A year ago, we set out to answer this question: What percentage of books have been permanently preserved by shadow libraries?

Once a book makes it into an open-data shadow library like Library Genesis, and now Anna’s Archive, it gets mirrored all over the world (through torrents), thereby practically preserving it forever.

Across the country, farmers are taking a chance on a new method: adding crushed volcanic rock to fields to improve soil health (and sequester carbon in the process).

This story was originally published in Modern Farmer and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.

Chris Rauch was strolling past booths at the annual ag show in Spokane last summer when he spotted a large jar full of basalt powder. A nearby sign urged him to spread it on his croplands to help improve soil pH.

Rauch looked at the gray dust and shook his head.

“That’s crazy,” he thought. “Why would I want to put even more rocks in my fields?”

Rauch grows dryland wheat in the rolling gold-brown hills surrounding the Pendleton, Oregon, municipal airport. His farm lies on the Columbia Plateau, a 63,000-square-mile basin formed by ancient basalt lava flows. At the end of the last Ice Age, retreating glaciers scoured the bedrock, leaving a wake of grit and gravel to form the deep loess soil.

Not much rain falls in this grassland habitat. Some years, it’s 9 to 12 inches, but lately, it’s more like 6 to 9. Pre-cultivation, the region owed the healthy pH of its soils to the lucky coincidence of sitting atop a volcanic bed. However, the topsoil is powerless to counteract the acidifying effect of ammonia-based fertilizers. Over the years, this has caused pH levels to drop to 5 and below, according to Dr. Francisco Calderon, director of the Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center.

“It’s not a widespread problem yet, but it’s rearing its ugly head in some places,” says Calderon.

A few weeks after the ag show, Rauch got the latest results of his soil pH tests: 5.3. He recalled the message from the ag show booth, run by a company called UNDO. The crushed rock raised soil pH levels. And it was free.

His first thought was, why? It seemed too good to be true. Yet the more he read, the more it seemed legit.

“You can’t beat zero,” he finally decided, and gave UNDO a call.

read more: https://grist.org/agriculture/to-reverse-a-troubling-trend-farmers-are-adding-rocks-to-their-fields/

archive: https://archive.ph/A5app

Ticket resellers are turning members of a credit card churning "buyers club" into their personal ticket-buying army for the Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo tours.

Members of an organized “Buyer’s Club” are buying Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert tickets for ticket resellers only to maximize their credit card points, 404 Media has learned. The practice shows how ticket resellers leverage the credit card point maximizing community to create a human ticket-buying botnet allowing them yet another way to bypass Ticketmaster’s ticket-buying limits and hoard tickets to resell at high prices while regular fans get left in the dust.

I originally learned about this practice from a credit card “churner” who looks for ways to maximize credit card points and had read my earlier article about how ticket brokers got Olivia Rodrigo tickets: “I am in the credit card churning community, and one of the things we do is take advantage of ‘manufactured spend’ opportunities,” which are opportunities to spending money on credit cards to earn points, without any risk, they said. “One of the methods of manufactured spend called ‘buyers groups’ and the basic setup is that you buy stuff the group requests (think iPhones, PS5s, laptops) on credit cards (and earn points for those purchases) and then dropship or reship to the group who (hopefully) pay you back and then resell the products.”

read more: https://www.404media.co/credit-card-point-maxers-are-secretly-buying-tickets-for-olivia-rodrigo-resellers/

archive: https://archive.ph/R6e7X

People continue to die in the Mediterranean because we are yet to see a coordinated rescue effort and safe routes for migration.

On October 3, 2013, one of the Mediterranean’s worst shipwrecks occurred off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. The vessel carrying almost 500 people, sank, resulting in the loss of at least 368 lives.

I was working in the humanitarian field in Rome at the time and was horrified to have something so tragic happen so close to home. I heard stories from colleagues about divers who were pulling victims out – body by body, day by day – lining them up on the harbour. I was heartbroken to see the photos of neatly arranged caskets in a warehouse; a few small white ones carrying the bodies of children were pulled up in the front.

It has been 10 years since this tragedy and the horrible memories of it still haunt Lampedusa. Unfortunately, not enough has been done to prevent such deadly incidents from happening again. More than 28,000 people have been reported dead or missing since 2014 in the Mediterranean Sea, more than 1,100 of them children.

A few weeks ahead of the anniversary, I found myself in Lampedusa. The island again was going through a difficult time. In a single week, it had seen the arrival of an estimated 10,000 people, a number which is nearly double its permanent population.

In all my years working for humanitarian organisations, I had never seen the island like this. The facilities set up to accommodate new arrivals were overwhelmed by lines of men, women and children, some of whom were forced to sleep outside in the streets. People wandered into town in search of food and water after spending days without eating.

Each individual arriving had a story marked by sacrifice and resilience. Many came with nothing, often carrying only a plastic bag with an object from a loved one or soil from their homeland. There were children who had experienced gender-based violence and mothers who had survived rape. There were people who had lost loved ones on the way.

Amid the pain and suffering of the people arriving by boat, one story of humanity stood out for me. An 18-year-old young man from West Africa had just arrived with a three-year-old child. They weren’t relatives; he had discovered the child alone in the desert and protected him throughout their perilous journey across the Mediterranean.

The child is receiving appropriate care, but his name, nationality and exact age remain unknown. Tragically, he is among a growing number of young children arriving alone.

Throughout Italy, we have seen the arrival of over 133,000 migrants this year, including more than 11,600 unaccompanied minors, according to the Italian Ministry of Interior. Alarmingly, children aged between zero and six years, alone, without family, represent over 2 percent of these arrivals – a tenfold increase from previous years.

At the same time, children continue to lose their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean. Since the start of the year, more than 4,500 people, including many children, have died, or gone missing while attempting the dangerous journey by sea to Europe.

At Lampedusa, I met two mothers who told me they had just lost their small children, a newborn and a five-month-old, at sea. Their heartbreaking testimonies reminded me of another story that has stuck with me for more than seven years now: A child, who survived a shipwreck because his mother handed him over to a man, shortly before drowning – a final act of love and desperation to save her son’s life.

But in my work, I have also heard stories of hope that keep me going. In June, I met a 14-year-old boy from Gambia in Sicily, whose only dream was to study. Today, he is in an Italian school, immensely grateful for the opportunity to continue his education.

Every child must be protected and receive proper care and education. Anyone fleeing adversity must be able to find refuge and hope.

A decade after the Lampedusa tragedy, we are yet to see substantial reform and proactive measures within the European Union that can ensure this. We still need a coordinated European search and rescue mechanism and safe and regular routes allowing people fleeing poverty, conflict and climate change-related disasters to reach Europe.

The time for solidarity and coordinated action is now. The responsibility to protect and receive people seeking safe haven is a collective one, and we must all push for unified action to ensure their safety and well-being.

Migration is not an emergency, but a human phenomenon which needs to be addressed and properly managed. Mass death in the Mediterranean is fully preventable and must be prevented.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of the piece had 2,500 as the number of people who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2023. The figure has been updated to 4,500 per Missing Migration Project data.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

link: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/3/lampedusas-tragedies-remind-us-we-need-urgent-action-from-the-eu

archive: https://archive.ph/tRPJQ

We’ve all admired the elegance of Japan’s traditional styles of architecture. Their development required the kind of dedicated craftsmanship that takes generations to cultivate — but also, more practically speaking, no small amount of wood. By the 15th century, Japan already faced a shortage of seedlings, as well as land on which to properly cultivate the trees in the first place. Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees — creating, in other words, a kind of giant bonsai.

The three newly-minted Nobel Laureates have "demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy," the Academy said.

Deep in a forest of France's Burgundy region, a group of enthusiasts is building a medieval castle the old-fashioned way — that is, with tools and methods from the late 13th century.

A cat wearing a black-and-yellow security vest strolls nonchalantly past security guards lined outside a Philippine office building waiting to receive instructions for their shift.

Conan, a six-month-old stray, joined the security team of the Worldwide Corporate Center in the capital Manila several months ago.

He is one of the lucky felines to be unofficially adopted by security guards across the city, where thousands of cats live on the street.

While the cats lack the security skills of dogs - and have a tendency to sleep on the job - their cuteness and company have endeared them to bored security guards working 12-hour shifts.

Conan was rescued when he was a few weeks old by a housekeeper who found him wailing in the building's car park.

A team of researchers explains how the discovery of a human skull and jawbone helps push back the timing of modern humans’ migration into Southeast Asia.

At a winter day in 1989 the Japanese sent chills down the spine of the world of tech. They presented a house, located in one of Tokyo’s most fashionable neighbourhood, which was able to think, sense and act on its own. It linked millions of microprocessors in consumer appliances, business machines and telecommunication networks into a giant cooperative web.

The incredible eco-restoration of one tiny Caribbean island - transformed from desolate rock to verdant wildlife haven in just a few years - has captured the imagination of environmentalists worldwide.

Trees make clouds by releasing small quantities of vapors called “sesquiterpenes.” Scientists are learning more—and it’s making climate models hazy.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/1Qnjp
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230930090902/https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-messing-with-climate-calculations/

Until I was about 30, I could not see images in my head. When I closed my eyes, all I’d see was black nothingness. Due to random luck, that changed.

Before I learned the technique that I’m about to share with you, experimenting with photographic composition was a manual task. I had to physically stand in front of my subject and actually move things. That, or I would fetch a sketchbook & pencils and begin drawing my ideas on paper.

Frustratingly, many people at college told me they could see and manipulate bright, clear images in their “Mind’s Eye”. They could preplan their photo-shoots and improve their compositions just by closing their eyes and imagining what the photo might look like.

This made absolutely no sense to me. I could not imagine what that would be like. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was a reddy/brown, fuzzy nothingness.

The pastries, about the size of a palm and filled with a sweet paste, are popular gifts during the ancient festival.

As autumn approaches in many parts of Asia, that means one thing: boxes and boxes of mooncakes.

The small pastries are synonymous with the Mid-Autumn Festival and are handed out in colourful boxes to friends and colleagues.

It is not uncommon to see boxes stacked around offices at this time of year or long queues outside popular bakeries. Brands from Starbucks to luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton and the five-star Shangri-La hotel chain sell their own versions of the traditional gift, with some costing as much as $100 for a box of four.

A few years ago, China even ordered officials to stop handing out mooncakes as part of a crackdown on corruption.

Lots of time and effort goes into making, buying and sharing mooncakes.

Here’s what you need to know..

What is a mooncake?

When most people think of a mooncake, they think of a golden crusty pastry with a dense calorie-laden filling such as lotus paste or red bean – much like the mooncake emoji available on your phone – but they can vary in size, shape, and ingredients depending on where they are made.

“mooncakes are basically pastries, but in the old days, they were tied to offerings to the moon goddess,” Clarissa Wei, a Taiwan-based food writer and author of the new cookbook Made in Taiwan, told Al Jazeera.

“Most people think of the Cantonese style, but in Yunnan, they stuff it with rose, in Taiwan, ours is with mung bean and pork, and in Hong Kong, it’s lotus seed and maybe dried pork and salted egg yolk. But at its core, it’s a dense bite-size pastry.”

Wei says handing out mooncakes is not unlike the practice of giving fruit cakes over Christmas in many Western countries.

And much like fruit cake, mooncakes can also be divisive. For some, they are stodgy and cloyingly sweet. For others, heavenly. Mostly they are eaten in small slithers.

read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/9/28/mid-autumn-festival-asia-goes-mad-for-mooncakes

archive: https://archive.ph/EcwNx

Today's fun rabbit hole: there's a mechanical watch feature called a "hack". Why is it called that?

The ability to regrow your own teeth could be just around the corner.

A team of scientists, led by a Japanese pharmaceutical startup, are getting set to start human trials on a new drug that has successfully grown new teeth in animal test subjects.

The idea of mutton leaves a bad taste for many US consumers—most of whom have never even tried it.

Plastic pollution is increasingly affecting the health of coasts and oceans. One well-known problem is plastic bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.

Exposure to blue light, like that from smartphones or tablets, may lead to early puberty in male rats, according to research presented at the 61st Annual European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology Meeting in The Hague. The results of this study were also published in Frontiers in Endocrinology.

On March 3rd, during a large East Coast winter storm, I headed to the ocean to capture some wave action. My travels eventually took me to Great Island Commons in New Castle, NH where Whaleback Lighthouse is prominently featured 0.8 miles offshore. I was hoping to capture big waves crashing around the lighthouse, and Mother Nature didn’t disappoint.

In an exciting discovery, a new species of tarantula with electric blue coloration was found in Thailand.

An online order for grouper fillets that was supposed to cost $10 ended up costing one woman more than $44,000 after scammers took control of her Android phone and banking details remotely.

The commonly-held belief that attempting to suppress negative thoughts is bad for our mental health could be wrong, a new study from scientists at the University of Cambridge suggests.

By not going into the office, an at-home worker can cut greenhouse emissions in excess of 50 percent if they take energy-conservation steps