Enjoy!
Monday, August 10, 2026
How European countries implement gender equality in their militaries, e.g. Denmark
Recommendable!
Yes, gender equality means e.g. conscription for women!
However, soon robots will do the fighting! Lucky women!
Bengal Famine 1943: How Churchill Starved 3 Million Indians | Independence Day 2026
Very recommendable!
However, it was neither orchestrated by the British empire nor Churchill's fault!
It was World War II going on and Japan invaded Burma.
Caution some imagery might be disturbing to some viewers.
Texas Children's Hospital Admits To Years Of Lies and fraud In Settlement Over transgender treatments of Kids
Disturbing news!
What were these parents thinking! How irresponsible and reckless were these parents?
"The legacy media are carefully avoiding this point, but Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) has just formally admitted to deceitful and potentially fraudulent behavior during the years they spent providing illegal sex-rejecting medical procedures to children. They lied, repeatedly and aggressively, and they’ve been forced to say so. ...
Under the terms of the settlement, TCH agrees to the “Permanent Cessation of Sex-Rejecting Procedures,” and to “irrevocably terminate” the appointments and clinical privileges of a list of doctors who participated in those procedures. The hospital has also agreed to implement a long series of administrative and compliance procedures that will assure no recurrence of sex-rejecting procedures, including the creation of “a compliance and ethics program.” ..."
Researchers rethink the aging brain’s immune system, immune cells from the body flow into the brain
Amazing stuff!
"Contrary to longstanding belief, immune cells from the rest of the body flow into the brain as it ages, a finding that could open new paths for treating neurodegenerative disease."
"In brief
- Stanford scientists discovered that immune cells in the blood travel into the central nervous system.
- The discovery upends conventional wisdom that the immune systems of the brain and the rest of the body are walled off from each other.
- The researchers built on recently developed genetics tools to trace the origins of immune cells in the brain.
- The discovery suggests researchers could one day engineer peripheral immune cells to travel to the brain to treat or prevent neurological diseases.
..."
From the abstract:
"Microglia are the resident macrophages of the central nervous system. In mice, microglia seed the brain during embryogenesis and can be maintained throughout life with minimal input from adult hematopoiesis.
The origins of human microglia are less clear, but recent evidence suggests that marrow-derived cells contribute to the human microglial pool in certain individuals.
Here, to investigate the ontogeny of human microglia, we develop an approach that uses the collection of accumulated somatic mutations which uniquely labels each clone of cells to track the infiltration of marrow-derived cells into the human brain.
Applying this approach to 20 aged individuals, we find evidence of an influx of marrow-derived cells into the brain in all examined individuals.
Single cell analysis, including single cell lineage tracing using mitochondrial DNA variants, demonstrates that these infiltrating cells are similar to microglia and can comprise a large fraction of the microglial pool.
Analysis of human cohort data demonstrates a protective association between most types of clonal hematopoiesis and Alzheimer’s disease.
In sum, this work uncovers a widespread influx of myeloid cells into the healthy human brain which contributes to the pool of human microglia and becomes common with aging."
Somatic mutations reveal the ontogeny of microglia in human aging (no public access)
Somatic mutations reveal the ontogeny of human microglia (preprint, open access)
AI designs a novel E. coli killer, a cocktail of synthesized bacteriophages
Good news! Welcome to novel antibiotics! This is only the beginning and this could be a breakthrough!
When will we be able to remove the sneezing gene from the human genome? 😊
"In brief
- Bacteriophages kill bacteria, and scientists hope engineered phages could work as new antibiotics.
- Stanford researchers applied a generative AI model, called Evo 2, to this challenge. Given a starting place – in this case bacteriophage ΦX174 – Evo 2 suggested new DNA sequences.
- Based on genomes written by Evo 2, the researchers synthesized and tested nearly 300 phages for effectiveness against E. coli.
They ended up with 16 that proved exceptional. - Given its potential, the researchers have made Evo 2 openly and freely available. Acknowledging safety concerns, they point to the importance of having tools like Evo 2 to address existing natural pathogens and the ability to build safety checks into AI tools – something that doesn’t happen when pathogens evolve naturally.
..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
The ability to design complex biological systems with artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform biotechnology, but progress has largely been limited to the scale of individual genes and proteins, with whole-genome design remaining out of reach.
King et al. used generative AI models trained on millions of natural genomes to design entire bacteriophages ...
Experimental tests yielded 16 functional genomes with diverse sequences, structures, and fitness profiles.
A cocktail of the generated bacteriophages rapidly overcame bacteria that had evolved resistance to a natural bacteriophage. This work lays a foundation for AI-guided design of biological function at the whole-genome scale. ...
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Evolution continuously forges new biological innovations written in genomes. Navigating this vast design space could access functions that would transform biotechnology, but even the simplest genomes are highly complex and can be rendered nonviable by a single mutation. Accordingly, most progress in biological design has been made at the scale of individual genes and gene circuits, whereas design at the scale of whole genomes has remained largely beyond reach.
RATIONALE
Genome language models are artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that have shown promise in designing biological systems. Much like how other language models are trained on large corpora of text, genome language models are trained on large corpora of DNA comprising millions of genomes from all domains of life. This enables these models to learn the evolutionary constraints that shape DNA sequences in nature.
However, the ability of genome language models to generate entire functional genomes has not been tested.
Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, are specifically well suited for this task, as they are relatively small, experimentally tractable, and have broad applications in molecular biology, microbial engineering, and therapeutics.
RESULTS
In this work, we leveraged genome language models, Evo 1 and Evo 2, to generate complete phage genomes with realistic genetic architectures and specificity for a bacterial host, Escherichia coli C.
Using the natural phage ΦX174 as a design template, we established a framework for generating and evaluating thousands of AI-generated genomes, nearly 300 of which we chemically synthesized and tested in laboratory conditions, yielding 16 viable phages.
The viable generated phages showed strong host specificity and diverse fitness profiles, including competitive infection kinetics. The generated phages were different from any known natural phages, exhibiting de novo mutations, divergent genes and regulatory elements, and variable genome lengths.
One of the phages utilized a DNA packaging protein from an evolutionarily distant phage in its capsid structure.
We also tested whether the generated phages could overcome bacterial resistance, a central challenge in developing phage-based antimicrobial therapies, and found that a mixture of designed phages rapidly overcame ΦX174-resistant E. coli strains, whereas a comparable mixture of naturally sourced ΦX174-like phages could not.
CONCLUSION
Our results demonstrate that generative models capture evolutionary constraints in DNA sequences with enough fidelity to produce complete bacteriophage genomes divergent from those observed in nature and with prespecified traits.
Our approach expands what synthetic genomics can achieve alongside methods such as directed evolution and rational engineering, lays out a path for generating adaptive and resilient phage therapies against rapidly evolving pathogens, and establishes a foundation for the generative design of larger, more complex genomes.
Genome design can augment the broader toolkit of genome sequencing, synthesis, and editing, enabling the composition of biological systems at the genome scale."
Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models (no public access)
Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models (preprint, open access)
Rapid Embodiment Adaptation for Quadrupedal Locomotion
This could be an interesting, new paper by Jan Peters and his team.
From the abstract:
"Humans readily adapt their movements as their bodies change through aging, injury, or load carrying, but learning-based robot policies often break when hardware properties shift.
We introduce an online embodiment adaptation framework for quadrupedal locomotion that infers embodiment parameters from short interaction histories and conditions control on the inferred hardware state.
Our method pairs a generalist policy trained under embodiment randomization with a lightweight adaptation module that identifies physical changes within half a second.
We evaluate two representative forms of embodiment variation:
joint-range constraints and trunk-mass changes, corresponding to joint-level kinematic degradation and body-level dynamic variation.
In simulation, the module accurately estimates these changes and enables closed-loop control that substantially outperforms policies conditioned directly on interaction history.
On a real Unitree Go2 robot, our system maintains stable locomotion under severe instances of the evaluated changes, including a fully locked leg and a 5 kg payload, where non-adaptive methods fail.
These results demonstrate the practicality of explicit online embodiment identification for rapid adaptation to joint-limit and payload-mass changes, and provide a step toward handling broader forms of uncertain, degraded, or changing robot hardware."
Birdsong and whale song show patterns similar to human language and is unconsciously learnt as babies
Amazing stuff!
"An international team of researchers has uncovered a previously undetected structure in the birdsong of Bengalese finches that has the same statistical patterns found in human languages. ...
The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, build on the team's previous discovery that humpback whales also rely on a similar systematic structure. ..."
From the abstract:
"All languages have statistically coherent subsequences (e.g., words) whose frequency distribution follows a power law.
These properties facilitate language learning in humans, making them good candidates for arising through cultural transmission as a way to help faithful transmission across generations.
Recently, both properties were found in whale song, which is also culturally transmitted, leading to the strong prediction that they should be found wherever complex sequential signaling is culturally transmitted.
Here, we use the same tools used to analyze human data and whale song to reveal that culturally transmitted Bengalese finch song also has statistically coherent subsequences whose distribution follows a power law.
We additionally show that statistical coherence increases over development, but the power law is present throughout, suggesting that it reflects a fundamental principle of learned representations.
Finding these parallels between evolutionarily distant species illustrates the importance of cultural transmission in shaping communication and suggests that core properties of language arise through convergent evolution."
Do Birds Learn Like Babies? New Hebrew University Study Finds Language-Like Patterns in Finch Songs (original news release) "It turns out that songbirds, humpback whales, and human babies may all rely on the same hidden mathematical rules when learning to communicate.
A new study reveals that Bengalese finches organize their songs using the same statistical patterns found in human speech—an evolutionary solution that makes complex communication easier to learn and pass from one generation to the next. The discovery suggests that some of language’s most fundamental building blocks may not be uniquely human after all, but a universal feature of learned communication."
Fig. 3. Detected subsequences follow a Zipfian distribution throughout development, but their statistical coherence and slope increase as they approach the adult target.
How early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells
Amazing stuff! Good news!
"... "We have uncovered a new biological process linking experience of early-life adversity to this long-term vulnerability to mental illness," ...
"This finding reveals a physical scar left by trauma experienced during development inside brain cells, providing scientists with a concrete biological target to develop new treatments and interventions." ...
The researchers found that an enzyme called SETD7 was more abundant in the dopamine neurons of young mice that had experienced stress compared with mice reared in a typical environment.
SETD7 helps place a chemical tag—H3K4me1—on the genetic slinky [coiled DNA]], marking the structure for uncoiling, which in turn makes the cell more reactive to everything going on in the environment, Peña explained.
The researchers then artificially boosted SETD7 in young, stress-free mice. Even without early-life stress, these mice grew up with a stretched-open DNA structure in their dopamine-producing brain cells, making it easier to turn on the genes that respond to stress. Such mice had a lower tolerance for stress in adulthood.
The researchers found that, as adults, mice whose SETD7 levels had been boosted when they were young had more reactive dopamine neurons and more anxious behavior compared with mice with normal levels of SETD7 throughout their lives.
Conversely, when the researchers blocked the SETD7 enzyme from adding too much of the H3K4me1 tag after early-life stress, the slinky remained closed, shielding mice from becoming hypersensitive to stress later in life. Despite experiencing both early-life and adult stress, mice with their SETD7 levels dampened were able to remain as social and exploratory as unstressed mice, and their dopamine neurons were active at normal levels. ..."
From the highlights and abstract:
"Highlights
• Early-life stress increases H3K4me1 and the monomethyltransferase SETD7 in VTA
• Setd7-OE heightens gene expression, dopaminergic, and behavioral responses to stress
• Setd7 knockdown in VTA ameliorates the impact of early-life stress
• Such epigenetic priming is a novel mechanism for encoding lasting stress sensitivity
Summary
Early-life stress increases gene expression, neurophysiological, and behavioral responses to subsequent stress.
Here, we determined the role of chromatin in such long-lasting sensitivity. We used a combination of bottom-up mass spectrometry, viral-mediated epigenome editing, RNA sequencing, patch-clamp electrophysiology of dopamine neurons, and behavioral quantification in a mouse model of early-life stress, focusing on the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a key dopaminergic brain region.
We found that early-life stress enriches histone-3 lysine-4 monomethylation—associated with open chromatin and primed or active enhancers—and the H3K4 monomethylase SETD7.
Mimicking early-life stress through postnatal overexpression of Setd7 and enrichment of H3K4me1 in the VTA sensitizes transcriptional, physiological, and behavioral responses to adult stress, while Setd7 knockdown ameliorates the impact of early-life stress.
These findings link early-life stress experience to long-term stress hypersensitivity within the brain’s dopaminergic circuitry, providing a mechanism by which early-life stress increases risk for mood and anxiety disorders later in life."
Graphical abstract:
Figure 3 Juvenile Setd7 overexpression augments transcriptional responses to adult stress
Agentic Laboratories of the Future: Towards World Models for Scientific Discovery
This could be an interesting, new paper by Jure Leskovec, Eric Xing and their team! It appears to be a survey/overview paper.
From the abstract:
"Scientific discovery is fundamentally a problem-solving process involving distributed intelligence. Human intuition, computational reasoning, and experimental execution are distributed across people, instruments, and software systems, limiting the speed and scale of discovery. Although automation, high-throughput experimentation, foundation models, and cloud infrastructure have accelerated individual stages of the scientific workflow, they have not unified the discovery process.
We hypothesize that the next generation of laboratories will be agentic: environments in which scientists, AI systems, and robotic platforms operate as collaborative discovery partners, with humans contributing the parts of discovery that remain hardest to make explicit: asking the right questions and holding provisional mechanistic models of how a system works.
The key missing layer is an agentic harnessing layer that continuously integrates hypothesis, literature-derived evidence, experimental data, uncertainty, and experimental state into a shared “laboratory world model”—a dynamic representation of the scientific system and its evolving context.
By maintaining and updating this lab world model, the agentic harnessing layer enables coordinated decision-making, adaptive planning, and increasingly autonomous scientific workflows across humans and machines.
A central challenge is that much of the scientific research process remains inaccessible to machines, including tacit knowledge, human observations, adaptive decision-making, and evolving experimental context.
Advances in multimodal AI and immersive interfaces may help bridge this gap, allowing humans, agents, and robotic systems to collaborate seamlessly in scientific discovery rather than simply automating isolated tasks.
Agentic laboratories could provide a new architecture for science, integrating human, artificial, and physical intelligence into a unified discovery system."
What Does a Discrete Diffusion Model Learn?
This could be an interesting new paper by Bernhard Schölkopf and his team. However, it might be theoretical and narrowly focused.
From the abstract:
"What does a discrete diffusion model learn: a denoiser, a score ratio, or a bridge plug-in predictor? At the level of jump rates, these are one object in different coordinates, and reading a neural network in the wrong coordinate changes the process being trained and sampled.
Starting with a rigorous derivation of the continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) ELBO for any noising process, boundary terms included, we prove the Oracle Distance theorem: the negative ELBO is exactly equal to the data entropy plus the path KL from the oracle reverse process to the learned one, not merely a bound.
Its unique optimizer is therefore the conditional expectation of the true reverse jump rate given the current noisy state, and its irreducible cost is the rate at which the forward process Zt destroys information about the clean data Z0, −ddtI(Z0;Zt), so every noising process shares the same best achievable negative ELBO: the data entropy.
For sequences with token-factorizing noise, the oracle projection yields three exact coordinates for the optimizer: denoiser, cavity (bridge plug-in), and score, with closed-form conversions among them.
This framework identifies which law each loss in the literature actually optimizes, recovering MDM, UDM, SEDD, and GIDD as special cases; explains why denoiser and cavity coincide for masked diffusion but not for uniform diffusion;
proves that a denoiser parameterization makes the uniform ELBO diverge at initialization while the bridge plug-in stays finite; and calibrates ELBO implementations exactly at initialization.
Every identity is verified numerically, without approximation, on an exactly solvable model."
China overtakes US to lead global R&D spending, hitting $615bn. Really!
Some serious doubts are well in order! How reliable have communist statistics been since 1945 or 1917?
Which R & D funding in the US was not included? And so on ...
"China has surpassed the U.S. to become the world leader in R&D spending by companies and universities, new Japanese data shows, as Beijing works to counter Washington's export restrictions on chips by accelerating development. ..."
Hanoi is building a new futuristic city by tearing down the old one
Bad news! That is what dictatorship communist governments do!
Sunday, August 09, 2026
Punk music turns 50 in the UK with festival celebration
Recommendable! Punk and funk, two unlike music genres came about around the same time.
Global warming is coming for the countryside. Really!
New climate disinformation und demagoguery by the AAAS! E.g. the headline of this news article contradicts the mentioned research!
The article heavily relies on climate model forecasts up to 2050! Laughable! Junk journalism!
Does this article/research confuse urban sprawl with rural areas? Quite possibly!
What is please "urban climate change"? Microclimate? How relevant is that compared to global warming/climate change? Or is this an admission that greenhouse gases are a red herring (junk science)? You bet!
This research also relies on junk climate models and forecasts of up to 100 years. Climate is a much too complex a phenomenon that is still poorly understood. Weather forecasts are still barely accurate for more than 48 hours or so and so on.
Does not the urban heat island effect already mess up the temperature measurement record for over 100 years or so given expanding urban areas and population growth? You bet! The urban heat island effect is perhaps the strongest reason why Global Warming is a hoax! Many of the systematic temperature measurements have been taken at meteorological stations in urban areas for the past 100 or more years..
Resolution of climate models is not a convincing metric!
"... But now a pioneering study [???] suggests that as global warming continues in much of the world, the countryside’s appeal as a climate buffer may dwindle. ...
But such regional models inherit the biases of the coarse global models and don’t capture feedback effects of cities on the broader climate. They have offered varying forecasts for the urban heat island effect: Some suggested it will stay the same, others saw it growing stronger, and still others forecast it would weaken. For the past few years, 20 modeling centers worldwide have been collaborating, hoping to converge on a verdict.
Taking advantage of increasing computing power, other researchers are pursuing global climate models that can simulate the whole planet at resolutions high enough to capture cities. As part of the European Union’s Destination Earth project to forecast the planet’s future, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has developed a high-resolution climate model. Researchers there used it to simulate a greenhouse-warmed world from 2020 to ’50 at a 9-kilometer resolution, fine enough to track urban climate.
The ECMWF team zoomed in on 200 cities in four climatic regions: cold, arid, temperate, and tropical. The results, published in June in Geophysical Research Letters, led to a surprising conclusion:
By 2050, whereas cities on average remained hotter than the countryside nearby, “the rural surroundings of cities warmed up faster,” says Xabier Pedruzo-Bagazgoitia, the study’s lead author. Except in cold regions, the urban heat island effect was weakening. ...
Fifteen years ago, a modeling study in the Journal of Climate had suggested a plausible mechanism for a weakened heat island effect [???]. ..."
From the abstract:
"Coupled multi-decadal global km-scale simulations completed in recent years open new perspectives in the investigation and understanding of urban climate change [???].
This study introduces a generic method for extracting urban areas and their rural references worldwide and validates it on hourly timescales with remote-sensing observations of land-surface temperature for over 400 cities, while identifying the key role of spatial resolution.
We showcase the immense amount of hourly data available for each city for 60 years of past and future climate [???] in the Next Generation Earth Modelling Systems simulations, and how these simulations represent surface-atmosphere interactions driven by urban areas.
We finally propose city clustering as a method to exploit these simulations and move beyond city-specific results. Results suggest a mean potential decrease in future urban heat island intensity driven by stronger rural warming for all clusters except for cold climates."
Dürre, Wasserknappheit und Ernteausfälle: Wie lässt sich die mittelalterliche Warmzeit mit heute vergleichen?
Empfehlenswert! Der Artikel ist anscheinend eine Zusammenfassung eines anderen, englischen Artikels.
Der Redakteur dieses Artikels macht auch den schweren Fehler die Umbenennung von Mittelalterlicher Warmzeit in "Mittelalterliche Klima-Anomalie" zu verteidigen. Diese Umbenennung dient wohl auch der Täuschung und Verdeckung das möglicherweise globale Warm Perioden von wenigen Jahrhunderten vielleicht sehr normal sind (aber bisher nicht weiter erforscht, fehlende Daten etc.). Und das wir seit der letzten Eiszeit (Little Ice Age von ca. 1300 bis etwa 1850 AD/CE) wieder in einer natürlichen Warmperiode leben.
Der Autor liegt auch falsch zu behaupten, dass "historische Warmphase in ihren Ursachen und ihrem räumlichen Ausmaß grundlegend [???] von der heutigen globalen Erwärmung unterscheidet". Selbstredend, z.B. die Weltbevoelkerung (auch eine Ursache der globalen Erwärmung) ist um ein vielfaches größer als im Mittelalter.
"Eine Hitzewelle über mehrere Monate, ausbleibender Regen, verdorrte Felder und schwere Ernteausfälle – diese Schilderung stammt nicht aus dem Sommer 2026, sondern aus dem England des 13. Jahrhunderts. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass extreme Wärme- und Dürreperioden bereits während der sogenannten Mittelalterlichen Warmzeit auftraten und in vielen Regionen tiefgreifende Folgen für Landwirtschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft hatten. Gleichzeitig macht der Autor deutlich, dass sich diese historische Warmphase in ihren Ursachen und ihrem räumlichen Ausmaß grundlegend von der heutigen globalen Erwärmung unterscheidet [???]."
How Olinia Turns Mexico’s EV Ambition Into Reality at a price of $8,500
Recommendable!
Government run businesses is rarely a good idea and many fail.
"The EV market in Mexico has exploded in the last three years, with the vast majority of cars sold there being manufactured in China—90 percent in 2025. However, Mexico is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of cars and car parts, and policymakers want to capture a piece of the action.
That’s why the Mexican government launched Olinia, a federally backed effort to develop a homegrown EV brand with engineers and researchers from the country’s public universities and research institutions. Its first vehicle, the Olinia 1, is designed around the needs of the average Mexican driver. Mass production of the Olinia 1 is expected to begin in early 2027 at an assembly plant slated for construction in the state of Puebla later this year. ...
[Chinese] Carmakers like BYD and Geely thus dropped their prices and started marketing aggressively in emerging markets like Mexico. ...
The government plans to replace many taxis [???] in urban areas with the EV. ...
Olinia is one of the signature projects of Plan México, the Sheinbaum administration’s strategy to strengthen domestic manufacturing and technological capabilities. The initiative aims to cultivate domestic expertise in batteries, power electronics, vehicle integration, and advanced manufacturing—areas that policymakers view as critical to Mexico’s long-term industrial competitiveness. The administration hopes the plan attracts $100 billion in annual foreign direct investment by 2030. ..."
Topological Materials Could Shrink Chip Interconnects and replace copper
Amazing stuff!
"... However, as electronics continue to shrink, copper becomes a dramatically worse conductor. Now scientists find that a new class of materials containing exotic quasiparticles might one day help enable next-generation interconnects that become better conductors the thinner they get. ...
Once copper wires shrink beneath this limit—in copper’s case, 40 nanometers—their electrical conductivity drops dramatically because their electrons start experiencing more collisions. ...
Researchers are investigating other metals that show better conductivity at nanometer scales for use in interconnects. For instance, cobalt and ruthenium have electron mean free paths of 10 nm and 6 nm, respectively. This means interconnects made from these metals can get smaller than copper wires before running into the same conductivity problem. However, if they shrink far enough, they will have to deal with the same challenge. ...
In a new study, scientists instead investigated topological materials, which possess extraordinary properties based on the topology of their structures. The researchers synthesized nanowires made of one such material as a proof of concept. ...
In the new study, ... synthesized nanowires of the Weyl semimetal niobium arsenide using a method known as thermomechanical nanomolding. This method allowed the researchers to make a single-crystal nanowire 2 to 3 micrometers long and as thin as 40 nm.
The scientists found the resistivity of niobium arsenide nanowires dropped with decreasing diameter. At room temperature, a 40-nm-wide nanowire displayed a resistivity about 70 percent lower than that of bulk single crystals. Their analyses suggest this improvement was due to surface conduction. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Nanowires of the topological Weyl semimetal niobium arsenide (NbAs) are three to four times as conductive as the bulk material. Cheon et al. used thermomechanical nanomolding to grow single-crystalline nanowires with diameters as small as 40 nanometers. These stable nanowires also have favorable breakdown current density and thermal conductivity that could enable application as interconnects in electronics. ...
Abstract
Ongoing demands for smaller and more energy-efficient electronic devices necessitate alternative interconnect materials with lower electrical resistivity at reduced dimensions.
We report the synthesis of Weyl semimetal niobium arsenide (NbAs) nanowires through thermomechanical nanomolding with single crystallinity and controlled diameters down to 40 nanometers.
The resistivity of NbAs nanowires decreases with decreasing diameter, and 40-nanometer-diameter nanowires exhibited a room-temperature resistivity of 10.5 ± 1.9 microhm·centimeters, which is ~70% lower than their bulk counterpart.
Calculations attribute this resistivity reduction to surface-dominant conduction with a long carrier lifetime at finite temperatures. Further characterization of nanowires and bulk crystals revealed high breakdown current density, stability, and thermal conductivity.
These properties highlight the potential of NbAs nanowires as next-generation interconnects that could surpass the limitations of current copper-based interconnects."
Surface-dominant transport in Weyl semimetal NbAs nanowires for next-generation interconnects (no public access)
Surface-dominant transport in Weyl semimetal NbAs nanowires for next-generation interconnects (preprint, open access)
The nanowires seen in this electron microscope image were molded from a bulk feedstock of niobium arsenide crystals.
Software developers in Africa are increasingly taking advantage of cheap, open-weight AI models from China
Good news! The Scramble for Africa continues!
"... to build tools for agriculture, education, legal services, and business. Unlike flagship American models, these Chinese models can often be downloaded, modified, and run independently, enabling greater customization and avoiding subscription fees."
"... In Kenya, entrepreneurs are using the models to streamline legal and business services.
In Nigeria, they have made educational tools that teach high school students.
In Ghana, developers are building local chatbots.
China’s A.I. is surging, especially in developing countries, as people look for the best possible system at the lowest possible cost. ..."
"... The A.I. model from the Chinese internet giant Alibaba handled Uganda’s dozens of languages better than anything from Meta or Google ... It was also inexpensive, and he could customize the model with his own data. ..."
How China’s A.I. Is Surging Across Africa (behind paywall)
First direct drone delivery of blood to the scene of traumatic injuries in Florida
Good, life saving news! This could be a breakthrough! "In traumas with hemorrhaging [severe blood loss], every minute matters."
"Tampa General Hospital is preparing to launch what it says will be the first drone system in the United States that delivers blood directly to the scene of traumatic injuries, allowing transfusions to begin on the spot. Average delivery times are expected to be under three minutes across the initial 70-square-mile service area."
"The technology is scheduled to come online in October 2026, subject to approval by the Hillsborough County Commission. The Board of County Commissioners is scheduled to convene on the matter on Sept. 2. ..."
An electrolyzer that can produce more than 99.9% pure hydrogen from water, while running directly on solar power, for under $2 per kilogram
Good news! However, Terraform Industries does not appear to have any convincing/professional Internet presence (their blog posts are outdated)! A little weird even for a startup or a pioneering, new company!
Reminder: Remember the Hindenburg Disaster of 1937! Hydrogen is explosive! Handle with great care!
"Last week the hydrogen electrolyzer team @terraformindies pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test site. ..."
The world’s installed solar capacity surpassed three terawatts (3 TW) in 2026
Good news, with qualifications!
How often do solar panels be cleaned to be effective?
How intermittent and unreliable is this source of energy?
How many batteries/storage are needed to make it more reliable?
Green or renewable energy are euphemisms!
"... less than two years after reaching two terawatts and four years after reaching one.
China still accounts for most of the growth in global solar capacity, but a rising share now comes from cheap Chinese panels installed in developing countries."
"After crossing the 100-gigawatt mark in 2012, it took the world 10 years to deploy 1 terawatt of solar power. An additional 1 terawatt, enough to meet all of US power demand at its peak, took less than three years to build. Not even two years later in 2026 — the precise timing is subject to debate among analysts — the 3-terawatt threshold was reached."
The World Adds a Third Terawatt of Solar Power (Yale University)
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone. No One Noticed (original news source?) "The next phase of the boom may reveal a shift in who is gaining access to the technology."
May be the largest known tungsten deposit in the United States was identified in Nevada
Good news!
"... containing an estimated 1.78 million metric tons of the metal. If commercially recoverable, the contained tungsten would be equivalent to centuries of current US consumption."
Das nächste Atommüll Endlager könnten wir noch schneller bauen in Finnland
Gute Nachrichten!
Wann wird die Bananenrepublik D endlich wieder Kernkraftwerke bauen statt existierende, in Betrieb befindliche abzuschalten und abzureissen!
The U.S. pledged $1 billion in security aid to Colombia as the new President vowed to defeat narco-terrorism and guerilla
Good news!
"The U.S. pledged $1 billion in security aid to Colombia as new President Abelardo de la Espriella vowed to defeat narco-terrorism and abandon peace talks with guerrillas."
"The United States pledged $1 billion in security assistance to Colombia after its new right-wing [???] president took office.
Abelardo de la Espriella, a millionaire lawyer with a taste for spectacle [???], took office Friday for his four-year term after a campaign focused on anger and fears about security. ..."
Diego Cadena and Abelardo de la Espriella. Both lawyers of former President Álvaro Uribe. (Source)
Nearly 7 million U.S. homes are now worth at least $1 million
Good news! Impressive! However, how much is due to price inflation?
"Nearly 7 million U.S. homes are now worth at least $1 million, up from about 1.5 million in 2005, according to the National Association of Realtors. Those properties make up 8% of the market, and in Hawaii, roughly 40% of homes have crossed that threshold.
Meanwhile, Americans need to earn about $110,000 a year to afford even a typical home, a Redfin report found. The median household income sits at roughly $88,000, leaving a gap of more than $22,000 between what families earn and what it takes to buy.
The affordability squeeze has eased slightly, with the gap shrinking from $26,000 a year ago and $29,000 two years ago as incomes rise faster than housing costs. Redfin defines “affordable” as a buyer’s mortgage not consuming more than 30% of their income."
Something seems to be odd with this chart by Redfin! Why that steep increase after 2021? Why not more historical data since it appears the curve was fairly flat before 2021?
Pentagon orders plan for rapid weapons production as US munitions dwindle
So much for this latest and often repeated news media hoax and/or sensationalism of depleting US ammunition!
Armed Bedouin clans in Gaza inflict heavy losses on Hamas, pose dilemma for Israel
Good news! Will the inhabitants of Gaza finally rid themselves of terrorist groups among them?
"Armed Bedouin clans in the Gaza Strip have fought Hamas's military wing, inflicting significant casualties, and are now helping secure areas west of the Yellow Line and locate weapons and terrorist infrastructure, security officials said Sunday.
Since the ceasefire was declared, the clans have continued operating discreetly, assisting security forces in securing the area and locating weapons and terrorist infrastructure both above and below ground. ..."
Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu: Israel officially rejects Board of Peace 15-point plan for Gaza's reconstruction
Bad news! Yes, the sticking point is the disarmament of any and all terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip!
The responsibility lies with the Arab inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and West Bank to rid themselves of any of these terrorists and terrorism and to live peacefully side by side with Israel!
"... "As for the Gaza Strip, first of all, I want to make the main point clear: as long as I am prime minister, there will be no Palestinian state, not in Gaza and not in Judea and Samaria. Neither 'Fatahstan' nor 'Hamastan,'" he said. ..."
The private sector is answering President Trump’s call to lower prices. Really!
How much is President Trump intervening in private businesses? Or is this just false advertisement by the president?
Government price controls by persuasion and/or browbeating?
"... Major retailers including Walmart, Target, Kroger, Giant Eagle, Albertsons, and Costco are cutting prices on thousands of everyday items. Novo Nordisk reduced Ozempic and Wegovy to as low as $199–$350 per month. Pfizer is cutting prices up to 85% through TrumpRx.
Energy utilities including Alliant Energy, NiSource, and Entergy have committed a combined $3.4 billion in consumer savings.
And automakers Ford and Stellantis are offering employee pricing and 0% financing nationwide. ...
Private Sector Answers the Call: Retailers, Drugmakers, and Energy Providers Cut Prices. Major retailers are responding directly to President Trump’s call to lower prices for American families.
Giant Eagle, Walmart, Target, Kroger, Albertsons, Sam’s Club, Meijer, Costco, and H-E-B are collectively cutting prices on thousands of everyday items — with Giant Eagle cutting 10% or more on over 300 products and Kroger announcing its “biggest price cuts in years.”
On prescription drugs, Novo Nordisk slashed Ozempic and Wegovy to as low as $199–$350 per month, while Pfizer is cutting prices up to 85% through TrumpRx.
Energy utilities including Alliant Energy (5-year rate freeze), NiSource ($1.4 billion returned to consumers), and Entergy ($2 billion returned) are delivering meaningful relief on monthly bills. Ford extended employee pricing nationwide; Stellantis offered 0% financing and 90-day deferred payments. ..."
Emigration from Israel continues at peak levels at 270,000 from 2023-2025
Bad news! How serious is this trend?
However, the criterion of leaving for at least three months or more might be flawed:
- What about the intention for leaving?
- What about the prospect of returning after three or more months? (see also 2nd chart below)
"... In previous years [before 2023], the number of Israelis who left the country according to this criterion (three months or more) was 30% lower, and averaged just 60,000 annually in 2010-2019. In 2024-2025, Israel had a negative migration balance for the first time in decades, that is to say, more people left than arrived. ...
The new study from Tel Aviv University and the Central Bureau of Statistics does not cover net migration as there are not yet enough data to examine this statistic for 2025. Data on the number of Israelis who left for twelve months or more, as measured by the group in previous studies ..."
"Not only has the number of Israelis emigrating from Israel increased in recent years, but their economic profile has also changed.
More high-income earners, tech employees, healthcare professionals, and people in the prime of their careers are moving abroad. This is according to a new study by the Israel Tax Authority’s Planning and Economics Division, which examined the income and tax payments of Israelis who emigrated from the country between 2015 and 2024. ..."
Emigration from Israel Remains at Record Levels, New TAU Study Finds "Nearly 270,000 Israelis left the country over the past three years, as researchers warn the trend could have long-term economic and security implications."
Tax Authority warns higher income Israelis are leaving "A Tax Authority study indicates that not only did more Israelis leave the country in 2023 and 2024 but that they had a higher income than those emigrating in previous years."
Number of Israelis leaving Israel for three consecutive months each year between 2009 and 2025
Number of Israelis leaving Israel for at least three consecutive months and for a period of 12 months
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