Africa’s air links are poor: Can the G20 push for more direct flights to improve tourism and trade?
In Africa, less than one in five continental airline routes are direct. Air connections are decided by factors like trade levels, diplomatic relations, and whether there’s enough demand to make a route financially worthwhile. Because there are so few direct connections in Africa, getting from one country to another often requires travelers to fly to Europe or the Middle East and transit there. This increases … ⌘ Read more
What happened to Apple’s legendary attention to detail?
Article URL: https://blog.johnozbay.com/what-happened-to-apples-attention-to-detail.html
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551
Points: 507
# Comments: 311 ⌘ Read more
Bending biogenic crystals naturally without external forces
From creating flexible gadgets to better medicines, the art of bending crystals is reshaping technology and health, and at the University of Houston a crystals expert makes it look almost like a magic trick. ⌘ Read more
Climate change is turning global wildfires into monsters
Predicting bushfires is difficult at the best of times. But as climate change wreaks havoc with our world’s weather systems it’s getting harder and more important to get right. ⌘ Read more
Mursa’s mass grave reveals diverse origins of Roman soldiers
Archaeologists in Croatia have discovered a rare mass grave inside ancient water wells at Mursa (modern-day Osijek), revealing the bodies to be soldiers of diverse backgrounds who may have fought in the Battle of Mursa around 260 CE. The multidisciplinary investigation, published in PLOS ONE, provides new insight into how the Roman Empire recruited armies from ethnically diverse backgrounds. ⌘ Read more
Geochemical research could help identify microbial activity in Earth’s rock record and perhaps in Martian sediments
Because oxygen-bearing sulfate minerals trap and preserve signals from Earth’s atmosphere, scientists closely study how they form. Sulfates are stable over billions of years, so their oxygen isotopes are seen as a time capsule, reflecting atmospheric conditions while they were evolving on early Earth—and possibly on its planetary neighbor Mars. ⌘ Read more
Hunters or collectors? New evidence challenges claim Australia’s First Peoples sent large animals extinct
Tens of thousands of years ago, Australia was still home to enigmatic megafauna—large land animals such as giant marsupial wombats, flightless birds, and short-faced giant kangaroos known as sthenurines. ⌘ Read more
Der ganze Vorgang ist archetypisch für die seit Jahrzehnten völlig ohne Not stattfindende politische Selbstverzwergung Europas.
A comment on heise about the recent AWS outage.
(Too bad there’s no good translation for the great word “Selbstverzwergung”.)
I’m paraphrasing: Europe (and other regions) depend on US IT services, a lot, without an actual need. We saw AWS, Google, and Microsoft build large datacenters and then we thought “welp, shit, nothing we can do about that, guess we’ll just be an AWS customer from now on.” Nobody really went ahead and built German/European alternatives. And now we completely depend on the US for lots of our stuff.
The article even claims that there’s now a shortage of sysadmins in the EU? I’m not so sure. But I’d welcome it, makes my job more secure. 🤣
Hosting services, datacenters, software, everything, it’s all US stuff. Why do we accept this, why not build alternatives …
How plant-fungi friendships may change in the face of warming soil and rising CO₂ levels
Just as the human body contains a multitude of symbiotic microbial companions, most plant species also live alongside microbial friends. Among these companions are mycorrhizal fungi, which help plants gather water and nutrients—particularly nitrogen—from the soil. In exchange, plants provide mycorrhizal fungi with an average of 3% to 13% of the carbon they pull from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and so … ⌘ Read more
Research shows that land can’t buy security for young Kenyans
An anthropologist from The University of Manchester has uncovered the hidden struggles of young men on the edges of Nairobi, who inherit land but lack the means to turn it into the financial security they desperately need. ⌘ Read more
Scientists release new survey of the biggest objects in the universe
Scientists have released a new study on the arXiv preprint server that catalogs the universe by mapping huge clusters of galaxies. ⌘ Read more
Fiji’s coral reefs show remarkable recovery after Category 5 cyclone
A new study led by WCS, University of the South Pacific, and partners has found that coral reefs in Fiji showed remarkable resilience after being battered by Category 5 Tropical Cyclone Winston in 2016. Despite losing more than half of their hard coral cover on average, reefs rebounded within four years, reassembling to nearly their pre-cyclone condition. ⌘ Read more
Who goes to the ballet? Education and social connections matter more than income, study finds
Why do some people regularly attend the opera, visit art galleries, or go to classical music concerts—while others rarely, if ever, do? ⌘ Read more
Exploring how dark matter alters electron-capture supernovae and the birth of neutron stars
Electron-capture supernovae (ECSNe) are stellar explosions that occur in stars with initial masses around 8–10 times that of the sun. These stars develop oxygen-neon-magnesium cores, which become unstable when electrons are captured by neon and magnesium nuclei. ⌘ Read more
Artificial insemination raises hopes for world’s rarest big cat
The world-first insemination of an Amur leopard in France has lifted hopes of animal lovers for the survival of Earth’s rarest big cat. ⌘ Read more
How spacefaring nations could avoid conflict on the moon
In the 1960s, Frank Sinatra’s song “Fly Me to the Moon” became closely associated with the Apollo missions. The optimistic track was recorded in 1964, when US success against the Soviet Union in the moon race was not assured. ⌘ Read more
China’s rising meat demand drives Brazilian soybean farming and resource use
Behind a steak served in China, there is often a soybean cultivation in Brazil. A new study, published in Nature Food, presents a snapshot of an increasingly interconnected and fragile food system. ⌘ Read more
Rethinking polygamy—research upends conventional thinking about the advantages of monogamous marriage
In July 2025, Uganda’s courts swiftly dismissed a petition challenging the legality of polygamy, citing the protection of religious and cultural freedom. For most social scientists and policymakers who have long declared polygamy a “harmful cultural practice,” the decision was a frustrating but predictable setback in efforts to build healthier and more equal societies. ⌘ Read more
Seismic anisotropy offers insight into viscous BLOBs at base of Earth’s mantle
In some parts of Earth’s interior, seismic waves travel at different speeds depending on the direction in which they are moving through the layers of rock in Earth’s interior. This property is known as seismic anisotropy, and it can offer important information about how the silicate rock of the mantle—particularly at the mantle’s lowermost depths—deforms. In contrast, areas through which seismic waves travel at the … ⌘ Read more
Offline interactions predict voting patterns better than online networks, finds study
According to a new study, offline social networks, revealed by co-location data, predict U.S. voting patterns more accurately than online social connections or residential sorting. Michele Tizzoni and colleagues analyzed large-scale data on co-location patterns from Meta’s Data for Good program, which collates anonymized data collected from people who enabled location services on the Facebook smartphone a … ⌘ Read more
Study finds Airbnb safety reviews can turn off some but the increased transparency can mitigate that
A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Marketing Science sheds light on how online safety-related reviews from Airbnb guests influence booking decisions and how the platform itself balances consumer welfare against its own financial incentives. ⌘ Read more
Gunboat diplomacy: How classic naval coercion has evolved into hybrid warfare on the water
Over the summer, the United States deployed warships to the Caribbean—ostensibly to menace drug traffickers but also as a none-too-subtle warning to Venezuela. Earlier in the year, a U.S. Navy destroyer bobbed along waters close to Iran for similar reasons. And in the Taiwan Straits and Pacific, China and the U.S. frequently show off their respective maritime military might. ⌘ Read more
Why is Halloween starting so much earlier each year? A business professor explains
Halloween is a fun, scary time for children and adults alike—but why does the holiday seem to start so much earlier every year? Decades ago, when I was young, Halloween was a much smaller affair, and people didn’t start preparing until mid-October. Today, in my neighborhood near where I grew up in Massachusetts, Halloween decorations start appearing in the middle of summer. ⌘ Read more
A seed bank in England marks 25 years of preserving the world’s plant diversity
Deep underground beneath the Sussex countryside in southern England, millions of seeds are kept frozen in a vault built to withstand fire, flooding, and any other disaster. ⌘ Read more
How a human ‘jumping gene’ targets structured DNA to reshape the genome
Long interspersed nuclear element-1 (LINE-1 or L1) is the only active, self-copying genetic element in the human genome—comprising about 17% of the genome. It is commonly called a “jumping gene” or “retrotransposon” because it can “retrotranspose” (move) from one genomic location to another. ⌘ Read more
Distant galaxy A1689-zD1 found to have unusually low dust-to-gas ratio
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), an international team of astronomers has carried out comprehensive multiwavelength observations of a distant massive galaxy known as A1689-zD1. ⌘ Read more
Hybrid metasurface modulates light at low voltages for energy-efficient optics
Metasurfaces are two-dimensional (2D), nanoengineered surfaces that interact strongly with electromagnetic waves and can control light with remarkable precision. These ultra-thin layers can be used to develop a wide range of advanced technologies, including optical photonic, sensing and communication systems. ⌘ Read more
Invisible poison: Airborne mercury from gold mining is contaminating African food crops, study warns
In a recent study published in the journal Biogeosciences, scientists have confirmed that mercury pollution from artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is contaminating food crops not through the soil, as previously believed, but directly from the air. Driven by the surging price of gold, which has increased by more than tenfold since 2000, the rapid expansion of unregulated mining in thes … ⌘ Read more
Mathieu Pasquet: slixmpp v1.12
This version is out mostly to provide a stable version with compatibility with the newly released Python 3.14, there are nonetheless a few new things on top.
Thanks to all contributors for this release!
Fixes- Bug in MUC self-ping ( XEP-0410) that would create a traceback in some uses
- Bug in SIMS ( XEP-0447) where all media would be marked as inline
- Python 3.14 breakage
- Prono … ⌘ Read more
Marriage is hard, but it’s even harder when you immigrate together
Canadian immigration policy has long emphasized family reunification. In fact, most of Canada’s 200,000 yearly newcomers migrate as a couple or a family unit. ⌘ Read more