The novelist attained fame with gripping works of eco-fiction. How hard could it be to rewild his own backyard?

Source: Best-Selling Author Jeff VanderMeer Finds That Nature Is Stranger Than Fiction | Audubon

Source: Baz Luhrmann – Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen – YouTube

It is still a glimpse into the future: Astronauts could be put into artificial hibernation and in this state be better protected from cosmic radiation. At present, there are already promising approaches to follow up such considerations. An international research team now has found decisive indications of the possible benefits of artificial hibernation for radiation resistance.

Source: Safety in space: Synthetic hibernation could provide protection from cosmic radiation — ScienceDaily

Jay Samit’s watercolors at the Richard Taittinger Gallery on Ludlow, is several kinds of trip, time travel into our Pop art past

Source: WM | whitehot magazine of contemporary art | Dots & Pixels: Pop. Art Reflections of Our Digital Lives at Richard Tattinger Gallery

Crows are smart.

Source: Crows able to understand the concept of recursion

In this new effort, the research team conducted similar experiments with crows that show that they, too, have the cognitive ability to understand recursion.

The experiments by both teams involved training test subjects to choose bracket pairs in a sentence made of symbols—choosing the parentheses in the sentence {()}, for example. Once the crows got the idea, the researchers then created longer sentences to see if the test subjects could still pick out the ones that were embedded. As with the monkeys, the researchers found that the test subjects could pick out the embedded characters in numbers that were greater than chance would allow.

They are also assholes.

Mohammad Mostafa, a farmer in the low-lying deltas of southwestern Bangladesh, has revived his forefathers’ farming practice of growing crops on floating rafts as rising seas and storm flooding threaten more and more farmland.

Source: As seas rise, Bangladesh farmers revive floating farms | The Wider Image | Reuters

A search for some delight in a difficult century

Source: Might there be blimps? – by Bill McKibben

What metaverse, web3, and artificial intelligence evangelists collectively ignore.

Source: Tech futurism’s blind spot – by Dave Karpf

What if the future isn’t Artificial General Intelligence and 100x increases in computing power? What if it’s cheap-and-flexible mesh networks? What if the future isn’t replacing untrustworthy institutions with blockchain governance? What if it’s replacing untrustworthy global and national institutions with revitalized local trust? What if the metaverse isn’t the future because, in the future, people commit themselves to improving and monitoring their vulnerable surroundings?

Black holes may explode via Hawking radiation, superradiance or through accretion disks and jets.

Source: Can a black hole explode? | Space

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast have developed a plastic film that can kill viruses that land on its surface with room light. The self-sterilizing film is the first of its kind—it is low cost to produce, can be readily scaled and could be used for disposable aprons, tablecloths, and curtains in hospitals. It is coated with a thin layer of particles that absorb UV light and produce reactive oxygen species—ROS. These kill viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.