Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
Decoding China's Big Move To Control the WHO with Palki Sharma
What are the European countries or other Western countries (except the US) doing about it?
Endlich Robotaxis in Deutschland (München) vorerst aber nur als Pilotprojekt
Deutschland hinkt mal wieder hinterher! Wofür braucht man noch ein Pilotprojekt für eine bereits mehrfach erfolgreich getestete Technologie? Typisch deutsche Pingeligkeit!
"... In einem Interview mit dem Handelsblatt sagte [Uber-CEO Dara Khosrowshahi]: „Wir sind kurz vor dem Start unseres Pilotbetriebs für autonome Fahrzeuge in München. Dafür arbeiten wir mit unseren Partnern Momenta und Autobrains zusammen. Aber wir wollen nichts überstürzen, damit wir unsere hohen Anforderungen erfüllen. Erst wenn wir von den Fähigkeiten der Fahrzeuge vollständig überzeugt sind, werden wir die Sicherheitsfahrer abziehen. Das haben wir bereits in Teilen des Nahen Ostens, beispielsweise in Dubai, gemacht.“"
Sality Malware botnet Disrupted in International Cyber Takedown
It took only 23 years to take down this botnet!
"... a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, in collaboration with private industry partners CrowdStrike and the Shadowserver Foundation, to disrupt the botnet and malware known as Sality and take down its infrastructure. ...
Since 2003, the Sality botnet has installed malicious software (malware) on compromised devices, enabling cryptocurrency theft and cyberattacks on victims in the United States and abroad. ..."
France Riots continue for three weeks as Arrests Pass 6,500, 715 police officers injured
And President Macron is in hiding!
"More than 250,000 people marched across France on Tuesday, the biggest day yet of a nearly three-week high school revolt. Riot police fired tear gas in Paris, Marseille, Rennes, and Strasbourg.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told lawmakers 715 officers and 215 students have been injured, and arrests have passed 6,500, most of them minors. ...
President Trump responded Tuesday on Truth Social: “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”"
Uncovering 76 environmental exposures linked with Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Really!
Why not 100 exposures? Is such a large number of exposures even useful?
"... The study identified 76 exposures significantly linked with ADRD and 34 linked with Alzheimer’s disease specifically. ..."
From the abstract:
"INTRODUCTION
Environmental exposures contribute substantially to Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), yet comprehensive exposome-wide investigations systematically evaluating multi-domain environmental factors remain limited and lacking utility for precision medicine.
METHODS
We conducted an exposome-wide association study (ExWAS) among 499,992 UK Biobank participants, examining 193 exposures across five domains (social, physical, chemical, lifestyle, and ecosystems).
Cox proportional hazard models with Bonferroni correction identified ADRD-associated exposures. We used the XGBoost classifier to build a predictive model and further developed an exposomic risk score (ERS) for risk stratification.
RESULTS
During a 15.3-year median follow-up, 8881 participants (1.77%) developed ADRD, including 4000 with Alzheimer's disease.
ExWAS identified 76 exposures after Bonferroni correction. The prediction model achieved area under the curve (AUC) = 0.718, outperforming demographics+apolipoprotein E (APOE) status alone (AUC = 0.678). The ERS stratified ADRD risk (highest vs lowest quartile hazard ratio [HR] = 2.97, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 2.59–3.41).
DISCUSSION
The ERS has the potential to contribute to clinically relevant prevention strategies for ADRD."
Fig. 1 Analytic workflow of the study.
Putin the Terrible celebrates his 74th birthday
Hopefully, this is his last birthday! Lord have mercy!
"26 years after becoming Russia’s president in 2000 (the prime-ministership still counts), and 20 years after journalist Anna Mazepa Politkovskaya’s murder in Moscow." She was assassinated on October 7, 2006.
Rosalind Franklin didn’t miss the DNA helix in her iconic image in 1952
So why did she not publish her findings immediately? History waits for no one (not even women)! Publish or perish! Making a discovery is one thing, communicating the discovery is another!
Did Ms. Franklin talk to Mr. Watson about her discovery?
How many times have similar things happened to male lab technicians?
Another nice attempt to show that a woman actually made a major discovery before any men? Or behind every great man was a woman?
"... Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray crystallographer at King’s College London, had produced the image days earlier in 1952. But Watson’s 1968 book implied the flash of insight was his alone.
Watson’s slight took hold partly because Franklin’s lab notes, usually thorough and meticulous, said little about photograph 51. But in a new paper in the Journal of the History of Biology, Sponsel and Sutton draw attention to an earlier image, photograph 49. Franklin’s notes on that image show she recognized the helical structure and calculated, for the first time, the length of each turn—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).” ..."
From the abstract:
"This essay, co-authored by a historian of science and an X-ray crystallographer, sheds new light on Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51. We refute the infamous claim that, unlike James Watson, Franklin failed to see the picture’s potential significance for interpreting the helical structure of DNA.
Rather, Franklin decided to take Photograph 51 precisely because she knew that key parameters of DNA’s B form helix could be calculated from the resulting image.
We show that she had in fact already made those calculations — on her earlier Photograph 49 — and she reused the same DNA sample for Photograph 51 to create a better-centered but otherwise identical diffraction image that would be suitable for publication. Thus Photograph 51 was not the result of an experiment in need of analysis, but was refined documentation for calculations that she had already performed on the earlier photograph. We argue that colleagues and later commentators did not merely overlook Franklin’s original reason for creating the strikingly clear and informative Photograph 51, they rhetorically erased her skill and judgment by describing it as though nature spoke for itself through the image — and to Watson, but not to Franklin."
Photograph 49 is the Key to Understanding the History of Rosalind Franklin’s DNA Photograph 51 (open access)
Rosalind Franklin’s photograph 51 (right) revealed DNA’s helical structure. But she had already recognized it in an earlier, flawed image: photograph 49 (left).
Rosalind Franklin
Florence Copper launches 1st new U.S. major copper operation in 20 years in Arizona
Good news! A renaissance of mining in the US!
"Florence Copper marked an historic moment as the company officially launched commercial production at its Florence facility on Tuesday, Oct. 6.
The move is the first new U.S. major copper operation in nearly 20 years and the world’s first commercial‑scale in‑situ copper recovery project.
For Arizona, a state built on the “Five Cs” — copper, cattle, cotton, citrus and climate — the milestone signals both a technological leap forward and a reaffirmation of copper’s place in the region’s economic identity.
An in-situ copper recovery (ISCR) or in-situ leaching (ISR) project extracts copper directly from underground ore deposits without open-pit mining, underground tunnels, blasting, rock crushing, waste rock piles or traditional tailing impoundments. ...."
Astronomers find a planet reborn from its star's ashes
Amazing stuff!
"A team of astronomers ... have identified the first second-generation planet ever found around a white dwarf. While similar 'reborn' worlds have been suspected to exist around pulsars, this discovery shows that a second generation of planets can form around this much more common stellar remnant. ...
"Second-generation planets are worlds that form out of the material a star casts off as it dies. They're incredibly rare ...
white dwarf HS 0209+0832, whose atmosphere contains an unusual chemical signature. It showed unusually heavy elements including zinc, copper, and, most notably, niobium found at levels over 1,000 times higher than the Sun's. These are all elements created during the death of a star and notably the first-time niobium has been found in a white dwarf. ..."
From the abstract:
"Many white dwarfs accrete the debris of disrupted planetary bodies, detected in the form of metal enrichment in their atmospheres, dusty or gaseous circumstellar discs, and photometric transits from debris. The composition of accreted debris has been shown to be diverse yet overall closely resembles Solar System bodies.
Here we report the discovery of a white dwarf accreting material that is unlike any Solar System object. The atmosphere of HS 0209+0832 is strongly enriched in trans-iron elements including zinc, copper and niobium but depleted in the canonical rock-forming elements silicon and iron.
The composition of the accreted object is consistent with a candidate second-generation planet, formed from the stellar material ejected during the giant phase. The key abundance signature that differentiates it from a first-generation planet is the high enrichment of s-process elements. Photospheric helium and the absence of terrestrial rock-forming elements implies that the white dwarf is accreting from the escaped atmosphere of a photo-evaporating giant planet candidate.
This is further supported by the detection of a sinusoidal photometric period of 4.399 ± 0.026 days at an amplitude of 0.120% ± 0.018%, which we attribute to thermal emission phase variability from a planetary day–night cycle or a transiting cometary tail of an evaporating gas giant.
The discovery of this second-generation planet that is chemically distinct from first-generation material demonstrates that close-in planets around white dwarfs can form after the main sequence."
Fort Hood mass shooter and psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan to die by US Army firing squad 15 years after the crime
What the heck took so long! This is a horrible case of justice delayed is justice denied!
Germany pledges $1.1B military aid package to Ukraine flush with drone interceptors
Good news! Bravo!
" German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has announced a new round of military aid for Ukraine, valued at approximately €1 billion ($1.1 billion), to include turbojet-powered drone interceptors, standoff weapons and space-based technology. ..."
English for trippers: Coasting from coast to coast on a coaster
Bring a toaster along! I toast to that!
Tuesday, October 06, 2026
Why is Queen Victoria so controversial?
Recommendable, but a bit too much woodcut like!
PM Modi Visits Sri Vinayaka Mandir as he completes 25 Years
Recommendable! Modi is perhaps the most consequential PM since Mahatma Gandhi!
Unfortunately, the video does not explain the rituals performed!
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