Week of February 18, 2019

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Hard

Harder

The RemoveDEBRIS satellite, created by a team at the University of Surrey, has pulled off its most demanding experiment yet. It fired a harpoon at 20 meters a second at a separate satellite panel that it was holding at the end of a boom. As you can see in the video above, the harpoon succeeded in stabbing and capturing the item. Last year the team also accurately fired a giant net at a satellite to capture it, and tested out a lidar- and camera-based system for identifying space junk.

Cognitive Dissonance

Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum are both Jewish.

Finkelstein and Birnbaum created a Frankenstein monster that found a new life on the internet. In that stew are the resentments for his assault on communism, and allegations that he’s a communist; anti-Jewish slurs and charges he’s a Nazi; and above all the old mix of European anti-Semitism.

Insatiable

There’s very little that can stop Amazon.

…Amazon now has 288 million square feet of warehouses, offices, retail stores, and data centers. In 2017—the biggest growth year for the company’s properties—alone, it added more square feet of building (74.6 million) than the company had total in 2012 (73.1 million), when it was already the largest online retailer in the world. Amazon has added more building space from 2016 to 2018 than it did in all the rest of its history. Go back a little further in time, and the growth is even more astounding: Amazon has 48 times the square footage it did in 2004.

Future Medicine

The stomach doesn't have any pain receptors.

The test device, called Soma, is shaped like the tortoise’s shell. Inside is a miniature post made of insulin. After the tiny device positions itself against the stomach wall, the post pops out and injects insulin. The device then travels through the colon and eventually is eliminated by the patient.