Russia's shadow fleet of tankers (Source)
Sunday, February 22, 2026
China has promised to eliminate tariffs on imports from every African country except Eswatini
Have you ever heard of Eswatini (former official name Swaziland in southern Africa, population about 1.3 million)?
The Scramble for Africa continues!
Will Eswatini cave in to Chinese pressure?
"China already has a zero-tariff policy for imports from 33 African countries, but Beijing said last year it would extend the policy to all 53 of its diplomatic partners on the continent…
From May 1, zero levies will apply to all African countries except Eswatini, which maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.” ..."
Flag of Eswatini
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack
Recommendable! An interesting article!
"Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that they said has been linked to more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.
Archive.today — which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph — is perhaps most widely used to access content that’s otherwise inaccessible behind paywalls. That also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia citations. ...
“Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.” Plus, “evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.” ..."
Sam Altman would like to remind you that humans use a lot of energy (and water), too
Good point! Touché!
Let's also keep in mind there is a high probability that the global human population will shrink in the coming decades due to a lower global total fertility rate (TFR).
"... For one thing, Altman ... said concerns about AI’s water usage are “totally fake,” though he acknowledged it was a real issue when “we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.” ..."
Sam Altman
New Zealand nuclear fusion reactor’s magnetic breakthrough
Good news from Down Under!
The website of this company is pretty lousy. Most of the stuff on their webpages is undated! Plus, it seems the company only presents third party news reports, but not original company news releases!
The news articles below read more like an infomercial!
"Nuclear fusion startup OpenStar Technologies has become the first commercial company in the world to create and confine a plasma using a floating half-tonne magnet.
The New Zealand-based company became the first in the country to turn on a fusion machine back in 2024. In a conversation with this journalist following that milestone, OpenStar founder and CEO Ratu Mataira explained the unique approach the company is taking by working to build a fusion reactor based on a levitated dipole. ...
This week saw the first public demonstration of OpenStar’s technology. ...
The result is a proof-of-concept that the technology powering its prototype device, Junior, is viable and can be scaled up to commercial levels. The startup aims to have commercial devices in production by the 2030s. ...
OpenStar’s next prototype device Tahi will have a magnetic field 4 times stronger than its predecessor. Its magnetic field will perform at up to 20 Tesla.
New Zealand’s government has pledged $NZ35 million to support Tahi’s development. ..."
Neuartige Wasserstoff-Heizung wird in Offenbach getestet
Nachdem alle Kernkraftwerke abgeschaltet wurden setzen die Deutschen nun auf Wasserstoff!
Wie gut beherrschen wir inzwischen dieses explosive Gas? Wie vergleichbar ist Wasserstoff mit Erdgas?
Kleiner Hinweis: Hindenburg Katastrophe von 1937.
Nebenbei bemerkt: In der Vergangenheit hatte Offenbach nicht gerade den besten Ruf.
"... Ihr einziges Abfallprodukt ist Wasserdampf. [???] ..." Wirklich! Was für ein demagogischer Unsinn! Wieviel Wasserdampf würde entstehen wenn fast alle Haushalte und Betriebe einer Großstadt mit Wasserstoff geheizt werden? Wasserdampf ist nicht so harmlos, wie hier so typisch vorgegaukelt wenn es um Wasserstoff heizen geht!
Das laut Hyting erste katalytische Wasserstoff-Luftheizsystem weltweit soll Maßstäbe in der Heiztechnik setzen.
US men and women teams beat Canada in ice hockey for gold at the Winter Olympics in Italy, gold for first time since 1980
What a match up! Back at the Winter Olympics of 1980 in Lake Placid, the US won over the heavily favored team from the former Soviet Union!
Putin the Terrible must be fuming now! However, the Russian ice hockey teams (men/women) were excluded due to international sanctions!
Atom-thin electronics withstand space radiation, potentially surviving for centuries in orbit
Amazing stuff!
"Atom-thick layers of molybdenum disulfide are ideally suited for radiation-resistant spacecraft electronics ...
One particularly promising route forward involves highly conductive, ultra-thin materials such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂). Just a single layer of atoms thick—around 0.7 nanometers—the material has already proven remarkably robust against radiation-induced defects in previous laboratory studies.
In their latest work, Zhou's team subjected the material to its most rigorous test yet. They began by growing monolayer MoS₂ using it to fabricate a transistor-based, radio-frequency communications system. The circuits were then exposed to powerful bursts of gamma rays, delivering doses comparable to those experienced by electronics operating in space. ..."
From the abstract:
"Integrated circuits for communications play an enabling role when it comes to outer-space exploration thanks to their small footprint and low weight. However, owing to the severe irradiation effects of space energetic particles, the implementation of radiation-tolerant electronic circuits remains a challenge.
Here we report the observation of the space radiation effect on a satellite-based device and find that atomically thin materials are expected to accumulate minimal radiation-induced damage in principle. Accordingly, on the basis of a 4-inch wafer-scale monolayer 2D MoS2 process, we implement an atomic-layer transistor-based radiation-tolerant radio frequency (RF, 12–18 GHz) system with both transmitters and receivers for spaceborne communication.
For on-orbit experiments, the 2D communication system was successfully launched to the approximately 517 km low Earth orbit.
Notably, the system maintains a bit error rate (BER) of less than 10−8 in the transmitted data after 9 months of on-orbit operation, indicating substantial radiation tolerance and long stability.
The lifespan of the 2D communication system is predicted to be about 271 years even on the geosynchronous orbit with a much harsher radiation environment. This work showcases the unique prospects of 2D electronics for spaceborne applications."
Radiation-tolerant atomic-layer-scale RF system for spaceborne communication (no public access)
Atom-thick circuit made from radiation-resistant molybdenum disulfide
Record-breaking Antarctic drill sediment core of over 225 m length reveals 23 million years of climate history
Amazing stuff! Global warming aka climate change is normal and has repeated itself over thousands of years!
Possibly, variations in solar activity of the sun are to be blamed!
"... "To our knowledge, the longest sediment cores previously drilled under an ice sheet are less than 10 m," ... "We exceeded our target of 200 m, and undertook this 700 km from the nearest base—this is Antarctic frontier science." ...
The 228 m of ancient mud and rock was drilled from under 523 m of ice at a deep-field camp at Crary Ice Rise on the edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. ...
The new sediment core ... provides a direct and comprehensive record of how this margin of the ice sheet has behaved during past periods of warmth. ...
including time periods when Earth's global average temperatures were significantly higher than 2°C above pre-industrial," ..."
"... The sediment core holds an archive of past environmental conditions from warmer periods in Earth’s history ..."
Triplet superconductivity—physicists may have found the missing link for quantum computers
Amazing stuff!
Google search: "Triplet superconductivity is an exotic, rarely observed state of matter where electrons pair up with parallel spins (spin triplet S=1), in contrast to conventional "singlet" superconductors (spin S=0) where spins are antiparallel."
"... "Triplet superconductors make a number of unusual physical phenomena possible. These phenomena have important applications in quantum technology and spintronics," said Linder.
More detailed information about these applications:
The reason triplet superconductors can transfer spin without energy loss is that the superconducting particles now carry spin with them.
Triplet superconductors can also be used to create a very exotic type of particle called a "Majorana particle."
A Majorana particle is its own antiparticle. Therefore, it can perform calculations in a quantum computer in a stable way. ...
Conventional superconductors are so-called "singlet superconductors." In simple terms, this means that the superconducting particles do not have spin.
In triplet superconductors, however, the superconducting particles have spin. ...
"The fact that triplet superconductors have spin has an important consequence. We can now transport not only electrical currents but also spin currents with absolutely zero resistance," ...."
From the abstract:
"NbRe is a noncentrosymmetric superconductor that has been proposed as a candidate for intrinsic spin-triplet pairing. However, a conclusive demonstration of triplet pairing in NbRe is yet to be found. To probe the presence of spin-triplet Cooper pairs, we fabricated Py/NbRe/Py trilayers capped with an antiferromagnetic layer.
Magnetic and electrical measurements reveal an inverse spin-valve effect, which could indicate equal-spin-triplet superconductivity. The minimal sample structure and the lack of ad hoc engineered interfaces clearly associate our observation to intrinsic triplet correlations of NbRe. The availability of NbRe in thin-film form and the simplicity of the heterostructure highlight its potential as a scalable platform for superconducting spintronics."
Unveiling Intrinsic Triplet Superconductivity in Noncentrosymmetric NbRe through Inverse Spin-Valve Effects (no public access)
Unveiling Intrinsic Triplet Superconductivity in Noncentrosymmetric NbRe through Inverse Spin-Valve Effects (preprint, open access)
JPMorgan Chase for the first time confirms it closed Trump’s accounts after Jan. 6th Capitol attack
What! Incredible!
Hopefully, Trump will win his lawsuit against JPMorgan!
"JPMorgan Chase confirmed for the first time that it shut down the bank accounts of President Donald Trump and several of his business entities in the months following the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The disclosure was made in a court filing as part of the ongoing legal disputes related to “debanking.”
Trump has sued the bank and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, for $5 billion. ..."
CEO Jamie Dimon (official photo)
Turkey tightens trade embargo against Israel
What! As far as I remember, Turkey is still a NATO member! Sultan Erdogan wants to reestablish the Ottoman Empire!
"Turkey is tightening its trade embargo on Israel, which it introduced in May 2024. Since last week Turkey has stopped issuing "preference documents" to Israel (Eur-Med certificates), two sources familiar with the matter have told "Globes.". The certificates are issued as part of a multilateral trade agreement, which includes the EU, and allows for the receipt of customs exemption on goods, upon presentation of the certificate. ..."
Saturday, February 21, 2026
Cuba Under Siege: The Castro Regime Is Playing Its Last Card
Very recommendable! Is China using Cuba as a base for espionnage on the US?
Russia’s Economic Toll After 4 Years of War in Ukraine
Recommendable! When will the lethargic and apathetic Russian people finally get rid of Putin the Terrible!
Virginia high school suspended more than 300 hundred students over anti-ICE walkout during school hours
Good news! Bravo! Maybe these students should learn to protest after school or on weekends!
"A high school in Virginia suspended over 300 students for walking out of class for an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest ...
A letter from principal Heather Abney to parents of students said that the district did not endorse the walkout and that students who left campus without permission would be punished according to their regular code of behavior. A total of 303 students were suspended for three days. ..."
One night of sleep vital signs may Predict Illness several years ahead and over 100 health conditions
Amazing stuff!
"Difficulty sleeping often precedes heart disease, psychiatric disorders, and many other illnesses. Researchers used data gathered during sleep studies to detect such conditions.
What’s new: SleepFM is a system that classifies Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, prostate cancer, stroke, congestive heart failure, and many other conditions based on a person’s vital signs while asleep — as much as 6 years before they show symptoms. ...
Input/output: Recordings of one night of sleep in, disease classifications out
Architecture: Convolutional neural network encoder, transformer, LSTM
Performance: Can accurately classify over 130 conditions ...
How it works: SleepFM comprises a convolutional neural network (CNN), transformer, and LSTM. The authors trained the system in two stages:
(i) to encode patterns in sleep data and
(ii) to classify diseases.
The training data comprised roughly 585,000 hours of sleep-study recordings that included, in addition to each patient’s age and sex, signals of activity in the brain, heart, respiratory system (airflow, snoring, and blood oxygen level), and leg muscles. The data was mostly proprietary but included public datasets.
The authors trained the CNN and transformer together. ...
The authors added the LSTM and separately trained it, given 9 hours of sleep data as well as the subject’s age and sex, to classify more than 1,000 diseases.
Results: The authors compared SleepFM’s performance on a proprietary test set to the same system without pretraining and a vanilla neural network that was trained on only demographic information.
Across 14 general categories of disease ..."
From the abstract:
"Sleep is a fundamental biological process with broad implications for physical and mental health, yet its complex relationship with disease remains poorly understood. Polysomnography (PSG)—the gold standard for sleep analysis—captures rich physiological signals but is underutilized due to challenges in standardization, generalizability and multimodal integration.
To address these challenges, we developed SleepFM, a multimodal sleep foundation model trained with a new contrastive learning approach that accommodates multiple PSG configurations.
Trained on a curated dataset of over 585,000 hours of PSG recordings from approximately 65,000 participants across several cohorts, SleepFM produces latent sleep representations that capture the physiological and temporal structure of sleep and enable accurate prediction of future disease risk.
From one night of sleep, SleepFM accurately predicts 130 conditions with a C-Index of at least 0.75 (Bonferroni-corrected P < 0.01), including all-cause mortality (C-Index, 0.84), dementia (0.85), myocardial infarction (0.81), heart failure (0.80), chronic kidney disease (0.79), stroke (0.78) and atrial fibrillation (0.78).
Moreover, the model demonstrates strong transfer learning performance on a dataset from the Sleep Heart Health Study—a dataset that was excluded from pretraining—and performs competitively with specialized sleep-staging models such as U-Sleep and YASA on common sleep analysis tasks, achieving mean F1 scores of 0.70–0.78 for sleep staging and accuracies of 0.69 and 0.87 for classifying sleep apnea severity and presence.
This work shows that foundation models can learn the language of sleep from multimodal sleep recordings, enabling scalable, label-efficient analysis and disease prediction."
New AI model predicts disease risk while you sleep "Stanford Medicine scientists and their colleagues created the first artificial intelligence model that can predict more than 100 health conditions from one night’s sleep."
Fig. 1: Overview of SleepFM framework.
Reprogramming of brain glial cells to corticospinal neurons may treat ALS and spinal cord injuries
Good news!
"Harvard stem cell biologists have discovered a way to grow the type of brain cells that degenerate in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and suffer damage in spinal cord injuries.
In a paper published in the journal eLife, researchers engineered a cocktail of molecular signals to coax some “progenitor cells” — precursors that can differentiate into other cell types — to generate corticospinal neurons (CSNs), brain cells vital to voluntary motor control. ...
“.progenitor population is that it’s already distributed throughout the brain ... They’re sitting there — resident stem cells.”
The new study offers the first-ever model for growing corticospinal neurons in the lab, opening new windows for researching and potentially regenerating neurons for two devastating neurological afflictions. ..."
"eLife Assessment
This study presents fundamental new findings introducing a new approach for the reprogramming of brain glial cells to corticospinal neurons. The data is highly compelling, with multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the success of this new assay. These exciting findings set the stage for future studies of the potential of these reprogrammed cells to form functional connections in vivo and their utility in clinical conditions where corticospinal neurons are compromised."
From the abstract:
"Corticospinal neurons (CSN) centrally degenerate in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), along with spinal motor neurons, and loss of voluntary motor function in spinal cord injury (SCI) results from damage to CSN axons.
For functional regeneration of specifically affected neuronal circuitry in vivo, or for optimally informative disease modeling and/or therapeutic screening in vitro, it is important to reproduce the type or subtype of neurons involved. No such appropriate in vitro models exist with which to investigate CSN selective vulnerability and degeneration in ALS, or to investigate routes to regeneration of CSN circuitry for ALS or SCI, critically limiting the relevance of much research. Here, we identify that the HMG-domain transcription factor Sox6 is expressed by a subset of NG2+ endogenous cortical progenitors in postnatal and adult cortex, and that Sox6 suppresses a latent neurogenic program by repressing proneural Neurog2 expression by progenitors.
We FACS-purify these progenitors from postnatal mouse cortex and establish a culture system to investigate their potential for directed differentiation into CSN. We then employ a multi-component construct with complementary and differentiation-sharpening transcriptional controls (activating Neurog2, Fezf2, while antagonizing Olig2 with VP16:Olig2).
We generate corticospinal-like neurons from SOX6+/NG2+ cortical progenitors and find that these neurons differentiate with remarkable fidelity compared with corticospinal neurons in vivo. They possess appropriate morphological, molecular, transcriptomic, and electrophysiological characteristics, without characteristics of the alternate intracortical or other neuronal subtypes. We identify that these critical specifics of differentiation are not reproduced by commonly employed Neurog2-driven differentiation. Neurons induced by Neurog2 instead exhibit aberrant multi-axon morphology and express molecular hallmarks of alternate cortical projection subtypes, often in mixed form. Together, this developmentally-based directed differentiation from cortical progenitors sets a precedent and foundation for in vitro mechanistic and therapeutic disease modeling, and toward regenerative neuronal repopulation and circuit repair."
Fig. 1 Identification and culture of SOX6+/NG2+ cortical progenitors with high purity and fidelity
How will the roughly $134 billion in tariff revenues, collected by the Trump administration, be refunded?
Now that the US Supreme Court has decided that Trump did not have the authorization for these broad tariffs!
"The ruling leaves open a massive question: refunds. As much as $175 billion has been collected under the struck-down tariffs, and trade attorneys warn the refund process could take months to years. The Court’s opinion was silent on how repayment should work."
"The battle is just starting for the 300,000 businesses that want $134 billion in tariffs refunded. ...
As it turns out, convincing six Supreme Court justices that President Donald Trump overstepped his authority in imposing sweeping tariffs relying on emergency economic powers was the easy part. The hard part: Getting a clear answer on what happens to the tens of billions of dollars that US companies forked over after Trump jacked up tariffs on every global partner last year.
The Trump administration — both formally and informally — has promised to refund duties collected if the Supreme Court issued a ruling against them. But neither the administration nor any of the justices have specified exactly how it would work. ..."
Friday, February 20, 2026
SBA Kelly Loeffler talks about the revival of small businesses under Trump with Maria Bartiromo
Recommendable!
Laura Ingraham discuses the US Supreme Court decision on Trump's tariffs
Recommendable! Laura also discusses the two dissenting opinions, which seem to be a lot more convincing than the decision itself.
Meet OAT: The New Action Tokenizer Bringing LLM-Style Scaling and Flexible, Anytime Inference to the Robotics World
"Ordered Action Tokenization (OAT), developed by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, is a new framework that enables robots to learn and move using the same autoregressive methods as large language models. Traditional robot tokenizers were often too slow, lacked structure, or caused system crashes due to "undecodable" math. OAT solves these issues by satisfying three "desiderata":
high compression,
total decodability, and a
left-to-right causal ordering.
Using a technique called Nested Dropout, OAT forces the most important global movements into the first few tokens, while later tokens add fine-grained details. This unique "ordered" structure allows for anytime inference, where a robot can stop generating tokens early to react quickly or continue for higher precision. Across more than 20 tasks, OAT consistently outperformed industry-standard diffusion policies and other tokenization methods, offering a more scalable and flexible foundation for future robotic control ..."
From the abstract:
"Autoregressive policies offer a compelling foundation for scalable robot learning by enabling discrete abstraction, token-level reasoning, and flexible inference. However, applying autoregressive modeling to continuous robot actions requires an effective action tokenization scheme. Existing approaches either rely on analytical discretization methods that produce prohibitively long token sequences, or learned latent tokenizers that lack structure, limiting their compatibility with next-token prediction. In this work, we identify three desiderata for action tokenization - high compression, total decodability, and a left-to-right causally ordered token space - and introduce Ordered Action Tokenization (OAT), a learned action tokenizer that satisfies all three. OAT discretizes action chunks into an ordered sequence of tokens using transformer with registers, finite scalar quantization, and ordering-inducing training mechanisms. The resulting token space aligns naturally with autoregressive generation and enables prefix-based detokenization, yielding an anytime trade-off between inference cost and action fidelity. Across more than 20 tasks spanning four simulation benchmarks and real-world settings, autoregressive policies equipped with OAT consistently outperform prior tokenization schemes and diffusion-based baselines, while offering significantly greater flexibility at inference time."
OAT: Ordered Action Tokenization (preprint, open access)
Circadian cycles studied at single-cell level across the whole brain
Amazing stuff!
"Although circadian rhythms have been well studied in a few specific regions, their brain-wide organization remains poorly understood. To quantify spontaneous circadian neural activity at single-cell resolution, Yamashita et al. used tissue clearing and whole-brain immunostaining on a large number of mouse brains over two full circadian cycles. Circadian rhythmicity was present in many brain regions. The activity of most regions peaked during the animals’ active phase. However, sleep centers, visual areas, the dentate gyrus, and the cerebellum all peaked during the inactive phase. A closer look revealed distinct circadian phases even within individual regions, highlighting temporal heterogeneity. These findings will be useful for relating physiological and behavioral experimental data to the time-of-day–driven internal regulatory forces."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Although circadian rhythms have been well studied in a few specific regions, their brainwide organization remains poorly understood. To quantify spontaneous circadian neural activity at single-cell resolution, Yamashita et al. used tissue clearing and whole-brain immunostaining on a large number of mouse brains over two full circadian cycles. Circadian rhythmicity was present in many brain regions. The activity of most regions peaked during the animals’ active phase. However, sleep centers, visual areas, the dentate gyrus, and the cerebellum all peaked during the inactive phase. A closer look revealed distinct circadian phases even within individual regions, highlighting temporal heterogeneity. These findings will be useful for relating physiological and behavioral experimental data to the time-of-day–driven internal regulatory forces.
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Neural activity across different brain regions underlies essential physiological and behavioral functions. These activities are coordinated in space and time, and circadian rhythms are a fundamental temporal regulator of such activity, influencing sleep, metabolism, hormone secretion, and cognition. Although the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) has been extensively studied as the master pacemaker, how spontaneous neural activity is coordinated across the entire brain over the circadian cycle has remained elusive. Previous approaches, including electrophysiological recordings, in situ hybridization, immediate early gene labeling, circadian gene reporters, and calcium imaging, have typically been restricted to limited regions and lack spatial continuity, making it difficult to achieve a systematic view.
RATIONALE
To overcome these limitations, we used tissue clearing and three-dimensional whole-brain c-Fos immunostaining. c-Fos is notable for its rapid and broad induction across the brain, making it suitable for spatially comprehensive mapping of neural activity. By sampling brains every 4 hours over 2 days under constant darkness, we aimed to generate a whole-brain atlas of circadian neural activity at single-cell resolution and to identify how different regions and subregions contribute to the temporal organization of brain function.
RESULTS
Each brain contained between 0.4 and 3.0 million c-Fos–positive cells.
Time-series analysis of 144 brains revealed that 79% of 642 anatomically defined regions showed significant circadian rhythmicity. Most regions peaked during the late subjective night, corresponding to the active phase in nocturnal mice, whereas some, including sleep-promoting nuclei such as the ventrolateral preoptic area, peaked during the subjective day. Visual regions peaked during the daytime, in antiphase to auditory regions at night, highlighting functional specialization.
The hippocampal memory system showed notable internal diversity: CA1 and CA3 peaked during the active phase, whereas the dentate gyrus peaked during the inactive phase, nearly in antiphase. This inversion aligns with reports of dentate gyrus recruitment during sleep stages, suggesting phase-specific contributions to memory processing.
Voxelwise analysis further revealed distinct subregional dynamics, including heterogeneous patterns in the SCN and dorsomedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, and a gradual peak time shift along the dorsoventral axis within CA1, highlighting continuous spatiotemporal variation even within single structures. In addition, we demonstrated that whole-brain c-Fos activity patterns could accurately predict circadian time using computational approaches adapted from omics data, confirming that brain-wide rhythms collectively encode temporal information.
CONCLUSION
Our study establishes a comprehensive atlas of circadian neural activity at the whole-brain scale. By combining tissue clearing with large-scale time-series sampling and systematic quantitative analysis, we provide a global view of how neural activity rhythms are organized across hundreds of regions and subregions.
The open-access database we developed allows users to explore these rhythms by region or voxel and to upload custom regions of interest for analysis. It is designed to be compatible with gene expression, connectivity, and cell-type resources, enabling integrative analyses that link circadian activity with molecular and anatomical data.
Thus, this resource not only advances chronobiology but also provides a temporal framework across neuroscience, linking time-of-day dynamics to studies of diverse brain functions, pharmacology, and disease."
A whole-brain single-cell atlas of circadian neural activity in mice (no public access)
Here is an almost 17 minutes long YouTube video about this paper. (Caveat: I did not watch it)
Whole-brain single-cell atlas of circadian neural activity.
US Supreme Court Strikes Down Tariffs Core to Trump Economic Agenda
What's next? Is there another law possibly giving President Trump the authorization?
From an economic standpoint it would be justified (but not recommended) to respond with tariffs if another country imposes tariffs on US imports. Hower, such countervailing/reciprocal tariffs may violate international trade agreements.
"In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that President Donald Trump’s executive actions on tariffs exceeded his constitutional authority.
During oral arguments in November, even Trump-appointed justices seemed skeptical of the government’s arguments that the president could impose tariffs without congressional approval. ...
At issue was whether the president exceeded his executive branch authority by imposing tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law intended to address emergencies only.
The Trump administration has argued the trade imbalance constitutes a national emergency. Trump has consistently argued the United States has gotten a raw deal on trade with other countries that impose tariffs. ..."
Unorthodox ‘universal vaccine’ offers broad protection in mice
Good news!
"... scientists report that by dosing mice with a mix of immune-provoking molecules, they re-created this effect and protected the animals for several months against a variety of respiratory pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2. The researchers now hope to test a version of their “universal vaccine” in people. ..."
From the abstract:
"Traditional vaccines target specific pathogens, limiting their scope against diverse respiratory threats. We describe an intranasal liposomal formulation combining toll-like receptor (TLR) 4 and 7/8 ligands with a model antigen, ovalbumin, that provided broad, durable protection in mice for at least 3 months against infection with SARS-CoV-2 and Staphylococcus aureus. In addition, the vaccine protected mice from other viruses (SARS-CoV-2, SARS, SCH014 coronavirus), bacteria (Acinetobacter baumannii), and allergens.
Protection was mediated by persistent ovalbumin-specific CD4+ and CD8+ memory T cells that imprinted alveolar macrophages (AMs), enhancing antigen presentation and antiviral immunity.
Following infection, vaccinated mice mounted rapid pathogen-specific T cell and antibody responses and formed ectopic lymphoid structures in the lung. These results reveal a class of “universal vaccines” against diverse respiratory threats."
Spiritual practices strongly associated with reduced risk for hazardous alcohol and drug use, A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies
Getting high on religion and religious community may indeed help!
Pray and meditate more and be better off!
"Individuals who engaged in spirituality were significantly less likely to exhibit hazardous use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and illicit drugs, according to a new meta-analysis led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The meta-analysis is the first of its kind to synthesize and comprehensively estimate associations between harmful or hazardous substance use and spirituality—considered any practice, religious or otherwise, through which an individual finds ultimate meaning, purpose, and connection to something greater than themselves. ...
The meta-analysis found that broad spiritual practices, including spiritual and religious community involvement, attending religious services, meditation, and prayer, reduced individuals’ risk of dangerous alcohol and drug use by 13%. This reduction was greater (18%) among individuals attending religious services at least once per week. The results were consistent across all of the drug categories studied (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and illicit drugs). ..."
From the key points and abstract:
"Key Points
Question What is the association between spiritual exposures and related drug use outcomes?
Findings This meta-analysis of 55 rigorous studies on spirituality and harmful or hazardous drug use (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or illicit drugs) documented a significant protective association of 13% related to both prevention and recovery. The risk reduction, which extended across all 4 drug categories, reached 18% for individuals with greater than weekly religious service attendance.
Meaning
These results have implications for clinicians and communities regarding future strategies to address harmful or hazardous alcohol or other drug use.
Abstract
Importance
This meta-analysis examines rigorous longitudinal 21st century studies on the associations of spirituality with harmful or hazardous alcohol and other drug (AOD) use.
Objective
To synthesize findings from independent studies about spirituality and AOD use and to produce a comprehensive estimate of the overall effect size of the associated risk reduction.
Data Sources
Studies previously identified in the Balboni and colleagues review on the association between spiritual exposures (including religion) and alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or other drugs were pooled. ...
Study Selection
From an initial retrieval of more than 20 000 articles, a total of 55 spirituality studies (as defined by Puchalski and colleagues) that were
(1) published 2000-2022 in the English language,
(2) used validated measures of spirituality,
(3) examined longitudinal associations between spirituality and AOD use, and
(4) were either prospective cohort studies with sample sizes of 1000 or more or randomized clinical trials (eg, public health interventions) with sample sizes of 100 or more, were captured.
Data Extraction and Synthesis
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) reporting guidelines were used for abstracting data and assessing quality and validity. Eligible studies were those that reported quantitative outcomes measuring AOD use in relation to spiritual exposures, provided sufficient data to calculate log-relative risks (log-RR) and associated error terms, and focused on either preventive effect (eg, delayed initiation) or recovery-related outcomes (eg, cessation). Effects extracted were transformed into log-RR based on the type of effect.
Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was the association between spiritual or religious involvement and AOD. Subgroup analyses examined differences by AOD use type (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and illicit drugs) and exposure type (spiritual or religious attendance vs broader spiritual exposures).
Results
Results from the 55 studies, which collectively included 540,712 participants, documented a significant protective association related to both prevention and recovery between spirituality and AOD use outcomes.
Specifically, a consistent 13% risk reduction extended across the studied drugs (RR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.84-0.91), a figure that reached 18% for individuals engaging in spiritual or religious communities (defined as >weekly religious service attendance; RR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.75-0.89).
Virtually all 134 effects extracted from the studies demonstrated protective, not detrimental, results. Multiple sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of evidence.
Conclusions and Relevance
The results of this meta-analysis regarding a protective association between spirituality and AOD use have implications for clinicians and communities regarding future strategies for AOD use prevention and recovery."
Spirituality and Harmful or Hazardous Alcohol and Other Drug Use A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies
New study maps where wheat, barley and rye grew before the first farmers found them
Recommendable!
"Using advanced machine learning and climate models, researchers have shown that the ancestors of crops like wheat, barley, and rye probably were much less widespread in the Middle East 12,000 years ago than previously believed. This challenges traditional assumptions about the geography of early plant domestication and agriculture. ..."
From the abstract:
"This paper presents the first continuous, spatially-explicit reconstructions of the palaeodistributions of 65 plant species found regularly in association with early agricultural archaeological sites in West Asia [Middle East], including the progenitors of the first crops. We used machine learning to train an ecological niche model of each species based on its present-day distribution in relation to climate and environmental variables. Predictions of the potential niches of these species at key stages of the Pleistocene–Holocene transition could then be derived from these models using downsampled data from palaeoclimate simulations. Our models performed well against independent contemporary test data, but their ability to predict the occurrence of specific species at archaeological sites was much more variable, probably reflecting a tendency of the method to underestimate the species’ fundamental niche. Nevertheless, the majority of species are predicted to have had more restricted geographic distributions under past climate conditions compared to today. Crop progenitors and several wild food species are modelled to have been concentrated in the Levant and, to a lesser extent, Cyprus and Western Anatolia, suggesting these regions may have served as glacial refugia. The average size of species’ niche shrunk by an average of c. 25% from the terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene, indicating that economically significant plants were adapted to cryo-arid conditions and did not, as often assumed, initially respond positively to the ‘ameliorated’ climate of the Holocene."
New study maps where wheat, barley and rye grew before the first farmers found them (original news release)
Figure 1 Map of the study region (West Asia, grey box) with locations of Late Epipalaeolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages.
Sub-$200 Lidar Could be installed in every car
Good news!
"MicroVision, a solid-state sensor technology company located in Redmond, Wash., says it has designed a solid-state automotive lidar sensor intended to reach production pricing below US $200. That’s less than half of typical prices now, and it’s not even the full extent of the company’s ambition. The company says its longer-term goal is $100 per unit. MicroVision’s claim, which, if realized, would place lidar within reach of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) rather than limiting it to high-end autonomous vehicle programs. Lidar’s limited market penetration comes down to one issue: cost. ..."
MicroVision hopes to produce a lidar unit costing under US $200—half of typical prices today.
Thursday, February 19, 2026
India's Prime Minister Modi meets His Serene Highness Hereditary Prince Alois of Liechtenstein
This seems unusual! Liechtenstein is a very small country in Western Europe, a principality! Most people probably never heard of!
Female UAE minister of state Reem Al Hashimy praises ‘truly momentous’ day for Trump's Board of Peace
Very recommendable! In her opinion, President Trump makes a huge difference!
Trump launches 10 BILLION dollar minerals reserve to counter China with Maria Bartiromo
Recommendable!
Interview with Export-Import Bank of the United States president and chairman John Jovanovic.
Macron asks Meloni not to 'comment' on France's affairs after activist remark. Really!
The French President seems to be thin skinned! Or he does not like remarks from a younger woman since prefers older, rich women! 😊
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