What I'm Reading (Dec. 12)

As earthbound telescopes get better and better at seeing, it turns out that they may be a security risk. 

“A government agency—no one told him which one—would chip in $5 million for the construction of a dedicated network for moving sensitive data. Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California.

Next, an automated system would compare the image with previous images of the same tile. It would cut out small “postage stamp” pictures of any new objects it finds, be they asteroids, exploding stars, or spy satellites. It would filter out the postage stamps that might depict secret U.S. assets and, one minute later, send all the rest, together with their coordinates, to an alert service available to astronomers worldwide.”

From The Atlantic, When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk

Would you prefer a natural form of insulin or a synthesized version? The naturalist fallacy that nature is good would argue for the former, but that would require killing 32 pigs to meet your annual needs. For today’s 7 million patients with diabetes requiring insulin, that is a whole lot of pigs. Of course, through the efforts of scientists and ACSH’s Dr. Henry Miller, our insulin is produced by E.Coli.

“Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale them.”

From Works in Progress, Animals as chemical factories

Has reading become “legacy media?”

“The concept of the mainstream media arose in the 20th century, when reaching a mass audience required infrastructure' a printing press, or a broadcast frequency, or a physical cable into people's houses' and institutions. That reality made the media easy to vilify. “The press became 'the media' because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it,” Richard Nixon's speechwriter William Safire wrote in his 1975 memoir. Somehow, the idea that the mainstream media is made up of major corporations has persisted, even though the internet, smartphones, and social media have made it possible for anyone to reach an audience of millions.”

Joe Rogan and countless influencers are today’s mainstream media. From The Atlantic, The ‘Mainstream Media’ Has Already Lost

One of the most fascinating aspects of immunology is understanding how a woman can carry a fetus that contains foreign DNA to term without the immune system attacking. This immunologic trick is thought to be part of why women have a greater prevalence of autoimmune diseases than men.

“The study showed how the placenta — the embryonic organ that connects offspring and mother — uses a molecular trick to feign illness. By pretending it’s under viral attack, it keeps the immune system running at a gentle, steady pace to protect the enclosed fetus from viruses that slip past the mom’s immune defenses.”

From Quanta, During Pregnancy, a Fake ‘Infection’ Protects the Fetus