Why don't they rename this company! Caution: Satire
Tuesday, November 07, 2023
Israel/Palestine war: 41 journalists, more than one a day, killed in first month of Israel-Palestine war. Really!
The casualty statistics about Gaza are incredibly incredible, probably the product of propaganda and demagoguery! We are most likely dealing with seriously inflated numbers!
How many total casualties? Around 10,000????
Is anybody genuinely fact checking these numbers?
Who provided these numbers? The press secretary of Hamas?
Image of the day
Janet Yellen (age 76), a naive grandma and mentally as fit as the 46th President! The senile, demented, and corrupt 46th President has surrounded himself with a cabinet of clowns!
Thousands of Gazans flee Hamas through IDF humanitarian corridor to south Gaza
How many Gazans were prevented to leave north Gaza by Hamas?
How many northern Gazans volunteered to stay instead of going to south Gaza?
Here Israel is giving Gazans a second chance to make the right choice and leave for south Gaza.
"... The IDF allowed the passage of Gazan civilians to the southern Strip through a humanitarian corridor open from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. local time, Arabic-language military spokesperson Avichay Adraee announced on Tuesday. ..."
Prager University: Why Did America Fight the Korean War?
Recommendable! Too short! Why did the U.S. not threaten to drop an atomic bomb on a Chinese city at the time?
Archaeologists identify remains in burnt houses houses in the Israeli settlements around Gaza
Horrific! Can you even imagine doing this kind of work? Caution: Disturbing images
Obama's comments on Israel-Hamas war 'nothing short of disgusting': Josh Hammer
Recommendable! Incredible! Barack Obama screwed up again big time! Shows again what an arrogant prick he is!
Monday, November 06, 2023
Warum E-Autos das Klima nicht schützen
Sehr empfehlenswert! Das Video lässt noch viele andere Faktoren aus, z.B. das E-Autos schwerer sind und daher die Strasse mehr beschädigen, die fehlende Infrastruktur (wieviel CO2 würde der Bau verbrauchen?) usw. usw. Welche Idioten schalten gut funktionierende Atomkraftwerke ab und wollen keinen neuen mehr bauen?
Schluss mit dem Klimaschwindel und -wahn in der Bananenrepublik D.!
A glimpse of the next generation of AlphaFold
Good news! A very remarkable success story continues! Bravo! Delving into the secrets of life!
"... It unlocks new understanding and significantly improves accuracy in multiple key biomolecule classes, including ligands (small molecules), proteins, nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), and those containing post-translational modifications (PTMs). ...
In 2022, AlphaFold’s structure predictions for nearly all cataloged proteins known to science were made freely available via the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, in partnership with EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).
To date, 1.4 million users in over 190 countries have accessed the AlphaFold database, and scientists around the world have used AlphaFold’s predictions to help advance research on everything from accelerating new malaria vaccines and advancing cancer drug discovery to developing plastic-eating enzymes for tackling pollution. ..."
Predicted structure of CasLambda (Cas12l) bound to crRNA and DNA, part of the CRISPR subsystem.
MetNet-3: A state-of-the-art neural weather model by Google
Next, we need better climate models! The current ones are junk! 😊
"... Today we present a new weather model called MetNet-3, developed by Google Research and Google DeepMind. Building on the earlier MetNet and MetNet-2 models, MetNet-3 provides high resolution predictions up to 24 hours ahead for a larger set of core variables, including precipitation, surface temperature, wind speed and direction, and dew point. MetNet-3 creates a temporally smooth and highly granular forecast, with lead time intervals of 2 minutes and spatial resolutions of 1 to 4 kilometers. MetNet-3 achieves strong performance compared to traditional methods, outperforming the best single- and multi-member physics-based numerical weather prediction (NWP) models — such as High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) and ensemble forecast suite (ENS) — for multiple regions up to 24 hours ahead. ..."
From the abstract:
"Deep neural networks offer an alternative paradigm for modeling weather conditions. The ability of neural models to make a prediction in less than a second once the data is available and to do so with very high temporal and spatial resolution, and the ability to learn directly from atmospheric observations, are just some of these models' unique advantages. Neural models trained using atmospheric observations, the highest fidelity and lowest latency data, have to date achieved good performance only up to twelve hours of lead time when compared with state-of-the-art probabilistic Numerical Weather Prediction models and only for the sole variable of precipitation. In this paper, we present MetNet-3 that extends significantly both the lead time range and the variables that an observation based neural model can predict well. MetNet-3 learns from both dense and sparse data sensors and makes predictions up to 24 hours ahead for precipitation, wind, temperature and dew point. MetNet-3 introduces a key densification technique that implicitly captures data assimilation and produces spatially dense forecasts in spite of the network training on extremely sparse targets. MetNet-3 has a high temporal and spatial resolution of, respectively, up to 2 minutes and 1 km as well as a low operational latency. We find that MetNet-3 is able to outperform the best single- and multi-member NWPs such as HRRR and ENS over the CONUS region for up to 24 hours ahead setting a new performance milestone for observation based neural models. MetNet-3 is operational and its forecasts are served in Google Search in conjunction with other models."
Deep Learning for Day Forecasts from Sparse Observations (that preprint dates back to June 2023)
Alabama mayor and pastor commits suicide after news article exposes his online 'fantasy' life as 'Transgender Curvy Girl'
A little bit of a bizarre story! A man with quite a bit of a double life. Supposedly, his wife knew about it.
Why did he not come clean in public before his citizens and parish. Why could he in the end not admit to it?
That he reportedly committed suicide with a hand gun in front of police officers was certainly a very bad choice! "By Friday, some had asked police to conduct a welfare check. Officers went in the direction of his home that evening but discovered Copeland driving en route. They pulled Copeland over on Lee Road 275, just north of Yarbrough's Crossroads, with no other reason than to assess his wellbeing.
Sadly, Copeland's subsequent actions confirmed everyone's worst fears regarding his mental state. He exited his vehicle, grabbed a handgun, and fatally shot himself in front of the officers."
Data Brokers and the Sale of sensitive Data on U.S. Military Personnel
Did not Lenin famously fret about capitalists selling the rope to hang them with?
Or is it just a case of naivete and carelessness?
"Overview
Data Brokers and the Sale of Data on U.S. Military Personnel - Tech Policy @ Sanford | Tech Policy @ Sanford Risks to Privacy, Safety, and National SecurityThe data brokerage ecosystem is a multi-billion-dollar industry comprised of companies gathering, inferring, aggregating, and then selling, licensing, and sharing data on Americans as well as providing technological services based on that data. After previously discovering that data brokers were advertising data about current and former U.S. military personnel, this study sought to understand (a) what kinds of data that data brokers were gathering and selling about military servicemembers and (b) the risk that a foreign actor, such as a foreign adversary government, could acquire the data to undermine U.S. national security. This study involved scraping hundreds of data broker websites to look for terms like “military” and “veteran,” contacting U.S. data brokers from a U.S. domain to inquire about and purchase data on the U.S. military, and contacting U.S. data brokers from a .asia domain to inquire about and purchase the same. It concludes with a discussion of the risks to U.S. military service members and U.S. national security, paired with policy recommendations for the federal government to address the risks at hand.
Major Takeaways:
- It is not difficult to obtain sensitive data about active-duty members of the military, their families, and veterans, including non-public, individually identified, and sensitive data, such as health data, financial data, and information about religious practices. The team bought this and other data from U.S. data brokers via a .org and a .asia domain for as low as $0.12 per record. Location data is also available, though the team did not purchase it.
- Data broker methods of determining the identity of customers are inconsistent and evidence a lack of industry best-practices.
- Currently, these inconsistent practices are highly unregulated by the U.S. government.
- The inconsistencies of controls when purchasing sensitive, non-public, individually identified data about active-duty members of the military and veterans extends to situations in which data brokers are selling to customers who are outside of the United States.
- Access to this data could be used by foreign and malicious actors to target active-duty military personnel, veterans, and their families and acquaintances for profiling, blackmail, targeting with information campaigns, and more."
Presidential contenders Trump and Haley are competing on implementing the greatest mass deportation of illegal immigrants of all times
Lately, the news have reported on their intentions to do that. Nice headlines, but will it be more?
We'll see how this will work out after any of the two assumes office of the next U.S. President.
If history is any guide, then Americans are too kind hearted to pull this off! Plus, there will be huge differences from state to state and much more.
That is odd! Middle school students each with notebook on their desktop using pencil and notepad
How much is leaning how to do hand writing actually necessary anymore in K-12 School?
I can already feel loosing my hand writing skills whenever I have to fill out conventional paper forms etc.
Source: Utah school districts sue social media giants, citing youth harm
Image of the day
U.S. foreign aid to the Middle East since the 46th President took office.
I doubt, the numbers for the the West Bank & Gaza Strip are so low. There is something missing.
Source: Middle East Received $21 Billion In U.S. Foreign Aid Under Biden Administration
Ukrainian Volunteer Who Lost Family in Russian Missile Attack Dies in Service
War is hell on earth! While defending his country against the megalomaniac and war criminal Putin the Terrible, he is now reunited with his family. Horrific!
Who abducts women in their 80ies to make them hostages?
The cowardly killers of Hamas apparently have also abducted at least two women in their 80ies. One of them has been released in the meantime.
It is one thing to mistreat and massacre civilians of all ages, it is another to abduct elderly women as hostages.
I suspect these horrific deeds may not go down well with the Arab public. Hamas in its extremism may have exceeded what is tolerable among Arabs.
Artificial Intelligence bot made an insider trade, then lied about it during simulation
All too human! 😊 Welcome to the new era of AI!
"In a troubling development, an artificial intelligence bot on OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model was presented with a factual scenario that led it to execute an illegal insider trade, even after being told that doing so was illegal. Perhaps even more troubling, the bot lied about what it had done when questioned about its actions.
According to a report from Business Insider, the simulation was presented at the UK's AI Safety Summit this week by Apollo Research. According to Business Insider, Apollo shared a video with summit attendees of a simulated conversation between employees at an imaginary company and and a bot that was supposed to be acting as an investment management system. In the simulation, the bot was advised about the existence of an upcoming surprise merger, and was specifically warned that this information constituted insider information. ..."
Now we know the Banana Republic of Germany is an extension of the Gaza Strip
Given all the pro terrorism protests in Germany after October 7, this conclusion is not too far fetched!
Never again after Auschwitz? Well, it seems antisemitism is alive and well in the banana republic.
After the defeat of Hamas in the Gaza Strip
The worn out old ways that have been applied or decades can not be continued! They have failed utterly as anyone has noticed for many years!
Perhaps, a coalition of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan together manage the Gaza Strip during a transition period in cooperation with Israel. During this transition period, hopefully a better form of self government for the citizens of Gaza Strip can evolve.
It is also high time that the Arab countries do something about the long failed state of Lebanon. It can not be e.g. that this country has become a long time safe harbor for Iran sponsored terrorists.
If the Arab countries are unwilling to step up, Israel may not have any other choice but to take control of e.g. North Gaza for as long as it takes.
Will there be finally peace in the Middle East!
Rwanda announces visa-free travel for all Africans & Africa Diasporas
Good news! Recently, there were several other African countries before making similar announcements. Is the African Union becoming reality? Is the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) making progress?
Sunday, November 05, 2023
Mike Johnson: We’re trying to change how Washington works
Recommendable! It appears, the new Speaker of the House is maturing very fast. He describes himself, his family, and his father's background (fire fighter) as of modest means.
For Halloween Kids pull ‘greatest costume’ in America after dressing up as falling Joe Biden
Kids can be so brutal! This is probably a first in U.S. history!
Common dietary nutrient manganese blasts blood vessel plaques in study
Good news!
"... [researchers] figured out that the element [manganese] can bind to a complex needed by lipoproteins, chemical carriers that move lipids including cholesterol and triglycerides, into the bloodstream. This complex known as the coat protein complex II (COPII) needs to maintain a very precise chemical balance that the manganese disrupts. As a result of this disruption, the researchers found that in the mice they studied, even oral manganese dramatically reduced blood concentration of lipids and removed plaques that had been established in the rodents' blood vessels. ..."
From what is believed to be the abstract:
"Precise control of circulating lipid levels is vital in both health and disease. We recently uncovered that bulk lipids, transported by lipoproteins, enter the circulation initially via the coat protein complex II (COPII) in a condensation-dependent manner. Divalent manganese, acting as a signaling messenger, selectively controls COPII condensation to regulate lipid homeostasis in vivo. Here we present evidence for a manganese-based therapy in murine models of hypolipidemia and hyperlipidemia, aided by advanced in vivo multimodal imaging of atherosclerosis. Dietary titration of manganese supply enables tailored control of circulating lipid levels in whole animals, with no apparent toxicity. Strikingly, elevating the manganese signal through diets could not only effectively treat pathological hyperlipidemia, but further achieve significant reversal of atherosclerotic plaques. Hence, the study provides critical proof-of-principle for a novel therapy for deadly cardiovascular diseases with a potentially broad impact"
Supercritical CO2 pilot aims to make steam turbines obsolete
Good news! Will this be a game changer?
"Steam turbines still produce most of the world's power, but supercritical carbon dioxide promises to be much cheaper, and 10% more efficient as a medium than water, using 10X smaller turbines. A US$155-million pilot plant is now complete in San Antonio. ...
Carbon dioxide goes supercritical when the temperature and pressure are above about 31 °C (88 °F) and 74 bar (1,070 psi), respectively. At this point, it stops acting like a gas or a liquid, and instead starts acting something like a gas with the density of a liquid. ..."
The device in the image above is the world's first supercritical carbon dioxide turbine. Roughly the size of a desk, is a 10-megawatt turbine capable of powering around 10,000 homes. Ten megawatts is pretty small potatoes in the energy business, but to do it with a turbine this tiny? That could prove to be a revolutionary feat.
"October 27, 2023 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI®), GTI Energy, GE Vernova (GE) and the U.S. Department of Energy celebrated the ribbon-cutting of the Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) Demo pilot plant today. The $155 million, 10-megawatt supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) test facility at SwRI’s headquarters in San Antonio will demonstrate an innovative new method of higher-efficiency, lower-cost electric power generation. ...
The STEP Demo pilot plant is one of the largest demonstration facilities in the world for sCO2 technology. ..."
Swri, Gti Energy, Ge Celebrate Mechanical Completion Of $155 Million Supercritical Co2 Pilot Plant
The STEP facility in San Antonio has been declared "mechanically complete" and is due for commissioning in 2024
sCO2 turbine developed by SwRI for the 10 MWe demonstration plant
US Secretary of State Blinken meets with PA's Mahmoud Abbas. Really!
What a joke! What a waste of time!
The question is who is more senile and demented the 46th President or Abbas (87 old)? Abbas is the unelected "President" of the State of Palestine since 2005.
Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence
Does the senile, demented and corrupt 46th President (age 80) even understand what this order is about?
Will the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia condemn the Hamas attack and excommunicate the perpetrators of this coward act!
Deaf since birth, some children in China can hear after gene treatment
Good news! Sometimes miracles do happen!
"... But this year her family, who live in a high-rise block in the city of Dongguan, enrolled her in a study of a new type of gene therapy. During the procedure, doctors used a virus to add replacement DNA to the cells in Yiyi’s inner ear that pick up vibrations, allowing them to transmit sound to her brain.
In less than a month, her mother says, she was hearing with the treated ear for the first time. ...
The feat is even more remarkable because until now, no drug of any kind has ever been able to improve hearing. ...
Otoferlin gene defects are the cause of around 1% to 3% of cases of inborn deafness, and there are only about 900 new cases a year in China, meaning the condition is rare. ...
The feat is even more remarkable because until now, no drug of any kind has ever been able to improve hearing. ...
Otoferlin gene defects are the cause of around 1% to 3% of cases of inborn deafness, and there are only about 900 new cases a year in China, meaning the condition is rare. ...
The new treatment is designed to add a working copy of the otoferlin gene. Because of the gene’s large size—it is around 6,000 DNA letters long—it had to be broken into two parts, each packaged separately into millions of copies of a harmless virus. ... then carefully injects the loaded viruses deep into a fluid-filled chamber in a part of the children’s ears called the cochlea. ...
the children’s hearing improved, on average, from not hearing anything under 95 decibels (as loud as a motorcycle) to hearing sounds at 50 to 55 decibels—about the level of a regular conversation.
“They reach maybe 60% to 65% of normal hearing,” ..."The Clintons, Qatar, and the Israel Massacre
Not only the Biden clan was on the take!
How much has Hillary dominated William? Who is the mastermind between two of them?
"The Qatar-Clinton money trail begins around 2008, when the Clinton Foundation—under pressure due to Mrs. Clinton’s imminent ascent to State Department leadership—published a list of donors. Among them: Qatar, listed as contributing between $1 million and $5 million. A Clinton Foundation spokesman later acknowledged that Qatar had been sending the Clintons money “since 2002.” ..."
They have come a long way! When will this couple finally fade away!
China approves the world’s first flying taxi without pilot in Guangdong
Good news!
"Anyone keen to view from on high the sprawling cityscapes of Guangdong, a bustling province in southern China, may soon be able to do so from the cabin of a flying taxi. On October 13th the Civil Aviation Administration of China (caac) awarded a “type certificate”, a crucial piece of aviation paperwork, to the world’s first electric vertical take-off and landing (evtol) taxi. And in case that does not sound futuristic enough, the small two-seater, called the eh216-s, was also cleared to fly without a pilot on board. ..."
Saturday, November 04, 2023
PM Lee to hand over leadership to DPM Lawrence Wong before Singapore's next General Election
Recommendable! Bravo! There are few things in politics more impressive than a peaceful handover of power!
Did India Have Secret Relations with Israel? with Palki Sharma
Very recommendable! What a complicated history! However, Israel over the decades supported India several time by delivering urgently needed weapons. Why Indira Gandhi was so fascinated with Yasser Arafat is strange!
Mental navigation by mental simulation and planning in rats similar to human imagination
Amazing stuff!
"Complex behaviors such as navigation often require chains of decisions that can be mentally simulated ahead of carrying out the behavior. The activity of spatially coding neurons (place cells) in the hippocampus and associated cortical regions has been posited as the expression of a “cognitive map,” which could serve as a substrate for generating these complex behaviors (1).... report that rats can navigate through a virtual reality (VR) environment using a brain–machine interface (BMI) that estimates the rat’s mental location from the ongoing activity of neurons in its hippocampus. This finding is an exciting expansion of BMI implementation from sensorimotor functions to a more cognitive domain and suggests that hippocampal activity is under volitional control. In addition, the BMI approach provides a new tool for probing the circuit-level mechanisms of mental navigation and spatial imagination."
"Editor’s summary
The hippocampus holds a model of the environment that can be mentally traversed during recall or simulation. It is unknown whether animals can intentionally control their hippocampal activity according to their model of the world. By combining virtual reality and a real-time brain‐machine interface, Lai et al. discovered that rats directly controlled their hippocampal neuronal firing in a goal-directed manner ... Rats first formed a hippocampal map of a virtual environment. Then, in brain‐machine interface mode, they demonstrated the ability to activate representations from this map corresponding to specific remote locations, which then brought either them or an object to spatial goals. The rats could sustain a hippocampal representation of a remote location for tens of seconds, reminiscent of human imagination or mental time travel. ...
Abstract
The hippocampus is critical for recollecting and imagining experiences. This is believed to involve voluntarily drawing from hippocampal memory representations of people, events, and places, including maplike representations of familiar environments. However, whether representations in such “cognitive maps” can be volitionally accessed is unknown. We developed a brain–machine interface to test whether rats can do so by controlling their hippocampal activity in a flexible, goal-directed, and model-based manner. We found that rats can efficiently navigate or direct objects to arbitrary goal locations within a virtual reality arena solely by activating and sustaining appropriate hippocampal representations of remote places. This provides insight into the mechanisms underlying episodic memory recall, mental simulation and planning, and imagination and opens up possibilities for high-level neural prosthetics that use hippocampal representations."
Rats can ‘imagine’ places they’ve previously visited Virtual reality study suggests that rodents, like humans, are capable of mental navigation
Nanoparticles Show Quick and Easy Way to Target microtumor Cancer
Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!
"Researchers have been exploring the use of injectable nanoparticles that can quickly home in on a microscopic tumor. It’s a novel technique that could pave the way for the early detection of small tumors that may not show up on traditional imaging technologies. ...
existing medical imaging techniques offer limited resolution when it comes to detecting microscopic tumors less than 0.5 millimeters in diameter. ...
However, it can be difficult to develop these “nanoswimmers,” which can efficiently disperse throughout a patient’s body, while sufficiently accumulating at the cancer site. Past studies show that only 0.7 percent of the injected nanoparticles reach their target. ...
Another option is to develop self-propelled nanoswimmers, which autonomously move inside the human body and have a chemical tendency to accumulate in tumors. For example, nanoswimmers designed to gravitate toward acidic environments will gravitate toward tumors, which tend to be more acidic than healthy tissues. But, autonomous nanoswimmers tend to move much slower than the magnetically guided nanoswimmers. ...
the semi-autonomous swarm can then be magnetically guided more quickly in the optimal direction: toward the tumor. ..."
the semi-autonomous swarm can then be magnetically guided more quickly in the optimal direction: toward the tumor. ..."
"Abstract:
Magnetically assembled bioresorbable nanoswimmers (NSs) can be used to highlight small tumors, thereby increasing the diagnostic capability of existing medical imaging techniques. Built upon our earlier work, this article proposes a novel in vivo computational framework for early cancer detection. Engineered NSs experience a change in their physical properties under the influence of tumor-induced biological gradients. The biologically sensed data by such bio-nano things (NSs) can either trigger an autonomous target-directed motion or be assisted through external manipulation for steering the swarm toward the target. Previously developed externally manipulable in vivo computation requires constant monitoring of NSs, introducing positioning and steering errors along with a limit on the swarm size. A parallel approach called autonomous in vivo computation helps to resolve the above drawbacks, but the tumor homing is slow contributing to a higher percentage of predetection loss of NSs. We propose the spot sampling strategy for an autonomous swarm which considers the whole swarm as a single entity for the purpose of its tracking and steering. We show through computational experiments: 1) that the proposed semi-autonomous in vivo framework can achieve faster tumor sensitization in complex environments having static and mobile obstacles and 2) that the spot sampling provides sufficiently precise data to steer the swarm toward the target, saving around 90% of the monitoring resource. Our proposed framework also helps to achieve a large swarm size (number of NSs) which in return can achieve a higher deposition of NSs on malignant tumors."
Semi-Autonomous In Vivo Computation in Internet of Bio-Nano Things (no public access)
Einstein Made It Famous; Tech Makes It Current. Generating electricity through Brownian Motion
Amazing stuff! Huge potential or more of a curiosity?
"There are many ways to convert the movement of liquids into electricity, such as, in the form of hydropower or tidal power. But there’s another kind of movement available in liquids that has rarely been considered for this purpose—molecular thermal motion or Brownian motion. ...
Molecular motion has traditionally been an impediment in engineering on a nanoscale, but recent developments in nanotechnology have also allowed scientists to use this phenomenon to their advantage. In a recent study from China, scientists posit that the internal, molecular motion of liquids could be a source of energy if only there was a way to harvest it. To demonstrate, they built a prototype of a molecular thermal motion harvester (MTMH). ...
To use Brownian movement as a source of energy, the researchers had to design a device that could capture and convert the motion into electricity. To make their harvester, they used nanowire arrays made of zinc oxide (ZnO) and gold-coated ZnO as electrodes. ZnO is a piezoelectric material, which means it produces an electric charge in response to mechanical stress, such as bending or flexing, from the Brownian movement of the liquid medium, which in this case was n-octane, with a purity of greater than 99.99 percent. The gold-coated ZnO nanoarray was used as a negative electrode, the plain ZnO one as positive, and the entire device—2 by 2 centimeters in size—was sealed with epoxy. ...
The prototype yielded a stable output voltage of 2.28 millivolts and current of 2.47 nanoamperes at room temperature, though the latter number goes up as temperature rises. ..."
"Abstract
Molecular thermal motion has been studied but yet never been utilized as an energy source. In this work, we demonstrate that the energy of liquid molecular thermal motion can be converted into electrical energy by a novel harvesting device, the molecular thermal motion harvester (MTMH). The MTMH was made by using two ZnO-based nano-arrays and one of which was gold coated to form a Schottky junction. The assembled electrodes were immersed in different liquid phase environments. The device was demonstrated to convert the molecule thermal energy of the liquid into a continuous and stable electric current. The output voltage and current can achieve 2.28 mV and 2.47 nA, respectively, and increase with the liquid temperatures. This strategy opens new insights into the development of mini- and micro-scale energy sources, and it can be expected the MTMH will have broad applications in the future."
Molecular thermal motion has been studied but yet never been utilized as an energy source. In this work, we demonstrate that the energy of liquid molecular thermal motion can be converted into electrical energy by a novel harvesting device, the molecular thermal motion harvester (MTMH). The MTMH was made by using two ZnO-based nano-arrays and one of which was gold coated to form a Schottky junction. The assembled electrodes were immersed in different liquid phase environments. The device was demonstrated to convert the molecule thermal energy of the liquid into a continuous and stable electric current. The output voltage and current can achieve 2.28 mV and 2.47 nA, respectively, and increase with the liquid temperatures. This strategy opens new insights into the development of mini- and micro-scale energy sources, and it can be expected the MTMH will have broad applications in the future."
Fig. 1 The structure of ZnO nanoarrays and the fabrication process of MTMH. (a) The surface micrograph of ZnO nanoarrays. (b) A detailed surface micrograph of ZnO nanoarrays. (c) The cross-section micrograph of the ZnO nanoarray. (d) The fabrication process of MTMH.
Microscopy with Virtual Superlensing Made a Reality
Amazing stuff! Could take microscopy to a whole new level!
"... There are, however, physical limits to how closely we can examine an object using traditional optical methods. This is known as the ‘diffraction limit’ and is determined by the fact that light manifests as a wave. It means a focused image can never be smaller than half the wavelength of light used to observe an object.
Attempts to break this limit with “super lenses” have all hit the hurdle of extreme visual losses, making the lenses opaque. Now physicists at the University of Sydney have shown a new pathway to achieve superlensing with minimal losses, breaking through the diffraction limit by a factor of nearly four times. The key to their success was to remove the super lens altogether. ..."
"Absract
Imaging with resolutions much below the wavelength λ – now common in the visible spectrum – remains challenging at lower frequencies, where exponentially decaying evanescent waves are generally measured using a tip or antenna close to an object. Such approaches are often problematic because probes can perturb the near-field itself. Here we show that information encoded in evanescent waves can be probed further than previously thought, by reconstructing truthful images of the near-field through selective amplification of evanescent waves, akin to a virtual superlens that images the near field without perturbing it. We quantify trade-offs between noise and measurement distance, experimentally demonstrating reconstruction of complex images with subwavelength features down to a resolution of λ/7 and amplitude signal-to-noise ratios < 25dB between 0.18–1.5 THz. Our procedure can be implemented with any near-field probe, greatly relaxes experimental requirements for subwavelength imaging at sub-optical frequencies and opens the door to non-invasive near-field scanning."
Superlensing without a superlens: microscopes boosted beyond limits New technique could be used in medical imaging and advanced manufacturing
Fig. 1: Concept schematic of virtual superlens
In a surprising finding, light can make water evaporate without heat
Amazing stuff! This could be huge!
We still do not even understand water very well! However, we told on a daily basis about the Global Warming hoax and the Climate Change religion!
"... After carrying out a series of new experiments and simulations, and reexamining some of the results from various groups that claimed to have exceeded the thermal limit, a team of researchers at MIT has reached a startling conclusion: Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat. In these experiments, the water was held in a hydrogel material, but the researchers suggest that the phenomenon may occur under other conditions as well. ...
The phenomenon might play a role in the formation and evolution of fog and clouds, and thus would be important to incorporate into climate models to improve their accuracy, the researchers say. And it might play an important part in many industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination of water, perhaps enabling alternatives to the step of converting sunlight to heat first. ..."
"Significance
Water evaporation under sunlight is a pervasive phenomenon, having both fundamental and practical importance in science and technology. Solar-driven evaporation rates using porous absorbers have been reported to exceed the theoretical thermal evaporation limit, but the mechanism of this phenomenon remains unclear. Here, we hypothesize that a photon can cleave off water clusters from water–vapor interfaces and call this process the photomolecular effect, in analogy to the well-known photoelectric effect. We provide experimental evidence and explain the physical driving force supporting this hypothesis. Such photomolecular evaporation process could be happening widely in nature. It may significantly impact the earth’s water cycle, climate change, and has potential clean water and energy technology applications.
Abstract
We report in this work several unexpected experimental observations on evaporation from hydrogels under visible light illumination. 1) Partially wetted hydrogels become absorbing in the visible spectral range, where the absorption by both the water and the hydrogel materials is negligible. 2) Illumination of hydrogel under solar or visible-spectrum light-emitting diode leads to evaporation rates exceeding the thermal evaporation limit, even in hydrogels without additional absorbers. 3) The evaporation rates are wavelength dependent, peaking at 520 nm. 4) Temperature of the vapor phase becomes cooler under light illumination and shows a flat region due to breaking-up of the clusters that saturates air. And 5) vapor phase transmission spectra under light show new features and peak shifts. We interpret these observations by introducing the hypothesis that photons in the visible spectrum can cleave water clusters off surfaces due to large electrical field gradients and quadrupole force on molecular clusters. We call the light-induced evaporation process the photomolecular effect. The photomolecular evaporation might be happening widely in nature, potentially impacting climate and plants’ growth, and can be exploited for clean water and energy technologies."
On the House Speaker Mike Johnson's Favorite Bible Passage
How meek is the new Speaker of the House?
This longer Bible passage (i.e. Psalm 37) contains following line " But the meek will inherit the land"
I think, this Psalm is wickedly weak and even misleading. Unfortunately, the wicked don't die and disappear or it takes millennia to happen. I think, there are much better passages in the Bible.
American Elites and China | Peter Schweizer
Very recommendable! This is only an excerpt of a longer speech! Very interesting what Schweizer has to say about the senile U.S. Senate Minority Leader McConnell and his wife.
The Beatles Use AI to Release a New Song After 28 Years with Palki Sharma
Here is the Indian take of this song release!
WeWork Expected to File for Bankruptcy Next Week with Palki Sharma
Recommendable with qualifications! Yes, market corrections can be very severe and swift!
Friday, November 03, 2023
Who is Admiral Lisa Franchetti, America's First Woman Navy Chief? with Palki Sharma
I am afraid this promotion is based more on politics than merit! Messing with the military for gender politics is dangerous!
Why China Has Banned Politicians From Investing in Private Equity Firms with Palki Sharma
Recommendable! More crack downs in China!
France Out, Russia In: Why African Armies Staged Coups
Very recommendable! Why Africans would want Putin the Terrible to support them is a mystery! Maybe it is only the military leaders of these countries in the Sahel.
Will Australia and China Reset Their Relations? with Palki Sharma
Recommendable! It certainly is a difficult relationship in several respects!
Israel-Hamas War: Hezbollah Chief Breaks Silence, Threatens Escalation with Palki Sharma
Recommendable! I don't believe that the Hezbollah has 100,000 well trained, battle hardened, and armed fighters. This number is being repeated again and again in the news. I bet it is highly inflated!
The Beatles - Now And Then (Official Music Video)
I like the funny video, but not the song so much! The other video on YouTube (audio only) with the original song was not impressive, because it is not one of the greatest songs of the Beatles.
Fish, reconsidered: A major update of the ‘Tree of Life’ draws surprising connections
Amazing stuff!
"... drew many surprising connections while completely revising the Tree of Life branches concerning ray-finned fishes, which represent more than 35,000 species — tunas, clown fish, catfish, piranhas, etc. – accounting for nearly all vertebrate fish species and about half of living vertebrate species. ...
Prior to the new revisions, ray-finned fishes were sorted into taxonomic groups largely based on morphology — their physical forms and structures — and other observable traits, which doesn’t capture all relationships among lineages ... Molecular genetic analysis ... has clarified relationships among lineages but, until now, those discoveries have never been synthesized and incorporated into an updated Tree of Life.
“Our knowledge of the fish Tree of Life is dramatically different than it was 20 years ago,” ... “Genetics has upended our understanding of how major fish lineages relate to each other. ...
In all, the researchers defined 97 inclusive groups based on common ancestry, accounting for 830 lineages. Only one of the 97 groups is new. They focused on consolidation, extracting more than 20 group names that they deemed redundant. ..."
In all, the researchers defined 97 inclusive groups based on common ancestry, accounting for 830 lineages. Only one of the 97 groups is new. They focused on consolidation, extracting more than 20 group names that they deemed redundant. ..."
From the abstract:
"Classification of the tremendous diversity of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) began with the designation of taxonomic groups based on morphological similarity. Starting in the late 1960s morphological phylogenetics became the basis for the classification of Actinopterygii but failed to resolve many relationships, particularly among lineages
within the hyperdiverse Percomorpha. The introduction of molecular phylogenetics led to a dramatic reconfiguration of actinopterygian phylogeny. Refined phylogenetic resolution afforded by molecular studies revealed an uneven diversity among actinopterygian lineages, resulting in a proliferation of redundant group names in Linnean ranked classifications. Here we provide an unranked phylogenetic classification for actinopterygian fishes based on a summary phylogeny of 830 lineages of ray-finned fishes that includes all currently recognized actinopterygian taxonomic families and 287 fossil taxa. We provide phylogenetic definitions for 90 clade names and review seven previously defined names. For each of the 97 clade names we review the etymology of the clade name, clade species diversity and constituent lineages, clade diagnostic morphological apomorphies, a review of synonyms, and discuss the clade's
nomenclatural and systematic history. The new classification is free of redundant group names and includes only one new name among the 97 clade names we review and describe, yielding a comprehensive classification that is based explicitly on the phylogeny of ray-finned fishes that has emerged in the 21st century and rests on the foundation of the previous 200 years of actinopterygian systematic research."
Pennsylvania female nurse who confessed to killing off men in care facilities now linked to 17 deaths
Another Me Too! An angel of death! About the darker side of gender equality.
"APennsylvania nurse who admitted in May to killing patients with fatal doses of insulin has now been linked to 17 care facility deaths. Heather Pressdee, 41, of Natrona Heights was slapped Thursday with dozens of new charges pertaining to a series of slayings going back to at least 2020. Her alleged victims ranged in age from 43 to 104.
Pressdee has worked at over 11 rehabilitation facilities since 2018. It appears she changed locations at least once in response to disciplinary measures over her alleged abuse of staff and patients. ..."
Engineers develop an efficient process to make fuel from carbon dioxide
Now we can put the climate hysteria to rest! Human ingenuity took care of the CO2 scare!
"The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.
Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production. ..."
"Highlights
• Impacts of CO2 partial pressure on local pH and carbon efficiency are gauged
• CO2, bicarbonate, and carbonate equilibrium are key to achieving high carbon efficiency
• Bicarbonate-to-formate electrochemical conversion generates no net acid or base
• Formate is a potential solid fuel for seasonal energy storage
Summary
Carbon efficiency is one of the most pressing problems of carbon dioxide electroreduction today. While there have been studies on anion exchange membrane electrolyzers with carbon dioxide (gas) and bipolar membrane electrolyzers with bicarbonate (aqueous) feedstocks, both suffer from low carbon efficiency. In anion exchange membrane electrolyzers, this is due to carbonate anion crossover, whereas in bipolar membrane electrolyzers, the exsolution of carbon dioxide (gas) from the bicarbonate solution is the culprit. Here, we first elucidate the root cause of the low carbon efficiency of liquid bicarbonate electrolyzers with thermodynamic calculations and then achieve carbon-efficient carbon dioxide electroreduction by adopting a near-neutral-pH cation exchange membrane, a glass fiber intermediate layer, and carbon dioxide (gas) partial pressure management. We convert highly concentrated bicarbonate solution to solid formate fuel with a yield (carbon efficiency) of greater than 96%. A device test is demonstrated at 100 mA cm−2 with a full-cell voltage of 3.1 V for over 200 h."
A carbon-efficient bicarbonate electrolyzer (open access)
Graphical abstract
Cum-Ex Skandal des Olaf Scholz. Beweis-Laptops aus Tresor verschwunden
Kaum zu glauben!
"... Steffen Jänicke heißt der Mann, er ist Leiter des Arbeitsstabs des U-Ausschusses – sozusagen dessen Chefermittler. Den Obleuten der Fraktionen im U-Ausschuss hat Jänicke mitgeteilt, er habe „verfügt, dass die Akteneinsicht sowie die Arbeit des Arbeitsstabes mit den Asservaten zunächst ausgesetzt wird“. Dass er selbst die wichtigen Laptops aus dem Sicherheitsraum entfernt hat, erwähnt er nicht. ...."
Is the 46th President a Chinese puppet?
The more we learn, the more likely it seems! How much money did he and his clan receive from China? The 46th President seems to be deeply compromised!
Thursday, November 02, 2023
Girl power is helping shape Mongolia's digital future
Way to go!
The members of team Future Programmer Girls proudly display the online game they developed during the Girls for Coding program in Ulaanbaatar.
How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime
Amazing stuff!
"Tokelau, a string of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything.
It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL—in exchange for money.
In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million—but the vast majority were spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.
Now the territory is desperately trying to clean up .tk. Its international standing, and even its sovereignty, may depend on it."
A federal judge issued an emergency temporary restraining order against the Biden administration for destroying concertina wire barriers erected by Texas along the southern border
Incredible! Why neither the 46th President nor Secretary Mayorkas are impeached by now is unfathomable!
As governor of Texas I would have sent the Texas Rangers to secure the border and I would have built the fence/wall myself to prevent mass illegal immigration.
"On Monday, a federal judge issued an emergency temporary restraining order against the Biden administration for destroying concertina wire barriers erected by Texas along the southern border. The restraining order was only necessary because Border Patrol had ignored the lawsuit filed earlier last week (TPPF, is co-counsel in the lawsuit.)
According to reports, border patrol officers were not only cutting the concertina wire but using tractors and forklifts to raise the barrier to allow illegal migrants to cross into Texas. In one instance, over 300 illegal migrants came through because of these actions. Federal agents have also assisted illegal aliens by attaching ropes and cables to the back of pickup trucks so they may more easily climb up river banks. ..."
On Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity
Just finished reading this paper. Very impressive work!
"We introduce Ferret, a new Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) capable of understanding spatial referring of any shape or granularity within an image and accurately grounding open-vocabulary descriptions. To unify referring and grounding in the LLM paradigm, Ferret employs a novel and powerful hybrid region representation that integrates discrete coordinates and continuous features jointly to represent a region in the image. To extract the continuous features of versatile regions, we propose a spatial-aware visual sampler, adept at handling varying sparsity across different shapes. Consequently, Ferret can accept diverse region inputs, such as points, bounding boxes, and free-form shapes. To bolster the desired capability of Ferret, we curate GRIT, a comprehensive refer-and-ground instruction tuning dataset including 1.1M samples that contain rich hierarchical spatial knowledge, with 95K hard negative data to promote model robustness. The resulting model not only achieves superior performance in classical referring and grounding tasks, but also greatly outperforms existing MLLMs in region-based and localization-demanded multimodal chatting. Our evaluations also reveal a significantly improved capability of describing image details and a remarkable alleviation in object hallucination. Code and data will be available at this https URL"
Will New George Floyd Autopsy Evidence Bring Derek Chauvin Retrial?
Recommendable! What exactly did the lifetime career criminal and drug addict George Floyd die from? Was the police officer made a scapegoat?
Egypt’s Rafah crossing: Why is it tightly controlled?
The Egyptian government does not like the Hamas either!
Its A Vibe - "Ladies of the Soul Train Line" Part 1 | Soul Train Awards 23'
Enjoy! When I saw Soul Train for the first time on American TV in Germany in the late 1980s with Don Cornelius I could not believe it! It was disco mania time etc.
Mahalia Jackson - It's No Secret What God Can Do
Enjoy! Brings out her amazing voice quite beautifully!
Did Dust Drive Dinosaurs to Extinction? with Palki Sharma
An interesting hypothesis! Just a reminder: Hit by a sizable asteroid is a real climate crisis not the phony one hear about every day!
Arab-Americans to Biden: No Ceasefire, No Vote with Palki Sharma
What a joke of a report! Not once were the Jewish votes mentioned. Much more important than the tiny minority of Arab Americans! What a joke of a report! Not once were the Jewish votes mentioned. Sometimes Palki Sharma totally fails like in this case!
UK Focusing on Existential Threats at World's First AI Safety Summit with Palki Sharma
What is this all about! Will robots do all the military fighting in the future? Just one of many questions.
What Israel’s Past Invasions of Gaza in 2009 and 2014 Can Reveal About Its Ground Offensive
Hamas has remained unfinished business for decades! Maybe this time!
Wednesday, November 01, 2023
Why is North Korea Shutting Embassies Around the World? with Palki Sharma
When will the Korean peninsula be unified again!
An online-trading startup sued the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for denying its application to launch a political election-betting market
You bet, there are so many ways to bet!
"Kalshi’s lawsuit might help determine if Americans could bet significant amounts of money on whether Republicans or Democrats will capture the House or Senate. The company says its market for derivatives contracts would enable investors to hedge against political risk—in some cases with trades as big as $100 million. The CFTC declined to comment; the agency previously has been reluctant to weigh in on what it sees as a sensitive question for U.S. democracy. Several states outlaw gambling on elections, though small-stakes bets are possible through various venues."
U.S. All but Stopped Spying on Hamas in Years After 9/11. It was outsourced to Israel.
What! What a blunder! Headline of the day!
"U.S. intelligence agencies all but stopped spying on Hamas and other violent Palestinian groups in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., instead directing resources to the hunt for the leaders of al Qaeda and, later, Islamic State, according to U.S. officials familiar with the shift. ..."
"They instead directed resources to hunt for al Qaeda leaders and, later, Islamic State, according to U.S. officials familiar with the shift. American intelligence outsourced the spying on Hamas to Israel—Hamas had never directly threatened the U.S—confident it would detect any threat. Now, more than 30 Americans are dead and 10 missing, fears of a regional war are mounting and billions of dollars in U.S. military hardware are heading to the Middle East since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, which left more than 1,400 Israelis dead and 200-plus held hostage. Some officials say the U.S. misjudged the threat to its national security. ..."
IDF releases proof of Hamas stealing gas from Gazan hospitals
What else to expect from cowardly killers of civilians!
One good reason why not to supply gas to the Gaza strip at this time!
Will the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia condemn the Hamas attack and excommunicate the perpetrators!
English for trippers: Train the brain while fainting on the train in the rain
The paint is not dry yet! No pain, no gain! Say it ain't so!
Abraham Accords here to stay despite war, says United Arab Emirati official
Good news!
"The Abraham Accords are not at risk amid the war between Israel and Hamas, said Dr. Ali Rashid Al Nuaimi, chairman of the Defense, Interior, and Foreign Affairs Committee of the United Arab Emirates Federal National Council on Tuesday, according to the European Jewish Press. ..."
Senioren-Hipster in China, Internethype um Social-Media Influencerinnen und Influencer
Sehr empfehlenswert! Erstaunlich! Da ich China und Chinesen persönlich ein wenig kenne, bin ich begeistert!
George Soros 'fundamentally hates humanity': Elon Musk
Recommendable! I think, Elon Musk is on to something!
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