President Trump said to urge Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw IDF soldiers from Syria, Lebanon

How President Trump manages the Middle East and the Abraham Accords!

Indeed, the presence of IDF soldiers in Syria could possibly destabilize the regime of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa! Good call!

"US President Donald Trump allegedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel should remove IDF troops from Syria and Lebanon during a phone call on Thursday, according to a Tuesday Axios report citing US and Israeli officials.

Trump claimed that the presence of Israeli military personnel in Syrian territory could create tension and may lead to escalation, one US official told Axios.

“They don’t want you there. You should redeploy,” Trump allegedly told Netanyahu, according to the official. ..."

Donald Trump said to urge Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw IDF soldiers from Syria, Lebanon | The Jerusalem Post "IDF sources told the Post the Axios report caught them by surprise, adding there has been no change on the ground in Lebanon or Syria."

US charges Russian 'bulletproof' web hosts over cyberattacks that netted $62M from cybercrime victims

How rogue is Russia under Putin the Terrible!

"U.S. prosecutors have charged three Russian nationals and two web hosts with hacking, conspiracy, and money laundering over their alleged roles in hosting cyberattacks that caused tens of millions of dollars in damages to U.S. businesses.

The three Russians, Alexander Volosovik, Kirill Zatolokin, and Yulia Pankova, who reside in St. Petersburg, are accused of owning and running two web hosts, Media Land and ML.Cloud, which allegedly provided criminals and state-backed hackers with web hosting and infrastructure support for carrying out cyberattacks. ..."

US charges Russian 'bulletproof' web hosts over cyberattacks that netted $62M from cybercrime victims | TechCrunch

New York state sues chemical companies over PFAS pollution. Really!

Another frivolous lawsuit by Dimocratic Party member and New York state attorney general Letitia James!

New York state sues chemical companies over PFAS pollution | Business | Chemistry World "Lawsuit alleges 3M, Chemours, DuPont and others knowingly sold polluting products, and seeks damages and cleanup cost payments"

New York state attorney general Letitia James

TAPIR, a new CRISPR-based technology

Good news!

"Which comes first: cellular dysregulation or ribosomal RNA? This classic chicken-and-egg problem has long flummoxed scientists studying diseases associated with altered levels of ribosomes ... researchers have struggled to confirm whether unusual ribosomal readings in patients with certain cancers and congenital conditions were contributing to the diseases’ progressions or were side effects from other cellular issues.

To better understand this relationship, scientists created a new gene editing technology called Targeted Activation of Protein Translation—TAPIR, for short. ... the new technology allows them to tweak the quantities of the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) that makes up the bulk of the ribosomes themselves. By adjusting how much rRNA a cell generates and then observing how that affects a given medical condition, the team could finally establish a cause-and-effect relationship between ribosomes and disease.

The researchers first put TAPIR to the test by prompting ribosome formation in mice with a rare congenital disease that impedes rRNA creation. Once the rRNA was switched back on, the mice showed some improvement in their condition. Then, they activated rRNA in a different set of mice with pancreatic cancer, a disease associated with heightened ribosomal activity; in response, the cancer hastened its already rapid expansion.

Both results point to the same conclusion: Changes in rRNA levels are causes of disease symptoms, not symptoms themselves."

"... New Perspectives for Rare Diseases and Cancer

The results could be particularly relevant for diseases in which ribosome function is disturbed. These include ribosomopathies such as Treacher-Collins syndrome, a rare congenital disease that causes facial malformations. In a mouse model, the researchers successfully managed to partially compensate for disease-related alterations by stimulating rRNA production in a targeted way.

In addition, the research team observed that similar mechanisms also play a role in pancreatic cancer. Tumor cells seem to use increased rRNA production to maintain their rapid growth. In the mouse model for pancreatic cancer, TAPIR was able to increase rRNA production and promote the growth of the cancer cells. This shows that the increased rRNA production has a causal effect in contributing to tumor growth and is not just a side effect. ..."

From the abstract:

"Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) transcription rates vary during development, and their dysregulation is linked to diseases such as cancer and ribosomopathies. Owing to their high abundance and genomic redundancy, the functional significance of rRNA-levels remains unclear.

Here, we developed TAPIR (Targeted Activation of Protein Translation), a CRISPR-based approach to elevate rRNA-levels by inducing 47S rDNA transcription. TAPIR increased nucleolar size and enhanced protein synthesis, even in rapidly proliferating cells.

In neural stem cells, elevated translation promoted self-renewal and proliferation in vitro and in vivo.

Furthermore, TAPIR enabled the modeling and partial rescue of associated disease phenotypes.

Our findings revealed that rRNA-levels directly regulate translational output and that protein synthesis capacity can act as a key determinant of mammalian stem cell behavior."

ScienceAdviser

New CRISPR Method Makes It Possible to Control Protein Production in Cells (original news release) "A research team led by Prof. Stefan Stricker at Helmholtz Munich and Ludwig Maximilian University has developed TAPIR, a CRISPR-based technology that enables precise control of protein production in cells. The method provides new insights into the regulation of stem cells, cancer, and rare diseases, while opening up new opportunities for biomedical research."

Manipulation of protein translation and stem cell self-renewal by CRISPR activation of rRNA transcription (no public access)

In dramatic testimony, US Supreme Court Justice Barrett recalls being given bullet proof vest over death threats. Really!

Wow! What! Bullet proof vests for US Supreme Court justices? Let that sink in for a moment!

Why not a helmet to protect their brains? Just kidding!

I blogged here yesterday about the testimony of two US Supreme Court Justices before the US Congress.

"... she had to explain to her 12-year-old son why she brought home a bulletproof vest to protect herself from death threats. ...

Barrett emphasized how her life changed after the 2022 Dobbs decision was released, which overturned the historic ruling in Roe v. Wade, which boosted threats against her and the other conservative justices. ..."

In dramatic testimony, Justice Barrett recalls being given bullet proof vest over death threats | Just The News "The emotional testimony occurred during a hearing on the Supreme Court's increased budget for the 2027 fiscal year, which includes a boost in funding for security amid an uptick in threats against the high court."

Justice Amy Coney Barrett (Source)

A global workspace in language models by Anthropic

Amazing stuff!

"... We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian.

Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you've heard of language models having a "scratchpad" or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—

the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process. ...

We find that the J-space has a number of unique properties, compared to the rest of Claude's processing:

• Claude can report on these representations. If you ask Claude what it's thinking about, it will tell you what’s in the J-space. Non-J-space representations are less reportable.
• It can also modulate them on request. If you ask Claude to think about something, or solve a problem silently in its head, it will light up the appropriate patterns in its J-space. By contrast, it has trouble modulating patterns not in the J-space.
• Claude uses its J-space for internal reasoning. If you ask Claude to solve a problem that requires multiple steps, the intermediate steps will light up in its J-space, even when it doesn’t say them out loud. These J-space patterns causally mediate its performance in such tasks, despite being smaller in magnitude than other representations.
• Representations in the J-space can be used flexibly for many tasks—for example, once “France” has lit up in Claude’s J-space, the model can recall its capital, or its national currency, or the continent it belongs to.
• However, despite its important role, the J-space is not involved in most of what a language model does—speaking fluently, recalling simple facts, using correct grammar, etc. In experiments where we prevented Claude from using its J-space, it still interacted normally, but lost its higher-order cognitive functions.

..."

"... If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately ...

In this paper, we present evidence that an analogous functional distinction has emerged in modern AI models. Specifically, we observe that language models maintain a privileged set of internal representations, available for report, modulation, and flexible internal reasoning, atop a much larger volume of automatic processing. We identify these representations using a new interpretability technique, which surfaces the concepts a model is poised to verbalize at any point in its processing. Measuring and intervening on these representations provides us a window into a model’s thought processes, uncovering internal reasoning and reactions that do not appear in its output. ..."

A global workspace in language models \ Anthropic

Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

The richer get richer – not just materially, but socially | Cornell Chronicle. Really!

So what! Especially in America, an individual (no matter rich or poor or background) with skills and talent is most likely quickly spotted and given an opportunity.

It also depends very much on the individual him- or herself to make better "social connections" in life!

Is sociology a pseudoscience?

"... This familiar example of elite network influence proves the adage that it’s not what you know but who you know that matters. And such disparities in social connection are far more pervasive throughout daily life than generally recognized, Cornell sociologists argue in a new open-access book, “Friends and Fortunes: Social Capital Inequality in America.”

Inequality in social ties is as stark as income inequality in the United States, the researchers say – and the two are mutually reinforcing. ...

“Why should there be differences in access to valuable social connections? Are they not free?” the authors write. “One would hope so. But the data tell a different story.” ...

explain how social networks subtly feed hidden systems of power, prestige, wealth and, ultimately, life chances. ..."

The richer get richer – not just materially, but socially | Cornell Chronicle

Friends and Fortunes Social Capital Inequality in America

Guide to Loop Engineering: How 'autoresearch' and 'Bilevel Autoresearch' Turn AI Agents Into Autonomous Machine Learning ML Research Loops

Recommendable, but a long, convoluted headline! An overview article.

Guide to Loop Engineering: How 'autoresearch' and 'Bilevel Autoresearch' Turn AI Agents Into Autonomous Machine Learning ML Research Loops - MarkTechPost

The pig in the python or how successive population cohorts influence economics and labor supply

Demography is destiny!

Like so many economic and social science theories, they explain historical data very well for a time and make reasonable predictions, but eventually they fail.

"In 1978, Richard Easterlin stood before the Population Association of America and predicted that the wages of young American men — falling since 1973 — would turn around by 1984.

He had earned the confidence. As we have discussed in the past, Easterlin’s relative cohort size hypothesis was the most successful applied demography of its era, and it had already explained the biggest population event in American history—the Baby Boom. He replaced the mysticism about returning GIs, swooning Rosie Riveters, and suburban optimism with actual social science. ...

Easterlin found the explanation for the unexpected Baby Boom in economics. The Depression produced small birth cohorts. Those cohorts came of working age in a booming postwar economy and immigration tightly restricted by the Immigration Act of 1924. The “lucky few” folks walked into a market starved for workers. They got high wages relative to what they’d grown up expecting, and so they married early and had a lot of children.

Tight labor markets and closed borders made the Baby Boom. That is the core of Easterlin’s thesis, and it is the part of his work that has aged best. ..."

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

The large size of the baby boom cohort depressed economic opportunities for that generation as it flooded the labor force in the 1970s.

Contrary to the predictions of Richard Easterlin’s relative cohort size hypothesis, however, there was no rebound of opportunities with the advent of smaller cohorts in the mid-1980s; incomes of young adults remained depressed until the 2010s.

New measures of flows into and out of the labor force make it simple to assess the relative impact of retirement, female labor-force participation, and immigration in concert with the size of birth cohorts entering the labor force. The results suggest that the departure of baby boomers from the labor force will have profound implications for economic opportunities of new workers.

Abstract

This analysis revisits the relative cohort size hypothesis proposed by demographer Richard Easterlin in the 1960s.

Easterlin argued that the economic and social prospects of a generation are influenced by the size of the cohort relative to adjacent cohorts.

He hypothesized that relative cohort size affects wages, employment, marriage, and fertility decisions.

The theory fits the data well for the period from 1940 to 1980 but fails in later decades.

I present a more nuanced view of the impact of demographic factors on worker competition through the lens of a measure of decennial labor-force flows. This approach allows consideration of the effects of retirement, female labor-force participation, and immigration on labor-market competition.

I calculate these flows for the period from 1910 to 2040 and propose an index of employment competition. The results show that trends in labor-market competition are consistent with wage trends of young workers since 1940. Projections to 2040 show that we are on the verge of a radical reshaping of labor markets in which new workers will be in extremely short supply."

Breitbart Business Digest

The pig in the python: US decennial labor flows and economic opportunity, 1910–2040 (no public access)

Canada to plug airspace surveillance gaps with Australia's over-the-horizon radar

Both countries are geographically over the horizon! 😊

"The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), operated by Canada and the United States, has gaping holes in its airspace radar coverage. Ottawa went some way to filling those gaps when it signed four related agreements in June for a new radar system sourced from Australia.

The system is called the Arctic Over-The-Horizon Radar (A-OTHR), and the deal is worth some US$1.75 billion to Australia. ..."

Canada to plug surveillance gaps with Aussie over-the-horizon radar

JORN, a network of three over-the-horizon radar facilities, is a strategic and early-warning asset for Australia. Canada is buying a similar system.

Meet Biomni – an AI-powered biomedical co-scientist

The future of scientific research & discovery is here thanks to ML & AI!

This is new research by Jure Leskovec and his team.

"In brief

• Biomni is an AI agent “co-scientist” that can help biomedical researchers through the entire research workflow, with outputs that demand human experience and reasoning.
• The tool specializes in being able to work with prompts written in casual language, such as “Why are these patients responding differently to the drug?”
• A prototype Biomni is already in use by more than 10,000 labs, making it the most widely used AI co-scientist system in biomedicine.

..."

From the abstract:

"Biomedical research is increasingly constrained by repetitive, fragmented workflows that slow discovery.

We introduce Biomni, a general-purpose biomedical artificial intelligence agent that autonomously executes diverse research tasks.

To map the biomedical action space, Biomni’s action-discovery agent mines tools, databases, and protocols from thousands of publications across 25 domains, building a unified agentic environment.

Its general-purpose architecture integrates large language model reasoning with retrieval-augmented planning and code-based execution, dynamically composing workflows without predefined templates.

Systematic benchmarking shows strong generalization across heterogeneous tasks—causal gene prioritization, drug repurposing, rare-disease diagnosis, microbiome analysis, and molecular cloning—without task-specific tuning.

Real-world case studies demonstrate Biomni interpreting multi-modal datasets, optimizing protein stability, orchestrating wet-lab instruments, and generating experimentally testable protocols.

Biomni envisions artificial intelligence augmenting human scientists and accelerating discovery."

Meet Biomni – an AI-powered biomedical co-scientist | Stanford Report "In creating a comprehensive, AI-enabled research agent for the biomedical sciences, Stanford researchers hope to speed innovation by eliminating the tedium of scientific legwork."

Autonomous biomedical research with an artificial intelligence agent (no public access)

Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent (preprint, open access)

When Does Continual Learning Require Learning

This could be an interesting new paper by  Trevor Darrell and Jitendra Malik.

From the abstract:

"As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?

Today, the field largely frames this as a problem of context management and mitigating forgetting.

We argue this framing is incomplete: continual learning is fundamentally about increasing model competence as the world changes.

We disentangle this change along two axes -- space, where the model encounters new domains, and time, where the underlying data drifts under a fixed task. This framing lets us study continual learning under realistic conditions: new domains arrive over time, facts drift past their training cutoff, and agentic interactions accumulate state across episodes.

To evaluate methods under this setting, we recast widely used LLM benchmarks as sequential problems and introduce a single mechanism-agnostic protocol that compares prompt-based methods (GEPA, ACE), supervised learning (SFT, SDFT), reinforcement learning (GRPO, SDPO), and context compression (Cartridges, In-place TTT).

Prompt-based methods fit each new stage quickly but degrade on future tasks. Distillation-based methods accumulate knowledge stably but struggle to update outdated facts.

Context compression improves efficiency without substantially improving the ability to learn new tasks.

Online reinforcement learning adapts most effectively to knowledge updates but remains sensitive to noisy reward signals.

Overall, our results suggest that continual learning is not a single capability: different patterns of environmental change require fundamentally different update behaviors, determining when adaptation must be learned inside model weights and when it can be achieved through external scaffolding.

We hope that understanding where each method succeeds and fails will guide the design of stronger continual learning systems."

[2607.07847] When Does Continual Learning Require Learning

Ewha Womans University in South Korea

No misspelling! 😊

Founded in "1886.5.31: Ewha Haktang was founded by Mary F. Scranton, an American missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church."

What do these ladies research today? New process turns mixed plastic waste into hydrogen fuel without sorting

Ewha Womans University

Space is sweet: interstellar sugars found in our Milky Way galaxy

Amazing stuff!

"Astronomers have found sugars in interstellar medium for the first time, suggesting an answer to a riddle about the origin of life.

Sugars are critical organic molecules. They form the backbone of DNA and RNA as well as playing a key role in metabolic processes.

Scientists have long wondered how sugars first formed on Earth. ..."

From the abstract:

"Sugars are essential biomolecules, serving as metabolic fuels, nucleic acid backbone components and structural or energy-storage polymers.

A central question in origin-of-life research is how monosaccharides formed on the primitive Earth, as laboratory experiments under prebiotic conditions yield insufficient concentrations.

The detection of ribose, glucose and other monosaccharides in asteroids and meteorites suggests an exogenous origin, possibly in the interstellar medium (ISM) before meteoritic parent-body formation. However, no sugar has been observed in the ISM so far.

Here we report the discovery of erythrulose, a chiral four-carbon ketose, in the ISM. The detection was achieved through ultrasensitive, broadband spectral surveys of the Galactic Centre molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, using the Yebes 40 m and IRAM 30 m telescopes.

Erythrulose appears to be at least eight times more abundant than analogous three-carbon sugars, which remain undetected in our ultrasensitive observations. Quantum chemical and astrochemical models indicate that erythrulose forms efficiently on interstellar dust grains from simpler two-carbon aldehydes and alcohols.

As ketoses readily isomerize into aldoses in aqueous conditions, interstellar erythrulose could have contributed to the sugar inventory available for early metabolic and replication processes."

Space is sweet: interstellar sugars found | News | ConnectSci

Detection of a four-carbon sugar in interstellar space (open access)

Fig. 1: Brightest and most unblended transitions of erythrulose observed towards the G+0.693 molecular cloud.

English for trippers: A numb number

Thumbs up! Dumb and dumber!

Female ex-middle school teacher, already facing grooming charges, arrested again on new felony sex crime charge

Another Me Too event!

Men watch out in the age of gender equality!

"Aformer middle school art teacher in Texas has been accused of grooming and having inappropriate relationships with multiple students, according to authorities.

The Irving Police Department confirmed to KDFW-TV that 28-year-old Haley Krista Radabaugh was arrested in May, charged with child grooming. ...

Texas Scorecard reported that Radabaugh was out of jail on bond when she was arrested on the second charge. ..."

Female ex-middle school teacher, already facing grooming charges, arrested again on new felony sex crime charge | Blaze Media

A hotel inside a Chinese hutong

Notice several umbrellas are also made available to guests.

A lotus flower market in China

 

New York State halts construction of all new data centers

Sounds like a stupid move by a Dimocratic Party governor!

What about e.g. the financial industry in NY and NYC? Perhaps, they would like datacenters in proximity.

"New York became the first state to halt data center construction after Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order today that temporarily bars the state from approving new permits for large projects. ..."

New York State halts construction of all new data centers | TechCrunch

US House of Representatives passes President Trump supported bill to make daylight savings time permanent

Good riddance Daylight Savings Time (DST)! Bravo President Trump!

Hopefully, other Western countries will follow! It is mostly only Western countries that apply DST!

This nonsense dates back to World War I.

House passes Trump-supported bill to make daylight savings time permanent | Just The News "The legislation, which puts the country on the time currently observed between March and November unless a state exempts itself before the act takes effect, passed in a bipartisan 308-117 split. It still needs to pass the Senate before it can take effect."

Putin the Terrible Was Xi Jinping’s Role Model. Now He’s the Junior Partner.

Nice headline!

"Xi Jinping once admired Vladimir Putin. Now he manages him. ..."

Putin Was Xi’s Role Model. Now He’s the Junior Partner. - WSJ "Four years of war and economic isolation have reduced the Russian president to a supplicant in a relationship growing more imbalanced"

(30276) Earth, Wind & Fire - September (Live)

Enjoy!

(30276) Earth, Wind & Fire - September (Live) - YouTube

$1.6 BILLION: The deal that could RESHAPE US rare earth production with Maria Bartiromo

Good news!

(30272) $1.6 BILLION: The deal that could RESHAPE US rare earth production - YouTube

Earth, Wind & Fire - Serpentine Fire (Official Video)

Enjoy!

(30272) Earth, Wind & Fire - Serpentine Fire (Official Video) - YouTube

Indeep - Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (Official Music Video)

Enjoy!

(30272) Indeep - Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (Official Music Video) - YouTube

The Jacksons - Blame It On the Boogie (Official Video)

Enjoy!

(30272) The Jacksons - Blame It On the Boogie (Official Video) - YouTube

Japan Tightens Intelligence Network After NYT Exposes Alleged Russian Spy Operations

Recommendable! Good news! Bravo PM Takaichi!

(30270) Japan Tightens Intelligence Network After NYT Exposes Alleged Russian Spy Operations - YouTube

IIT Madras Creates World's Most Detailed 3D Brain Maps

Good news!

Update of 7/15/2026: A New Brainstem Atlas Reveals Hidden Anatomy of the Human Brain "ANCHOR, a 3D human brainstem atlas, combines MRI and microscopy imaging to help researchers study neurodegenerative diseases and guide clinical applications."

(30270) IIT Madras Creates World's Most Detailed 3D Brain Maps | Vantage on Firstpost | 4K - YouTube

The researchers constructed ANCHOR using brainstem sections showing the block-face image, Nissl staining, immunohistochemistry, and anatomical annotations.

Israel's Mossad Wanted to Make Ahmadinejad Next Iran Leader

Recommendable! Contains some more details!

(30268) Israel's Mossad Wanted to Make Ahmadinejad Next Iran Leader | Vantage on Firstpost | 4K - YouTube

Ancient Mesoamericans used a-maize-ing strategies to avoid malnutrition

Ama(i)zing stuff!

"Corn flakes for breakfast, tamales for lunch, and some hominy grits with a side of corn bread for dinner? As delicious as this corn-ucopia sounds, such a maize-heavy diet is not without potential health trade-offs: Maize contains very little lysine, an amino acid important for preventing connective tissue disorders and anemia. For the hundreds of millions of people around the world who rely on maize as their primary source of food, finding dietary supplements that can add lysine is vital to prevent malnutrition.

To help understand how the earliest maize-eating societies avoided these consequences, a group of researchers examined the remains of 39 humans who lived in Belize between 1100 and 6100 years ago—just a few millennia after corn was first domesticated in Mexico.

By taking small samples from the skeletal remains and analyzing the ratios of carbon isotopes in their amino acids, the researchers deduced that the people ate animals like turkeys that had themselves eaten corn and concentrated the lysine in their bodies, allowing the amino acid to build up through a process known as trophic magnification. The findings ... suggest that Mesoamericans may have provided maize to food animals long before fully domesticating them around 2200 years ago ..."

From the abstract:

"The adoption of maize as a dietary staple shaped human societies. While a reliable carbohydrate-rich source, its inherent nutritional limitations posed substantial challenges.

Maize is deficient in lysine, an essential amino acid crucial for maintaining balanced health.

Maize-dependent diets, therefore, necessitated complementary dietary strategies. We report amino acid stable carbon isotope data from 39 directly dated humans from southern Belize [6100 to 1100 before present (B.P.)] to investigate how early populations mitigated nutritional deficiencies.

Concentration-dependent mixing model results indicate that protein supplementation from maize-eating animals contributed maize-derived lysine to human diets through trophic magnification (elevated proportions of isotopically distinct nutrients in tissues from trophic transfer).

Our results indicate that such strategies were in place by 6100 B.P., consistent with evidence of early maize cultivation but predating reliance by ~2000 years. Our findings highlight early coevolutionary dynamics linking maize cultivation and human-animal provisioning relationships, deepening understandings of adaptive food systems during agricultural transitions and offering insights into nutritional strategies underpinning sustainable subsistence."

ScienceAdviser

Nutritional Adaptations to Early Maize Cultivation: Earliest Isotopic Evidence of Maize Based Animal Provisioning in the Neotropics Tracing Early Maize-Based Animal Provisioning (original news release)

Nutritional adaptations to early maize cultivation: Earliest isotopic evidence of maize-based animal provisioning in the Neotropics (open access)

Fig. 1. Human and turkey maize and nixtamalized maize daily requirements.

Fig. 6. Analytical framework for calculating dietary contributions of maize-based foods and maize-consuming animals to individual lysine δ13C values.

Von der Leyens Marsch in die digitale Diktatur: Wie die EU alle Bürger kontrollieren will

Eine hysterische Schlagzeile oder was ist dran?

Wenn es so schlimm ist werden die Bürger der EU hoffentlich protestieren!

Von der Leyens Marsch in die digitale Diktatur: Wie die EU alle Bürger kontrollieren will "Die Zeit ist gekommen: Von der Leyen legt die Axt an das freie Internet. Ihre Alters-App zwingt jeden Bürger zur Identifizierung und errichtet die technische Infrastruktur einer digitalen Diktatur, in der Brüssel über Zugang und Ausschluss entscheidet. Das Ende von Anonymität, Meinungsfreiheit und Privatsphäre ALLER Bürger im Netz."

Defying Trump, Italy's Prime Minister Meloni 'maintaining' hard line against Iran war help. Really!

Is Italy's Prime Minister Meloni suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? I hope not! Very disappointing!

The US will remember that the coward Europeans did not aide the US in the War against Iran to prevent nuclear arms development!

"Despite being singled out for sharp criticism by US President Donald Trump at the NATO Summit, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni doubled down on her government’s refusal to let Washington use bases for military operations in the war against Iran. ..."

Defying Trump, Italy's Meloni 'maintaining' hard line against Iran war help - Breaking Defense

US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Approves Giant Space Mirror in the Sky. Really!

I have some serious doubts about these kinds of projects! What are the consequences (beyond bothering astronomers)?

I could not find an image of the giant space mirror on the company's website.

"Federal regulators have approved a California startup’s plan to launch a giant space mirror that will catch sunlight and beam it back down to targeted spots on Earth long after the sun has set.

The company, Reflect Orbital, aims to fly the craft later this year, unfurling a steerable reflector about 60 feet on a side. It hopes to have tens of thousands more circling the planet by 2035.

The company promises sunlight on demand, powering solar farms after dark, lighting construction sites overnight, and aiding search-and-rescue crews. ..."

Tuesday, July 14, 2026 - Join The Flyover

Reflect Orbital co-founder and CEO Ben Nowack with the company's Earendil-1 demonstration satellite, which is slated to launch to Earth orbit sometime in 2026.  (Source)

Source

Two US Supreme Court Justices to Give Rare Testimony to Congress. Really!

What is this all about? Was this necessary? Could this be a violation of the separation of powers?

Caveat: I am not familiar with the details of this event.

"While two Supreme Court justices are scheduled to field questions from a House panel Tuesday about the court’s budget, it’s plausible, if not likely, that members will use the opportunity to press the justices about some highly contentious cases.

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan will appear before members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. Some of the subcommittee members have been outspoken about recent high court rulings. ..."

Supreme Court Justices to Give Rare Testimony to Congress

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan

The wild Mossad operation to replace Khamenei with Israel's great enemy Ahmadinejad - analysis

I blogged here yesterday about the arrest of Ahmadinejad by the IRGC in Iran.

Was this a good choice by Mossad?

"... it has been known now for some time that the Mossad sought to replace supreme leader Ali Khamenei with former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. ...

But the latest exposure by the Times of the tactics used by the Mossad to recruit Ahmadinejad, including its picking him up mid-war under the cover of an attack around his residence, and his walking away from the operation after being unhappy about the circumstances of the war, has not come from Israeli sources. ...

the latest leaks about wild meetings with Israeli officials and Mossad agents in Guatemala, Hungary, and elsewhere, with Ahmadinejad managing to lose his minders multiple times, and clandestine funds being sent to his aides ..."

Why the Mossad's Ahmadinejad operation ended in a strategic setback | The Jerusalem Post "Information, including from The Jerusalem Post's own Western sources, indicates that Mossad sought to replace Ali Khamenei with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Mossad logo

A Theory of Contrastive Learning with Natural Images

This could be an interesting new paper by Antonio Torralba and his coauthor.

From the abstract:

"Why does contrastive learning with simple images and augmentations yield useful representations for downstream tasks?

We address this question by analytically computing the optimal representation in terms of a contrastive loss for a range of basic augmentations and any image dataset with stationary statistics.

We show that for certain augmentations the optimum can be attained by a CNN whose first layer filters are sinusoids, followed by a pointwise nonlinearity, global average pooling, and a final linear layer that performs partial whitening.

We also show that the optimal weights in such CNNs for more complicated augmentations are still sinusoids.

The frequencies of the sinusoids and their weights can be computed using a simple waterfilling algorithm given the dataset's expected power spectrum.

Experiments with different image datasets and augmentations show that such CNNs trained with SGD empirically learn sinusoids in their first layer and to perform partial whitening"

[2607.07470] A Theory of Contrastive Learning with Natural Images

New flapping robot swims and flies like a diving bird

Amazing stuff!

"Loons, gulls, puffins, and petrels are some of the 100 species of birds that can both fly and swim. These diving birds can plunge in water to swim after prey, and leap back into the air to fly away. 

Inspired by these naturally aquatic aviators, engineers ... have designed a robot that can swim underwater, then flap out of the water to continue flying through air, much like diving birds. 

The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is designed to help scientists study the mechanics that enable diving birds to fly through air and water.  ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

Diving birds transition between flying through air and navigating through water by flapping, but the mechanisms by which different species try to do this efficiently is challenging to study. Zufferey et al. developed a flapping-wing robot that can fly in the air and transition to, provide thrust under, and take off from water. The authors found that flight in air requires a higher-frequency wingbeat, and that larger wings do not increase power demands underwater. Performance was evaluated across wing sizes, flapping frequencies, and egression angles in both indoor and outdoor settings. Comparisons showed where various bird species have overlapping behavior and where differences in weight and mechanics affect overall motion. ...

Abstract

Wing-propelled diving birds flap their wings to move through air and water, yet the wing morphology and kinematics that enable this behavior remain poorly understood because of the difficulty of collecting in situ data.

The impact of flapping frequency, wing size, and stiffness on locomotion in—and transition between—the two media are still unknown.

We compared data from diving birds against experiments using a flapping-wing robot capable of flying, swimming, plunge diving, and exiting the water. We show that frequency adaptation, flexible wings, and powerful actuation enable seamless transitions without folding wings or legs, that large wings enhance flight without substantially reducing underwater efficiency, and that tail-body distance and egress angle affect water exit. These results clarify how birds (and robots) balance multifluid locomotion constraints."

New flapping robot swims and flies like a diving bird | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "MIT engineers’ design could lead to a new class of aerial-aquatic vehicles for ocean exploration."

A flapping robot swims and flies like a diving bird (original news release by EPFL) "An aerial-aquatic vehicle developed at EPFL and MIT could lead to a new class of devices for ocean exploration."

Leaping out of the water: Aerial-aquatic locomotion with flapping wings (no public access, but this link provides access to the PDF file)

What happens when environmental change outpaces life’s ability to adapt? Really!

Is the MIT trying here to sell a banality as a new scientific discoveries?

"... Now, scientists ... have found that this connection between evolutionary adaptation and the pace of environmental change holds up at the global scale as well — and can determine life’s susceptibility to mass extinction. The researchers developed a theoretical model of this phenomenon, which they present in a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters. ..."

From the abstract:

"It is widely assumed that extinction occurs when environmental change outpaces a species’ capacity to adapt. However, this hypothesis lacks support at the scale of global change, in part because the distribution of adaptation rates is unknown. Here, we test this idea by formulating a general model that predicts the distribution of adaptation rates across species. By assuming that species go extinct when they adapt too slowly, we derive a precise sigmoidal relationship between the rate of extinction and the rate of environmental change. We then show that above-background extinction rates in the fossil record follow the same sigmoidal response to global carbon-cycle change, indicating that the adaptation-rate distribution is effectively a distribution of critical thresholds.

The inferred range of adaptation rates is similar to the spread of extreme rates of environmental change. This suggests that macroevolution may align the diversity of adaptation rates with environmental forcing, thereby setting the biosphere’s sensitivity to global change. When rescaled to the slow rates of the geologic past, modern rates of environmental change appear to be below, but near, the point of maximal extinction susceptibility."

 

What happens when environmental change outpaces life’s ability to adapt? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "A new model links Earth’s mass extinctions to mismatches between rates of environmental change and biological adaptation."

Relating Rates of Global Change, Evolutionary Adaptation, and Extinction (no public access)

Modi’s visit: Australia, India seek to gain strength from each other

Good news! India, a rising superpower!

"... Probably the most striking part is the undertaking ‘to consult on defence-related developments in the Indo-Pacific that affect shared interests.’ This would have been unthinkable between Australia and India even a few years ago. ...

A second remarkable outcome was in the area of civil nuclear energy and the sale of uranium to India as part of broader energy-security cooperation.

Uranium sale to India has a long and complicated history, because India was usually rejected as a buyer because of its refraining from signing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. India, on the other hand, has repeatedly argued with the justification that, even though it has not been a party to the NPT, it has abided by the treaty’s principles better than the signatories have. This used to be a source of much frustration in India because Australia was selling uranium to China even though it had violated its NPT and Nuclear Suppliers Group commitments. ..."

Modi’s visit: Australia, India seek to gain strength from each other | The Strategist

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s three-day visit to Australia last week delivered substantial outcomes, especially in the defence and security sector.

English for trippers: To tease with ease

On an easel!

President Trump scales back 2 Utah national monuments

Good news! Bravo President Trump!

Declaring/expanding national monuments has gone to extremes in recent years! U.S. presidents have abused their power! E.g. the senile, demented and lifelong liar, the 46th President "... declared 10 new national monuments and modified/restored protections for 5 others during his administration." (Google search)

 

"Today, President Donald J. Trump signed Proclamations modifying two Utah national monuments, the Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Proclamations reduce these monuments to appropriate sizes that allow for common sense land use in these areas.

One Proclamation reduces the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from approximately 1.87 million acres to approximately 181,500 acres.

Another Proclamation reduces the size of the Bears Ears National Monument from approximately 1.36 million acres to approximately 121,100 acres. ...

FIGHTING GOVERNMENT OVERREACH ON PUBLIC LAND: President Trump is ending the overreach and abuse of the Antiquities Act, which has been used to restrict the uses of America’s public lands. ..."

Trump scales back 2 Utah national monuments | AP News

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Modifies Two National Monuments, Restoring Sensible Land Management

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (Source)