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Ana Swanson writes in the Washington Post that when people talk about "disruptive technologies," they're usually thinking of the latest thing out of Silicon Valley but some of the most historically disruptive technologies aren't exactly what you would expect and arguably, the most disruptive technologiy of the last century is the refrigerator. In the 1920s, only about a third of households reported having a washer or a vacuum, and refrigerators were even rarer. But just 20 years later, refrigerator ownership was common, with more than two-thirds of Americans owning an icebox. According to Helen Veit, the surge in refrigerator ownership totally changed the way that Americans cooked. "Before reliable refrigeration, cooking and food preservation were barely distinguishable tasks" and techniques like pickling, smoking and canning were common in nearly every American kitchen. With the arrival of the icebox and then the electric refrigerator, foods could now be kept and consumed in the same form for days. Americans no longer had to make and consume great quantities of cheese, whiskey and hard cider -- some of the only ways to keep foods edible through the winter. "A whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation," writes Veit.

Technologies like the smartphone, the computer and the Internet have, of course, dramatically changed the ways we live and work but consider the spread of electricity, running water, the flush toilet developed and popularized by Thomas Crapper and central heating and the changes these have wrought. "These technologies were so disruptive because they massively reduced the time spent on housework," concludes Swanson. "The number of hours that people spent per week preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning fell from 58 in 1900 to only 18 hours in 1970, and it has declined further since then."

The NYT reported on October 14, 2015 that a magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of the Cushing Hub, a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world, now holding 53 million barrels of crude with a capacity for 85 million barrels. The Cushing oil hub stores oil piped from across North America until it is dispatched to refineries. The Department of Homeland Security has gauged potential earthquake dangers to the hub and concluded that a quake equivalent to the record magnitude 5.7 could significantly damage the tanks and a study by Dr. Daniel McNamara study concludes that recent earthquakes have increased stresses along two stretches of fault that could lead to quakes of that size. "It’s the eye of the storm,” says Dana Murphy, vice chairman of the state’s oil and gas regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

“When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes,” says Daniel McNamara, author of a paper published online that a large earthquake near the storage hub “could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines.” “Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it’s a high concern.” Nevertheless, Oklahoma’s attempt to deal with the earthquakes this autumn faces continuing obstacles. The government’s chief seismologist, who came under oil industry pressure to minimize the quakes’ origins in waste disposal, left this fall, and his successor is scheduled to depart soon. The state budget for the fiscal year that began in July slashed appropriations to the Corporation Commission by nearly 45 percent.

The NYT reports that Julian Assange has suffered "deep pain" in his right shoulder for the last three months but the British government has refused to let the WikiLeaks founder Assange receive a special "safe-passage" so he can receive medical attention outside the country's London embassy where he has been holed up for over three years. "The British government is not offering the terms to make this happen," Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño told journalists. "It's an additional fault in his protection, in the defence of a person's human rights. This is a person who needs to have exams done to understand the situation given it is grave. We don't know what he may have, and they don't want to give an authorization that they can perfectly well give." According to Patino Assange needs magnetic resonance imaging scan to investigate the source of the pain. “The reply we have had from Britain is that he can leave whenever he likes for any medical care he might need but the European arrest warrant for Assange is still valid. In other words, he can leave – and we will put him in jail,” Patiño added.

Christine Hauser writes in the NY Times that police in Lakeland, Florida say that 911 dispatchers started receiving calls Saturday from viewers who were watching a woman broadcasting herself while apparently driving drunk, using the live-streaming app Periscope. Despite the tip being generated in the virtual world, it took some traditional police sleuthing to find the woman and, ultimately, arrest and charge her. The woman, identified by the police as Whitney Marie Beall, 23, first invited her viewers to follow her as she went bar-hopping in downtown Lakeland. During the live stream, Beall repeatedly said that she was drunk and appeared to be asking viewers for directions. She noticed that there were at least 57 people watching and asked, “So where am I right now, people?” One 911 caller said Beall was driving a Toyota in the north Lakeland area. “I just saw a girl on Periscope driving drunk. She doesn’t know where she is and she’s driving really fast,” said the caller. As officers pulled Beall over, her 2015 Toyota Corolla, which already had a flat right front tire, rammed into a curb. Beall failed the Standardized Field Sobriety Tests and she refused the breathalyzer test. “She hung her head down and said this was a big mistake,” says reporter Holly Bounds. "And she is learning a lesson from it all."

Beginning in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope began looking at approximately 150,000 stars for signs of objects orbiting with some recognizable pattern in an attempt to find exo-planets Now Ross Anderson writes in The Atlantic that scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look at KIC 8462852, a star that undergoes irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level that can last for between 5 and 80 days. “We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.” Dips in the light emitted by stars are often shadows cast by transiting planets especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects. Boyajian, a Yale Postdoc who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper describing KIC 8462852's bizarre light pattern and explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.

SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Jason Wright says the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star. “When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” says Wright. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion on a proposal to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity. If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations. "In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky," says Anderson, "where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days."

Matt Richtel reports at the NY Times that the push to make the state greener with electric cars is having an unintended side effect: It is making some people madder and meaner. The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. According to Richtel electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another’s cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window. "Cars are getting unplugged while they are actively charging, and that's a problem," says Peter Graf. "Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'"

The problem is that installation of electric vehicle charging ports at some companies has not kept pace with soaring demand, creating thorny etiquette issues in the workplace. German software company SAP installed 16 electric vehicle charging ports in 2010 at its Palo Alto campus for the handful of employees who owned electric vehicles. Now there are far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one of the roughly 1,800 employees on the campus now drive a plug-in vehicle, overwhelming the 16 available chargers. And as demand for chargers exceeds supply, a host of thorny etiquette issues have arisen, along with some rare but notorious incidents of "charge rage." Companies are finding that they need one charging port for every two of their employees' electric vehicles. "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead," said ChargePoint CEO Pat Romano. "Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars. If you are going to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."

Amid the turmoil in congress after Kevin McCarthy's exit from the race for Speaker of the House, the NYT reports that one veteran Republican is floating the idea of teaming up with Democrats to elect a new speaker — an idea that would normally be unthinkable in modern American politics, in which such elections normally break on party lines. “In order to pass any bill around this place, everybody knows we need to assemble a bipartisan coalition,” says Republican Representative Charlie Dent, pointing to a stopgap spending measure that was adopted last week with more Democratic votes than Republican ones. “Same thing will happen on the debt ceiling, budget agreement, omnibus, there will be a bipartisan coalition. I suspect at some point if we can’t get 218 Republicans to vote for a speaker candidate, we will have to assemble a bipartisan coalition to elect a speaker,” says Dent. “In my view it's come time to marginalize those members who doesn't want to be part of the governing majority." While potentially appealing to voters disgusted with partisan rancor and paralysis in Congress, such a prospect still remains highly unlikely. But Dent’s remark highlights the frustration among many Republicans that their caucus is so fractured that serving as speaker has little appeal.

Jeff Guo reports at the Washington Post that development of qinghaosu — or artemisinin — is one of modern China’s proudest accomplishments winning a Noble Prize in Medicine this year for Tu Youyou, but it’s also a story about Communism, Chairman Mao, and China’s return to the world economy. On May 23, 1967, Chinese scientists commenced Project 523, a secret effort that enlisted hundreds of researchers to discover a new malaria drug during the Vietnam War. Although in a better warfare position, the People's Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army) and its allies in the South, Viet Cong, suffered increasing mortality because of malaria epidemics. The project began at the height of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, a brutal time during which academics and intellectuals were murdered, imprisoned, or sent to “reeducation camps” in mass purges.

For doctors and chemists. Project 523 was a lifeline, according to Professor Zhou Yiqing. “By the time Project 523 had got under way, the Cultural Revolution had started and the research provided shelter for scientists facing political persecution." Tu’s husband had been banished to the countryside when she was asked to get involved in Project 523. Tu’s research project sought to find modern logic in ancient ways, much as the French researchers identified quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree. According to Tu, she and her team screened over 2,000 different Chinese herbs described in old texts, of which about 200 were good enough to test in mice. That’s when they hit upon a plant called Artemisia annua: annual wormwood, or qinghao in Chinese. At the time, all of this work remained a Chinese military secret; some of the results were published in Chinese-language journals, but it would be well after the death of Mao Zedong until China would reveal that it had discovered a surprisingly potent new weapon against malaria.

According to Guo the lion’s share of the credit rightly goes to Tu and the countless other Chinese scientists who worked on Project 523. But Oxford anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu suggests that the political climate at the time also deserves recognition. Qinghaosu might never have been discovered had it not been for Maoist China’s nationalist infatuation with Chinese folk medicine. “It was thus a feature specific to institutions of the People’s Republic of China that scientists, who themselves had learnt ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning,” Hsu argues. “This was crucial for the ‘discovery’ of qinghao.”