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Solwa’s Solar-Powered Machines Help Farmers Dry Their Food Instead Of Letting It Rot

The company behind this tech (@solwasrl) is interesting too—they have a product for desalination (solar) and one that makes fuel from seawater sludge!

A lot of food grown in developing countries never makes it to the people’s bellies. Because of a lack of refrigeration, it rots during transport or when farmers fail to sell it immediately at markets. Every year, 1.3 billion tons of food (with a value of more than $1 trillion) is wasted in this way, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Drying food is a good alternative to cooling (perhaps you’ve heard of beef jerky). And with the FoodWa system, developed by a startup in Italy, you don’t even need electricity to do that. Its dryer runs completely on solar energy, which is captured both in the form of heat and by solar panels.

Source: These Solar-Powered Machines Help Farmers Dry Their Food Instead Of Letting It Rot | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

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Meet The Mystery Vigilantes Who Created ‘Malware’ To Secure 10,000 Routers – Forbes

TL;DR: apparently altruistic hackers made a botnet that removes other malware from easily-compromised routers.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time a computer virus has removed others from the system!

They also placed their malware (or goodware depending on which way you look at it) under the General Public License, the widely-used free software license written by Stallman.There’s still a concern that despite the hackers’ promises, they could still use Wifatch for evil – something The White Team even warned about. When asked if they could be trusted, the hackers wrote: “Of course not, you should secure your device.”

Source: Meet The Mystery Vigilantes Who Created ‘Malware’ To Secure 10,000 Routers – Forbes

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Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch

Another awesomely audacious aspiration aims to truly decentralize the web once and for all: IPFS

Remaking The Internet With IPFS
The InterPlanetary File System — a tribute to J.C.R. Licklider’s vision for an “intergalactic” Internet — is the brainchild of Juan Benet, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, earned a computer science degree at Stanford, started a company acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 and, last year at Y Combinator, founded Protocol Labs, which now drives the IPFS project and its modest aim of replacing protocols that have seemed like facts of life for the last 20 years.

Source: Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch

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Losing sight – Tink

A fascinating look at what it was like for the author to completely lose their vision, and re-learn everything—even how to use their computer or smartphone!

I do remember being surprised to learn that only 3% of blind people are completely blind. Most have some degree of light perception or even a little usable vision, but I’m one of the few who can see nothing at all, and nothing is the best way to describe it. People assume it must be like closing your eyes or being in a dark room, but it’s not like that at all. It’s a complete absence of light, so it isn’t black or any other colour I can describe.

Source: Losing sight – Tink

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Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover | Stanford News Release

TL;DR: mealworms’ microbiome can digest plastic!

The papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, are the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal’s gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.


Source: Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover | Stanford News Release

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East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases in one fell swoop | Ars Technica

Good news from an unlikely source!

The judge also invited the defendants to submit a joint brief as to why they should get attorneys’ fees. Just the invite is a sign of changing times: in his four years on the bench, Gilstrap has never granted attorneys’ fees to a defendant in a patent case, according to Texas Lawyer.

Source: East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases in one fell swoop | Ars Technica

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The sky’s gone dark – Charlie’s Diary

Woah… Let’s get those automated space cleanup satellites and lasers going before this becomes a real problem! TL;DR: space debris might compound and prevent launching new satellites.

For the first time since the 1960s it’s beginning to look as if human activity beyond low earth orbit is a distinct possibility within the next decade.

But there’s a fly in the ointment.

Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading, is a nightmare scenario for space activity. Proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, it proposes that at a certain critical density, orbiting debris shed by satellites and launch vehicles will begin to impact on and shatter other satellites, producing a cascade of more debris, so that the probability of any given satellite being hit rises, leading to a chain reaction that effectively renders access to low earth orbit unacceptably hazardous.

This isn’t just fantasy. There are an estimated 300,000 pieces of debris already in orbit; a satellite is destroyed every year by an impact event. Even a fleck of shed paint a tenth of a millimeter across carries as much kinetic energy as a rifle bullet when it’s traveling at orbital velocity


Source: The sky’s gone dark – Charlie’s Diary