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Oregon State University researchers have developed a new family of advanced materials that convert water into energy-producing hydrogen using only sunlight, offering a potential clean-energy alternative to solar panels and concentrated solar energy solutions.

The OSU College of Science team said their new approach, which enables high-speed, high-efficiency hydrogen production, could provide a solar-powered source of hydrogen for automotive fuel cells and other chemical manufacturing processes.

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Even amidst tragic news that at least 18 Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt state of Plateau were killed by Fulani jihadists over the past week, there is reason for hope: The nation’s government has finally bowed to pressure and taken concrete action against the plague of anti-Christian violence.

Because of pressure started by President Donald Trump’s campaign to stop the persecution of Christians, the government of Nigeria finally responded with commensurate force to stop these latest attacks in the Middle Belt from turning into something much worse, likely saving hundreds of Christians’ lives.

In the middle of September, local reporters covering persecution in Nigeria—like Masara Kim with Truth Nigeria—began documenting a massive build-up of Fulani jihadists in central Plateau state, one of the epicenters of persecution against Christians in the country. This was not another routine gathering of dozens of attackers, but nearly a thousand armed fighters amassing in the area, coming from all different regions in Nigeria.

The rationale for this terrorist build-up is murky, but it could have been related to reports that a major Fulani militant leader had just been arrested by local forces, or to general attempts to destabilize the country during a presidential election season. Whatever the reason, it appeared that the largest attack on this community in years would be launched imminently.

For context, the last time a coordinated attack of such magnitude occurred was Christmas Eve 2023, when militias devastated 25 villages, leaving almost 200 Christians dead, with pastors beheaded and churches burned to the ground. Over the following months, more than a thousand were killed as the communities were left to fend for themselves, effectively defenseless.

The Foundry.

While the American military action in Iran has been a source of many benefits to the U.S., a collateral negative effect has been the increase in world oil prices and the associated increase in gas prices at the pump for U.S. consumers. However, things may not be as dire as many would lead you to believe.

To understand the real state of things, examining U.S. gas prices over the past two decades provides invaluable insight—and it allows for a more informed and rational discussion of the pros and cons of this Iran conflict.

The table below documents the average gasoline prices during recent U.S. administrations before factoring in inflation. The average price of gas during Trump 1.0 was about 48 cents per gallon less than under Obama. Average gas prices during Trump 2.0 have been about 9 cents per gallon less than during the Biden administration.

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The Trump administration put some reasonable limits on federal student loans, and the Left is having a fit about it.

According to a Department of Education rule finalized in July, schools will now need to prove that their degrees are paying off for students to ensure that they remain eligible for federal funds.

The rule change was finalized in July but has only now gone viral. That’s likely because schools must report loan data at the beginning of October.

The War Zone.

The Navy has identified the aircraft type at the center of last night’s mishap aboard the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The service said the incident involved the crew of an EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jet who were forced to eject after the aircraft experienced an arresting gear failure while trying to land. This took place about 6:18 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time Monday as the vessel was off the coast of Virginia.

The Growler crew, attached to the “Zappers” of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 130, was “promptly recovered by search-and-rescue personnel assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 7. Both aviators were safely returned to the ship,” the Navy added. The cause of the mishap is still being investigated.

…

It is unclear at the moment whether the aircraft was lost or if there was any damage to the carrier itself. We have reached out to the Navy to find out more details.

If they had to eject, then yeah, the aircraft was lost. If the arresting wire actually broke, which is implied by the fact that sailors on deck were injured, then yeah, there was damage to the ship.

The failure of an arresting wire is one of the worst nightmares carrier-based fixed-wing naval aircrews and sailors on deck can face. The wire turns into a falling steel whip that can cut a person in half as it slices through the air across the flight deck, and usually, the aircraft it broke away from, ends up in the sea as it doesn’t have enough airspeed or time to get airborne again.

Well, there’s more to it than that. The one invariable rule for carrier landings is that when the aircraft hits the deck the pilot goes to full power just in case they miss the wire or the wire breaks and they have to get airborne again (“bolter”). A functioning arresting wire will stop the plane no matter what its engines are doing; it’s specifically engineered to do that. All this has been thought through and prepared for. It will be interesting to find out the details. (Yeah, I do miss my time on the JFK, even though it’s been fifty years.)

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The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).

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Supporters of women’s sports and sex-based protections have reason to celebrate. The Department of Education announced Sept. 28 that it is formally rescinding the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rule and reinstating the 2020 Title IX regulations promulgated under the first Trump administration.

Ongoing litigation has prevented the Trump administration from being able to formally rescind the illegal 2024 Biden regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations, even though the Department has been following the 2020 Trump-era Title IX regulations since January of last year.

In April 2024, the Biden administration had issued final regulations rewriting the more than 50-year-old civil rights law, Title IX, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Essentially, it allowed boys who claim to identify as girls to participate in girls’ and women’s sports at schools that receive federal funding.

It all comes down to ‘federal funding’. These people are whores for ‘free’ government money.

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Just in case you were wondering.

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The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Department of Homeland Security to continue its citizenship verification program.

In a 6-3 shadow docket ruling in the case of DHS v. League of Women Voters, the justices allowed the Trump administration to expand the program that allows states to use Social Security records and other information to check voters’ citizenship status.

“By prohibiting interference with the disclosure of information regarding citizenship status to DHS—’notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law’—Congress necessarily authorized DHS to request and receive that information,” the majority opinion says.

The three liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

The War Zone.

Chinese authorities have reportedly taken possession of an F-35 cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door that were inexplicably diverted to Hong Kong while being shipped from Australia to the United States. The incident appears to have left physical components that incorporate aspects of the fighter’s low-observable design in the hands of a country that has spent years doing whatever it could to gain information on the aircraft and America’s stealth technology secrets in general.

So, what does all this mean? Let’s put it in perspective.

The parts in question were being shipped by UPS from Australia to the United States in late May, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. The components from a Royal Australian Air Force F-35A were being sent to the United States for inspection and possible repair or disposal.

…

What is highly unusual is where this particular shipment ended up. F-35 components moving through an established international logistics system apparently stopped in South Korea, and were then routed to Hong Kong. Chinese authorities subsequently took possession of the parts and have not returned them, according to the sources cited by Bloomberg.

Looks like another win to me.

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A birth tourism operation in the Houston area has agreed to close in a settlement, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Friday.

The center “unlawfully facilitated over 1,000 births to foreign Chinese nationals,” Paxton posted on X.

Paxton’s office first sued the operation in late April, stating the De’Ai Postpartum Care Center primarily helped Chinese nationals travel to Texas to give birth and secure U.S. citizenship for their children.

The center had operated for years across multiple Houston-area properties. Locations included sites in Sugar Land, Houston, Richmond, and Rosenberg, according to details from the original state lawsuit.

Nature, which purports to be a scientific publication that somehow winds up invariably on the Woke side of the aisle.

Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings has long puzzled archaeologists. Might hidden chambers — suspected to hold the remains of Nefertiti — lie beyond its walls? Now, researchers say they have found new evidence pointing to this controversial conclusion.

The decision of whether to peek into the supposed chambers, a few metres from the existing tomb, is in the hands of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. If approved, careful drilling to deploy miniature tractors equipped with cameras could start in November, co-author of the study George Ballard told Nature.

The researchers conducted a range of geophysical surveys, including the first use of gravitational techniques to probe the density of ground around the site, as well as ground-penetrating radar (GPR) from inside the tomb. Taken together with studies of the tomb structure, the ground around it and wall paintings, the data strongly suggest that there is a “hidden complex” of corridors and rooms that pre-dates the entombment of Tutankhamun, says lead researcher Mamdouh Eldamaty, an archaeologist at Ain Shams University in Cairo and former antiquities minister of the Egyptian government.

Soon to be a major motion picture…

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Ensuring America has secure elections might be the largest and most consequential fight for conservatives ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections. Requiring identification and proof of citizenship to vote is an 80-20 issue for Americans, and conservatives are fighting to deliver it.

The SAVE Act, which would establish a requirement for voter ID and proof of citizenship for voter registration, has passed the U.S. House multiple times, but the Senate has repeatedly failed to pass any version of it. Instead of waiting around for the Senate to act, state officials are taking it into their own hands.

Multiple states have already passed their own versions of the SAVE Act. A charge led by the State Freedom Caucus Network, a group of state elected conservatives, is advancing legislation in Arizona, South Dakota, and Wyoming, with more to come.

Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, told the Daily Signal at the network’s annual summit that this is “absolutely” a solution to the Senate refusing to act. Self was a keynote speaker at the summit in Dallas, Texas.

Self is my Congressman, and does a find job.

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Our brain may be a hybrid of two ancient nervous systems that were packaged together hundreds of millions of years ago. This is based on the finding that the front and back brain regions in people and several other species develop from two distinct cell types in embryos, instead of sharing the same developmental origin, as previously thought.

“Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” says Kyle Loh at Stanford University. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

 

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A leaked video of a French military chaplain addressing paratroopers in a cathedral has circulated widely on social media. In the clip, the chaplain makes disparaging remarks about leftists, tells soldiers to keep fighting for their national heritage, and warns of the risk that French values and culture could be displaced.

The Telegraph (UK).

The Singapore Prosperity had docked at a series of Saudi ports in mid-August as it made its way through the Gulf. The tanker, roughly the size of three football pitches, was carrying an estimated two million barrels of crude oil as it headed for the Strait of Hormuz.

Then it disappeared.

Two days later, according to reports, it reappeared on maritime trackers as its transponder was apparently turned back on, near Fujairah, on the other side of the strait.

The Telegraph (UK).

The brain is two separate organs that work together, rather than a single unified unit, scientists at Stanford University have discovered.

Researchers now think that at some time in human evolutionary history, the two parts of the brain may have been separated in space – similar to how jellyfish have two nervous systems in different parts of their body – before moving together.

The human brain, therefore, consists of two ancient nervous systems which are “cleverly packaged together” and have evolved independently over millions of years, experts believe.

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When the definitive history of Joe Biden’s presidency is written, it will likely conclude that his most important legacy was unprecedented immigration levels. The U.S. foreign-born population (legal and illegal) grew by 8.3 million during his time in office, driven mostly by the border crisis that he instigated.

At first, the media called the massive influx “seasonal” or blamed it on pent-up demand after COVID lockdowns. Later, they claimed that every Western country faced a similar situation. Many argued it was inevitable. As David Bier of the Cato Institute argued in the New York Times, “Biden Can’t Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It.” Of course, nothing about it was inevitable.

The border crisis began almost immediately after Biden took office. The president’s public statements and his decisions to end the Remain in Mexico policy, dismantle Title 42, and terminate agreements with Central American countries that stopped people from transiting through those nations all played a part. Biden also chose not to pressure Mexico to stop the flow of migrants through its territory. Most important, however, was the administration’s decision to release most people encountered at the border into the United States rather than detain them and expedite their removal.

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The numbers for 2025 just came out. And they are really good. It’s too bad we won’t know about 2026 until September 2027, but let’s look at what we do know…

Real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) Median Household Income:

2024 was $85,210
2025 was $87,460

That’s a one-year gain of $2,250 or 2.64%. That’s spectacular. Of course, as the stockbroker commercials caution: past performance is no guarantee of future. But, by way of comparison…

Obama’s total gain over 8 years was $4,970, or 6.88%.

Biden’s total gain over 4 years was $1,620 (1.94%).

Trump v1 total gain over 4 years was $6,360 (8.24%).

Read it.

The US has announced it has space weapons in orbit….days after a Chinese spy satellite “broke up” and around the time it was announced that China had provided satellite targeting data to Iran……is the game afoot?

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Watch it.

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

Watch it.

I have always wondered about that.

Read it.

Things are looking up.

ScienceDaily.

Two widely used zero-calorie sweeteners, sucralose and stevia, may have effects that linger far longer than the sweet taste itself. In mice, researchers found that both sweeteners altered the gut microbiome, reduced beneficial compounds produced by gut bacteria, and changed the activity of genes involved in metabolism and inflammation. Some of those changes were also detected in later generations that had never consumed the sweeteners themselves.

Sugar. It’s not just for breakfast any more.

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On Tuesday, medical technology company Stryker announced that a hip arthroscopy had been performed at Duke Health using its SportSuite Vision app on Apple Vision Pro. SportSuite Vision allows surgeons to view the operating room while placing digital tools, including arthroscopic and CT imaging, within their field of view.

Typically, arthroscopic procedures require surgeons to reference multiple displays positioned around the operating room. SportSuite Vision displays that information through the Apple Vision Pro, reducing awkward bending and twisting and streamlining the surgical process.

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The law firm America First Legal released a parental rights toolkit Tuesday, explaining how a law that protects the rights of disabled children also helps parents defend their rights when schools adopt policies hiding a child’s transgender identity from parents.

“Parents hold the fundamental and constitutionally-protected right to direct the upbringing of their children, and that includes authority over their children’s education,” Julie Alexa Strauss, general counsel at America First Legal, said in a statement on the new toolkit, exclusively provided first to the Daily Signal. “Yet today, radicalized school personnel are exploiting their access to children, particularly vulnerable children with disabilities—often behind closed doors—to push ideological agendas.”

“Congress gave parents of children with special needs powerful legal rights, but too many families are never made aware of just how extensive those protections are,” Strauss added. “AFL’s IDEA Toolkit helps parents understand those rights, empowers parents to assert their authority, and holds schools accountable when they overstep the law.”

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, first passed in 1975 but renamed in 1990, guarantees children with disabilities access to a free, appropriate public education.

America First Legal argues that the law “also gives parents extensive authority over evaluations, educational services, school records, and individualized education programs.”

The law firm states that its “IDEA toolkit arms parents with an arsenal of tools designed to ensure that they, not the government, remain in control of their children’s education.”

MIT News.

Molecules are among the smallest building blocks available for making next-generation devices. Their unique, customizable properties enable promising applications in emerging computing, sensing, optical, and quantum technologies.

But integrating molecules into functional devices at scale remains a challenge. Traditional semiconductor manufacturing processes can damage small and fragile molecular materials. Now, MIT researchers have developed a scalable fabrication technique that incorporates delicate molecular materials into electronic devices on a chip without causing damage.

Their method extends the capabilities of standard semiconductor manufacturing processes to accommodate molecules. The researchers first prefabricate the device components using traditional processes. Then, they introduce the molecules and harness nanoscale surface forces to mechanically transform the fabricated device, which self-assembles without damaging the molecules.

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If they were any good, they wouldn’t be dependent on Federal funding for their research.

Obviously they will be more at home in socialist Canada.

And we are much improved by their absence.

Watch it.

Other countries are doing it, and it’s good to know that Americans are persisting.

Nature magazine.

Shadowed by past disasters, nuclear engineers are developing different types of reactor, fuel, coolant and material that could help to make fission the zero-carbon energy technology of choice.

Read it.

To copy DNA, you generally use DNA as a template. To make RNA, cells generally use DNA as a template, while RNA in turn provides the instructions for making proteins.

But now a bacterium has revealed a different path, and it’s deeply surprising.

In one half of this newly discovered system, a protein acts as a molecular template for building a specific repeating DNA sequence – basically allowing information written in amino acids to determine information written in DNA.

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The land-based Harpoon Coastal Defense System (HCDS) scored a direct hit during US Navy trials ahead of its planned deployment to Taiwan’s military. The HCDS is currently not under contract for the US or any other military besides Taiwan’s, making the successful live-fire test a critical step in fulfilling Taipei’s $2.3 billion order.

An American Harpoon missile system that will be fielded by Taiwan struck a vessel in a maritime strike test.

The Boeing-made Harpoon Coastal Defense System successfully struck the test target during a developmental test. According to the Portfolio Acquisition Executive Munitions release, the test was designed to validate the ground-based Harpoon system’s ability to engage at-sea threats.

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I’m thinking California.

Read it.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations are among the nonprofits that could lose their tax-exempt status as the Trump administration cracks down on what officials consider “bogus” charities.

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An Alaska federal judge on Monday threw out a lawsuit by environmental groups challenging President Donald Trump’s move to allow offshore drilling along broad swaths of previously protected coastline.

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At the core of the issue is the administration executive order that requires states to send their voter rolls to the U.S. Postal Service for mail service for mail-in ballots. The USPS would then cross-check with DHS and Social Security records to ensure each of the names and addresses were eligible to vote before mailing them a ballot.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

So: Instead of pulling kerosene out of our fossil fuels, we can clear-cut forests to grow ‘sustainable’ coconut trees.

Taking bets on how soon some proglodyte group takes up the cause.

Although I will say that I suspect that coconut oil would make carrier flight decks smell a lot nicer than they do now.

Read it.

Good luck with that. What are they going to do, send us a sternly-worded memo? Send protesters to the border to line up and burst into tears?

Read it.

Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison is scouting Austin, Texas, as a potential landing spot for the studio should California Attorney General Rob Bonta refuse to settle the multistate antitrust suit blocking his roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a New York Post report.

…

Ellison told his senior leadership team on Aug. 5 that the company would begin leaving California on Oct. 1 unless Bonta agrees to negotiate, Variety reported, with Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee under consideration and a five-year plan to shift most studio jobs out of state.

And another one bites the dust,
Another one bites the dust,
And another one’s gone, and another one’s gone,
Another one bites the dust….

Watch it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

I used to get one of those meal delivery kits sent to my house, the kind that comes with a new recipe card every week. It ended up being a great way to learn how to cook, different techniques, little tips, methods I never would’ve picked up just winging it on my own.

What none of those recipe cards ever really nailed though was the format itself, long blocks of text you had to read start to finish just to figure out when to add the eggs.

Turns out someone solved that problem decades ago.

Too lazy to do the work? (Me! Me!) Go here.

The Other McCain.

Florida’s 25th District is the main House “battleground” in the state this fall, after the district was redrawn to give the GOP a 10-point edge. The incumbent Democrat, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, won by a margin of less than 5 percent in 2024, and his seat is one of the most vulnerable for Democrats nationwide in the midterm fight to control the House.

Controversial left-wing podcaster Hasan Piker endorsed Moskowitz’s primary opponent, DSA-backed Oliver Larkin — and got stomped.

Read it.

A report released by House committees on Aug. 13 alleged that Harvard University prioritized financial ties over American national security and received more than $600 million from China, the most of any U.S. university.

The War Zone.

Last week, the U.S. Navy announced that future stretched Virginia class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSN) fitted with Virginia Payload Modules (VPM) will be recategorized as guided missile types (SSGN). In doing so, the service disclosed that two Block V Virginia class boats will lack a VPM, and the four large vertical launch tubes contained therein, rather than just one as had been previously understood. Now, the Navy has confirmed to TWZ directly that the second VPM-less Block V will have a one-of-a-kind seabed warfare configuration. This will allow it to conduct espionage missions on the seafloor, a role currently filled by the USS Jimmy Carter, a one-off subvariant of the Seawolf class attack submarine.

In its August 3 press release, the Navy said it planned to acquire 19 VPM-equipped Virginia class SSGNs across the Block V and Block VI subclasses. As TWZ noted at the time, this created a discrepancy of one submarine based on publicly stated procurement plans. It was already known that the first of the 12 Block Vs, the future USS Oklahoma, would lack a VPM, but the expectation had been that the other 11 would have this feature. The Block VI production run is currently set to consist of nine more submarines, all with VPMs. We correctly posited last week that the outlier could be the seabed warfare submarine, the basic plans for which emerged some years ago now.

Read it.

Researchers in China have created a textile from living mycelium that is self-cleaning, near self-repairing and can be coloured or made UV protective through “plug-and-play” add-ons of different fungi or yeast.

The breakthrough from the researchers at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology is a type of engineered living material (ELM) – a material built off living organisms that stay active even after they’re fabricated into their final form.

This distinguishes it from most contemporary uses of mycelium, which involve drying and effectively killing the fungus to produce a stable, non-growing material that has become a popular emerging alternative to plastic packaging and vinyl.

Eeeeeeeeewwwwwww….

The War Zone.

From recent satellite imagery, the Russian Navy now looks to be using nets to protect submarines from drone attacks at a highly strategic base on the country’s far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula. There are also signs that Russian forces have been taking new steps at a separate base along the Black Sea to shield submarines against uncrewed aerial threats. The appearance of the nets over the submarines at the base in Kamchatka point to how Russia’s concerns about drone threats have extended to critical facilities far removed from the battlefields of Ukraine.

TWZ obtained the imagery showing the netting in place over submarines at the Russian Navy’s base at Rybachiy from Vantor. Business insider was first to report on these images. Rybachiy is notably the homeport for the vast majority of Borei and Borei-A class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs, in service in Russia today. It is also home to various other guided missile and attack submarines assigned to the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

Images of Rybachiy from Vantor taken on August 4, seen at the top of this story and below, show several different types of submarines fully covered by nets. What is visible in the imagery is broadly consistent with netting that Russian forces have employed in and around Ukraine as a countermeasure against kamikaze drone attacks against assets on the ground and in the water. Similar netting has also observed in use by other armed forces elsewhere globally.

Interesting Engineering.

A U.S. critical minerals company has recently confirmed the nation’s largest known tungsten resource at its Railroad Valley Minerals Project in Nye County, Nevada, despite a NASA land withdrawal restricting exploration across part of the site.

In its updated resource report, 3 Proton Lithium (3PL) said that the project hosts an inferred resource of 1.78 million tons of tungsten. The company revealed that the deposit is part of a mineral system that also contains world-class resources of lithium, potash, and boron.

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You wanted to slow down ALL immigration? This is how you do it.

Democrats will still give them free handouts, but at least it will be less than it was.