uniting

When Maryam Keshavarz was a young girl growing up in New York City in the 1980s, she would spend her summer holidays travelling to Iran, from where her parents had migrated. As well as her luggage, she would fly with small plastic bags taped to her body containing objects she would smuggle into and out of Iran.The most common thing Keshavarz was asked to bring from the US was cassette tapes featuring American pop. “I would stick them in my underwear,” she says over video call from Los Angeles, “because it was an Islamic…

Twistronics, a novel field in quantum physics, involves stacking van der Waals materials to explore new quantum phenomena. Researchers at Purdue University have advanced this field by introducing quantum spin into twisted double bilayers of antiferromagnets, leading to tunable moiré magnetism. This breakthrough suggests new materials for spintronics and promises advancements in memory and spin-logic devices. Credit: SciTechDaily.comPurdue quantum researchers twist double bilayers of an antiferromagnet to demonstrate…

FlatpakI've used one Linux desktop or the other for decades now. But, I'm a Unix and Linux expert. For most people who just want a desktop and its applications to just work -- thank you very much -- the hundreds of different Linux desktops and dozens of ways to accomplish similar goals are more annoying than enticing. One such problem is how you can find, install, and be certain any given program will work on your desktop. Now, leaders from the GNOME Foundation and KDE Foundation, along with Debian Linux, are…

via Marvel Studios One of the newest forms of Marvel Cinematic Universe discourse has seen Avengers: Age of Ultron undergo a significant reappraisal, after Joss Whedon’s sequel spent years being derided as the weakest assembly of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes by far. In fairness, it did earn the least money at the box office and score the worst reviews of the quartet, but there’s a lot to love about the titular team’s battle against the rampaging sentient artificial intelligence accidentally created by Tony Stark.…

The news: Last month, Stanford’s Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, added monkeypox to the suite of viruses it checks wastewater for daily. Since then, the virus has been detected in 10 of the 11 sewer systems that SCAN tests, including those in Sacramento, Palo Alto, and several other cities in California’s Bay Area.Why it matters: The World Health Organization declared the spread of monkeypox a global health emergency over the weekend, following weeks of indecision over whether the situation was severe enough to…