I will be visiting Hong Kong on Fri. 5/22 and Sat. 5/23.
I expect to resume blogging on Sunday 5/24.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea Internet cables in Strait of Hormuz
More evidence, the warmongering, terrorism sponsoring and nuclear weapons developing fanatic, suicidal mullahs in Iran are totally insane or megalomaniac!
Is this a threat to cut the undersea cables?
Be glad, Israel and President Trump exposed it!
"... The latest assertions of Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz were announced in a brief statement by Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for Iran’s military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “We will impose fees on internet cables” Zolfaghari wrote in a May 9 post. It was not immediately clear how Iran might implement such fees or impose its rules on cable projects, given that the majority of routes pass through Oman-controlled waters. ..."
Wie viel CO₂ Elektroautos wirklich sparen? Wenig!
Ich wette sehr wenig wenn alle relevanten Fakten/Daten berücksichtigt werden!
Klimawandel (Alarm und Hysterie) ist nur ein vorgeschobener Grund für mehr Elektroautos! Eine der größten Lügen/Schwindel/Skandal unserer Zeit! Der wahre Grund ist eher Rohöl und fortschreitende globale Motorisierung!
Specialized medical transcription speech-to-text model beats frontier AI in real time and accuracy
Good news! Impressive! Errors in translation could be deadly!
When will all and any patient doctor encounters be quickly transcribed?
"Copenhagen-based Corti launched Symphony for Speech-to-Text, a clinical-grade recognition model that achieved a 1.4 percent word error rate on English medical terminology—versus OpenAI’s 17.7 percent, ElevenLabs’ 18.1 percent, Whisper’s 17.4 percent, and Parakeet’s 18.9 percent. The gap widens further on structured clinical entities like medication dosages: Corti hit 98.3 percent recall while the strongest generalist model managed 44.3 percent. That difference matters more now than it used to.
As healthcare shifts toward autonomous AI agents making real-time clinical decisions, transcription errors compound—if a model mishears “hyperthyroidism” as “hypothyroidism,” every downstream system operates on corrupted data. Corti also outperformed legacy incumbent Dragon Medical One in dictation accuracy and now serves over 100 million patients annually across health systems including the UK’s National Health Service. ..."
From the abstract:
"After decades of use in dictation and, more recently, ambient documentation, speech is emerging as a primary modality for interacting with technology and AI in healthcare.
Yet medical speech recognition remains difficult: systems must capture specialized terminology, resolve contextual ambiguity, and render measurements, abbreviations, and clinical shorthand precisely.
Existing solutions are typically optimized either for general-purpose transcription or narrow dictation workflows, limiting their reliability in safety-critical settings and their usefulness for broader clinical workflows.
We introduce Symphony for Speech-to-Text, a medical-grade speech recognition system for real-time streaming and batch file-based clinical use. Symphony decomposes the transcription process into specialized components for recognition, formatting, and contextual correction to optimize medical term recall while producing clinically structured text in real time and adapting across use cases. Evaluations on public benchmark and medical speech datasets show that Symphony substantially outperforms state-of-the-art systems in clinical settings while matching or exceeding them in general-domain settings, suggesting robust generalization rather than overfitting.
We release a clinical benchmark dataset to support reliable validation and further progress in medical speech recognition. Symphony is available through a production-grade API for live dictation, conversational transcription, and batch audio file processing."
Corti's new Symphony for Speech-to-Text model beats OpenAI at medical terminology accuracy, highlighting the value of specialized AI
Symphony for Speech-to-Text: Behind the research supporting real-time medical voice interfaces (original news release)
Symphony for Speech-to-Text: Supporting Real-Time Medical Voice Interfaces (preprint, open access)
Latest Cursor Composer undercuts software coding model competition
Good news! Amazing stuff! Automated coding gets faster, better and cheaper by the hour!
"Cursor’s coding model rivals leaders at lower price
Cursor shipped Composer 2.5, a coding model built on Moonshot’s open-source Kimi K2.5 and trained on 25 times more synthetic tasks than its predecessor. It scores 79.8 percent on SWE-Bench Multilingual, beating GPT-5.5 (77.8 percent) and coming within one point of Claude Opus 4.7 (80.5 percent), and 63.2 percent on CursorBench v3.1, broadly in line with both frontier models. It's not clear whether Cursor has achieved true parity: Comparisons mix Cursor’s own harness with self-reported competitor numbers and have not yet been independently reproduced on a unified scaffold.
But Composer operates at a fraction of the cost: $0.50/$2.50 per million input/output tokens versus Anthropic and OpenAI’s substantially higher rates. A faster variant delivers the same performance at $3.00/$15.00 per million tokens. ..."
Introducing Composer 2.5 (original news release)
When a Productivity Boom Meets a Tight Labor Market
Recommendable! Economics and the AI technology revolution.
Caveat: I did not read the entire, long article!
"Edmund Phelps, who died last week at 92, won the Nobel Prize in Economics back in 2006 for his work on the deep structure of unemployment, inflation, and expectations. But one of his most provocative ideas—the productivity business cycle—has still not received the attention it deserves. ...
The U.S. economy has come to an unusual crossroads. Productivity is accelerating, the labor market remains historically tight, and workforce growth has stalled.
Conventional wisdom treats the tight labor market and stalled workforce growth as warning signs that growth could be hampered. This has become one of the leading arguments for easing back on immigration restrictions and expanding foreign worker visa programs. We need more workers, the business lobby is constantly telling President Trump.
Phelps’s theory suggests something different: if productivity is arriving without a prior hiring boom, this may be the rare cycle that delivers gains in output without first producing an employment boom that has to be painfully unwound.
The heart of Phelps’s innovation theory, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, was deceptively simple and deeply counterintuitive. Productivity booms don’t necessarily begin when productivity gains show up in the data. They begin earlier, when entrepreneurs and investors come to expect future productivity gains.
When businesses see new technological opportunities, the shadow value they place on business assets rises—especially trained employees, installed capital, customer relationships, and organizational capacity. Companies rush to hire, train, invest, and expand in anticipation of future productivity improvements. This boom is real. Employment expands, wages rise, asset prices climb, and the economy accelerates.
But when the productivity gains finally arrive, they don’t necessarily produce a second boom. The hiring and investment that the gains would justify may already have taken place. The future has been capitalized in advance. The realized productivity gain then marks the end of the boom rather than the beginning of a new one.
The Great Depression as a Productivity Hangover ..."
Edmund Phelps
How Harvard University intends to deal with grade inflation by implementing an A grade cap
First of all, why did this elite university have a grade inflation problem in the first place!
I am not sure this is helpful! This is like treating the symptoms and not the cause!
"20% The A’s allowed per Harvard course, plus an additional four A’s to account for smaller courses with more variability. Faculty voted to approve the A-cap as part of a yearslong effort to curb grade inflation. The change comes despite a sharp backlash from students."
"Professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have approved a proposal to cap the number of A’s awarded to Harvard College students, part of a broad proposal aimed at reducing grade inflation.
Starting in the fall of 2027, courses will limit A grades to 20 percent of enrollment, plus an additional four A’s per class.
Voting was conducted by email over the past week, and the results were announced on Wednesday morning. Faculty members voted 458 to 201 to approve the grading cap ..."
Harvard Faculty Approve a Cap on A Grades "Reforms to reduce grade inflation will take effect in the fall of 2027."
A cap on A grades is not exactly Veritas!
U.S. prosecutors charged Raúl Castro of Cuba with murder
Why did it take the US 30 years to indict Raul Castro in such a what appears to be a clear case! Raul Castro is now 94 years old!
"U.S. prosecutors charged Raúl Castro with murder, escalating the U.S. pressure campaign as it seeks to force economic and political concessions from Cuba’s Communist regime.
The charges against the aging patriarch and former president relate to the Cuban military’s shooting down a humanitarian group’s planes in 1996, when he was defense minister. Three U.S. citizens and one permanent resident—all part of the Cuban exile community—were killed. ..."
Raul Castro (Source)
Chart of the day
The phenomenal revenue growth of Nvidia! "Sales for the April quarter reached $81.6 billion, up 85% from the year-earlier period " (Source)
Chart generated by Google AI
Four German speaking European countries tout pan-German space command amid European push to supplant US tech
Good news! Europe ought to form their own defense organisation like NATO!
"Germany’s defense minister used a rare four-nation gathering of German-speaking defense chiefs this week to push forward plans for a European military space command, calling on close partners including Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg, to help shape the initiative rather than simply join it.
Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, announced at a press conference in Berlin that Germany is developing a European Space Component Command alongside a Weltraumakademie − a multilateral space training academy − and insisted that partner nations will be “embedded in the design phase” rather than presented with finished structures.
The meeting, billed as the first “DACH+L” format, expanding the traditional German-Austrian-Swiss defense dialogue to include Luxembourg, served as a platform for Pistorius to demonstrate traction on Germany’s €35 billion ($40.7 billion) military space investment pledged last fall. That program spans encrypted low-earth-orbit satellite constellations, military-grade launch capacity, and an expanded Space Command within the Bundeswehr.
Austria’s Defense Minister Claudia Tanner reaffirmed that Austria plans to put three operationally designated military satellites plus a test object into orbit next year, developed partly with Austrian startups."
Austria’s Defense Minister Claudia Tanner (Source)
The history of the domestication of horses goes back much further to at least about 3000 BCE
Amazing stuff!
"... Scholars continue to debate when this historic bond actually began. Some scientists have argued, for example, that horse domestication first occurred about 2200 to 2100 B.C.E., around the same time humans invented chariots.
This time period marked the expansion of horses from a lineage known as DOM2, the direct genetic ancestors of all modern domesticated horses. These equines possessed favorable genetic mutations linked to endurance and calmness around humans—and they eventually galloped their way across Europe, Anatolia, the Near East, and Central Asia.
But research published last week ... challenges this idea, suggesting that humans began riding horses much earlier than previously thought.
Researchers combined archaeological artifacts, ancient DNA, bone studies, and other evidence to show that horses from multiple genetic backgrounds were being eaten, managed, milked, and ridden in communities across Eurasia long before 2200 B.C.E. The team identified people from the Yamnaya culture, who lived across the Eurasian steppes between about 3200 and 2600 B.C.E., as early riders of DOM2 horses. “Rather than a sudden breakthrough, domestication was a protracted, regionally varied process whose transformative effects on human mobility and social organization began as early as the fourth, if not the fifth millennium B.C.E.,” ..."
"Taming and domestication were not single events. They were a slow, stop-start process, full of setbacks, playing out over generations and across vast regions, before full domestication set in shortly before 2000 BCE. ...
“The role of horses in major historical developments is almost too vast to measure, hence the saying that the world was conquered on horseback,” ...
Today, truly wild horses no longer exist. Even Przewalski's horse
Opens in a new tab, long held up as a living relic of the wild, is now known to descend from early domesticated populations, showing how deeply humans have shaped horse populations over time.
The timing matters. Around 3,500 to 3,000 BCE, steppe populations began pushing east and west across Eurasia. They brought the wheel with them. Cattle pulled the first wagons. Horses came at the same time. A rider could cover ground in hours that a wagon took days to cross but both were key innovations in mobility and transport, revolutionizing human society.
Researchers now link that leap in mobility to the spread of Proto-Indo-European languages. The horse carried people. And with them, words. The languages spoken across much of Europe and Asia today trace back to those early riders and wagon drivers. ..."
From the abstract:
"Recent papers argued that the domestication of horses can be equated with the appearance of favorable genetic mutations that are first evident in individuals in the DOM2 clade dated about ∼2200–2100 BCE.
We challenge the idea that this genetic shift alone defines domestication.
Evidence from archaeology, ancient DNA, osteology, and other disciplines shows that horses from multiple genetic backgrounds (DOM1, DOM2, and, as we suggest here, DOM3) were managed, milked, and ridden long before 2200 BCE.
Yamnaya groups (∼3200–2600 BCE) rode DOM2 horses—the direct ancestors of modern domestic stock—while incorporating them into diets, rituals, and mobility systems.
Selection for traits linked to endurance and temperament began centuries earlier. Rather than a sudden breakthrough, domestication was a protracted, regionally varied process whose transformative effects on human mobility and social organization began as early as the fourth, if not the fifth millennium BCE, and set the stage for later DOM2 dominance."
The first domesticated horses: 6,000 years of a complex story (original news release) "Horses were being ridden, worked, and traded long before anyone thought it possible. New research pushes back the accepted timeline of human use of horses by centuries, showing that humans used horses in organized ways as early as the 4th millennium BCE, if not earlier."
Horse genetics, archaeology, and the beginning of riding (open access)
Fig. 1. Early horse representations in the steppes.
(A) The earliest clear image of a steppe horse, embossed on a silver cup from the Maikop-Oshad chieftain’s grave, Russia dated 3520–3350 cal BCE
Fig. 9. Wagons in the third millennium BCE record.
Two time slices, three geographical regions and three horse populations: A complex map of Eurasia.
Canada: Individual political candidates motivate only 6% of voters and about elected representatives who change political party after election
Food for thought!
"Key findings:
- Recent polling indicates that only 6% of voters are motivated by individual candidates, compared to 39% by the party leader, 24% by the party, and 15% by policies.
- Canadian polling shows strong support for restricting or penalizing floor crossing, similar to New Zealand’s “waka (canoe) jumping” rules.
- A solution: parliamentarians who leave their party should either sit as independents until the next election or trigger a by-election to restore voter authority and democratic legitimacy.
..."
Angela Merkel: Am Ende lässt ein demokratieverachtender Hosenanzug die Hosen runter
Empfehlenswert! Ich habe hier vielmals zu der schrecklichen SED Kanzlerin Merkel gebloggt! Merkel ist einer der Hauptgründe warum Deutschland zur Bananenrepublik abgestiegen ist. Wieviel Mitschuld trägt der gegenwärtige Bundeskanzler Merz?
Wie konnte sich Helmut Kohl nur so vergucken in diesem "Mädchen"! Zu spät kam er zur Einsicht und nannte sie dann fortan "Verräterin" (Quelle: Google AI)
Warum haben sich so viele Wähler mehrmals so geirrt in dieser Frau!
Wie konnte es dazu kommen, dass Angela Merkel insgesamt viermal vom Deutschen Bundestag zur Bundeskanzlerin gewählt (2005, 2009, 2013 und 2018) wurde.
P.S. Warum ist die Journalistin und Autorin des Artikels Sofia Taxidis so besessen mit den Hosenanzügen von Merkel und von der Leyen? Seltsam! 😊
"... Ihre Rede zeigt die ganze autoritäre Kälte dieser Frau. Merkel spricht von Wahrheit, meint aber Deutungshoheit, von Verantwortung, die Kontrolle meint. Sie spricht von Demokratie, aber meint die Absicherung jener Machtverhältnisse, die ihre Politik erst möglich gemacht haben und die nun im Schwinden begriffen sind. Ohne das Ändern der Spielregeln mit totalitären Mechanismen ist diese schwindende Macht nicht mehr zu halten. Also wird eingegriffen, was das Zeug hält. ...
Nun wird diese Merkel von eben dieser von der Leyen im EU-Parlament geehrt. Zwei Frauen vom gleichen eiskalten machttaktischen Schlag. Mit dem absoluten Willen demokratische Prozesse auszuhöhlen und abzuschaffen. Von einer Europäischen Union, die unter Ursula von der Leyen immer unverhohlener in Richtung kontrollierter Öffentlichkeit marschiert. Chatkontrolle, digitale Identität, Plattformregulierung, Werteprogramme, Medienlenkung unter wohlklingenden Etiketten: Das ist die Brüsseler Fortsetzung der Merkel-Methode. Nicht nur in der Auswahl ihrer zahllosen Hosenanzüge sind sich diese beiden Frauen einig. ..."
Angela Merkel wurde mit Europäischen Verdienstorden geehrt Quelle
Disclaimer
Since end of February, I am blogging from behind the Great Firewall of China.
My Internet service in China is very spotty. Thus, I am not able to blog as usual.
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Deutsches Unwort: Windpark
Wer dutzende oder sogar hunderte von dicht nebeneinander stehenden, riesigen Windturbinen als Windpark bezeichnet ist ein übler Demagoge! Was für ein schrecklicher Euphemismus!
Diese "Windparks" produzieren viel Lärm und unzuverlässige Energie. Sie töten massenweise Tiere und Insekten. Sie verschandeln die Landschaft usw.
Nordsee und Ostsee: Windenergie Offshore-Milliardenprojekte von Totalenergies und BP vor dem Aus
Gute Nachrichten aus der Bananenrepublik D! Weg mit der Umweltverschandlung und massenweise Tötung von Tieren und Insekten!
Fragt doch mal unsere Vorfahren, wie z.B. die Betreiber von Windmühlen, was die von Windenergie gehalten haben! Unzuverlässige Windenergie ist Rückschritt!
Windpark noch so ein deutsches Unwort! Was für ein Euphemismus!
"Es war ein Paukenschlag, als die Bundesnetzagentur im Juli 2023 mitteilte: Der Staat würde mit der Vergabe von Flächen für die Errichtung von Windparks in der Nord- und Ostsee sehr viel Geld einnehmen. Insgesamt 12,6 Milliarden Euro hatten der französische Energiekonzern Totalenergies und der britische Energiekonzern BP für das Recht geboten, auf drei Flächen nordwestlich von Helgoland sowie auf einer Fläche vor Rügen Windparks bauen und betreiben zu dürfen. Ende 2030 sollten die Parks ans Netz gehen, hieß es damals. In einer weiteren Auktion ein Jahr später bot Totalenergies noch einmal knapp zwei Milliarden Euro für den Bau eines weiteren Windparks. ..."
Scheußlich!!!
Implanted synthetically engineered bacteria to sense pathology and deliver drugs long-term to the site locally
Amazing stuff! This could be a breakthrough!
"Patient recovery from many debilitating conditions and diseases could be sped up significantly and be more effective if drugs and therapeutic molecules were delivered right to where they are needed in the body, over the entire regenerative process, and in doses finely tuned to therapeutic needs. An intriguing way to achieve this is the use of implantable, synthetically engineered, living cells that can sense injury or disease-associated conditions in their environment and flexibly respond by producing the right amount of a therapeutic molecule.
Bacteria, in particular, are promising in this regard as they can thrive in harsh physiological environments within the body, such as within infected or inflamed tissues, tissues undergoing mechanical movements, and tumors.
Some of these microbial therapies have even advanced into clinical trials to treat certain cancers, metabolic disorders, and the progression of kidney stones. However, thus far, such trials have failed, and microbes are feared to also pose significant safety risks because they cannot be contained at specific sites in the body. ...
By encapsulating a genetically engineered, therapeutic strain of E. coli bacteria within a biomaterial made from a hydrogel that was specifically designed to regulate bacterial growth and resist mechanical stresses, like those present at physically active sites in the body, the bacteria could be confined for over six months.
The E. coli bacteria were equipped with a synthetic gene circuit that allowed them to sense pathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria causing infections and then respond by releasing a therapeutic molecule that killed the nearby residing pathogens.
Implanted into the joints of mice next to a specialized orthopedic implant designed to help heal femoral injuries, the ILM autonomously and effectively treated infections with P. aeruginosa, a common cause of often debilitating orthopedic device infections. ..."
From the abstract of the Perspective:
"Engineered cells can sense disease and deliver drugs at a site of pathology. These living therapeutics provide localized, self-sustaining responses to environmental changes, such as inflammation and pathogenic signals, that conventional drugs cannot offer ...
A promising chassis for living therapeutics is bacteria, which can be genetically programmed to release drugs in response to an external signal. However, bacteria require physical enclosure to prevent uncontrolled spread and toxicity. Biomaterials such as hydrogels and core-shell capsules have only demonstrated short-term containment of up to 2 weeks in culture.
On page 729 of this issue, Harimoto et al. report a hydrogel scaffold with engineered stiffness and toughness that confines bacteria for up to 6 months in culture. When the system harbored bacteria producing pyocin, it cleared an infection in a mouse model of joint replacement. This could advance living therapeutics from short-lived proof-of-concept systems to durable, programmable medicines."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Engineered bacteria could serve as a source of long-term drug delivery, but they tend to escape confinement because of their small size and robust viability. Harimoto et al. created a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) hydrogel matrix engineered for both high stiffness and high toughness that can contain bacteria without killing them off ... The hydrogel is used to trap engineered Escherichia coli that expresses a sense-and-respond genetic circuit designed to trigger the release of a protein antibiotic to clear Pseudomonas infection. This system was tested in vivo over a 6-month period, revealing positive treatment outcomes in a murine joint infection model. ...
Abstract
Microbes are increasingly used as living therapeutics, yet their uncontrolled dissemination in the body has remained a clinical roadblock.
Physical containment remains largely unattainable owing to eventual bacteria escape.
In this work, we present an implantable material that encapsulates and confines bacteria, wherein synthetically engineered microbes produce therapeutic payloads from within.
We developed a hydrogel scaffold with dual mechanical features: high stiffness to regulate bacterial proliferation and high toughness to resist material fracture under physiological stress.
This design achieved complete bacterial containment for 6 months and withstood multiple forms of mechanical loading that otherwise caused catastrophic material failure.
By genetically engineering embedded bacteria, we endowed the material with environmental sensing and on-demand therapeutic release capabilities and demonstrated autonomous treatment in a murine prosthetic joint infection model."
Materializing safe, on-demand living therapeutics (original news release)
Scaffolds toughen bacteria-based therapy (Perspective, no public access)
Implantable Living Materials Autonomously Deliver Therapeutics from Contained Engineered Bacteria (preprint, open access)
This illustration explains how the team designed Implantable Living Materials (ILMs) as a living therapeutic that uses an optimized hydrogel to safely contain synthetically engineered bacteria that are able to sense a pathogenic stimulus and respond to it by secreting a therapeutic protein within living organisms. The material itself is sufficiently “stiff” so that bacteria pushing against it from the inside can’t break it apart, and sufficiently “tough” to provide to protect the enclosed bacteria against external physical stresses. Combined with the synthetically engineered bacteria, the new approach becomes a safe and autonomous functioning drug delivery device.
Fig. 1 Design and mechanical characterization of Implantable Living Materials (ILMs).
Fig. 2 ILMs maintain bacterial containment during long-term culture and mechanical loading.
Newly discovered life forms on rocks in deep ocean trenches
Amazing stuff! We still know so little about our oceans!
When will autonomous submersibles investigate the flora and fauna at the depth of our oceans? I bet, we will learn a lot more surprising things!
It appears the same Chinese research institute, i.e. Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sanya, China, has previously published a similar study, but more focused on genetic analysis. See Life at depth over 10,000 meters: breakthrough genomic study reveals population dynamics and adaptation to the extreme hadal environments
"The ocean’s mysterious hadal zone, which lies within trenches between 6000 and 11,000 meters down, is one of the least explored habitats on the planet. Recent studies have demonstrated that this abyss is home to a remarkable diversity of life, which manages to thrive despite crushing pressures and frigid temperatures. But many of these organisms, particularly those that are permanently attached to hard, rocky substrates, remain difficult for scientists to sample.
To investigate these deep-sea communities, researchers aboard the Chinese submersible Fendouzhe descended into the darkness of the Kermadec and Mariana trenches. As the team reports in a new study, collected rock samples revealed 32 species, mainly consisting of single-celled organisms called protists, most of them new to science .
The team did find some larger fauna, including two sea anemones, a carnivorous sponge, and a marine worm.
But the vast majority of the observed critters were millimeter-sized and living in a variety of dense formations on rock surfaces, from tubes and chains to large mats. Some organisms were slender and sparsely branched, while others had tiny, bead-like chambers.
One flat, encrusting bryozoan was so transparent that it only became visible once the rocks dried.
Researchers have previously assumed that these organisms get their energy from inorganic chemicals, so the study authors were surprised to find that many of their sampled specimens appear to feed on organic matter. Some have a diet consisting of pine pollen grains, which are transported from the land by wind and ocean currents before settling in trenches."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Characterizing life at the deepest depths of the ocean is extremely challenging, involving sampling at depths between 9000 and 11,000 meters. Our knowledge of these communities is thus relatively limited. Song et al. report a wide array of species sampled by a manned submersible in the Kermedec and Mariana trenches. They describe a new fauna characterized by mostly filamentous and sedentary protists and forams. Particularly surprising was the presence of heterotrophic, rather than chemolithoautotrophic, organisms feeding on terrestrial pine pollen. The authors argue that similar communities occur across the deepest ecosystems, with implications for understanding carbon hotspots at these depths. ...
Abstract
Deep-sea hard substrates host faunal novelties and distinct evolutionary lineages. However, sessile organisms on rocks are difficult to sample and largely unknown at extreme hadal depths.
Here, we report a deep hard-substrate fauna (9000 to 10,898 meters), comprising 32 species of six protist and metazoan phyla, most millimeter-sized and new to science, from the Kermadec and Mariana trenches, using the manned submersible Fendouzhe.
We show that the filamentous organisms dominating these assemblages are heterotrophic foraminiferans, challenging the earlier chemolithoautotrophic hypothesis.
Large-scale seafloor imaging and sampling suggest that similar protistan-dominated sessile communities thrive in seven hadal regions around Oceania. These faunas open new perspectives on biodiversity at the deepest ocean depths and unveil widespread, but previously unrecognized, carbon hotspots in global hadal trenches."
Project 5921 (Apparently, the project website for this research paper. Contains e.g. lots of images.)
Protist-dominated hard substrate faunas thrive at the deepest ocean depths (no public access)
This protist, which scientists recovered from a deep ocean trench, contained dozens of pine pollen grains in various stages of digestion.
Some of the several hundred photos from the project website
Russia’s civilian Hospitals Overwhelmed by waves of Wounded soldiers
Putin the Terrible, how many more pointless war casualties of young Russian men!
When will the lethargic, apathetic Russian Slav(e)s/Serfs finally get rid of their last tsar, the megalomaniac, warmonger and war criminal Putin the Terrible! He is an ugly remnant of the Cold War and a former KGB agent. He is a wannabe Stalin. Please Russian people make the world a better, more peaceful place again! How many more young Russian men will be killed or maimed before you act!
"... The report also cites estimates from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which describes Russia’s total losses in Ukraine – as high as 1.198 million by January 2026 – as unprecedented in the post-World War II era. ..."
Wie sich der Kanzler vor der SPD-Fraktion demütigte
Manchmal sagen Bilder mehr als tausend Worte! Welch ein Depp!
Leider ist das Foto unten von schlechter Qualität!
Merz ließ sich von der SPD-Bundestagsfraktion einladen – oder sollte man lieber sagen: vorladen – und lieferte einen Auftritt, der von Anfang bis Ende wie eine Werbeveranstaltung für den Koalitionspartner erschien, mit dem die Union eigentlich tief zerstritten ist. ..."
Putin the Terrible arrives in China just days after Donald Trump’s visit. This is Xi Jinping's opportunity to become a great leader
Hopefully, Xi Jinping will tell the megalomaniac and warmonger Putin the Terrible to end the war in the Ukraine and return all occupied areas (incl. Crimea) to the Ukraine!
What legacy does Xi Jinping want to leave behind? Go down in history at best as a mediocre leader of a communist party or the great, responsible global leader of the superpower China acting on behalf of humanity and peace?
"... This is the Russian leader’s 25th visit to China. ..." Please Xi Jinping make this the last trip ever of Putin the Terrible to China!
Fast home deliveries of consumer goods worsen conditions for e-commerce warehouse workers. Really!
When an elite university like Cornell U is concerned with work conditions! What a joke!
One more good reason to deploy more robots!
"... Consumers’ around-the-clock, often impulsive demand for cheap, rapidly delivered products creates harsher working conditions in e-commerce fulfillment centers than in traditional warehouses, according to Cornell-led research that provides the first comprehensive assessment of e-commerce work in the U.S. ..."
Some NATO countries reportedly support a plan to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz beginning in early July
Any snail is faster than NATO! What a failure!
Shame on NATO member countries (especially UK, France, Italy, and Germany), which failed to support President Trump when he needed it!
"Some North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries reportedly support a plan to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz beginning in early July if Iran continues to impose its blockade, according to a senior NATO official speaking to Bloomberg on May 19. One NATO diplomat stated that several NATO countries support the idea, but that there is not the required unanimous support to enact it."
Iran’s parliament to vote on bill offering €50 million reward for killing Trump, Netanyahu, and admiral Cooper
Incredible!
"The Islamic Republic will soon vote on a bill that would see whoever kills US President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and or CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper awarded with a €50 million sum, Ebrahim Azizi, the chairman of Iran’s national security commission, told state TV on Thursday. ..."
Germany to deploy Patriot battery to Turkey, relieving US forces on NATO’s southeastern flank
It is about time that the European allies do something to help the US to deal with Iran! However, this is by far not enough!
"Germany will deploy a Patriot air and missile defense battery to Turkey from late June through September 2026, the German Defense Ministry announced Monday, as NATO seeks to reinforce its southeastern flank in the wake of Iranian missile strikes targeting Turkish territory. ...
The deployment comes after a period of acute alarm on NATO’s southern perimeter. In early March, NATO air defenses intercepted at least four Iranian ballistic missiles that entered Turkish airspace within days of each other, with one apparently targeting Incirlik Air Base in Adana province, where U.S. forces − including nuclear weapons − are stationed. The incidents prompted NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe to boost the alliance’s ballistic missile defense posture and to deploy additional U.S. Patriot systems to Adana and Malatya. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that Iran “is also posing a huge threat to us here in Europe.” ..."
Is Russia taking control of some Ukrainian drones to redirect them to fly into Baltic States to cause damage?
For some time, I have had the suspicion this is the case!
"... Speculation and some tacit official acknowledgment have surfaced that Russia may be using electronic warfare measures to redirect long-range strike drones from Ukraine meant for Russian targets towards the NATO countries at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. ...
This year has seen several incidents of Ukrainian drones entering Baltic NATO countries’ airspaces and, in some cases, even crashing into critical infrastructure. An accidental strike on an empty Latvian oil refinery last week prompted the resignation of both the prime minister and the defense minister there. Previously, drones had hit a power plant chimney in Estonia and fallen into a lake in Lithuania. ..."
Hackers have compromised dozens of popular open source packages in an ongoing supply-chain attack
This is very nasty!
My impression is that law enforcement is doing to little about hackers given all the bad news of all kinds of hacking incidents/crimes (stealing software, deleting data, extortion etc. etc.) in recent times!
"... On Tuesday, cybersecurity firms StepSecurity and SafeDep warned of the latest wave of supply-chain attacks, which aim to compromise developers of popular open source projects and use that access to plant malicious updates that are pushed to users downstream.
According to SafeDep, hackers took over the account of one developer and released over 630 malicious versions across 317 packages in about 20 minutes. The goal of the attack is to steal credentials for various services, including password managers, as a way to steal data and continue spreading the malware.
Among the packages that the hackers compromised is Antv, a library made by Alibaba. In some cases, the hackers published malicious updates on GitHub, according to JFrog Security. ..."
ICE Arrests 33 Migrants After Raids on Orlando Construction Sites
What do construction companies do? Hire cheap and compliant labor!
Illegal immigrants taking away entry level jobs from Americans and legal immigrants!
Why in the age of gender equality are there still so few women working on construction sites? Why do the usual gender equality propagandists not complain?
South Korea's LetinAR is building optics behind AI glasses
Good news!
"... Over the past few years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) placing its bets.
Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023,
Google is building Android XR, and Apple is expected to enter the market.
Last week, Samsung was reportedly set to unveil its first AI-capable smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London
this July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and others are all moving too.
The numbers reflect the momentum. Global AI glasses shipments surged to 8.7 million units in 2025, up more than 300% from the prior year, and analysts project that figure will cross 15 million this year, per Omdia.
Suppliers and component makers of AI-powered smart glasses are also positioning themselves for what comes next. One of the companies, a South Korean startup called LetinAR, has spent the last decade building the optical technology that could make all of this actually wearable. ...
The LG Electronics-backed startup just secured $18.5 million ...
LetinAR doesn’t make the glasses. It makes the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the tiny lens component that projects images into your field of vision, is what determines whether a pair of smart glasses feels like a sci-fi headset or something you’d actually wear to work ...
It has to be light, thin, and power-efficient, while still delivering a sharp, clear image. Getting all of that right in a single component, small enough to fit inside a normal-looking frame, is the central engineering challenge of the entire industry. That’s what LetinAR is building. ...
PinTILT sidesteps that trade-off ... By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully engineering the angle of each tiny element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter form factor, using less power. ..."
Monday, May 18, 2026
Pop singer Shakira acquitted of tax fraud, court orders Spain to hand back $70 million
Good news! Soak the rich by the socialist Spanish government failed?
Caveat: I am not familiar with the details of Shakira's case.
"Summary
- Spanish High Court acquits Shakira in 2011 case on appeal
- Court orders Treasury to reimburse her with $70 million, including interest
- Tax agency will appeal ruling, no repayment until appeal ends
Spain's High Court has acquitted Colombian pop star Shakira of tax fraud and overturned the 55 million euro ($64 million) fine imposed in 2021 by the Spanish tax agency, according to a court document seen by Reuters on Monday.
Acting on an appeal by the "Hips Don't Lie" singer, the court ordered the Treasury to reimburse her with over 60 million euros ($70 million), including interest, Shakira's defence said.
The judge ruled that authorities had failed to prove that Shakira spent more than 183 days in Spain in 2011, as required by Spanish law to be considered a tax resident in the country. It does not affect tax years after 2011. ..."
Elon Musk: We’ll launch self-driving technology in Israel soon
Good news! Let's get rid of steering wheels!
"... Musk said, "I’m a big fan of the entrepreneurship that comes from Israel. Israel is achieving amazing results relative to the size of its population and is definitely number 1 in the world. I take my hat off to Israel for its innovation." ..."
Russia Faces Latent Banking Crisis as Bad Assets Breach Critical 10% Threshold
Good news, if confirmed!
When will the lethargic, apathetic Russian Slav(e)s/Serfs finally get rid of their last tsar, the megalomaniac, warmonger and war criminal Putin the Terrible! He is an ugly remnant of the Cold War and a former KGB agent. He is a wannabe Stalin. Please Russian people make the world a better, more peaceful place again! How many more young Russian men will be killed or maimed before you act!
"... The analytical group, which regularly briefs the Russian government, confirmed that toxic assets have held above the danger line for a third consecutive month. ...
The CMACP noted that corporate liquidity is drying up rapidly. Nearly 50% of all registered Russian enterprises cited severe payment delays from corporate partners as their single greatest existential threat heading into mid-2026. This chain reaction of unpaid invoices between contractors has created a massive backlog of default risks that local banks are struggling to absorb. ..."
Russia Faces Latent Banking Crisis as Bad Assets Breach Critical 10% Threshold "The Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine has highlighted a critical report from Moscow’s pro-Kremlin Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMACP) revealing that toxic and non-performing assets in the Russian banking sector have exceeded 10%.
Under International Monetary Fund (IMF) methodology, breaching this 10% threshold for three consecutive months marks the definitive boundary of a systemic banking crisis. Analysts note that the crisis remains latent because state-dominated banks are masking defaults through artificial loan restructuring."
Trump Administration Ends Controversial Russian Oil Sanctions Waivers
Good news! Bravo! Tighten the screws on the megalomaniac and warmonger Putin the Terrible!
Most Western media seem to totally ignore the almost daily attacks on Russian crude oil production and refining by the Ukraine, which also undoubtedly contribute to the high global crude oil prices!
"The Trump administration has officially terminated its short-lived, highly controversial sanctions-waiver program for Russian oil, reverting to a policy of maximum economic pressure as global energy vectors shift ...
The expiration of the waivers will likely defuse an increasingly bitter diplomatic rift between Washington and its primary European allies. Across the EU, capitals had vocally condemned the US policy shift, arguing that providing any regulatory leeway allowed Moscow to profit from the instability generated by its direct alliance with Tehran. ..."
How the Ukraine is driving the advances in drone/robot warfare with a very young defense minister
Food for thought!
What are ABC weapons? Actually, the acronym should be now AABC weapons. Atomic, autonomous, biological and chemical weapons!
The defense minister of the Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov is only 35 years old! He promotes the "war of the machines"! The President of the Ukraine Volodymyr Selensky is a comedian, his wife Olena Zelenska is a screenwriter. What a historical meeting of the minds!
"Ukraine’s 35-year-old defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov is pushing the military to adopt AI-powered autonomous weapons as leverage to force Russia toward settlement. The tech entrepreneur, four months into the role after leading government digitization, believes warfare should be progressively offloaded to machines: “autonomous weapons are the new nuclear weapons.”
AI currently assists with drone target recognition; Fedorov envisions unmanned systems fighting entirely without soldiers in the kill zone.
His strategy—Air, Land, Economy—aims to intercept 95 percent of incoming Russian strikes, attrit Russian forces faster than they can be replaced, and cripple the Russian economy.
Traditional commanders have pushed back, questioning whether the vision disconnects from battlefield reality, though frontline brigades have largely embraced the technology.
Fedorov is also monetizing Ukraine’s war data, including over five million annotated drone videos, through Avenger Labs, licensing it to allied companies to train AI models on the condition that Ukraine receives the resulting systems. ..."
Enter the Killer Robots: The Ukrainian Forging the Future of Warfare (behind paywall)
Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov (Source)
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