NPR: Blood donor James Harrison, who saved 2 million babies, has died
Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018. All but 10 were from his right arm, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
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Harrison’s plasma contained a rare and precious antibody called anti-D, which was discovered in the mid-1960s. It is used in medications to prevent haemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn (HDFN) — also known as rhesus disease — a potentially fatal disease that occurs when a pregnant person’s blood is incompatible with that of their unborn baby, prompting their immune system to attack it.
TechCrunch: Moonwatt secures $8.3M to dial up solar’s staying power with sodium-ion storage
Moonwatt, a clean tech startup founded in September last year in the Netherlands, is working on a battery-based energy storage system that’s co-located with, and optimized for, solar power plants to help them manage this variability. The team designed dedicated battery enclosure hardware, inverter power electronics to connect to the grid and the software needed to integrate and manage the storage system.
Ontario should be investing in these, or Canadian made alternatives if available, to store excess power overnight. Right now we pay the US to take it, and in the current climate, that should end.
(Another political crossover article.)
Ars Technica: Threat posed by new VMware hyperjacking vulnerabilities is hard to overstate
VMware warned Tuesday that it has evidence suggesting the vulnerabilities are already under active exploitation in the wild. The company didn’t elaborate. Beaumont said the vulnerabilities affect “every supported (and unsupported)” version in VMware’s ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, Cloud Foundation, and Telco Cloud Platform product lines.
ScienceAlert: 3 Out of 5 Adults Will Be Classified Overweight by 2050, Study Finds
A comprehensive new report estimates that the proportion of the global population who are overweight or obese has doubled since 1990.
Forward projections to 2050 estimate a further increase, to around 60 percent of those over 25 and more than 30 percent of children and young adults.
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“The drivers of the obesity epidemic are complex. A country’s increasing obesity rates often overlap with their increasing economic development,” the authors write in The Conversation.
“Economic development encourages high growth and consumption. As local farming and food supply systems become overtaken by ‘big food’ companies, populations transition to high-calorie diets.
“Meanwhile, our environments become more ‘obesogenic,’ or obesity-promoting, and it becomes very difficult to maintain healthy lifestyles because we are surrounded by very convenient, affordable, and addictive high-calorie foods.”
Last Updated: 04.Mar.2025 23:38 EST
