WeLove Digital

The Beautiful World of Bees in Pictures

Bees are part of an ecosystem under stress. Pesticides, disease, habitat loss and climate change have all contributed to illness and death in bee populations. These vital pollinators need our support. Science and conservation have a crucial part to play in saving bees and other insects from decline and extinction. Honey bees are the most important single species of pollinator and contributor to…

Modified Bricks Can House Energy, Too — Building Energy Storage into Buildings

What if building an emergency battery were as easy as painting conductive plastic onto bricks, stacking them, and charging them up? Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have done just that — they’ve created supercapacitors by modifying regular old red bricks from various big-box hardware stores.

The bricks are coated in poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate…

NASA to fly a football stadium-sized high-altitude balloon to study light from newborn stars — TechCrunch

NASA’s latest mission won’t actually reach space – but it will come very close, with a massive observation craft made up of a football stadium-sized high-altitude balloon, along with a special stratospheric telescope instrument that can observe wavelengths of light blocked by Earth’s atmosphere, cast from newly-formed stars.

The mission is called the ‘Astrophysics Stratospheric Telescope for…

Fail We May, Sail We Must. Tribute to Andrew Weatherall from The Glade at Glastonbury 2020

Tribute to the chief Sabre from Glastonbury’s best dance stage, The Glade. Andrew Weatherall’s life and career celebrated by DJ mixes from some of his nearest and dearest friends and collaborators

Superb dub mix from Blood Sugar/Sabresonic – no details on the DJ here, but Bim Sherman was a Jamaican singer and songwriter who recorded with Adrian Sherwood’s experimental reggae/dub On-U Sound label

People’s Park China

Filmmaker Jonathan Bregel’s beautifully observed documentary of 36 hours in Shanghai’s People’s Park is paradise for people watchers.

There’s nothing quick about Jonathan Bregel’s 45 minute documentary on the pace of life inside Shanghai’s People’s Park. It’s not ‘Slow TV’ either. ‘People’s Park’ is a document of Chinese life in public places.

Dancing, fishing, playing musical instruments, Mah…

The planet is experiencing a biodiversity emergency brought on by the human race. This week in the UK schoolchildren took part in educational strike action to say ‘no more, fix the planet’. Extinction Rebellion, set up in 2018, has demanded governments tell the truth about our ecological crisis and create true participatory democracy to reduce carbon emissions to zero. The scene is set.

So what…

Japan’s “Society 5.0” Initiative is a Roadmap for Today’s Entrepreneurs — TechCrunch

This is an interesting article from Techcrunch about AI’s use in achieving a human-centred society model in Japan. On first glance I’d say that there are a lot more questions to be asked and a lot more work to be done around ‘fintech’ and so-called ethical investments – AI fed with the wrong data will still produce a top-down, wealth concentrating, biased model of society. But read on, it’s food…

Health Focus: Beyond Veganuary, plus Orphan Drugs for Rare Conditions

The VNutrition app helps you sustain a plant-based diet the whole year round. Plus, drug repurposing and how it provides new treatments for rare diseases.

If you were one of the hordes trying out veganism as part of your new year’s resolutions, the VNutrition app aims to help you extend ‘Veganuary’ into a sustainable lifestyle year-round. The app was launched by The Vegan Societyto allow people…

One of the most popular posts on WeLove Digital is a relatively simple one. Collective nouns for animals or people are surprising and often poetic in their description – a ‘wilderness’ of monkeys for example. So here’s the second part of what you could loosely call a series.

Attention! Troops of Mushrooms on display.

Whether you’re talking about a barren of mules, a pontification of priests, or a…

Power Hour: The History of White LEDs

Compared to incandescent lightbulbs, LEDs produce a lot more lumens per watt of input power — they’re more efficient at producing light.  Of course, that means that incandescent light bulbs are more efficient at producing heat, and as the days get shorter, and the nights get colder, somewhere, someone who took the leap to LED lighting has a furnace that’s working overtime. And that someone might…

Inspired by spiders and wasps, these tiny drones pull 40x their own weight — TechCrunch

If we want drones to do our dirty work for us, they’re going to need to get pretty good at hauling stuff around. But due to the pesky yet unavoidable restraints of physics, it’s hard for them to muster the forces necessary to do so while airborne — so these

Microsoft closes its $7.5B purchase of code-sharing platform GitHub — TechCrunch

After getting EU approval a week ago, today Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, the Git-based code sharing and collaboration service with 31 million developers, has officially closed. The Redmond, WA-based software behemoth first said it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock in June of this year, and after the acquisition closed it would continue to run it as an independent platform and…

Albanian Terror: Enver Hoxha and the Party, Preserved in a Nuclear Bunker (Pictures)

World War Two was a turbulent time for Albania. The country was invaded and overrun by Mussolini’s Italian fascist forces in 1939 and Albania then joined the Axis forces to fight with the Nazis. Fierce resistance from partisan communist forces was led by Enver Hoxha and in 1944 the country was purged of fascism. That would prove a milestone in the country’s history as Hoxha went on to become the…