Podcast

Ice Age Ecologist Dr. Jacquelyn Gill - BGM Interview

John Martellaro · · Add Comment

Dr. Jacquelyn Gill is an Associate Professor of Paleoecology and Plant Ecology, School of Biology, Ecology and Climate Change Institute, the University of Maine. Her research interests include: Paleoecology, community ecology, vegetation dynamics, extinction, climate change and biotic interactions. She received her Ph.D. in Paleoecology from the Univ. of Wisconsin.

An outdoor life, science fiction, cave exploration and a professor who taught her how to ask questions about what she saw in the natural environment laid the foundation for Jacquelyn’s interest in Nature and Ecology. She tells a remarkable, instructive story about how she got admitted to her Ph.D. program. Then we chatted about just what Paleoecology and Biogeography are as well as the effects of animal extinction, recovering extinct animals from DNA, ecological models, and recovery from bad ecological trends. Jacquelyn is spellbinding in her description of her work.

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FCC Tests Eero Wi-Fi 6 Mesh Routers WIth BTLE, Zigbee

Andrew Orr ·

The FCC has been testing Eero’s Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers. Not much is known about these devices, including a launch date, but it appears that these products will have Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee to enable smart home automation connectivity.

Although the underside diagram for Gateway and Extender is shaped somewhat like the second-generation Beacon design, we don’t see any plugs shown—so it seems unlikely that they will be wall-wart designs like the Beacon’s or like Eero competitor Plume. We expect the new generation of devices will likely be desktop-style designs, with external power supplies.

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Gaming Company Razer Leaked 100,000 Users’ Data

Andrew Orr ·

In August, security researcher Volodymyr Diachenko found a server owned by Razer that exposed the data of over 100,000 users. It took the company over three weeks to get around to fixing the issue.

The cluster contained records of customer orders and included information such as item purchased, customer email, customer (physical) address, phone number, and so forth—basically, everything you’d expect to see from a credit card transaction, although not the credit card numbers themselves. The Elasticseach cluster was not only exposed to the public, it was indexed by public search engines.

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Life in Clouds Around Venus? Scientists Now Think it's Possible

Charlotte Henry ·

Could there be life… around Venus?! That’s a question being asked by some UK scientists, who found evidence of phosphine, a gas associated with life, around the planet’s atmosphere, BBC News reported.

On Earth, phosphine is associated with life, with microbes living in the guts of animals like penguins, or in oxygen-poor environments such as swamps. For sure, you can make it industrially, but there are no factories on Venus; and there are certainly no penguins. So why is this gas there, 50km up from the planet’s surface? Prof Jane Greaves, from Cardiff University, UK and colleagues are asking just this question.
They’ve published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy detailing their observations of phosphine at Venus, as well as the investigations they’ve made to try to show this molecule could have a natural, non-biological origin. But for the moment, they’re stumped… Given everything we know about Venus and the conditions that exist there, no-one has yet been able to describe an abiotic pathway to phosphine, not in the quantities that have been detected. This means a life source deserves consideration.

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What Does NVIDIA Buying Arm Mean For Apple?

Charlotte Henry ·

NVIDIA’s purchase of Arm throws about a lot of interesting questions. One is what, if anything, does it mean for Apple. Gizomodo took a look.

Nvidia, however, is the least controversial processor company that could buy Arm. While it also licenses Arm technology, Nvidia’s main schtick is GPUs. There’s a reason you don’t really hear about Nvidia with regard to smartphones. In fact, the only real outside hardware using its mobile chipset Tegra is the Nintendo Switch and the Magic Leap headset, which let’s be real, doesn’t really count as a win. That said, should the deal go through, Nvidia buying Arm could mean a lot of major improvements to the Tegra chipset and could theoretically, be a good thing for Nintendo down the line.