Good news! Homeland Security Sec. Markwayne Mullin also specifically mentions how illegal drugs get into Alaska.
Friday, August 14, 2026
US, Mexico join forces to TACKLE violent drug cartels
Kenya & Tanzania’s Rail Race Targets Africa's Trade through Uganda, Rwanda, DRC
Good news especially for some of the landlocked countries of east Africa!
'No such thing as a regional conflict anymore,' US Strategic Command chief says
Food for thought! However, the article below seems to be strangely limited to information warfare.
By any other name, e.g. the Russo-Ukrainian War is already a World War III given how many countries are involved on both sides.
The Iran war of 2026 is fast expanding geographically encompassing more and more countries.
Then we have weaponized drones flying into other than the warring countries either by defensive measures, or intentional rerouting or otherwise (e.g. Ukrainian drones ending up in Baltic States or Romania etc.).
"... “There is no such thing as a regional conflict anymore,” Correll said. “Every conflict is global in the information domain.” ..."
Iceland's EU referendum at end of August 2026: "No" is a vote for freedom
This will be an interesting referendum! Hope and pray the citizens of Iceland will vote no! Population of Iceland less than 400,000.
"On 29 August 2026, Iceland holds a referendum on whether to renew its 2009 application for membership of the European Union, which was put on hold in 2013.
Iceland is already deeply integrated into Europe through its membership of the European Economic Area (EEA) with Norway, Liechtenstein, and, for all practical purposes, Switzerland, since 1994. Through the EEA, it enjoys access to the Single Market while retaining control of its fisheries, agriculture, foreign trade, and monetary affairs.
Supporters of membership argue, however, that Iceland should join the EU to exert influence over the rules of the Single Market. Opponents counter that this influence would be negligible: 0.8 per cent of the members of Parliament; 0.1 per cent of the vote on most issues in the European Council; one out of 28 commissioners and one out of 28 judges in the Court of Justice of the European Union, both of whom are supposed not to serve the interests of their home country. ..."
Flag of Iceland (Source)
Why are Muslim American Politicians Uniformly Democrats? Really!
Good question, but is it true or just a historical coincidence? Are Republican muslims perhaps less prominent and/or more silent/less outspoken about their religious beliefs?
Or do the mainstream media avoid reporting on Muslim Republicans?
Caveat: I did not read the article.
"Muslim Americans are increasingly getting involved in American politics.
Most prominent are members of Congress Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Andre Carson (D-Ind.), and Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.).
Most prominent among several mayors is Democrat Zohran Mamdani in New York City.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, now running for the Senate seat in Michigan, could become the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate. ..."
Why Aging May Be a Program, Not a Breakdown
Very recommendable! An interesting hypothesis! Will we one day find the triggers of the aging program in humans?
"... Yet the underlying biology of aging remains a matter of uncertainty and debate.
Many lines of research align with the theory that aging is a direct result of decay — the inevitable degradation of molecules (including proteins or DNA), organelles, cells, or whole organs — from external assault or inexorable breakdown. When the body’s repair mechanisms fail to keep pace with these changes ...
Far from a random but linear process of wear and tear ... aging is a stepwise, programmed, orderly affair. “The destruction of the system is programmed at a very early stage,” ... Using technology that offers a systemwide view of the aging process in mice ... has outlined discrete stages of aging, akin to those of embryonic development, that are defined by changes in molecular signals and specific cell populations. In humans, the process likely begins before age 30. ...
In one series of experiments ... processed 21 million cells, sampled from 14 tissues or organs in about 50 male and female mice at five life stages, and built a data set of gene expression for each cell. “It’s extremely large-scale data,” ... “You know which organ it’s from and which age it’s from, and you also know extensive molecular information.” Each stage was marked by a dramatic decline in or expansion of specific cell types. ...
Two of his landmark papers, published in 2025 and 2026 in Science, point to a radical redistribution of the cells that make up the body as mammals age, and describe some of the epigenomic instructions that guide this process. “There are molecular changes and maybe some other changes in aging,” ... “but they all converge in the remodeling of the cell society.” ...
In one set of studies, we extracted more than 20 million cells from various organs from mice of different ages: 3, 6, 12, 16, and 23 months — roughly equivalent to 20, 30, 50, 60, and 75 years in humans. We analyzed the expression of 20,000 genes per cell and used this information to define the cell types. Then we tracked their population dynamics. ...
We found that not every cell type gets changed in aging. We identified 536 main cell types and 1,828 subtypes. Only about one-quarter of these subtypes show a strong shift in aging. Others remain stable across the lifespan.
It is surprising to find that changes in aging are not universal across all the cells, that there are specific cell populations that are more vulnerable. ...
We found that aging can be separated into distinct time windows. In each window, specific groups of cells show coordinated dynamics.
In the early phase, for example, we see that some cell types are rapidly depleted. This is followed by another phase, in which other cells are greatly expanded. ...
researchers have observed a phenomenon called “abrupt aging” in middle-aged humans that is consistent with the cell population dynamics we saw. When researchers analyze protein signatures in human blood, they see a significant change between the mid-40s and late 50s. People also tend to report an abrupt decline in function in middle age ...
What do your findings tell us about the nature of aging?
Previously, people saw aging as a linear accumulation of damage to molecules such as proteins and DNA.
But we found that aging is not a linear process. It’s more like a developmental process, in which there are distinct stages that involve coordinated changes in specific cell types across different organs. Our claim is that aging is not so much molecular damage as a remodeling of the entire cell society. ...
Our technology allows us to examine the genomic program that governs the function of each cell — which regions of the genome are active and which are silent. If it’s random molecular damage, we might see random changes across the genome. But we always see the same regions that are open [active] or closed [silent] at each stage. We identified 280,000 genomic regions that are reproducibly open or closed during the aging process in specific cell types. ...
So the body has a program for aging?
Yes, the abrupt changes in mammalian aging along with the coordinated cellular dynamics at each stage suggest there are upstream signals that control aging. It’s like a tree in autumn: Its leaves fall not in a linear way but in just two weeks during the transition between summer and autumn. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract (1):
"Editor’s summary
Aging is a complex process that results in functional changes across tissues and cell types. These changes are beginning to be documented across organismal lifespans using single-nuclei RNA sequencing. Zhang et al. generated cell atlases across multiple time points in both a commonly used mouse strain and two immunodeficient strains and their wild-type counterparts, cataloging changes in cell populations and expression changes within cell types over these time points. Investigating the role of a diminished immune complement, the authors found that certain intestinal epithelial populations increased in the absence of these adult lymphocytes. This study provides a resource for researchers studying aging, particularly in the context of immunodeficiency. ...
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
As we age, certain cell types within the diverse cellular landscape of various organs undergo substantial changes. These alterations not only affect the overall function of the organism but also play a critical role in the development of age-related diseases.
Cataloging these vulnerable cell types is essential for understanding the cellular basis of aging-related pathologies and for identifying potential interventions. However, the inherent heterogeneity and varying cell proportions within each organ make it challenging to identify rare but crucial aging-associated cell types. Although single-cell genomics studies have examined the effect of aging on various organs, conventional studies face challenges such as imbalanced sex representation, biased age sampling, and limited cell coverage. These limitations hinder a comprehensive and systematic dissection of the aging process at the cellular level.
RATIONALE
To establish a panoramic cellular characterization of organismal aging in mammals and identify cell types associated with the aging process, we optimized the low-cost, high-throughput EasySci method to establish a unified single-nuclei profiling platform for all major mammalian organs. We collected and profiled tissue and organ samples from mice across their life span using a sex-balanced cohort with multiple replicates, all processed by a single individual to minimize batch effects.
To dissect intercellular regulatory networks, we used a cell-knockdown strategy to selectively deplete mature lymphocytes in vivo in adult and aged mice, allowing us to investigate their role in regulating the population dynamics of other cell types during aging.
RESULTS
We generated PanSci, an atlas comprising single-nucleus transcriptome profiles of 21,786,931 cells from >600 samples, covering 14 different tissues or organs across five life stages in both male and female mice.
This extensive dataset enabled us to construct a unified cellular map of organismal aging, identifying >300 distinct cell types and >3000 cellular states. Using this dataset, we characterized sex-dimorphic gene expression patterns shared across organs and cell types as well as cell types with sex-specific molecular programs. Additionally, by clustering >200 cell subtypes undergoing marked aging-associated population changes, we uncovered nonlinear temporal dynamics of aging at the cellular level.
Moreover, we mapped the cross-organ immune landscape of aging, revealing both widespread and organ-specific alterations in immune cells. We further explored the regulatory roles of the immune system on aging and pinpointed specific age-related cell population expansions that are lymphocyte dependent.
CONCLUSION
PanSci provides a comprehensive catalog of aging-related cell population changes, featuring a balanced representation of replicates across sexes, a broader age range, and substantially larger cell numbers compared with existing studies. Our data suggest that aging, at the cellular level, progresses through dynamic changes rather than a simple linear trajectory.
By identifying >200 distinct cellular states with marked aging-related changes, we demonstrate the potential of scalable single-cell genomic techniques to uncover key cellular targets for therapeutic innovations aimed at restoring cellular functions and rejuvenating systemic biological processes in aging and diseases. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract (2):
"Editor’s summary
Aging atlases have been generated for multiple organisms, but they are often restricted to capturing the transcriptional landscape across cells.
Lu et al. created a single-cell chromatin accessibility atlas in mice for 21 tissues over three age time points ... They combined this atlas with a previous gene expression atlas of aging and found many changes in cellular composition and chromatin accessibility with aging.
Changes occurred across cell types, but immune cells in particular showed diverging patterns with aging, and the authors were able to trace these patterns to particular transcription factor motifs within the peaks. Many of these changes were sex specific, reinforcing the importance of using diverse samples in such endeavors. ...
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Aging is the leading risk factor for many diseases. This association underscores the potential of therapies targeting the aging process itself to delay or prevent age-related diseases. Substantial advances in single-cell genomics have enabled the profiling of alterations in aging. However, these analyses typically focus on transcriptomics and overlook the impact of chromatin landscapes.
RATIONALE
Single-cell assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq), which analyzes genome-wide chromatin accessibility at the single-cell level, has enabled the mapping of the cell type–specific chromatin landscape in a range of mammalian tissues.
With a further optimized version of single-cell ATAC-seq by combinatorial indexing (EasySci-ATAC), we investigated aging-associated changes in cell populations and chromatin changes across the entire organism, aiming to identify aging-associated noncoding regions and their corresponding cell types.
RESULTS
In this study, we applied EasySci-ATAC to profile chromatin accessibility in more than 10 million nuclei across 21 tissue types from mice spanning three age groups (1 month, 5 months, and 21 months). We detected a total of 1.3 million cis-regulatory elements and identified cell type–specific usages of them.
We reported aging-associated population dynamics of 536 tissue-level main cell types and 1828 finer-grained subtypes. In broadly distributed cell types, we observed coordinated expansion or depletion of the same subtype in multiple organs.
At the molecular level, we identified extensive chromatin reprogramming with aging, including changes in the accessibility of individual peaks and certain transcription factor motifs, and linked them to expression changes of putative target genes.
Moreover, we detected extensive sexual dimorphism, including age-conserved, sex-specific chromatin states for the same cell types and age-sex interaction effects at both proportional and molecular levels.
CONCLUSION
Our organism-level single-cell chromatin accessibility atlas illuminates how aging remodels cellular composition and regulatory regions of multiple tissues.
In addition to many highly tissue-specific changes, we uncovered coordinated cellular and molecular dynamics that are shared across different organs, including immune remodeling, broad depletion of functional cell types, the emergence of inflammation-related states, and sex-dependent trajectories.
By cataloging these changes, we offer a resource for understanding the molecular logic of aging and for guiding therapeutic strategies aimed at preserving or restoring youthful tissue states. ..."
A panoramic view of cell population dynamics in mammalian aging (1, no public access, only cited 94 times which is low for a paper that was first published March 2024 as preprint)
A Panoramic View of Cell Population Dynamics in Mammalian Aging (1, preprint, open access)
Organism-wide cellular dynamics and epigenomic remodeling in mammalian aging (2, no public access, cite 14 times)
Organism-wide cellular dynamics and epigenomic remodeling in mammalian aging (2, preprint, open access)
Cellular architecture of organismal aging.
An organism-wide single-cell atlas of chromatin accessibility reveals cellular dynamics and epigenomic remodeling during aging.
Graduate Student Proves the Fractal Uncertainty Principle
Recommendable! Until now I was only familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty/indeterminacy Principle in physics.
From the abstract (very short):
"We prove that if a fractal set in Rd avoids lines in a certain quantitative sense, which we call line porosity, then it has a fractal uncertainty principle. The main ingredient is a new higher dimensional Beurling-Malliavin multiplier theorem."
Fractal uncertainty in higher dimensions (preprint, open access)
WaiT for the Signal: Simple Frequency-Aware Flow-Matching
This could be an interesting new paper by Stéphane Mallat and Luke Zettlemoyer and their team.
From the abstract:
"As image generation models scale to ever higher resolutions, global coherence, local detail, and texture fidelity become critical axes for generation quality.
However, standard flow matching treats all spatial frequencies uniformly, ignoring the natural frequency hierarchy where high-frequency bands become indistinguishable from pure noise far earlier than coarse structures.
We introduce WaiT, a Wavelet-aware image Transformer that decomposes generation into coarse and fine bands via lossless wavelets.
True to its name, the high-frequency bands wait for the signal: staying pure noise until coarse structure has emerged, then joining the flow for joint refinement.
Since standard FID discards fine-grained detail through aggressive downsampling, we introduce a more stringent three-axis evaluation protocol to assess quality at native resolution.
On ImageNet 512x512, WaiT achieves a pixel-space FID of 1.43 and is Pareto-optimal across all three axes, reducing sampling compute by up to 50%.
With our largest 2B model, we set a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.3 for pixel-space models on ImageNet 512 resolution.
Our formulation outperforms even the strongest latent-space models on texture fidelity, and scales seamlessly to high-resolution OpenImages and to video generation, achieving a state-of-the-art FVD of 0.84 on Kinetics-600 with no algorithmic modifications."
Brain cancer cells exploit normal nerve signaling to multiply and invade, new study finds
Amazing stuff! Cancer is history (soon)!
"... Many gliomas arise from, or contain cells that closely resemble, oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs), which are immature support cells in the brain. These OPC-like cells are a major part of tumors such as glioblastoma (GBM) and H3K27M-altered diffuse midline glioma (DMG). What makes this especially interesting is how closely glioma cells mirror healthy OPCs, sharing many of the same biological behaviors. ..."
From the abstract:
"Glioma pathophysiology is robustly regulated by interactions with neurons. Key to these interactions is the role of neuroligin-3 (NLGN3), a synaptic adhesion molecule shed in response to neuronal activity that functions as a paracrine factor crucial for glioma growth.
Here we elucidate the mechanistic pathway whereby shed NLGN3 interacts with glioma and their normal glial counterparts.
NLGN3 binds to chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan 4 (CSPG4, also known as NG2) on both glioma and healthy oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs), facilitating CSPG4 shedding by ADAM10.
NLGN3–CSPG4 interactions alter membrane tension, thereby activating mechanotransducers, primarily PIEZO1, leading to membrane depolarization and subsequent ADAM10-mediated CSPG4 shedding.
The NLGN3–CSPG4–PIEZO1 pathway maintains OPCs in an undifferentiated, stem-like state and promotes glioma proliferation, underscoring its dual roles in healthy and malignant contexts."
It appears there is no original news release about this research by any of the involved institutions.
Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace issues first building contract – for a military base for Moroccan soldiers
An irony of history! 😊 Securing the peace comes first. This news is a little bit dated.
The company involved, i.e. Arkel International, has not provided a press release about it.
"... Louisiana firm awarded tender to build rudimentary outpost to house Moroccan troops. ..."
"... [President] Trump’s Board of Peace, which was set up in January to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, has finally issued its first construction contract in the devastated territory: a project to build a rudimentary 150-person military outpost to house Moroccan troops, a source familiar with the matter told the Guardian.
The contract, which has not yet been finalised, was awarded to Arkel International, a Louisiana-based firm that has previously carried out work with the US government in countries such as Iraq"
Credits: Defense News
Why brain imaging struggles to identify psychiatric disorder signatures
This is very odd indeed!
"... Researchers ... analyzed thousands of brain scans collected in earlier studies to better understand the reasons for these observed inconsistencies. Their findings ... suggest that many widely used experimental designs and tools might fail to reliably capture the subtle differences in brain structure linked with distinct psychiatric disorders. ...
"... To quantify the severity of this inconsistency, the study involved a world-first analysis of more than 6,000 brain scans, evaluating the consistency of grey matter volume and cortical thickness. Researchers pooled existing MRI data from 25 studies across 59 sites globally, covering five major psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, autism spectrum disorder, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder. ..."
but decades of research using brain-scanning technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have failed to reach a consensus about which brain changes are most characteristic of different psychiatric disorders. ...
the findings suggest categories like "depression" may not describe people with the same underlying brain condition; instead, they may represent an umbrella term that groups together people with symptoms caused by distinct sets of brain changes. ..."
From the abstract:
"Decades of structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have documented alterations of gray matter morphometry in psychiatric disorders, but the field has failed to identify any consensus disease phenotypes.
Here we examine whether current approaches will ever converge on such phenotypes by evaluating the consistency of brain-wide maps of gray matter volume and cortical thickness differences obtained for each of 59 study sites of five psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, autism spectrum disorder, major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder), totaling 2,437 patients and 2,065 controls.
We find that cross-site consistency is low (median r ≤ 0.16); markedly reduced compared to Alzheimer’s disease (r = 0.54); unexplained by demographic, clinical or scanner differences; and robust to analytic choices.
Using bootstrapping, we observe that consistency may improve for sample sizes ≥200 per group for schizophrenia but that other disorders may require much larger samples.
Our findings indicate that current widespread practices in structural MRI are unlikely to identify robust morphometric phenotypes for psychiatric disorders."
Monash study reveals decades of psychiatric brain imaging research has failed to replicate (original news release)
Fig. 1: Analysis pipeline.
Nearly 94 million of the estimated 154 million lives saved since 1974 resulted from measles vaccine protection. Really!
Sorry, but this seems not not very impressive given that between 6.5 and 7 billion babies were born since 1974 (according to Google Search).
How many children suffered from or were killed by measle vaccinations during the same time period? I had a multi prompt dialog with Google AI about this question. It appears there are no reliable statistical data available at least not on a global scale or such data is simply not collected. However, Google AI points out there are severe allergic reactions associated with measle vaccination and that improper handling of the vaccination can cause serious complications etc. We are to believe that measles vaccinations are safe anywhere in the world.
Teureres heizen mit klimafreundlichen Gasen in der Bananenrepublik Deutschland
Neues aus der Bananenrepublik D! Die Mauer fiel und der Sozialismus breitete sich in ganz Deutschland aus!
Dem Klimawahn ist kein Opfer zu schade! Am deutschen Unwesen wird die Welt nicht genesen!
Z.B. die Chinesischen Kommunisten lachen sich kaputt über die dämlichen Deutschen während in China weiter hunderte von Kohlekraftwerken gebaut werden.
"... Allerdings muss spätestens 2045 auch der Gebäudebestand in Deutschland klimaneutral sein. Deshalb regelt das neue Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetz, wann und in welchem Umfang klimafreundliche Brennstoffe in neuen fossilen Heizungen eingesetzt werden müssen:
Bis zum Jahr 2028 können alle Brennstoffe verwendet werden,
ab 2029 müssen mindestens 10 Prozent,
ab 2030 mindestens 15 Prozent,
ab 2035 mindestens 30 Prozent und
ab 2040 mindestens 60 Prozent klimaneutrale Brennstoffe verwendet werden, ...
ab 2045 die Komplettumstellung auf Stoffe wie Biomethan, Bioheizöl, biogenes Flüssiggas oder nachhaltig erzeugten Wasserstoff erfolgen muss. ..."
Once more the Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives made a fool out of himself
The top leadership of the Dimocratic Party in the US Congress (senile Chuck Schumer and DEI choice Hakeem Jeffries) is very mediocre! This is really bad for a two-party system like the US.
The Minority Leader gave a speech at the National Association of Black Journalists.
According to Google Search his speech is still not published. Representative Jeffries website is outdated as far as press releases are concerned (see screen print below).
President Trump has so far appointed three Supreme Court Justices who were then confirmed.
"House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled that Democrats would look to overhaul the Supreme Court if they regain power in Washington.
In remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta [August 12-16, 2026], Jeffries said he believes “dramatic Supreme Court reform is necessary” and described the conservative wing of the court as a “subsidiary” of President Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. ..."
The Dimocratic Party opted for a DEI choice when they selected Hakeem Jeffries for this job he is obviously not qualified for!
Top Democrat Targets Supreme Court for Changes (behind paywall) "‘Variety of different options’ are on the table if Democrats regain power, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says"
Iraqi federal government is considering using force to disarm Iranian-backed Iraqi militias if they fail to disarm by September 30
Good news! What took so long!
"... Iraqi sources told Saudi media on August 12 that the Iraqi federal government has a plan to deploy Iraqi Army, Counter Terrorism Service, and other “elite” units around Iraqi militia operation centers to restrict the militias’ freedom of movement and supplies after the September 30 disarmament deadline."
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Hollywood Swinging - Kool & the Gang
Enjoy! Don't miss the trumpet solo roughly in the middle of the video!
Is Northern Ethiopia on the Brink of War Again? Tigray Tensions Escalate
Bad news! Again a possible war in the Horn of Africa?
China Hunts For Rare Earths In Iran
Serious stuff! When China gets into bed with a rogue state!
Pentagon centralizes oversight across offensive and defensive drone programs
Good news!
"The Pentagon has introduced the direct-reporting portfolio manager for unmanned systems (DRPM-UxS), a new position established by War Secretary Pete Hegseth. This role is designed to oversee all Department of War drone and counter-drone programs, consolidating management of unmanned aerial, surface, underwater and ground systems, as well as related autonomy and AI initiatives, under a single leader. The DRPM-UxS will report directly to Deputy War Secretary Stephen Feinberg."
"
- War Secretary Pete Hegseth established the DRPM-UxS, a new direct-report position to oversee all Pentagon drone and counter-drone efforts
- The role covers UAS groups 1–3, surface and underwater vessels, ground systems, AI and swarming software, counter-drone, and drone and counter-drone marketplaces
- Senior Pentagon officials will discuss military drone and autonomy efforts at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2026 Air and Space Summit on July 30 and the 2026 Navy Summit on Aug. 27
... "
ZESTy robots do the cartwheel and other feats
Amazing stuff! This could be a breakthrough!
The researchers of this paper are with Robotics and AI Institute, which seems to be in a sort of stealth mode as it appears it has not published anything recently on ZEST. E.g. searching for ZEST on their website results in nothing. None of the authors of this paper are familiar to me.
Notice only about 7 months elapsed between preprint date and journal article date. This is unusually fast.
From the abstract:
"Achieving robust, humanlike whole-body control on humanoid robots for agile, contact-rich behaviors remains a central challenge, demanding heavy per-skill engineering and a brittle process of tuning controllers.
We introduce ZEST (zero-shot embodied skill transfer), a streamlined motion-imitation framework that trains policies via reinforcement learning from diverse sources—high-fidelity motion capture, noisy monocular video, and non–physics-constrained animation—and deploys them to hardware zero-shot.
ZEST generalizes across behaviors and platforms without relying on contact labels, reference or observation windows, state estimators, or extensive reward shaping.
Its training pipeline combines adaptive sampling, which focuses training on difficult motion segments, and an automatic curriculum using a model-based assistive wrench, together enabling dynamic, long-horizon maneuvers.
We further provide a procedure for selecting joint-level gains from approximate analytical armature values for closed-chain actuators, along with a refined model of actuators. Trained entirely in simulation with moderate domain randomization, ZEST demonstrated broad generality.
On Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid, ZEST learned dynamic, multicontact skills (army crawl and breakdancing) from motion capture. It transferred expressive dance and scene-interaction skills, such as box climbing, directly from videos to Atlas and the Unitree G1.
Furthermore, it extended across morphologies to the Spot quadruped, enabling acrobatics, such as a continuous backflip, through animation.
Together, these results demonstrate robust zero-shot deployment across heterogeneous data sources and embodiments, establishing ZEST as a scalable interface between biological movements and their robotic counterparts."
ZEST: Zero-shot embodied skill transfer for athletic robot control (no public access)
ZEST: Zero-shot Embodied Skill Transfer for Athletic Robot Control (preprint, open access)
In a first, US will allow some private firms to carry out cyberattacks and disruptive operation against Transnational Criminal Organizations
Concerning! This could potentially have international ramifications! As a minimum these operations would have to be closely monitored and supervised.
"The U.S. government will for the first time allow vetted private companies to launch offensive cyber operations against international criminal gangs and hackers, the White House said on Wednesday.
In a newly published presidential memorandum, the Trump administration said the move will allow the federal government to use “innovative capabilities of the private sector” to combat cybercrime and threats targeting Americans, such as ransomware attacks, financial scams, and sextortion.
The memorandum allows private companies participating in the government’s program to conduct surveillance, like using spyware to collect intelligence, as well as make disruptive attacks aimed at the destruction of criminals’ data or systems.
The policy change marks a seismic shift in the U.S. government’s long-standing position under U.S. federal computer hacking laws, which broadly prohibit private companies from conducting cyberattacks or disruption operations without a court-authorized approval. ..."
The average Canadian family spent 42% of its income on taxes in 2025 - which is more than they spent on housing, food, and clothing combined.
Bad news! This overtaxation of Canadian citizens has been going on for too many years!
"Taxes versus the Necessities of Life: The Canadian Consumer Tax Index, 2026 Edition
- The Canadian Consumer Tax Index tracks the total tax bill of the average Canadian family from 1961 to 2025. Including all types of taxes, that bill has increased by 2,928% since 1961.
- Taxes have grown much more rapidly than any other single expenditure for the average Canadian family: expenditures on shelter increased by 2,349%, food by 952%, and clothing by 526% from 1961 to 2025.
- The 2,928% increase in the tax bill has also greatly outpaced the increase in the Consumer Price Index (946%), which measures the average price that consumers pay for food, shelter, clothing, transportation, health and personal care, education, and other items.
- The average Canadian family now spends more of its income on taxes (41.9%) than it does on basic necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing combined (36.0%). By comparison, 33.5% of the average family’s income went to pay taxes in 1961 while 56.5% went to basic necessities.
- In 2025, the average Canadian family earned an income of $121,111 and paid total taxes equaling $50,721 (41.9%). In 1961, the average family had an income of $5,000 and paid a total tax bill of $1,675 (33.5%).
..."
The solution for Israel's jammed roads: smart traffic lights
Good news! An idea whose time is long overdue!
"... in the past few years Netivei Israel - the National Transport Infrastructure Company has deployed some 170 AI-based adaptive traffic lights in an attempt to analyze demand and adapt in real time to the situation on the roads. ...
Netivei Israel’s sample comprises 25 junctions presenting different scenarios. The average time saving at those junctions over the course of the day was 25 seconds per vehicle.
At Furedeis junction, traversed by some 80,000 vehicles daily, the total daily time saving was estimated at 771 hours.
At the junction at the entrance to Kiryat Tiv’on, the time saving was measured at up to 56 seconds on average per vehicle, or a total of 679 hours per day. ..."
Robot Recycler Salvages Parts From Broken or end of life Robots
Good news! This seems to be still early, preliminary work!
The famous Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" of free markets! The coming and going of new businesses!
The Achilles heel of this system seems to be the requirement to work off CAD data of the broken robot. What if the CAD data is e.g. not available?
"... There are over 4 million industrial robots in use worldwide, according to the International Federation of Robotics. And researchers predict that number will grow to over 16 million by 2030, as manufacturing rapidly increases. But what’s going to happen when they start breaking down?
A new system designed by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in Karlsruhe, Germany, can predict the defect in a broken product and disassemble it while protecting valuable parts from damage. To continue robotic development sustainably, the industry should prepare for the dismantling, recycling, and rebuilding of our robotic systems. ...
KIT’s robotic disassembly system relies on a CAD model of the broken product and of each part, so it can see how the parts should behave and understand if anything is out of the ordinary. It also uses a mathematical model to predict the damage done to a broken part.
When you give the system a broken device and a CAD model, it first guesses how each part of the broken device should move. The axes each part can move along are called degrees of freedom (for example, a screw should rotate, but not move side to side). The disassembler nudges each part to see if it moves as expected. Based on how the part actually moves, it then uses the mathematical model to predict what went wrong with the part: A corroded part might move less than you think it should, a loose screw may move more, and a deformed part might have different degrees of freedom than expected.
At the beginning of disassembly, the system formulates a plan. It guesses what might be wrong with the device it’s taking apart, and then can change its guess based on observing each piece it takes apart. ..."
From the abstract:
"To support the circular economy, robotic systems must not only assemble new products but also disassemble end-of-life (EOL) ones for reuse, recycling, or safe disposal.
Existing approaches to disassembly sequence planning often assume deterministic and fully observable product models, yet real EOL products frequently deviate from their initial designs due to wear, corrosion, or undocumented repairs.
We argue that disassembly should therefore be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which naturally captures uncertainty about the product's internal state. We present a mathematical formulation of disassembly as a POMDP, in which hidden variables represent uncertain structural or physical properties.
Building on this formulation, we propose a task and motion planning framework that automatically derives specific POMDP models from CAD data, robot capabilities, and inspection results.
To obtain tractable policies, we approximate this formulation with a reinforcement-learning approach that operates on stochastic action outcomes informed by inspection priors, while a Bayesian filter continuously maintains beliefs over latent EOL conditions during execution.
Using three products on two robotic systems, we demonstrate that this probabilistic planning framework outperforms deterministic baselines in terms of average disassembly time and variance, generalizes across different robot setups, and successfully adapts to deviations from the CAD model, such as missing or stuck parts."
From CAD to POMDP: Probabilistic Planning for Robotic Disassembly of End-of-Life Products (preprint, open access)
Young Female Dance instructor accused of sexually abusing teens at studio; authorities fear there could be more victims
Another Me Too event!
Welcome to the age of gender equality! Men/boys watch out!
"Delaware dance instructor was arrested for allegedly sexually abusing teenagers who attended classes at the studio where she worked, according to authorities. Law enforcement warned there could be more sexual abuse victims.
Delaware State Police said in a statement that 23-year-old Emily Pryor Albino of Seaford was arrested and charged with four felony counts of first-degree sexual abuse of a child by a person of trust and one felony count of sexual solicitation of a child using a computer/cell phone/other electronic device ..."
"Image source: Delaware State Police"
Bomb Hidden in Trash Bin Kills Russian/Ukrainian Officer Who Defected From Ukraine in Russian-occupied Sevastopol, Crimea
Is the Ukraine copying from the Israeli Mossad playbook?
I blogged here earlier about a recent bomb attack on Russian military officers in a restaurant in Moscow.
"... A Russian military officer was killed on Thursday when an explosive device detonated near a residential area in Russian-occupied Sevastopol. ..."
Russia's Amazon (Wildberries) lost a third of its warehouse capacity and $5.7 billion worth of goods since mid-July due to Ukrainian attacks
Good news! Hit Putin the Terrible where it hurts most, bankrupt the Russian government!
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!
"... According to The New York Times, Ukraine has targeted at least 23 Wildberries facilities since mid-July, with nine company workers reportedly killed in the attacks. ...
Will this good looking Russian lady take down Putin the Terrible? Hope and pray!
Tatyana Vladimirovna Kim, a Russian entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Wildberries (Source)
Wildberries warehouse in Krasnodar on fire after a Ukrainian strike on July 22, 2026
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