Brighton: a tribute to MCA by graffiti artist ‘Aroe’

• New nanostructure for batteries can store 10 times more charge [Phys.org]

“a team led by materials scientist Yi Cui of Stanford and SLAC has found a solution: a cleverly designed double-walled nanostructure that lasts more than 6,000 cycles, far more than needed by electric vehicles or mobile electronics.”

• A Warning For Mankind: Beware The New Big Brother [Daily Maverick]

“It will cost us a little bit. Not much, but a little bit. We will have to forego and make a few sacrifices in our lives to enforce ethics on media, but that’s our role. Along with making free technology, that’s our role. We are the last generation capable of understanding directly what the changes are because we have lived on both sides. We have a responsibility. You understand that?” 

• Media Ignore Theft of Zanele Muholi’s Photography [divamag]

“Zanele Muholi, described by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa as “one of the country’s foremost artists”, had more than 20 external hard drives stolen from her flat in Vredehoek, Cape Town on April 20. The hard drives contain stills and video footage, including photos from the funerals of victims of homophobic hate crimes. It is thought that the burglars were targeting Muholi’s work, as little else was taken from her flat, and back up hard drives were also taken.”

• Elon Musk And His Mission To Mars [M&G]

“It was bad South African TV that gave Elon Musk part of his mysterious edge. As a 10-year-old he read whole volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica after emptying the family bookshelves—anything to avoid another episode of ChiPs or Die Man van Intersek. Now, 29 years later, Musk is still playing video games alone into the late hours of the night. These days it is in a basement man cave in a leased mansion in Bel Air, California, where Musk, who sold his online payment system PayPal for R11-billion in 2002, is plotting the future of the human race. Sixteen months ago, the South African expat accomplished something only ever achieved by the governments of the United States, Russia and China. He sent a spacecraft into orbit and then recovered it.”

• Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Writers [Flavorwire]

Susan Sontag, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain…

• Emo haircuts can cause lazy eyes [News.com.au]

M57: The Ring Nebula 

• The Most Beautiful Death (Letters of Note)

Brave New World novelist Aldous Huxley was diagnosed with cancer in 1960, at which point his health slowly began to deteriorate. On his deathbed in November of 1963, just as he was passing away, Aldous – a man who for many years had been fascinated with the effects of psychedelic drugs since being introduced to mescaline in 1953 - asked his wife Laura to administer him with LSD. She agreed.

• Ego Depletion (You Are Not So Smart)

Ostracism is a potent and painful experience. The word comes from a form of serious punishment in ancient Athens and other large cities. The Greeks often expelled those who broke the trust of their society. Shards of pottery, ostracon, were used as voting tokens when a person’s fate was on the ballot. Primates like you survive and thrive because they stick together and form groups, keeping up with those prickly social variables like status and alliance, temperament and skill, political affiliation and sexual disposition prevent ostracism. For a primate, banishment is death.

• How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death (NY Times)

Twenty-two months before she died, Pam Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.

• 53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed (The Atlantic)

More than half of America’s recent college graduates are either unemployed or working in a job that doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree. About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields

•  How Thinking About Death Can Improve Life (Common Health)

One major implication of this body of work, Vail says, is that we should “turn attention and research efforts toward better understanding of how the motivations triggered by death awareness can actually improve people’s lives, rather than how it can cause malady and social strife.” Write the authors: “The dance with death can be a delicate but potentially elegant stride toward living the good life.”

• A Former Meatpacking Plant Becomes a Self-Sustaining Vertical Farm (Good)

Spent grains from the beer brewery will feed the tilapia. The waste produced by the fish will feed the mushroom garden or be converted nitrates to feed the hydroponic plants. Those plants will clean the water through natural processes and be cycled back into the fish tanks. Taken together, the system will make the building completely self-sustainable.

• Britain Bans Olympics Photography (PressTV)

The London 2012 conditions state: “Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally, and may not exploit images, video and/or sound recordings for commercial purposes under any circumstances, whether on the internet or otherwise, or make them available to third parties for commercial purposes”.

• Cockney cash: Lady Godivas & Speckled Hens (BBC)

Need a speckled hen and not near a cab rank, where do you find some sausage and mash? Why, you go to your local cash machine of course and, if you live in east London, you might even come across one which gives you the option of proceeding in a variety of languages – and offering cockney.

• Glass That’s Anti-Fogging, Self-Cleaning and Free of Glare Created (MIT news)

A new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls.

•  Proposal To Allow Egyptian Husbands To Legally Have Sex With Their Dead Wives (Daily Mail)

Alleged proposals to allow Egyptian husbands to legally have sex with their dead wives for up to six hours after their death have been branded a ‘complete nonsense’… it would also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment… The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife arose in May 2011 when Moroccan cleric Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death.

• California Opens Its First Medical Marijuana Vending Machine (Deathandtaxesmag)

To purchase a serving you need to use a special swipe card, verify your thumbprint, and then enter a secret pin code, all while cameras monitor your movements. Offering marijuana strains named Skywalker, Bio Diesel, Platinum and others, after verification you use a touch panel to make your selection.

• Hand Sanitizer Chugging Proves American Teens May Be World’s Stupidest (Jezebel)

American teenagers may be falling behind in math, science, and ability to ascend a flight of stairs without passing out, but they’ve proven time and again that they’re world leaders in discovering innovative ways to kill brain cells. Case in point: a half dozen California teens have ended up in local emergency rooms after extracting highly concentrated alcohol from hand sanitizer and drinking it.