Seattle public schools sue social media giants, an international nuclear fusion project faces years of delay and Princeton researchers discover a way to use egg whites to remove salt and microplastics from seawater Searched.
This is all the tech news that is trending right now. Welcome to trending hashtags. It’s Monday, January 9th and I’m your host, Asha Pamma.
A public school district in Seattle is suing social media giants including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat for harming the mental health of young people. The 91-page long COMPL filed on Friday in the US District Court seeks a ban on social media. Companies for mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, cyberbullying and more. According to NPR, the complaints stem from difficulty educating students and consequently forcing schools to hire mental health professionals, develop lesson plans about the effects of social media, and provide additional training to teachers. Seattle Public Schools is asking the court to order the companies to stop creating a public nuisance, to pay damages and to pay for prevention education and treatment for excessive and problematic use of social media.
source: npr
An international project into nuclear fusion will face years of delay, its owner has said, weeks after scientists in the US announced the achievement of nuclear fusion. The Guardian explained that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Project, set up at a site in southern France, seeks to prove the feasibility of fusion on a large scale and as a carbon-free source of energy. However, this decades-old effort has had a long history of technical challenges and cost overruns. Correcting problems such as the wrong size to weld the joints of the blocks together or traces of corrosion in the thermal shield will take not weeks, but months or even years, said Pietro Barbaschi, director general of the project.
source: Guardian
Princeton Engineering researchers have used egg whites to create a material that can remove salt and microplastics from seawater. According to SiteDaily, the researchers used egg white to create an aerogel, a versatile material known for its light weight and porosity. It has a wide range of uses including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation. Craig Arnold, one of the researchers, got the feeling from a sandwich he ate during lunch. He asked his lab group to mix different bread recipes with the carbon to see if they would recreate the airgel structure he was looking for. The team continued to eliminate ingredients during testing, until when none worked, only egg whites remained. If this challenge can be resolved, the material has significant advantages, as it is cheap to produce, energy efficient to use, and highly effective, reports Sci-Tech Daily.
source: Sitek Daily
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, wants us to retrieve our personal data from the tech giant, CNN reported. Berners-Lee claims that his startup Inrupt, launched in 2017, allows people to keep their data in one central location and control which people and applications can access it, rather than having to store it all over the world. Stored by apps or sites on the web. Users can obtain a Pod from a handful of providers, hosted by Web Services such as Amazon (AMZN), or run their own server, if they have the technical know-how. When self-hosting, says Berners-Lee, users can have the utmost control and privacy. Erupt’s platform is being tested by the UK’s National Health Service and the government of the Belgian region of Flanders. The latter plans to use Pods to let its citizens choose how to share their personal data.
source: CNN
This is all the tech news that is trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast Network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Daily Briefing. Be sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get important news straight to your inbox every day. Plus, check out the next episode of Hashtag Tendence, our weekly hashtag trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have any suggestion or tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thanks for listening, I’m Aashi Pamma.
