标签：#science

Chemicals from accidents that injured or killed people increased by nearly 50 percent in recent years.

Wildfire survivors call fire-prediction markets “morally reprehensible” and worry they could increase the risk of arson.

The heat of the Hadean may have come from impacts as well as the interior.

A large-scale clinical trial has shown that even long-term consumption of DHA—an omega-3 fatty acid found in abundance in oily fish—may not lead to improvements in cognitive function.

A new study has succeeded in mapping, on a global scale, the fungal network that supports plant life and helps regulate our planet’s climate.

Every big social network locks audience data behind auth walls and anti-bot systems. Bluesky went the other way. The AT Protocol is open by design, so public profile data (bios, follower counts, full follower and following lists) is queryable through a documented API without logging in. The whole surface is basically two endpoints: GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.actor.getProfile?actor=HANDLE GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.graph.getFollowers?actor=HANDLE&limit=100 There's also getProfiles for batching 25 handles per call. Follower lists paginate with a normal cursor , which still works on the graph endpoints. Search is a different story, cursor pagination 403s there now, but that's a topic for another post. For one-off lookups, curl is honestly all you need. Where it gets tedious Bulk. Thousands of profiles, follower exports that run into six figures, weekly snapshots for tracking. Pagination, rate-limit backoff, and stitching the pages together is boring code that has to run reliably. I packaged that part as an Apify actor: Bluesky Profile Scraper . Paste handles or profile URLs, optionally turn on follower/following export, and you get JSON or CSV back with a sourceProfile field linking each follower record to the profile it belongs to. $2 per 1,000 records, runs on a schedule if you want snapshots over time. What people use this for Vetting an influencer's real audience before paying them. Exporting who follows a competitor and what their bios say. Charting follower growth from weekly runs. And enrichment: find who's talking about you with a mentions monitor , then profile those authors to see their actual reach. Bluesky is the only major network right now where any of this is straightforward and stable. Worth using while it lasts.

Introduction I used to think "connecting to a database" was one skill. Turns out it's two: connecting to a database chilling quietly on your own laptop, and connecting to one living in the cloud, behind a login, in this case, an SSL certificate that will not let you in until you treat it with respect. This week I did both. Same tool (Power BI), same dataset, two very different vibes. Grab a coffee, here's the full walkthrough local PostgreSQL first, then Aiven's cloud version, side by side, screenshots and all. Part 1: Local PostgreSQL → Power BI Step 1 : Create a schema Nothing fancy, just giving my table a home: CREATE SCHEMA powerbi ; Step 2 : Import the dataset Right-click the new schema → Import Data in DBeaver, point it at your CSV, and let the wizard do its thing. Step 3 : Check the table landed properly A quick peek at the columns to make sure nothing got mangled on the way in. Step 4 : Connect Power BI In Power BI Desktop: Get Data → Database → PostgreSQL database. In the Server field, type localhost (or 127.0.0.1 ) and your database name. localhost Choose Import , hit OK, and log in with your local username and password. Click Load . That's it. That's the whole local experience. Part 2: Aiven PostgreSQL (Cloud) → Power BI Now for the part that actually taught me something. Step 1 : Grab your connection details Everything you need lives on Aiven's Overview page: Host, Port, Database name, User, SSL mode. Your service URI will look something like this (don't worry, this isn't a real password, Aiven masks it in the console): postgres : // avnadmin : •••••••• @ pg - xxxxxxxx - yourproject . c . aivencloud . com : 22016 / defaultdb ? sslmode = require Step 2 : Import the dataset into Aiven Same DBeaver wizard as before, just pointed at the Aiven connection instead of local. CREATE SCHEMA powerbi ; Step 3 : Aiven's certificate. Download the CA cert from the Overview page: Now here's the part that actually tripped me up: Power BI's PostgreSQL connector doesn't ha

This week's science news.

The Swift Observatory was launched in 2004, but recent solar storms have pushed its orbit lower, and it's in danger of burning up in Earth's atmosphere as soon as this year. To try and stave off its demise, NASA has enlisted Katalyst Space Technologies. The company's Link spacecraft launched Friday with the goal of intercepting […]

The US Department of Energy reportedly deleted about 6,000 pages related to energy conservation as a historic heatwave tears across the country. The deletion was suspiciously timed, following Republican outrage over Mayor Zohran Mamdani asking New Yorkers to help reduce strain on the grid by setting their AC to 78 degrees. Republicans like Ted Cruz […]

Why Your SOE Resume Needs a Structural Overhaul Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) often have deep hierarchical structures and a culture of collective achievement. But Western tech companies want to see individual impact, autonomy, and data-driven results. Continuing to lead with your former employer's prestige or your rank (e.g., "Senior Engineer Grade 7") wastes valuable space. The solution: reshape every section to answer the question "What did you personally accomplish with data?" The Core Shift: From Hierarchy to Impact In a Chinese SOE resume, it's tempting to list departments you led or teams you oversaw. In a Western senior data scientist resume, focus on the problems you defined, the algorithms you deployed, and the revenue, cost savings, or user metrics that improved. For example, instead of "Led the data analytics team of 10 people," write "Designed and deployed a demand-forecasting model that reduced inventory costs by 15% (¥12M annually)." Three Resume Sections That Require Full Rewriting Professional Summary: From 'Accomplished Engineer' to 'Data Science Leader' Start with your total years of experience, your technical stack, and the types of business problems you solve. Example: "Senior Data Scientist with 10+ years applying machine learning to supply chain and logistics. Expertise in Python, TensorFlow, and Spark. Reduced operational costs by 15-30% through predictive models deployed at [SOE name]." Work Experience: From Role Descriptions to Metric-Driven Bullets For each role, list 3-5 bullets. Every bullet should have a verb, a task, a technology (if relevant), and a quantified result. Avoid vague phrases like "responsible for." Use specific numbers: "Improved forecast accuracy from 70% to 85% by building an ensemble of ARIMA and XGBoost models." Education & Certifications: Emphasize Transferable Skills Your Chinese degree is fine, but add relevant certifications (AWS, TensorFlow, Coursera) to show adaptability. Consider a "Technical Skills" se

Disturbances in this critical sense are often linked to problems with brain health.

Biology could explain the find, but there are other potential explanations.

Aa large-scale study demonstrates that preservatives widely used in everyday processed foods may exacerbate common health risks.

Ambystoma quetzalcoatli is the first fossil salamander to be formally identified in Mexico, revealing that axolotls have inhabited the country for millions of years.

The companies’ Fourth of July plans include celebrating new reactor designs coming online. But there’s still a long way to go before they deliver energy at a meaningful scale.

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. Europe is melting, the eastern US is currently trapped in a "heat dome," the Midwest has the corn sweats to […]

At the event "The Briefing: AI for Science" earlier this week, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a new "AI workbench for scientists" that pulls fragmented tools and datasets into one environment, and generates figures and visuals. Anthropic, already dominating the industry with its popular coding tools and powerful AI models, framed the launch around what it […]

NASA awarded Rocket Lab deals for three dedicated launches using the company's Electron rocket.

Midjourney has shown more of its futuristic medical scanner. It still hasn't shown much proof it works. The AI startup, best known for generating images, released a behind-the-scenes video of its dunk-tank ultrasound scanner, which it plans to deploy in spas and hopes will transform medicine with cheap, detailed, radiation-free imaging. The nearly 20-minute tour […]