Are the mullahs of Iran panicking? Who will be next?
IRGC = Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Source)
Monday, July 13, 2026
Former Iranian president Ahmadinejad (age 69) under arrest by IRGC for work with Mossad
Malaysia to start initial production of homegrown EV battery in July
Good news! Competition is good, more competition is better!
"Malaysia plans to start small-scale production of a homegrown graphene-enhanced lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles this month, marking a milestone in the country's efforts to move up the tech manufacturing value chain. ..."
Die Brandmauerregierung plant und baut den Überwachungsstaat
Heisse Schlagzeilen aus der Bananenrepublik D!
Ukraine Says It Struck 105 Russian Shadow Fleet Vessels in 8 Days, Including 15 Overnight
Good news! Make Putin the Terrible pay a high price for invading Crimea in 2014 and eastern Ukraine in 2022!
When will the lethargic and apathetic Russian Slav(e)s finally get rid of Putin the Terrible!
New Smithsonian Report: The National Museum of American History Has Become Wholly Un-American
What is going on?
"Following an executive order calling for a complete audit of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Trump administration released a sweeping report with thousands of examples of how the museum is failing its basic task of showcasing American history.
Using the museum leaders’ own words, the report clearly documents how the museum has shifted its mission from history to woke activism, with exhibits that:
- Reject America’s heritage and reframe history through a DEI agenda
- Fail to showcase America’s Founding era, except for castigating the Founders as slave owners
- Promote sexual images and inappropriate material for young children
- Promote pro-abortion messaging
- Demand the abolishment of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency
- Refuse to celebrate America’s 250th birthday or America’s Founders
..."
Saving America’s Story "How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.
Report by the Domestic Policy Council following President Trump’s March 27, 2026, Executive Order 14253 (“Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”), and the ongoing review of the Smithsonian Institution" (original White House report)
Body Repairs Itself in a Way We Never Knew: Aged Cells Revert to Stem Cells
Amazing stuff!
"The discovery, published in Nature Communications, challenges the prevailing view that the loss of stem cells in a tissue is an irreversible process that inevitably leads to tissue collapse and disease. According to this notion, significant regeneration of damaged tissue requires transplantation of external cells. The ... researchers show that this is not entirely accurate and that the body itself can activate an internal “reprogramming” mechanism for repair. ...
“We were surprised to discover that the cornea can regenerate itself even after the destruction of all its stem cells,” ... “What is even more surprising is the repair process itself. Following injury, even mature, aged cells undergo reprogramming and become stem cells that function throughout life and prevent disease development ... In other words, the body has a remarkable ability to replenish its own stem cell reservoir, a capacity usually attributed only to simple organisms that can, for example, regrow amputated limbs. While the ability to regenerate entire organs was indeed lost in complex organisms such as humans, our study shows that part of this capacity remains. This means that instead of relying solely on transplants or external interventions, we may one day be able to activate natural mechanisms that already exist within the body and harness them for healing.” ..."
From the abstract:
"Recent studies report that epithelial differentiated cells can undergo a reverse process called dedifferentiation in response to stem cell loss. However, the extent of this reversion and the plasticity of young versus aged-differentiated cells remain unclear.
Here we show that dedifferentiated corneal epithelial cells acquire a transcriptomic state closely resembling native stem cells, sustain tissue homeostasis across lifespan and efficiently repair repeated tissue injury. Transplantation of stage-specific genetically traceable aged differentiated epithelial cells onto a denuded niche reveals reversion into a stemness-like state, restoring both quiescent and active stem cell compartments.
This plasticity operates within the epithelial lineage, allowing transitions along the differentiation axis, but remains restricted across lineages, as transplanted conjunctival cells fail to regenerate the corneal stem cell pool.
Mechanistically, we identify niche-derived cytokines that trigger reprogramming in vivo and enhance stemness in primary human corneal epithelial cells, revealing a conserved and therapeutically exploitable pathway for epithelial regeneration."
Fig. 1: Dedifferentiated LSC-like cells capture the transcriptome like native LSCs.
U.S. National Debt Reaches $39.4 Trillion
Just a reminder! This is unsustainable! The current debt/GDP ratio is about 123%!
Will President Trump do something about it? He should!
Nominal GDP for 2026 is estimated at $31.866 trillion.
"The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) released its July 2026 Monthly Debt Update, reporting that the total gross national debt reached $39.38 trillion as of July 3, 2026.
Debt held by the public totaled $31.68 trillion, while intergovernmental debt stood at $7.71 trillion.
According to the JEC, the nation’s debt has risen by $2.81 trillion over the past year and by $10.90 trillion over the past five years.
During the previous 12 months, the debt increased at an average pace of $7.71 billion per day, $321.15 million per hour, $5.35 million per minute, or $89,208.39 per second.
The annual increase equates to $8,204.76 per person and $20,814.36 per household, while total gross national debt now amounts to $115,188 per person and $292,217 per household. ..."
Apache County Becomes Third In Arizona To Remove Spanish From Printed Ballots
Food for thought! Neither the US nor Arizona are officially bilingual.
"Apache County has removed the Spanish language from its print ballots.
Gila and Mohave counties made the same decision ahead of the 2024 general election.
Apache County officials cited printing costs and election wait times as deciding factors for the decision to limit printed ballots to one language. As support for these justifications, Apache County noted that it will continue to offer Spanish ballot translations on their electronic vote machines. Gila County does as well. ..."
Neue Studie: Die Sonne als Klimaregisseur – 2.000 Jahre Klimageschichte zeigen solare Spuren im Mittelmeerraum
Empfehlenswert! Ich habe hier seit einigen Jahren zu dem Thema das schwankende Sonnenaktivität ursächlich sind für Klimaschwankungen auf der Erde statt CO2.
"Die Sonne ist der Motor des irdischen Klimas. Ohne ihre Energie gäbe es keine Ozeane, keine Atmosphäre und kein Leben. Trotzdem spielt die Sonne in vielen aktuellen Klimadiskussionen nur eine Nebenrolle. Häufig wird argumentiert, dass die Schwankungen der Sonnenleistung zu gering seien, um relevante Klimaänderungen auszulösen.
Eine neue im Juli 2026 im Fachblatt Heritage veröffentlichte wissenschaftliche Arbeit aus Italien zeigt nun, dass diese Betrachtungsweise möglicherweise zu kurz greift. Die Autoren untersuchten die Klimageschichte des Mittelmeerraums über einen Zeitraum von rund 2.000 Jahren und fanden Hinweise darauf, dass Veränderungen der Sonnenaktivität mit langfristigen Schwankungen der Niederschlagsverteilung verbunden waren. Dabei geht es nicht um eine simple Aussage wie „mehr Sonne bedeutet wärmeres Klima“. Das Klimasystem ist wesentlich komplexer. Die Sonne kann über verschiedene Prozesse die atmosphärische Zirkulation beeinflussen – und damit verändern, wo, wann und wie viel Niederschlag fällt. ..."
From the abstract:
"This study presents a meta-analysis of relatively high-resolution paleohydrological proxies derived from geological archives in Sardinia and in the Italian Peninsula–Sicily over the last 2000 years, with particular emphasis on the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA).
The investigated climate proxies, ranging from annual-decadal to centennial resolution, include terrestrial and marine sediment cores, glaciers, pollen spectra, speleothems, lake-level fluctuations, as well as sedimentary and geomorphological inventories.
Such datasets were analyzed through holistic and stratigraphic approaches along West–East and North–South transects across the central Mediterranean. Limited temporal resolution and incomplete stratigraphic continuity of several paleoclimatic records from the investigated regions thwart full reconstructions of paleohydrological trends.
Nevertheless, the presented meta-analysis has enabled:
(1) the recognition of reliable paleoclimatic correlations between the two regions, which exhibit long-lasting anti-phase hydroclimatic trends (wetter conditions in Sardinia and drier conditions in central Italy during the MWP, with the opposite pattern during the LIA); and
(2) the identification of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) as the primary driver of these paleohydrological variations.
The significance of this anti-phase pattern is discussed in the context of the North–South and West–East climatic dipoles identified in the Mediterranean region during the middle to late Holocene.
Furthermore, we assessed the potential of the investigated paleohydrological network to:
(1) compare reconstructed hydrological patterns with mean temperature and precipitation records derived from empirical and model-based climate reconstructions in southern Europe and the Mediterranean; and
(2) identify gaps in data coverage that currently limit our understanding of high-resolution spatiotemporal hydrological variability and dynamics
The hydroclimatic pattern in Sardinia and in the Italian Peninsula–Sicily has exhibited marked spatio-temporal divergences, with major hydroclimatic transitions coincident with well-known solar minima over the last millennium, thus suggesting a possible cause-and-effect relationship. The interpretations presented in this study provide a framework for understanding how changes in the paleoclimatic variability of water resources may have influenced different regions of Italy since the Middle Ages, potentially affecting societal transitions as well as historical and socioeconomic dynamics.
Comparison of the multidecadal-to-centennial reconstructions of paleohydrological patterns is presented for both areas, pending the development of new, higher-resolution, and more precisely dated proxies from the Italian records. Their importance is emphasized in order to improve reconstructions of past climate variability and to enhance assessments of future climate trajectories."
Mauritania: A rare glimpse at one of the world's least-visited nations
Recommendable! The 28th largest country of the world has only a population of less than 5.5 million.
"In an age when it's increasingly easy to explore the furthest reaches of the world – from the tallest mountains to the most remote islands – there are still entire countries that few travellers ever see. One such place is Mauritania.
With approximately 90% of its land located within the Sahara Desert, Mauritania is one of the world's least-densely populated and least-visited nations. Because of a lack of tourism infrastructure and security concerns, fewer than 10,000 international travellers arrive each year in the sand-swept, sun-bleached country, compared to several million who visit neighbouring Algeria and Senegal. ..."
The Chinese graduate accused of becoming Mexico's 'fentanyl king'
What a story!
Caveat: I did not read the whole long article.
"... On the outskirts of Sinaloa's state capital city, Culiacán, sitting in a parked car where no-one can overhear him, he explains how ingredients to make the deadly drug fentanyl are shipped thousands of miles from Chinese factories to laboratories in Mexico. Members of his cartel credit Brother Wang with establishing this supply chain.
Known in the criminal world as the "king of fentanyl", Brother Wang is a 39-year-old Chinese national, whose real name is Zhang Zhidong, according to the US Department of Justice. Arrested in Mexico in 2024, Zhang later made a dramatic escape before he was recaptured and extradited to the US in 2025. ...
When Zhang appeared in court in New York in 2025, the Deputy Attorney General at the time, Todd Blanche, described him as one of "the world's most dangerous traffickers".
He also accused him of "running a global enterprise that pumped massive quantities of cocaine, fentanyl, and methamphetamine" into the US and laundering "millions in narcotics proceeds". ...
Zhang graduated from the prestigious Peking University in Beijing with a Spanish degree in 2010, and a year later travelled to Mexico to work for a Chinese-owned company that mined iron ore. He soon secured a senior role. ..."
South Africa says 53,000 foreigners deported in campaign
Good news!
"The South African government says more than 53,000 foreign nationals have been deported or repatriated since launching a "migration management" campaign five weeks ago.
Most were from Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, officials say, and the number is likely to rise as repatriations and deportations continue.
South Africa is carrying out one of its biggest crackdowns on undocumented migrants in years, following weeks of anti-immigration protests that have seen violence, intimidation and looting. ..."
The great wipeout: Nvidia lost $1 trillion within two months
Wow! Roller coaster!
Unifying Object-Centric World Models and Diffusion Policy: A Hierarchical Framework for Multi-Stage Robotic Tasks
This could be an interesting new paper by Yann LeCun and his team!
From the abstract:
"Visual world models have shown great potential in learning complex system dynamics. Recent advancements leverage these models as transition functions within Model Predictive Control (MPC) frameworks to solve various control tasks.
When applied to robotics, however, they are limited to single-stage tasks such as reaching or grasping, and struggle with multi-stage ones that demand complex sequential planning.
In this work, we introduce WorldDP, a world model framework designed for multi-stage robotic manipulation.
Our hierarchical approach utilizes a high-level world model as a transition function to optimize for feasible subgoals during runtime, which are subsequently reached by a low-level Diffusion Policy.
To further aid in learning dynamics and planning, we incorporate object-centric representations that decouple environmental entities and enable us to plan sequentially with respect to each.
Evaluated across several robotics benchmarks, WorldDP consistently outperforms existing baselines, validating that coupling the world model's physically grounded planning with diffusion policy's efficient execution yields superior multi-stage performance."
Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe Earth did it
Recommendable!
"... It may come as a surprise, then, that scientists don’t really know how water first arrived here on Earth. ...
When astronomers look at exoplanets — worlds outside our solar system — they see a diversity of atmospheres. But when they simulate the ways the planets took shape, scientists find that many of them could have started out brimming with hydrogen. Could Earth’s formative years have been similar? ...
But in recent years, several spacecraft caught up to comets to examine them. What they found was that cometary water didn’t match ours; the chemical signatures were different. ...
Asteroids — rockier and more metal-rich than comets — then became the most popular choice. Asteroids impact Earth far more frequently than comets do, and their water reserves (while not as voluminous as those of comets) look a lot more like those on our planet. ...
Through careful observation of worlds orbiting other stars, along with some explosive laboratory experiments involving diamond anvils and lasers, scientists have realized that rocky planets like Earth have a way to make water all by themselves. All you need is an ocean of magma, a whole lot of hydrogen, and a little bit of geological alchemy. ...
asteroids. These rocky objects mostly hang out between Mars and Jupiter, and they impact our planet all the time as meteorites, though most of their material burns up in the atmosphere or lands in the ocean. Scientists have collected tens of thousands of meteorites and found that the water molecules contained in a particular group closely resemble those in our world. ...
But some studies ... found that there was hydrogen in the meteorites all along. It was just hidden in their organic molecules, silicate glasses, and sulfur compounds. Perhaps, then, Earth was also awash in hydrogen in its early days.
Earth’s ocean of magma was full of oxygen. In a paper published in 2023, three scientists wondered what might happen if the hydrogen in a planet’s atmosphere and the oxygen in its magma were to mix — somehow. Hydrogen doesn’t just spontaneously bind to oxygen, so they aren’t the most willing chemical partners. Still, the researchers concluded that such a process would let a planet make its own water; they just weren’t sure how much.
Two years later, they were thrown a lifeline by an ambitious set of experiments built by the researchers ...
how sub-Neptunes, commonplace exoplanets two to four times the diameter of Earth, can have atmospheres rich in water, as telescopic observations suggest, even when they hew close to their scorching-hot host stars. ...
if a huge amount of hydrogen put the magma under a sufficient amount of pressure. “That higher pressure is a big part of what facilitates the water production,” ... “It actually enhances the chemical reactions.” ...
To test their model, the team wanted to re-create the extreme (and extremely dangerous) conditions present on adolescent sub-Neptunes. They needed to put hydrogen, a highly flammable gas, under intense pressure using special tools called diamond anvils, and then combine it with rock samples melted with lasers. It took them five years to develop the techniques they needed to conduct these experiments safely and effectively. ...
They had hoped the hydrogen and oxygen would react to make water. And that’s what happened, to the extreme: The reaction of high-pressure hydrogen and laser-melted rock was so efficient that it made up to 1,000 times more water than scientists predicted. (A second laboratory study, published around the same time, reported similar results.) “It doesn’t seem unreasonable [that you could] produce a huge amount of water quite quickly,” ..."
The road to virtual immune cells
Good news!
"The idea of building a ‘digital twin’ of a cell that mimics its behaviour is not new, but the advancement of artificial intelligence and the rapid expansion of biological datasets is helping to make it a reality.
Capturing the activity of immune cells — and their ability to sense, interpret and respond to the environment — in this way could help reveal the intricacies of their responses and help design immune-based medicines.
In translational research, virtual immune cells could help find drug targets, improve the ability to modulate the immune system and support personalized therapies, write a group of pathologists and systems biologists."
Toward mechanistic virtual immune cells (no public access)
Towards Autonomous Mechanistic Reasoning in Virtual Cells (a subject related preprint by other authors)
Tapered Language Models
This could be an interesting new paper by Aaron Courville and his team!
From the abstract:
"Modern language models, including transformer, recurrent, and memory-based variants, share a common chassis: a stack of identical layers in which parameters are allocated uniformly across depth. This is a default inherited from the original transformer and largely unchanged since, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that layers contribute non-uniformly to the final output, with later layers refining the residual stream rather than transforming it.
We ask whether parameter capacity should reflect this asymmetry.
Our controlled experiment shows that, under a fixed budget, allocating more capacity to earlier layers and less to later layers improves perplexity over a uniform-width baseline, while the reverse allocation hurts.
Building on this result, we introduce Tapered Language Models (TLMs), an architectural principle in which a parameter-bearing component is monotonically tapered across depth under a fixed total budget. MLPs are the natural site for this instantiation: they dominate parameter count across all modern LM families and expose width as a single, clean axis of variation.
Across three model scales and four architectures (Transformer, Gated Attention, Hope-attention, and Titans), tapering MLP width via a smooth cosine schedule consistently improves perplexity and downstream benchmark performance over uniform baselines, at no additional parameter or compute cost. These findings establish depth-aware capacity allocation as a simple, architecture-agnostic axis of language model design, a free lever hidden in plain sight."
Interjurisdictional competition is paying off in North America regarding major construction projects
What a nice expression! Interjurisdictional competition.
"In Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is using a parcel of its land that is not subject to the city’s zoning authority to build large residential towers that would be illegal under Vancouver’s extremely restrictive zoning rules.
And in the United States, data center developers are courting Indian reservations, attracted by the possibility of securing faster approvals from sovereign tribal governments."
Where are the Shaolin monks buried?
In close proximity to the famous monastery at Mount Song in Henan Province, China.
Four US nuclear startups have brought experimental reactors to criticality, hitting a critical milestone
Good news! Bravo President Trump!
"Four nuclear startups participating in Department of Energy reactor-testing programs have brought experimental reactors to criticality, meaning they can sustain controlled nuclear chain reactions.
The department had aimed to reach that milestone with at least three designs by July 4; the companies delivered four. Analysts at the Breakthrough Institute argue that the programs are restoring a crucial stage in the nuclear innovation cycle by allowing companies to build, test, and improve reactor designs before attempting to build costly commercial-scale plants."
"“Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can sustain a chain reaction, by the nation’s 250th birthday. And just in time, four reactors did so. ..."
"... The Reactor Pilot Program essentially opened a special door for prototype reactors to fast-track development. In August [2025], the US Department of Energy selected 11 reactor projects for the program and offered them land and support from the national labs system. These are all microreactors; the large light-water reactors that dominate the grid today are tens or even hundreds of times their size. ..."
"... Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 reached zero-power criticality at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) on June 4th.
Valar Atomics’ Ward 250 followed later that month in Utah, becoming the first DOE-authorized reactor built and operated outside the national laboratory system.
And Deployable Energy, in DOE’s Nuclear Energy Launch Pad program, reached criticality at INL yesterday, making it the third reactor to meet the July 4 target.
Aalo anticipates reaching criticality this week. ..."
Four nuclear reactors hit a big milestone in the US "Achieving criticality is just the first step toward power for the grid."
In a landmark case, Four men have been brought to trial in Sierra Leone over the forced marriage of a 17-year-old female teenager
Good news! How guilty are the mothers?
"Activists say the trial—the first of its kind in the country—shows that the national ban on child marriage is starting to be enforced."
"... “For the first time since child marriage was banned in Sierra Leone two years ago, people accused of committing the crime have been brought to trial.
Four men appeared at a High Court on Friday in the capital city, Freetown, charged with the forcible marriage of a 17-year-old girl …"
"... Among the accused are the girl's father and her so-called husband. The BBC is not naming them to protect the child's identity.
All four men pleaded guilty - but because the alleged groom claimed he had obtained consent from the child's mother for the marriage, relying on the outdated customary marriage act, his plea was re-classed by the prosecutor as "not guilty". ...
Sierra Leone is a patriarchal society and it has long been common for a father to give his daughter's hand in marriage forcibly.
Despite the fact that 18 is now the minimum age to wed, many instances of underage girls being forced to marry persist in the country, often officiated by local religious figures. ..."
Von jedem verdienten Euro bleiben den Bürgern nur 46,9 Cent
Zur Erinnerung: Die Bananenrepublik D ist immer noch ein extrem Hochsteuerland!
Nur ein Spinner glaubt Kanzler Friedrich Merz würde daran etwas ändern und endlich die Steuern senken!
"Die Steuer- und Abgabenlast in Deutschland steigt weiter. Nach einer Berechnung des Deutschen Steuerzahlerinstituts arbeiten Arbeitnehmer rechnerisch bis zum 13. Juli für den Staat und die Sozialkassen. Singles trifft es noch härter."
Sunday, July 12, 2026
India and New Zealand Sign Strategic Partnership, Set Ambitious Trade Target with Palki Sharma
Good news! First visit of New Zealand by an Indian Prime Minister in 40 years!
President Trump recounts his last call with US Senator Lindsey Graham hours before he passed away
Did Trump cause the suspected/reported cardiac arrest of the US Senator leading to his death? Just kidding! Pardon my facetiousness!
First 3D Structure of Inactivated Cone Opsins Revealed in three different studies
Amazing stuff! I limit myself here to one of the three papers.
"... In a new study, ... two researchers ... have succeeded for the first time in determining the three-dimensional structure of human cone opsins in their dark state and showing how their molecular architecture enables their rapid activation by light. This provides important new insights into human vision and its evolution and may offer new starting points for the study of eye diseases that currently lack effective treatment. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Human daytime vision relies on a trio of visual receptors called opsins, which are found in the cone cells in and around the central region of the retina.
The three opsins are tuned to long, medium, or short wavelengths of light, roughly corresponding to red, green, and blue, and mutations or other defects in cone cell function can lead to vision deficits.
Although the cell biology and biochemistry of color vision have been well studied, up to now, the molecular explanation for cone opsin spectral tuning and signaling kinetics has been limited by a lack of experimental structures.
Three papers in this issue now resolve this deficit.
Schmidt et al. determined structures of the dark state of the green and blue human cone opsins, which revealed important details of these receptors and provide a basis for a femtosecond-resolution spectroscopy study.
Ohashi et al. performed complementary structural, spectroscopic, and computational results with dark-state red and green cone opsins from macaques, which have color vision similar to humans.
Finally, Peng et al. studied all three human cone opsins in the presumed active state bound to a G protein and all-trans retinal.
The three papers together provide a clear picture of the features of these visual receptors that lead to different spectral properties, activation and inactivation kinetics, and recycling. ...
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
High-acuity daylight vision relies on cone photoreceptors, specialized class A G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs). Like other light-sensitive GPCRs, the three human cone opsins covalently bind vitamin A derivative 11-cis-retinal through a protonated Schiff base. Despite sharing the same chromophore, they detect distinct wavelengths of light and generate swift signaling responses at high repetition rates. Although cone opsins are central to human vision, and in contrast to the well-studied rod photoreceptor rhodopsin, the detailed molecular basis of these functional specializations remains elusive.
RATIONALE
To obtain structure-function relationships that extend the kinetic and mechanistic understanding of photopic vision, we solved cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structures of the two most evolutionarily and functionally divergent human cone opsins, short-wavelength-sensitive OPN1SW and medium-wavelength-sensitive OPN1MW, in their initial 11-cis-coupled state. We combined the structural data with multiple functional assays, hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics simulations, time-resolved spectroscopy, and multitaxon opsin sequence analysis.
RESULTS
Cryo-EM structures of cone opsins revealed receptor-specific activation mechanisms and distinct strategies for stabilizing the retinal Schiff base.
OPN1SW, representing the phylogenetically older vertebrate opsins, has a more constrained polar chromophore environment, which contributes to its blue-shifted maximum absorption wavelength (λmax), yet its stabilization is weaker than that of rhodopsin. The architecture of OPN1SW shows substantial divergences in the canonical GPCR microswitch networks, including the replacement of the toggle switch with Y6.48, a disrupted PIF triad, and the absence of a highly conserved sodium- or water-coordination site.
Collectively, these alterations favor a preactive conformation, also captured by cryo-EM. OPN1SW further uses W185ECL2 as a steric switch to transmit the retinal isomerization event across several helices through an extended aromatic network.
In contrast, OPN1MW contains a chloride ion within the chromophore-binding pocket that modulates wavelength sensitivity and influences the amplitude of G protein signaling. This chloride-binding site coevolved with a structural pathway on helix 2 that couples chromophore chemistry to canonical GPCR microswitches.
Both receptors have accessible binding pockets that allow rapid ligand hydrolysis and, consequently, fast retinal turnover.
Femtosecond transient-absorption spectroscopy resolved the photoisomerization cascade, supporting a model in which deprotonation and subsequent hydrolysis limit signal duration in cone opsins.
CONCLUSION
Our structural and mechanistic insights describe how distinctive chromophore environments and GPCR microswitch adaptations tune spectral sensitivity and signaling-state lifetimes in cone opsins. Conservation of central residues across short-wavelength-sensitive and medium-to-long-wavelength-sensitive opsins suggests shared mechanistic principles that shaped the evolution of daylight vision. Similar motifs in other GPCRs, including sensory receptors, inform the strategies for modulating receptor activation kinetics and signal duration."
New insights into human vision (original news release)
Experiment performed at ELI Enables New Insights into Human Vision (original news release) "The retina of the human eye contains six to seven million cone cells. These cells contain light-sensitive proteins known as cone opsins. They enable us to perceive our surroundings in detail in daylight. In a new study, researchers ... have now, for the first time, determined the three-dimensional molecular structure of human cone opsins in their dark state, that is, before they are activated by light."
Illuminating the molecular basis of human daylight vision (no public access)
Cone opsins use distinct chromophore-stabilization strategies to tune spectral sensitivity, activation kinetics, and retinal regeneration.
Germany experienced a net loss or exodus of 400 millionaires in 2025
More bad news for the banana republic of Germany!
Unfortunately, I was not able to find similar data for previous years for Germany from the website of Henley & Partners!
"Germany experienced a net loss of 400 millionaires in the most recent annual tracking. While the country remains home to about 1.78 million high-net-worth individuals" (Google)
"... Germany has the third highest number of people with liquid assets totaling at least $1 million, according to a study. ..."
Germany news: Number of millionaires is growing, study shows "Around 1.78 million people in Germany were classified as high-net-worth individuals or people who have at least $1 million in liquid assets. DW has the latest."
DiPOD: Diffusion Policy Optimization without Drifting Apart
This could be an interesting new paper by Pieter Abbeel and his team!
From the abstract:
"RL post-training has become increasingly pivotal for improving diffusion policies, but existing diffusion policy-gradient methods are often unstable and cannot achieve reliable policy improvement.
We identify the cause as the double-drift phenomenon: optimizing a variational surrogate can let the ELBO separate from the true log-likelihood, which then makes the resulting proxy policy gradient misaligned with the true policy gradient of expected return.
We propose DiPOD, a diffusion policy optimization framework that maintains tight-bound behavior throughout training by interleaving self-distillation with policy-improving gradient updates.
This leads to a simple and practical algorithm: augmenting each diffusion policy-gradient update with an on-policy ELBO regularizer.
Across diffusion language model post-training and continuous-control diffusion policies, DiPOD substantially stabilizes training and reaches higher rewards than previous methods."
Pyrrhus Aeronautics unveils rifle mounted drone control system. Really!
Things around drones are getting very creative! 😊
Though the company name conjures up a Pyrrhic victory! 😊
When will the regional Arab Gulf allies of the US buckle under the attacks by Iran?
Iran pursues a very clever strategy in response to the attacks by the US, retaliate against the Arab allies in the region.
Or will the attacked Arab allies (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bachrain, Qatar) themselves finally resort to stronger military responses against Iran?
Seems to me this could be a matter of time and may happen sooner than later!
P.S. Where are the coward Europeans failing to help the US (e.g. with mine sweepers and escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz etc.)?
Renewable advocates pin hopes on batteries to fix intermittency, but costs are prohibitive: report
How many batteries would have to be built? How much mining would be necessary? How much CO2 will be emitted?
The subject of how to store the energy generated by so called renewable energy sources is often omitted or deliberately avoided!
"... Researchers with the National Center for Energy Analytics set out to find out if it’s possible to power the grid with wind, solar and batteries. Their report, which was released Thursday, casts considerable doubt on renewable energy proponents’ promise that batteries can resolve the problems of intermittency with wind and solar. ...
“This study demonstrates that a wind-solar-battery policy to meet electricity demand is physically implausible, cost-prohibitive, and unjustifiable on the basis of goals to reduce CO2 emissions,” the report concludes. ..."
"... While the quantity of battery storage has grown rapidly, it remains a minuscule share of total U.S. electricity consumption. At the beginning of 2026, total grid-scale battery storage could supply about 15 minutes of average U.S. electricity demand. ...
This study evaluated the physical and economic feasibility of building a reliable electric system primarily powered by wind, solar, and battery storage. The analysis used a model of the PJM Interconnection system, the nation’s largest grid operator, which covers 13 states and the District of Columbia and serves more than 67 million people.
Using PJM’s long-term forecast through 2045, the study estimated the quantities of wind, solar, and storage batteries that would be needed under three scenarios: renewables only (RO), which consisted of wind, solar, batteries, and existing nuclear plants while retiring all coal and natural gas generation;
natural gas and nuclear (NGN), which comprised existing and new natural gas generators along with new nuclear plants; and
NGN+B, which added battery storage to replace gas-fired generators during peak demand periods.
The analysis showed that to compensate for the intermittency of solar and wind, roughly tenfold more total generating capacity would be required by 2045 under the RO scenario than the NGN scenario. The additional capacity would be needed not only to serve daily or seasonal variations in supply and demand but also to accommodate well-documented wind and solar droughts—that is, multiday periods with little to no sunshine or wind. ..."
Batteries and the Grid: Hype, Hope, and Economic Reality "A PJM-based analysis finds a wind-solar-battery grid is physically implausible and cost-prohibitive—costing ratepayers over $4 trillion, roughly six times a natural gas and nuclear system."
To Retain or to Adapt? Generalizing Continual Learning
This could be an interesting new paper by Doina Precup and Razvan Pascanu and their team!
From the abstract:
"The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This objective rests on a pervasive, often unstated assumption: that a lifelong learner should approximate the Joint-Task Learning (JTL) solution and retain all previously acquired knowledge.
We challenge this retention-centered premise, arguing that in non-stationary environments prioritizing retention can impede real-time adaptation.
Shifting the focus to the Average Lifelong Error (ALE), we formalize CL as an online optimization problem governed by the interaction between environmental and learning dynamics.
We introduce Transfer Efficiency as a quantitative measure of the tension between Instability, the bias inherited from conflicting past experience, and Transient Error, the optimization cost of learning new tasks from scratch.
Under mild convergence conditions, holding across linear and neural network models, this decomposition yields a Critical Task Duration: a closed-form threshold beyond which historical knowledge transitions from a warm-start advantage to an optimization liability whenever retention induces a positive stationary bias.
We validate these theoretical predictions on continual image classification and reinforcement learning benchmarks.
Finally, by connecting continual learning to the online learning framework of predictable sequences, we show that JTL is only one instance of a broader family of objectives, and we propose a new general class of continual learning algorithms, which we call Predictive Continual Learning.
Predictive CL algorithms optimize expected future performance under an explicit, dynamically updated model of future tasks.
As a proof of concept, we analyze a Window algorithm that interpolates between JTL and Independent-Task Learning (ITL), outperforming both under controlled distributional drift."
Engineered in One Plant, Three Kingdoms, Five natural psychedelics
Good news!
"... Researchers ... have now managed to bring together in a single organism five psychedelic substances that in nature are scattered across the tree of life.
After uncovering how plants naturally produce one of the best-known psychedelic compounds, DMT, they were able to reengineer that process step by step inside a model plant – along with four other psychedelics. The result is what amounts to a biological factory that could, in the future, be used to simultaneously produce multiple psychedelic molecules, including some that do not naturally occur in plants. ..."
From the abstract:
"Psychedelic indolethylamines with therapeutic potential are naturally produced in plants, fungi, and animals.
Here, we elucidated the complete N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) biosynthetic pathway in hallucinogenic plant species traditionally used in shamanic rituals for spiritual healing.
Leveraging the similarities in their chemical structures, we reconstructed in one plant assay the full biosynthetic pathways of five renowned natural psychedelics; psilocin and psilocybin found in mushrooms, DMT from plants, and bufotenin and 5-methoxy-DMT secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.
We further engineered halogenated analogs of these molecules, which do not naturally occur in plants and exhibit prospective therapeutic potential for psychiatric conditions.
Blending catalytic functions across the tree of life, coupled with metabolic engineering guided by rational protein design of mutant enzymes, enabled substantially more efficient in planta production of the indolethylamine components.
This work establishes a versatile platform for concurrent biosynthesis and diversification of psychoactive indolethylamines, paving the way for their production in plants."
Fig. 3. Reconstruction of the N,N-dimethyl-tryptamine biosynthetic pathway.
Fig. 5. Metabolic engineering strategy for complete reconstruction of psychedelic indolethylamine biosynthetic pathways in N. benthamiana.
Covid-19 Pandemic recreated in Fast Forward in a test tube
Good news! However, how the SARS-CoV-1 virus was released from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan (a dual use research institute at the time), China will not be answered, I suspect.
"A key step in the origin of many pandemics occurs when an animal-borne virus infects humans and then evolves to spread more efficiently from person to person. That is why scientists and physicians keep a close watch on viruses that could jump from animals to humans, such as emerging strains of avian flu and bat coronaviruses, as well as viruses that have already crossed into humans but, for now, spread poorly among people, such as hantavirus and Ebola.
Researchers have now recreated in a test tube, within just a few months, the evolutionary path the coronavirus followed during the COVID-19 pandemic – from the original Wuhan strain to the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variants. ..."
From the abstract:
"In vitro protein evolution can provide powerful insights into the amino acid sequences that underlie key biological functions.
Here, we use this to explore the evolutionary trajectories of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding motif (RBM) binding the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), an essential first step in viral infection.
Applying stringent selection pressures starting from the Wuhan or another non-Omicron variant protein-coding sequence results in rapid convergence towards Omicron characteristic mutations and its sub-lineages.
Conversely, under mild selection, only some Omicron-like mutations are selected, however at lower frequencies and with incomplete representation.
Stringent selection results in fewer, but dominant, non-synonymous mutations mirroring Omicron mutations and their variations within its sub-lineages.
Notably, initiating evolution from Omicron itself results in maintenance of Omicron-defining mutations under both conditions.
This evolutionary pattern parallels global SARS-CoV-2 mutation trends as well as in silico simulations, emphasizing the critical role of receptor-binding constraints in shaping viral adaptation.
Mutations primarily associated with immune evasion are not selected by in vitro evolution.
Our findings demonstrate the predictive capacity of in vitro evolution, suggesting Omicron RBM to be the humanized binding motif, emerging from high-stringency selection, superimposed on milder background pressures."
Stringent selection drives convergence toward omicron-like SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding motifs (open access)
Fig. 1: High-throughput yeast display evolution of SARS-CoV-2 RBD under defined selection pressures.
Fig. 3: Mutation accumulation following in vitro evolution in comparison to SARS-CoV-2.
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