figure it out the coalition will be unstoppable.”