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Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change.

They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across many scales of life — seemingly wherever there’s a branching system of inherited modifications — in a dynamic not examined in traditional evolutionary models.

That’s the perspective emerging from a new mathematical framework published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that describes the pace of evolutionary change. The new model, part of a roughly 50-year-long reimagining of evolution’s tempo, is rooted in the concept of punctuated equilibrium, which was introduced by the paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.

Never trust a ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

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Researchers at the University of Vermont have found a new way to understand language, challenging a major assumption in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that has guided research for more than 70 years.

Their study, published in Science Advances, presents “ousiometrics,” a quantitative approach to studying essential meaning. The work suggests that language is not organized mainly around emotion, but around a deeper pattern shaped by power, danger, and order.

The central finding is striking: across language, humans consistently lean toward safety.

Never trust any ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

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In a small workshop in northern France, in Montreuil-aux-Lions, a very special kind of thread has been woven for seven generations: the silk threads of Maison Declercq, master trimmers, whose creations enable the restoration of some of the finest fabrics and pieces of furniture in the world.

Their story touches me particularly deeply, as I grew up between Saint-Étienne, the capital of ribbon and trimmings, and Lyon, the capital of silk, where the most prestigious historic silk houses, such as Prelle or Tassinari et Châtel, still thrive today. Even as a child, I never tired of admiring the incredible wooden looms invented by the craftsmen of my homeland, impressive cathedrals of thread that gave birth to a thousand-and-one wonders in shimmering colours. Tassels, rosettes, ribbons, tiebacks: all these seemingly useless trinkets, yet they once elegantly adorned a delicate bergère chair where Queen Marie-Antoinette used to rest, or a sumptuous curtain drawn by Empress Eugénie. The Declercq family hails from the North, yet shares the same heritage and the same expertise.

There are artisan Houses that do not merely produce objects but weave “the thread of history.” Houses where every gesture seems to defy the brutality of the centuries, where the craftsman’s hand extends that of his ancestors in a stubborn fidelity to beauty. The Declercq workshop, an artistic trimmings maker since 1852, belongs to that category of French companies that the whole world envies us for.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

t has never been a great time to be an infantryman. But today’s conditions are especially pitiable. In the “kill zone” imposed by both sides’ drones in eastern Ukraine, the risk of finding yourself inside a lethal video game is omnipresent. In February Ukrainian troops trying to join the small number of their comrades still inside Myrnohrad, a town in Donetsk, knew that Russian drones operated by well-hidden pilots would make it impossible to do so in vehicles. They had to infiltrate gingerly through the forests. It could take weeks. They might not get out for months.

The after-effects might last years. Soldiers returned from the front keep their windows covered and lights dimmed even when hundreds of kilometres outside the zone. Trapped in what psychologists speak of as hypervigilance and hyperarousal, the sound of a drone can trigger fear and a feeling of helplessness. They glance up as they walk.

As the battle for Myrnohrad was grinding on, American and Israeli jets taking part in the other great-power war of the moment were bombarding Iran at will. Their pilots had everything they needed to pound, assess and pound again, all the sensors the world’s most advanced military forces could bring to bear—on-board infrared and radar, back-up from drones nearby and radar farther off, satellite oversight and more besides. Israel hacked traffic cameras in Tehran to track Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, as it closed in to kill him.

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In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make design.

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The absence of shame as a constraint. This is the component hardest for the credentialed class to model, because the credentialed class is constituted by shame. The credentialed class is the class of people who have internalized the institutional consequences of saying the wrong thing, and who have organized their public speech to avoid those consequences. Trump did not come up through any of those institutions. He came up in New York real estate and tabloid culture, both of which are environments where shame is a vulnerability rather than a discipline, and where the operators who succeed are the ones who have learned to act without it. He says things the credentialed class would be unable to say, not because the things are necessarily wrong, but because the credentialed class has been trained to feel an autonomic flinch before the words leave the mouth. Trump does not have the flinch.

John C. Wright explains it all to you.

And now, a word from the Patriarchy:

In all of life, men go out into the wilderness, fight and built, and found a new settlement. This can be either literal wilderness or figurative. Starting a business, starting a political movement, springs from a similar male conquering impulse.

Then women and old men come into the frontier, after it is conquered and safe, and they make it nice and civilized and set up lace curtains in the windows, doilies on the chairs, flower gardens.

The woman and old men move into the settlement, built a church, start a school, elect a sheriff, close the opium dens and gambling dives, drive away the saloon girls, streetwalkers, and the roughnecks, and make the streets safe for women and children to walk at night.

In business, unfortunately, this means women flock to the HR department and try to make the competitive dog-eat-dog atmosphere of capitalism into something socialist, childproof, and sterile, and safe.

And in entertainment, the female impulse is to prevent entertainment, sex and violence, at all costs, but instead to use stories teach and lecture, as every mother must to do to every small child.

And when this happens, the men, sick of being stifled, move onto a new wilderness, a new business, a new venture. There is no female Elon Must in all of history, no female Einstein, no female Thomas Edison, or Thomas Aquinas, nor Christopher Columbus, Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart or Sir Edmund Hillary.

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.
~Hesiod, 8th century BC

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Apparently Wilhelm II was the Joe Biden of early modern Germany.

Like Hitler without the talent.

Believe me, you don’t want to be in a berthing compartment when there’s farting going on….

The Telegraph (UK).

Boarding schools are “increasingly not British at all” after a surge in the number of foreign students, the UK’s top educational philanthropist has said.

Sir Peter Lampl, the founder of the Sutton Trust, said British children were being “priced out” of boarding schools, with their places taken by international students.

Sir Peter, a former adviser to Sir Tony Blair, claimed this was partly a result of Labour’s “narrow-minded and mean-spirited” VAT raid on private schools, which had handed an advantage “to our foreign competitors”.

The War Zone.

President Donald Trump on Friday announced he was lifting the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports enacted last month. The move comes amid media reports and administration messaging that Washington and Tehran appear to be drawing closer to a deal that could lead to ending the conflict. Iranian officials have rejected that notion. TWZ cannot confirm either side’s assertions.

“Ships caught in the Strait due to our amazing and unprecedented Naval Blockade, which will now be lifted, may start the process of ‘heading home!’” Trump proclaimed on Truth Social, referring to the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic chokepoint has been largely closed to most traffic by Iran since not long after the launch of Epic Fury on Feb. 28.

Trump’s comments may reflect a still unsigned Memorandum of Agreement with Iran that paves the way for reopening the Strait and is designed to create negotiating space to deal with the larger issues of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Construction Physics.

Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem. We’ve looked at a variety of construction productivity metrics, both for the US and for countries around the world, and found that construction productivity almost always rises much less in construction than it does in industries like manufacturing; often, it doesn’t improve at all. We’ve analyzed trends in construction costs in the US and around the world, and noted that construction almost never gets any cheaper: construction costs almost always rise at or above the level of overall inflation. And we’ve considered the most obvious strategy for solving this problem — moving the construction process into a factory — and we saw that the cost savings from prefabricated construction are frequently much less than hoped, often never materializing at all.

Now that we’ve mapped the contours of the problem, we can begin to explore its deeper nature to understand why, specifically, construction productivity is so resistant to being improved, and why construction costs stubbornly refuse to fall.

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Many years ago, I was watching a nature show. It was about some hunter-gatherers on some Pacific island. The film crew went right up and talked to one of the hunter-gatherers about his life — hunting, gathering, finding and killing witches among his fellow tribesmen, and so on. But as they talked, I realized that there must be a giant video camera right in the face of this tribesman. And he wasn’t even reacting to it. What was this strange, unnaturally shaped object, made of strange unknown materials, and potentially possessing magical powers? Didn’t he wonder? And didn’t he ask himself if he could get something like it, and use it for whatever these strange foreigners were using it to do?

I often think about the example of the tribesman and the video camera. It’s a small version of a story that happens again and again, on a far grander scale, determining the fate of entire nations and geopolitical systems of power: absorption of foreign technology. Most of the things you use on a day-to-day basis were not invented in the country in which you live (even if you live in America). They were invented all over the world, and one crucial reason you have access to them is that your society deemed it fitting to allow those technologies into the country.

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The most effective way to destroy an organization is to make it more bureaucratic. In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was aware of this. What they didn’t know was that their blueprint for sabotaging Nazi operations would become the operating manual for modern corporations.

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College degrees don’t offer the job security they once did. Is blue-collar work the answer?

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Over this past week, we’ve been subjected to a flurry of pandemic warnings. It’s like the disease of the day: Bird flu, novavirus, m-pox, hantavirus, slap rash (did you miss that one?), and Ebola. A former director of the CDC just warned that this Ebola outbreak could become a pandemic.

It sounds scary but that is literally impossible for reasons I will explain. My hope is that this article will allow you to know this too. My point is to rescue basic knowledge of infectious disease that every person knew in my grandmother’s generation. The postwar period put huge emphasis on this in schooling. It was called public health in those days.

They knew much more than certified experts today.

Read it.

I’m not a Texan. This week’s Republican senatorial primary wasn’t my rodeo, circus, or fashion show… Ken Paxton, John Cornyn, James Talarico are not my ponies, monkeys, or models, respectively.

But if you follow the news, you’ve been forced to consider the ramifications of the race. Even the math of the race.

I heard time and time again (often from Jim Geraghty on The Three Martini Lunch) that if Paxton was the nominee, the RNC would have to spend tons of money for Paxton to defeat Talarico. Many conservative commentators are very concerned about money that will need to go to Texas rather than for other tight senate races. But I also heard that $100 million was spent on Cornyn’s unsuccessful campaign to be the nominee. What if that money had been saved for the November race?

Another math problem comes courtesy of John Cornyn. In the recent race, he asked voters to look at what he’d done in the previous six months. He’s been in the Senate for 24 years. So what percentage of 24 years is six months? I believe it’s a small percentage.

There’s another math problem we can’t work out because we don’t have the figures. What percentage of senators actually support the SAVE Act? We don’t know, because it hasn’t been brought to a vote. Senator Cornyn assures us he supports it. Paxton was willing to drop out of the race if it was passed. But even if John Thune “doesn’t have the votes”, why can’t he do a vote anyway so we’ll know what percentage of senators oppose the will of 80% of the American people?

There is one math problem I can do. Jimmy Talarico says there are six genders. What percentage of those genders are imaginary? The answer is two thirds of Talarico’s genders aren’t real.

So a math problem for y’all. What are the odds of James Talarico being the next senator from Texas?

I am a Texan, so I’ll give you a hint: Zero.

The New Neo.

I’ve written this previous post about Somaliland. Since then, I’ve been wondering what makes Somaliland so different from its neighbor, Somalia, and so many other states in the region. I think the answer is probably complicated and probably contains many elements of which I’m unaware. But one is probably its different colonial history; Somaliland was a British colony and Somalia was an Italian colony. This can make a world of difference.

Sarah Hoyt:

Socialism is Communism on the installment plan, having surrendered the idea that they’ll eventually get to that magical state withering away and instead believing it’s possible to stay suspended in that place where everyone gets what he needs and everyone contributes what she can. Like communism, in its most functional form, it is an oligarchy, nepotistic and brittle in the face of any new technology. For its failure mode, see the sh*tshow of Europe these days. Or the way we were headed two years ago. Eventually the nepo oligarchy becomes an open kakistocracy that can stay in power only by brutal repression. Next verse, same as the first, welcome to the end stage of various dictatorships as the velvet glove comes off and the steel clad boot comes down.

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Most of us are already quite comfortable recycling our household waste. In Spain, for instance, millions of tonnes of packaging are processed every year, but did you know that buildings and their materials can also be recycled, or that an entire building could be completely dismantled and reassembled?

Formula 1, often a laboratory for innovation, offers us a real-world example of this in the form of the Red Bull team’s “pit box”, known as the F1Holzhaus – literally, “the wooden house”. It made its debut at the 2019 Spanish Grand Prix and has been the team’s “home” in Europe ever since. Before every Grand Prix, fourteen workers assemble its 1,221 square metres in just 32 hours, and then dismantle it in less than a day.

This building reflects a change in the conception of construction, which has to be increasingly committed to sustainable buildings that can be adapted, modified and reused.

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For Beijing, Taiwan is the unfinished chapter of the Chinese civil war and the symbolic wound of national division. But it is also a military-geographic problem. As long as Taiwan remains outside the control of the People’s Republic of China, China’s navy faces a barrier along the first island chain. Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines form a maritime arc that limits China’s free access to the wider Pacific. If Taiwan fell under Beijing’s control, that barrier would be broken.

For Taiwan, geography is both shield and vulnerability. The sea protects it from easy invasion, but the same sea makes it dependent on trade, shipping, imported energy, and open maritime routes. As noted in a recent analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Taiwan’s island status and dependence on maritime supply chains make blockade scenarios strategically dangerous even without a direct invasion.

Energy remains one of Taiwan’s deepest structural vulnerabilities. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Taiwan relies heavily on imported LNG and coal for electricity generation, making maritime security inseparable from energy security. This dependence means that any prolonged disruption in shipping lanes could rapidly become an economic and social crisis.

This is why a Taiwan crisis would not necessarily begin with amphibious landings or missile strikes. It could begin with pressure: inspection zones, cyberattacks, port disruption, gray-zone naval operations, airspace intimidation, or partial maritime restrictions. The objective would not necessarily be immediate conquest, but psychological exhaustion and economic destabilization.

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How do we learn to remember? At the most fundamental level, it’s all about chemicals and electricity. Beyond their roles in diet and nutrition, calcium and magnesium work as ions, or charged particles, in the brain. Magnesium can block a channel found within brain receptors known as NMDARs. When the blockade lifts, calcium can pass through the channel. These processes enable the brain to perform essential functions, like learning and remembering.

Scientists have known all of this for a while. What they couldn’t figure out was how NMDARs tell calcium from magnesium. Now, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Hiro Furukawa, postdoc Rubin Steigerwald, and colleagues have found an answer that could have implications for brain development and disease. It involves water, dehydration, and a molecular cage captured across 50,000 movies.

WIRED.

For more than 80 years, the principle of “the surface of an object must be smooth” has been the basic premise of aeronautical engineering throughout the world in order to suppress the transition to turbulence and reduce aerodynamic drag. This premise was based on the results of a 1940 study by Ichiro Tani, a Japanese aerodynamicist who quantitatively demonstrated the relationship between “surface roughness” (an indicator of the state of the machined surface) and turbulent transition, arguing that surface roughness, which was unavoidable with the manufacturing technology of the time, prevented laminar flow from being realized.

However, in 1989 Tani reinterpreted the experimental data on rough-surface pipes obtained by fluid engineer Johann Nikulase in the 1930s, bringing a new perspective that “roughness may not necessarily only promote turbulent transition and increase fluid resistance.” Inheriting this idea, a research group led by Yasuaki Kohama of Tohoku University experimentally demonstrated in the 1990s that fibrous rough surfaces, which have fine fibrous irregularities on their surface, have the effect of delaying transition under certain conditions.

The Causal Fallacy.

I am contractually obligated as a discourse participator to acknowledge the launch of yet another discourse participating Substack. The Argument is an Abundance liberal absolutely definitely not Abundance liberal publication, led by Jerusalem Demsas (ex-The Atlantic) and staffed by a variety of people who absolutely do not have a certain ideological movement in common.1

The opening substantive post, from staff writer Kelsey Piper (whose departure from Vox means I no longer have someone to identify as the reasonable person at Vox), concerns the recent, consistent failure of guaranteed income pilots to produce any non-pecuniary benefits for their treated participants. This finding is, as Piper puts it, “shocking”.

Quanta.

Since their discovery in 1982, exotic materials known as quasicrystals have bedeviled physicists and chemists. Their atoms arrange themselves into chains of pentagons, decagons and other shapes to form patterns that never quite repeat. These patterns seem to defy physical laws and intuition. How can atoms possibly “know” how to form elaborate nonrepeating arrangements without an advanced understanding of mathematics?

“Quasicrystals are one of those things that as a materials scientist, when you first learn about them, you’re like, ‘That’s crazy,’” said Wenhao Sun (opens a new tab), a materials scientist at the University of Michigan.

Recently, though, a spate of results has peeled back some of their secrets. In one study (opens a new tab), Sun and collaborators adapted a method for studying crystals to determine that at least some quasicrystals are thermodynamically stable — their atoms won’t settle into a lower-energy arrangement. This finding helps explain how and why quasicrystals form. A second study (opens a new tab) has yielded a new way to engineer quasicrystals and observe them in the process of forming. And a third research group has logged (opens a new tab) previously unknown properties of these unusual materials.

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I used to think that people were pretty smart. Meaning if I were walking down the street, or through a crowded mall, I could be pretty certain that most people I ran into were at a certain level of intelligence.

What do they say? That the average IQ is 100? And when you start getting really low in IQ, the number of people who have that lower IQ gets smaller and fewer in number. It is like the classic bell curve. The middle of the bell curve is the number of people with an IQ of 100; outliers on either side get lower or higher.

That’s what I used to think.

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The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.

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Against the backdrop of Tulsi Gabbard resigning her position as Director of National Intelligence, there is an opportunity to explain how the Washington DC Intelligence Community functions in real life.

ODNI Tulsi Gabbard has rightly been receiving a lot of praise for her efforts at removing the shroud of secrecy that is often used by an intensely territorial IC network. Simultaneously, she has received criticism or what Machiavelli called, “the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution”; because, in reality Tulsi Gabbard might be considered the first functional DNI.

It was DNI Tulsi Gabbard who released the receipts showing how the CIA and IC ran an impeachment operation against President Trump. CIA operative Eric Ciarmella, ICIG Michael Atkinson and HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff all collaboratively involved.

Here it becomes more important for the next sequence of events to fully understand what it was about Tulsi Gabbard in the position of DNI that made such a big difference. What was it about her approach to the office of the DNI that made Gabbard stand out? This is a discussion worth having.

 

Brilliant.

ATQUE: Spencer Pratt Literally Uses LA Shithole Filth As Campaign Ad

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The idea took off after one resident pointed out the obvious: if neighborhoods are blanketed in graffiti that the city ignores, simply spray “Vote Pratt” over it and watch the cleanup crews mobilize within minutes.

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Public health disparities provide an important lens for understanding social and political change in the USA. Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s. Here we find evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms. First, demographic realignment within political coalitions brought less healthy individuals into the conservative camp. Yet by the 2020s, demographic change, public policy and COVID-19 do not fully account for the widening gap in mortality rates. Public opinion data are consistent with a second mechanism: declining trust in medical professionals among right-leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness, even for issues unrelated to COVID-19. These patterns suggest that growing ideological divides in health behaviours are leaving conservative Americans increasingly vulnerable to preventable health risks.

Two words: Doctor Fauci.

New York City, by Samuel Johnson:

There none are swept by sudden Fate away,
But all whom Hunger spares, with Age decay:
Here Malice, Rapine, Accident, conspire,
And now a Rabble Rages, now a Fire;
Their Ambush here relentless Ruffians lay,
And here the fell Attorney prowls for Prey;
Here falling Houses thunder on your Head,
And here a female Atheist talks you dead.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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Another MAGA victory took place earlier this week, but this one has flown under the radar a little bit.

Lee County, Alabama, home of Auburn University, has had the same sheriff since before the turn of the 21st Century. But on Tuesday night, Jay Jones was narrowly defeated, largely because he would not participate in basic illegal immigration enforcement.

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More than 500 years ago in what is now Peru, the Inca Empire relied on one of the world’s most distinctive, and poorly understood, systems for recording information: sets of intricately knotted cords known as khipus. For centuries, archaeologists and historians believed making and reading these cords was a job for the elite, reserved only for men who were literate bureaucrats. Yet a single lock of hair is challenging that picture.

After analyzing a 500-year-old khipu made of human hair, a team of anthropologists found that its creator’s diet did not include foods associated with the Inca upper classes such as maize and meat. The results, published today in Science Advances, suggest the khipu wasn’t made by an imperial bureaucrat, but rather by someone of much lower status, like a commoner.

The finding suggests “that numeracy was much more widespread in the population … [and] probably not just in the hands of men,” says Karenleigh Overmann, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs who was not involved in the study. “Anybody can tie knots and strings.”

Naval News.

Needless to say, the U.S. Navy has nothing like this.

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Alberta will hold a referendum on whether the province should remain in Canada or begin the legal process toward a future binding vote on separation, marking the first major test of Canadian unity in decades.

Thursday’s announcement by Premier Danielle Smith follows growing pressure from separatist groups after a citizen-led petition calling for independence gathered more than 300,000 signatures earlier this year. A separate petition supporting Alberta remaining in Canada reportedly gathered more than 400,000 signatures.

The independence movement has gained traction in the oil-rich province, driven by a long-standing belief among many Albertans that Ottawa overlooks the province’s interests, particularly over energy policy and natural resources. Despite this, opinion polls suggest most Albertans would vote against separation.

The referendum is scheduled for 19 October. Voters will be asked whether Alberta should remain a province of Canada or whether the provincial government should begin the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding referendum on separation.

Vote Pattern Analysis.

In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.” Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny.

This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern.

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A new study on the Shroud of Turin, the fabric that some Christians believe was wrapped around Jesus Christ after his death, could support a long-held belief about the biblical account of his burial.

Dr. Kelly Kearse, an immunologist who studied at Johns Hopkins University and now works as a chemistry teacher at Knoxville Catholic High School, found in a study of the shroud that the “washing hypothesis” that forensic pathologist Dr. Frederick Zugibe proposed in 1998 is contradicted by evidence collected from the shroud itself.

In her research, Kearse examined human blood samples to see how blood transfers to cloth and found that serum halos, or clear rings that form around blood clots, are visible on parts of the shroud.

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I usually focus on the building science of homes, HVAC, and indoor environmental quality. Today, though, I’m going to cover a topic of outdoor environmental quality. I’ve had mosquitoes in my backyard since we bought the house in 2019. This year, however, the yard is practically uninhabitable all the time because the constant rainfall has kept the yard wet and overpopulated with mosquitoes. That’s about to change because last week, I heard about the perfect solution: the Mosquito Bucket of Death.†

So, for the past few days I’ve been setting them up and putting them out in my yard. I’ve got four out there now and may add more. I wish I had started them in April because it takes a while for them to do their thing. And their thing is using an otherwise harmless bacterium to kill the mosquito larvae after the female mosquitoes lay their eggs in the bucket. Here’s a video showing a bit about how they work and how to set them up.

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Traditionally, prefabricated construction has meant large fixed factories churning out modules or panels that get shipped to building sites. The siren song is industrial-esque economies of scale in an industry that’s long evaded affordability and efficiency. But those centralized models, made infamous by companies like Katerra, General Modular Homes, and Skender, have faced challenges due to large up-front capex requirements and the hefty cost of shipping fabricated products to construction sites.

The emerging microfactory model flips that script. Instead of shipping bulky housing components from a distant plant, why not ship the factoryitself to the project? In other words, take a compact, automated production unit (often the size of a shipping container) and set it up right next to the jobsite. The factory becomes a portable product, and the building components are made where they’ll be used—a true inversion of the old “fixed factory, shipped goods” paradigm.

By making factories shippable and goods more locally produced, microfactories aim to capture the benefits of off-site fabrication (automation, efficiency, indoor conditions) without the drawbacks of centralized production.

New Scientist.

We have known of magnets for millennia. Today, they are at the heart of a raft of modern technologies, from electric generators and smartphones to loudspeakers and hospital scanners. And yet for 100 years, we have been missing something about them. We always assumed there were only two types. It was Šmejkal’s art-inspired insights that finally gave the lie to that in 2022.

Fast-forward to today, and we know that what Šmejkal called “altermagnets” aren’t just an idea. We have discovered real examples and are working out how to make this new kind of material in practical and useful ways. There is even a possibility that these magnets could help us build a completely new kind of computer. “Altermagnets could actually have all the functionalities of current devices, but much faster, with less energy consumption, and smaller,” says Šmejkal.