"The Bay Area was rocked this morning by a fatal disk error reaching 6.5 on the Richter scale at 4:34 AM PST. Residents are advised to be prepared for post-crash data dumps."

his underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.

And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).

Late Tuesday night, at approximately 10:20PM ET, my maternal grandfather, Bert Praetorius, passed away at approximately 90 years of age...During World War II, he worked for the US Army in signals intelligence (SIGINT) along the east coast of the United States and Canada in efforts to help locate and track German U-boats. After the war, he was honorably discharged and returned to New York City to work for NBC as an electrical engineer, often working on broadcasts of Yankees games (he knew and was friends with many of the players, including many who are considered "greats" today). It was here that he developed the technology for rewinding to work properly (think of something like when you're watching tv and you see someone drop an egg on the sidewalk, and then you'll see the entire think in reverse flawlessly, without the lines you would see like when you would try to do the same with a tape in the VCR- and remember, at this time, this was many years before the advent of home video recording). For this, he received little recognition, despite the now complete ubiquity of his invention...I just felt that it was important to let at least some people know who he was, as his invention, while it likely hasn't actually affected your life much at all, is something with which almost everyone is likely familiar and has never even thought about, as well as him just having had an interesting life.

"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now," said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley . . . New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species. Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events, and there have been only five in our planet's history, until now.

The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is happening currently, is different from the past events. "My feeling is that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens," Wake said.
[...]
The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on the wane.