“Terracotta’s porous surface
allows water to slowly evaporate,
carrying heat away and cooling the space around it,”
says Adithya Pradyumna,
an environmental health researcher at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru.

Drawing on this principle, architects in India’s sprawling metro areas
are turning to terracotta for new passive cooling solutions
that range from clay refrigerators to perforated tiles,
ventilated screens, and facades
that allow natural ventilation and help heat and
moisture transfer
between indoor and outdoor environments.

In certain designs, water is also distributed across terracotta surfaces to evaporate and thus lower surrounding temperatures.

Passive cooling uses building design
to regulate indoor temperatures with natural materials,
strategic ventilation and well-controlled shading.

This approach works particularly well in the Mediterranean and other arid or semiarid places
— like parts of the Pacific Northwest,
where research found it can reduce
air-conditioning loads by up to 70 percent

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/terracotta-is-a-3-000-year-old-solution-to-fighting-extreme-heat/

A brief introduction to Gravitational Economics

First things first: money follows the law of gravity, by trickling. Just like in Newtonian mechanics, 'down' is the direction of the largest nearby havy object, in moneyspacetime, pieces of money trickle down — towards the largest nearby rich object.

At the same time — and this is something that classical econogravyists don't really like to talk about —, the velocity of money is limited by the speed of green light. Which is not even a constant, because an economy is like Tinker Belle — it starts to slowly fade away every time people stop believing in it.

Parasite conference in Iceland 2025

"Breaking the Ice: Exploring parasite biodiversity at high latitude"

Conference of the Scandinavian-Baltic Society for Parasitology

Opening talk by Robert Poulin

#CSBSP11 #parasites #Baltic #scandinavia #ecology #biodiversity #evolution
#goldenflea

If you’re upset about GitHub today, please give money to alternatives like @Codeberg. They need funding. Lots and lots of funding

https://donate.codeberg.org/

Listen, it’s very simple: In Britain we use the metric system, except for beer and milk, which come in pints. But not plant milk — that comes in litres.

Oh, and distances are in miles. But only if they’re too far to walk — if you can walk it it’s in metres. If you’re driving then your fuel efficiency is in miles-per-gallon, but petrol is sold in litres.

Oh, and your height is in feet and inches. If you don’t care much about your weight it’s in stone (but not pounds — no-one can remember how many pounds are in a stone and it’s hard to read the little tick marks on analogue scales). If you do care about your weight then your digital scales tell you it in kilograms.

Oh, and if there’s a heatwave then tabloids will forecast a “100°F scorcher”. But if it’s cold then it’s an “arctic blast” with “widespread temperatures below 0°C”.

I hope this clears things up.