Recommended Links of the Week | Curious Web Finds (N°375)

Welcome to another edition of our weekly recommended links. This time we bring you the most elaborate puzzle on the Internet, travel at 20% of the speed of light, a nuclear bomb in your backyard, and the true story behind VLC's logo, among endless other curiosities for the most curious web readers. Don't miss the videos and a gallery or two.

Recommended Links of the Week (N°375) — Links girl

No one can figure out who is behind the most elaborate challenge in the history of the Internet: "The story began on January 5, 2012. That afternoon, Swedish security analyst and expert Joel Eriksson was killing time on the internet. Another day diving into the depths of the web out of sheer distraction, until he reached a forum where he found an enigmatic message. It was an image with white text on a black background that read: Hello, we are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a hidden message in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the path to us. We hope to meet the few who reach the end of the path. Good luck. 3301"

What Hollywood didn't tell you about traveling at the speed of light: "The first study of this Starshot initiative was published just a few days ago and its results, to put it mildly, are not encouraging. The scientific paper is titled 'Interaction of relativistic spacecraft with the interstellar medium' and its conclusions are clear: the impact of dust and gas particles scattered through space would pulverize the hull of a spacecraft traveling at 20% of the speed of light."

If the world had only a hundred countries with similar populations: "One might wonder what a planet divided into just 100 nations with similar populations would look like. That is the question a reader of Fronteras asked. But asking questions is only half the journey. Then comes the fun part, finding the answers. Inspired by that post and armed with an Excel spreadsheet, a world map, and generous doses of geographical extravagance, our friend Félix Llamosas from Encarnación (Paraguay) got to work and gave birth to this colorful map showing how the world would look if it had only one hundred countries of similar population."

Ladybug taking flight

How to make a nuclear bomb in your backyard: "North Korea has just conducted its fifth nuclear test, the strongest they have carried out to date, and it caused a 5.3 magnitude earthquake. 'A success,' said North Korean television, in achieving something that 'everyone wants,' being a nuclear power. But beyond moratoriums and politics, is it really so difficult to build a nuclear bomb? Is it so complex to put together our own nuclear bomb in the garden, garage, or car trunk? Or, today, is it easier than we think?"

The destructive power of a bomb like the one North Korea tested: "What would be the effects on a city if a bomb like the one tested early this morning in the underground of North Korea were dropped on it? A simulator based on physical models allows us to represent schematically the damage of an explosion of that magnitude (10 kilotons, according to calculations by the South Korean Ministry of Defense) if, instead of underground, it had occurred over a city."

Russia's new nuclear electronic warfare satellite project: "This satellite would have a huge deployable antenna capable of directing high-power signals in the radio and microwave spectrum against targets in space and on the ground. These electronic warfare signals would create so much interference that they would completely or partially disable the targets. The higher the power of the jamming signal, the greater its military value, hence the decision to use a reactor instead of solar panels for this task. It is to be assumed that for most of the time the satellite could be used passively for electronic intelligence tasks."

Awwwwwww

The greatest war in Earth's history is happening right now: "The greatest war by number of individuals and battles in animal history is happening right now. A global war that began in Argentina and affects the entire planet. It has already spread to all continents except Antarctica, reaching places as distant as Hawaii, Japan, New Zealand, and Norway. A conflict that began sometime in the late 1800s when some individuals, small brown ants about three millimeters long, living on the banks of the Paraná River, traveled as stowaways on a ship headed to New Orleans."

The 16-bit console war - SNES vs Mega Drive: "To remain competitive, Sega decided that it had to enter the 16-bit market with a newer, more powerful console. During its development it was called Mark V, but the company finally changed the name to something more commercial that sounded stronger, launching it in Japan on October 29, 1988 as the Mega Drive and later in Europe and the United States (as Genesis). Mega Drive Japan - 1988The new Sega console had a main 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU at 7.6 MHz. The system had 64 KB of video RAM capable of showing 80/64 sprites on screen, with a palette of 512 colors and a resolution of up to 320x480."

Playing microbial Russian roulette: "Suppose we have a very valuable resource, for example a drug that can save the lives of tens of thousands of people each year who do not respond to other known drugs, and if this compound cannot be administered, the patient's death is almost certain. Surely any reasonable person would tend to think that health systems in particular, governments and society in general, and even legislation ultimately, would take special care to preserve its effectiveness for as long as possible, also avoiding any situation that could put this last-resort treatment at risk. Well, thanks to the current economic system prevailing in the world (which prioritizes the short-term benefits of industrial agriculture and livestock over any other consideration), we are getting closer and closer to losing one of the last reserve antibiotics we currently have."

Pancake Robot

The true story behind why VLC's logo is a traffic cone: "Actually, it all has to do with a drinking binge in the late 1990s. Originally, VLC was a project developed by university students at the École Centrale Paris, one of the most prestigious engineering schools in France. It was known as "VideoLAN Client" and its initial purpose was to be a client and server for video streaming for a university network. However, what follows is history. From 1998 it was rewritten and redesigned, and in 2001 it was released under the GNU public license. But what does all this have to do with a traffic cone?"

There were also hippies in the USSR: "Among the many rules that the Eastern hippies defied was that of official atheism. Tired of that lack of religious freedom, young people began to take an interest in Eastern religions and philosophies incompatible with dialectical materialism. Beliefs that, as Marx had said, were the opium of the people. The difference is that these guys, besides consuming it as a religious belief, also took opium and other narcotic substances in their less metaphorical form. Definitely, hippies were a highly dissolving element for Soviet society."

The 'Age of Epidemics' has begun: Are we prepared to face them?: "Only last week, 974 public health alerts were declared worldwide. In Spain, we suffered the first outbreak of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in Western Europe, and Latin America continues to fight Zika, one of the four public health emergencies of international importance ever declared. Since the eighties of the last century, epidemic outbreaks have only grown, spurred by climate change, globalization, demographic changes, technological development, and evolution. And it does not seem that the trend will change in the near future. It is increasingly clear that we are on the threshold of the Age of Epidemics and that this will be one of the challenges that will define the future."