Down on the Farm That Harvests Metal From Plants →
Slicing open one of these trees or running the leaves of its bush cousin through a peanut press produces a sap that oozes a neon blue-green. This "juice" is actually one-quarter nickel, far more concentrated than the ore feeding the world's nickel smelters.
[...] This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants?
How a Hacker's Mom Broke Into a South Dakota Prison →
John Strand breaks into things for a living. As a penetration tester, he gets hired by organizations to attack their defenses, helping reveal weaknesses before actual bad guys find them. Normally, Strand embarks on these missions himself, or deploys one of his experienced colleagues at Black Hills Information Security. But in July 2014, prepping for a pen test of a South Dakota correctional facility, he took a decidedly different tack. He sent his mom.
Opinion | How Trump and Xi Can Both Win Their Trade War →
What Trump also underestimated is that we don't just have a trade access problem with China today, we also have a trust shortage problem. When all we bought from China were toys and T-shirts and cheap electronics, we did not care if they were communists, capitalists, authoritarians or vegetarians. But now that China wants to sell us many of the same high-tech products that America and Europe make — from 5G infrastructure to cellphones to advanced electronics — products that get deeply embedded in our society and can be dual use (civilian and military), we need a whole new level of trust between our societies. That will take time to build.
After seven roof fires, Walmart sues Tesla over solar panel flaws →
The retail giant says Tesla's "negligent installation and maintenance" of solar panels caused fires on the roofs of as many as seven Walmart stores since 2012.
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake →
David Brooks presents a history of the family and some shocking (and frankly) depressing statistics about its decline:
Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We've seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We've seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality — all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can't quite return to a more collective world. The words the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg wrote in 1988 are even truer today: "Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns."
Our politics should adapt to reflect this new reality, but it is also stuck:
As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; "go live in a nuclear family" is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.
Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people [...].
In the end he celebrates the rise of found-families and kinship as a potential return to supportive extended-families structures.
Americans and Digital Knowledge →
American internet knowledge remains low. 41% still don't know advertising is how social media platforms make money.
US violated Constitution by searching phones for no good reason, judge rules →
The United States government violated the Fourth Amendment with its suspicionless searches of international travelers' phones and laptops, a federal court ruled [...].
"This ruling significantly advances Fourth Amendment protections for the millions of international travelers who enter the United States every year," ACLU staff attorney Esha Bhandari said. "By putting an end to the government's ability to conduct suspicionless fishing expeditions, the court reaffirms that the border is not a lawless place and that we don't lose our privacy rights when we travel."
Let's hope it sticks.
Fourth Spy Unearthed in U.S. Atomic Bomb Project →
The world's first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexican desert — a result of a highly secretive effort code-named the Manhattan Project, whose nerve center lay nearby in Los Alamos. Just 49 months later, the Soviets detonated a nearly identical device in Central Asia, and Washington's monopoly on nuclear arms abruptly ended.
How Moscow managed to make such quick progress has long fascinated scientists, federal agents and historians. The work of three spies eventually came to light. Now atomic sleuths have found a fourth. Oscar Seborer, like the other spies, worked at wartime Los Alamos, a remote site ringed by tall fences and armed guards. Mr. Seborer nonetheless managed to pass sensitive information about the design of the American weapon to Soviet agents.
[...]
His role "has remained hidden for 70 years," write Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes in the current issue of Studies in Intelligence, the C.I.A.'s in-house journal; their article is titled "On the Trail of a Fourth Soviet Spy at Los Alamos."
It got better two months later as it was learned that the spy, Oscar Seborer, had the most intimate working knowledge of the American bomb's construction of all the spies. He worked on the explosive trigger mechanism. His codename? Godsend.