A major argument against the widespread adoption of virtual currencies is the massive amounts of power required to maintain the industry. According to the New York Times’ analysis of cryptocurrency energy consumption, Bitcoin mining alone consumes 91 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, accounting for about 0.5% of all electricity consumed worldwide.
Humans manufacture 300 million tons of plastic every year. 8 million tons are estimated to end up in oceans every year. If it all washed up on the coast at once, it’s enough to cover every coastline on the globe with a significant layer of trash. You can imagine it as a neverending stack of garbage about 50 cm tall, and 50 cm wide (that’s about 1.6 ft). Marine plastics
A placebo is a substance or treatment designed to have no real therapeutic quality. The placebo effect is patient’s perceived belief in treatment’s effectiveness. It has been studied since 18th century, and confirmed by influential 1955 research study titled The Powerful Placebo. Patients can perceive therapeutic outcome of treatment even when they are treated with sugar pills that cannot possibly have real medicinal value.
In 1931 Clifford Clinton founded Clifton’s Cafeteria (named by combining his first and last name “Clifford” and “Clinton”), a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles serving American cuisine like roast beef, meatloaf , brisket, and turkey. Their kitschy interior design featured stuffed animals, fake trees and neon parrots. There is only one surviving branch: Clifton’s Brookdale, opened in 1935.
Ever since humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer society to agriculture, they had to learn to overcome food storage issues. Mold, fermentation or pests could destroy one’s grain. Lack of solutions sometimes resulted in famine. Civilization came up with many ideas for fighting rodents considered as pests: house mice, rats and others. Cats were domesticated over 9,000 years ago, and archeological findings suggest that they were used for pest control in Egypt
As of 2019, data centers consume about 2% of global electricity. According to Swedish KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the internet uses 10% of the total electricity consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater.
You know how smartphones sometimes get really warm after an hour of web browsing, right? And how laptop’s fan is howling on a warm day, spouting hot air from the vents. In a powerful gaming PC heat is an issue. Computers produce heat, but can a computer heat up a room? A Reddit user did some serious maths
Is it true that GPS receivers in consumer grade devices automatically disables itself when it suspects it’s being used in advanced weaponry? It definitely seems so. The limits set by CoCom were established: anything faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h or 1,200 mph) or higher than 59,000 feet (18,000 m) was regarded as a weapon. Most likely, an intercontinental ballistic missile.
