Read it.

“There are all kinds of proteins congregating at the cellular membrane, and if we want to understand what a protein does, how it’s regulated by its environment, and specifically how it triggers the spread of a disease, we need to understand what surrounds it,” explained Gupta, whose lab is part of the Nanobiology Institute at Yale’s West Campus.

Lacking the spatial nanotechnology required to understand the molecular context of how membrane proteins are regulated in health and diseases, the scholars developed a novel platform that provides access to around 2000 membrane proteins as well as a chemical tool to examine areas that surround proteins of interest.

Read it.

The vice chief of the U.S. Space Force said Chinese satellites have been observed rehearsing “dogfighting” maneuvers in low Earth orbit, a display of the communist nation’s ability to perform complex maneuvers in orbit.

The maneuvers, referred to as rendezvous and proximity operations, involve not only navigating around other objects but also inspecting them, the Air Force Times reported Tuesday.

“With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Tuesday at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington, D.C.

Reuters, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed, opens new tab with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler’s AI system “DABUS” was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted.

Read it.

Democrats just had their egg-related misinformation and disinformation campaign against the president scrambled, as new USDA data reveals a third consecutive week of price declines at supermarkets. The drop follows President Trump’s recent countermeasures to stabilize national supply after the Biden-Harris administration’s reckless culling of 150 million egg-laying hens plunged the industry into turmoil and sparked egg-flation.

Read it.

The basic externalities story goes like this: Some things, like air quality or scientific discoveries, have effects which spread to millions of people without cost or reward to the creator. Actions with unpunished costs are over-produced and actions with uncompensated benefits are left undone.

The story continues that if only we could coordinate, we could fix the misallocation caused by externalities. We might get the government to tax and subsidize externalities or else we might try to lower transaction costs so that people can bargain to solve externalities on their own.

The basic story over-focuses on social coordination as the solution to externalities. Our institutions cannot be relied on to optimally correct externalities or even to avoid making them worse. Usually, the costs of an externality subside only after we’ve invented a technology which makes it cheap or privately beneficial to do the socially optimal thing. Most importantly, technology shifts out the production possibilities frontier making it possible to get outcomes beyond what even perfect social coordination could attain.

Economics should emphasize the importance of technology as a solution to externality problems and focus less on social coordination.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The United States began to carry out large-scale military strikes on Saturday against dozens of targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, according to local news reports and two senior U.S. officials, the opening salvo in what American officials said was a new offensive against the militants.

Air and naval strikes ordered by President Trump hit radars, air defenses, and missile and drone systems in an effort to open international shipping lanes in the Red Sea that the Houthis have disrupted for months with their own attacks. The Biden administration conducted several similar strikes against the Houthis but largely failed to restore deterrence in the region.

U.S. officials said the bombardment, the most significant military action of Mr. Trump’s second term, was also meant to send a warning signal to Iran: Mr. Trump wants to broker a deal with Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but has left open the possibility of military action if the Iranians rebuff negotiations.

U.S. officials said that airstrikes against the Houthis’ arsenal, much of which is buried deep underground, could last for several days, intensifying in scope and scale depending on the militants’ reaction. U.S. intelligence agencies have struggled in the past to identify and locate the Houthi weapons systems, which the rebels produce in subterranean factories and smuggle in from Iran.

Long past time.

Read it.

Videos have emerged showing an out of control commercial oil tanker hitting a row of three Brazilian Navy patrol boats, as well as the pier, in the Port of Santos along the country’s southeastern coast last night.

The Brazilian-flagged Olavo Bilac suffered an issue with its rudder while maneuvering between piers, according to multiple Brazilian media reports citing the Port Authority of Santos. The incident happened at around 11:20 PM local time on Wednesday. The Port of Santos is situated just to the southeast of the city of São Paulo.

As can be seen in the videos below, which offer views of the incident from what appears to be a closed circuit camera at the port and the ship’s deck, the nearly 817-foot-long (249-meter-long) Aframax class tanker first went careening into a pier after the loss of rudder control. It then struck a moored patrol boat, which was then pushed into two other patrol boats.

Read it.

New imagery has appeared of one of China’s new ‘invasion barges,’ which involves a temporary pier that can be connected to other vessels via a barge, or series of barges, with jack-up supports for more stability. The development of jack-up barges is widely seen as part of preparations for a possible invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China. At the same time, they also reflect the growing use of ostensibly non-military maritime assets to support amphibious operations by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).

A new video showing three of the jack-up barges deployed in tandem on a still-unidentified beach began to circulate recently on social media channels.

Read it.

What they found is a new form of epigenetic inheritance driven by amyloid proteins — structures more commonly linked to diseases like Alzheimer’s. This discovery may help explain mysteries like “missing heritability” — the fact that many traits and diseases run in families without clear genetic explanations.

…

Scientists have known for decades that genes alone don’t account for the full picture of inheritance. For instance, we now know about epigenetics — changes in gene expression that don’t involve alterations in DNA code — where mechanisms like small RNA molecules and chemical modifications to chromatin can alter traits that can be passed down to subsequent generations.

However, this is the first time that proteins have been identified as carriers of inheritance.

Read it.

Spiders don’t just spin webs—they engineer them. By stretching their silk as they spin, spiders strengthen the fibers at the molecular level, aligning proteins and forming extra bonds that boost durability.

Nature.

Metastasis is the spread of cancer cells from primary tumours to distant organs and is the cause of 90% of cancer deaths globally1,2. Metastasizing cancer cells are uniquely vulnerable to immune attack, as they are initially deprived of the immunosuppressive microenvironment found within established tumours3. There is interest in therapeutically exploiting this immune vulnerability to prevent recurrence in patients with early cancer at risk of metastasis. Here we show that inhibitors of cyclooxygenase 1 (COX-1), including aspirin, enhance immunity to cancer metastasis by releasing T cells from suppression by platelet-derived thromboxane A2 (TXA2). TXA2 acts on T cells to trigger an immunosuppressive pathway that is dependent on the guanine exchange factor ARHGEF1, suppressing T cell receptor-driven kinase signalling, proliferation and effector functions. T cell-specific conditional deletion of Arhgef1 in mice increases T cell activation at the metastatic site, provoking immune-mediated rejection of lung and liver metastases. Consequently, restricting the availability of TXA2 using aspirin, selective COX-1 inhibitors or platelet-specific deletion of COX-1 reduces the rate of metastasis in a manner that is dependent on T cell-intrinsic expression of ARHGEF1 and signalling by TXA2 in vivo. These findings reveal a novel immunosuppressive pathway that limits T cell immunity to cancer metastasis, providing mechanistic insights into the anti-metastatic activity of aspirin and paving the way for more effective anti-metastatic immunotherapies.

Yale School of Medicine.

Mireille Serlie, MD, PhD, loves fast food. Her research seeks to understand why.

“Fast and ultra-processed foods do something to our brains that make us overeat,” says Serlie, a professor of medicine (endocrinology and metabolism) at Yale School of Medicine.

Serlie studies the effects of eating patterns and specific nutrients on the brain and the functional differences between the brains of people with obesity and those with a healthy weight.

In a Q&A, Serlie discusses eating patterns, fasting, and the importance of diet and exercise in retaining muscle mass after weight loss.

Watch it.

An interesting approach to creating an artificial ‘fossil fuel’.

I find their approach of trying to keep things as low-cost as possible, without worrying about nominal efficiency, very attractive.

Much of the discussion in the video seems to riff off of the concept “Making energy out of thin air”, and that’s a bit exaggerated. The process depends on inputs of electricity from solar energy and materials like limestone, but compared to the complexities of modern fossil fuel production, it represents (if they can scale it up) a beneficial improvement.

I intend to keep my eye on this company.

Watch it.

The transition from expensive materials to inexpensive materials is key to advancing productivity.

`

Read it.

Novo Nordisk is adopting a strategy similar to that of its rival Eli Lilly & Co., preparing to offer its blockbuster weight-loss drug directly to obese US consumers at a discounted rate.

Bloomberg reports that Novo’s Wegovy will be offered directly to cash-paying consumers for $499 per month—significantly lower than the uninsured cost of about $1,350 per month.

Lilly began selling its obesity drug Zepbound directly to patients last year. At the same time, Wegovy’s limited supply drove some customers to compounded versions sold by telehealth companies like Hims & Hers Health Inc., which locked overweight Americans into a monthly subscription model.’

From what I’ve seen, the Eli Lilly drug has fewer side effects.

You still need a prescription.

Read it.

Today, we raise a cheer for reason, justice, and the unyielding spirit of free expression! Today, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia delivered a resounding blow to overreach in the long-running defamation lawsuit brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against conservative commentator Mark Steyn. In a Final Judgment Order, Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr. reduced Steyn’s punitive damages from an astronomical $1 million to a modest $5,000—vindicating Steyn, protecting open debate, and sending a powerful message about the limits of legal bullying.

It ought to have been zero.

Read it.

In their quest for answers, researchers pinpointed a specific protein, AP2A1 (Adaptor Protein Complex 2, Alpha 1 Subunit), which seems crucial to this cellular phenomenon.

Found predominantly in senescent cells, particularly within the structural stress fibers, AP2A1 could be the key to understanding cellular aging.

To explore AP2A1’s function, researchers manipulated its presence in cells, observing significant effects.

“The results were very intriguing,” said Shinji Deguchi, senior author of the study. “Suppressing AP2A1 in older cells reversed senescence and promoted cellular rejuvenation, while AP2A1 overexpression in young cells advanced senescence.”

Read it.

President Trump’s election has brought about mass layoffs among federal employees and contractors, including some who have sued and others who have protested.

But one group — that of America’s would-be censors — is taking its cause worldwide.

During the Biden administration, a massive industry took root, sweeping up billions in taxpayer funds to research, target and combat those accused of misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation.”

Although the exact number is uncertain, many trained censors are now facing unemployment.

Read it.

And it burns … oh, it burns….

Read it.

The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman is back at sea conducting routine operations after a week or so in port in Greece for repairs. Truman collided with the cargo ship M/V Besiktas-M in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt’s Port Said earlier this month.

Souda Bay is in Crete, which is technically Greece, but the write-up implies that it is on mainland Greece, which would be incorrect. When I was in the Navy my ship stopped at Souda Bay, which has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

“Led by Forward Deployed Regional Maintenance Center (FDRMC), Truman completed the five-day ERAV at Naval Support Activity (NSA) Souda Bay, Greece,” according to a Navy press release. “In an all-hands effort, Sailors worked with FDRMC personnel, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, and local industry partner Theodoropoulos Group to assess damage, develop a repair plan, and restore weathertight integrity to the ship following the collision on Feb. 12.”

So this is just a temporary patch-up job to allow the ship to continue operations. No doubt full repairs will be scheduled for the next RAV (restricted availability) period when back from deployment.

“Our ship remains operationally ready to complete deployment with mission and purpose on full display by the entire crew,” Navy Capt. Christopher Hill, Truman‘s commanding officer, also said in a statement. “We are out here launching and recovering aircraft, ready to ‘Give ‘em Hell’ with combat credible power.”

‘Combat credible power’ sounds like a blurb from the old Wacky Races TV cartoon program.

Read it.

More and more good news from the southern border highlights how the Biden administration intentionally created a catastrophe and how President Donald Trump—through a change in policy and rhetoric—has reversed the system practically overnight.

We didn’t need the phony “border security” bill President Joe Biden championed—which was really more of a handout to Ukraine—to fix the problem. We just needed an executive branch willing to enforce the law.

Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks said in a CBS News interview on Thursday that unlawful crossings at the southern border are down 94% since this time last year.

Read it.

Most people think wrinkles, graying hair, and a few creaks in the knees define aging. Yet scientists have spent decades exploring whether these signs, along with genetic mutations, tell the whole truth about growing older.

Early research suggests that epigenetics might help us measure how our bodies grow older, but what actually pushes these epigenetic “clocks” forward has been heavily debated.

The answer may involve unexpected links between random genetic changes and the epigenetic patterns found in older cells, according to Dr. Steven Cummings from Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute.

Read it.

Rumored to have killed the Roman emperor Augustus, nightshade’s berries are notoriously deadly. Tomatoes belong to the same plant family, Solanaceae, and produce toxic steroidal glycoalkaloids too.

Yet, generally, tomatoes don’t kill us.

Once believed to be poisonous, tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) actually convert their bitter toxins into something more palatable and less deadly. Sichuan University biologist Feng Bai and colleagues have now identified the genetic mechanisms involved in the tomato fruit’s safe transformation.

Read it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Don’t like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like “f” and “v,” opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Proto-Indo-European pat?r to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows “that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language,” says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel’s lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues “expected to prove Hockett wrong.”

Read it.

Sometimes the lawfare works, and sometimes it does not.

Read it.

The Navy has relieved the commanding officer of the USS Truman — the aircraft carrier that had a collision with a merchant ship outside the Suez Canal last week.

Capt. Dave Snowden was relieved Thursday for “loss of confidence in his ability to command” by Rear Adm. Sean Bailey, the commander of Carrier Strike Group 8, a Navy statement announced Thursday.

Snowden’s replacement will be Capt. Chris “Chowdah” Hill, the commander of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower who rose to fame online last year while he commanded his aircraft carrier in the Middle East amid Houthi attacks.

Read it

Satellite imagery shows the extent of the massive amount of work that has been done in the past year to restore more than 20 million square feet of runways and other World War II-era infrastructure at historic North Field on the U.S. island of Tinian in the Western Pacific. The airfield was originally established as a launchpad for B-29 bomber raids on Imperial Japan, including the ones that saw atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The facility has been refurbished to again offer a critical power projection node with its original grid-like layout presenting targeting challenges for a modern opponent, all of which could be especially valuable in a future high-end fight in the region against China.

A series of satellite images of North Field taken between Dec. 3, 2023, and Jan. 29, 2025, by Planet Labs starkly illustrates just how extensive the reconstitution of the derelict airfield has become. The images, as can seen below, show the progressive clearing of the previously overgrown runways, taxiways, and other infrastructure.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The new guidance follows President Trump’s demand that the Health and Human Services Department align with his executive order barring transgender athletes from women’s sports.

Read it.

It says a lot about America’s fast fading legacy media establishment leaders that they’ve decided to use up the last shreds of their credibility to glorify censorship.

This dynamic is exactly what’s been playing out following Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich, Germany, on Friday. In that speech, he excoriated European governments for, among other things, retreating from the principle of free speech.

Vance pointed to specific examples where Western European governments trampled on free speech rights, like how the Germans have raided the homes of people who expressed “anti-feminist” commentary on the internet or how British authorities arrested a man for praying at an abortion clinic.

Read it.

A bill that could help Indiana absorb nearly three-dozen Illinois counties breezed through committee Monday — although a border shakeup appears unlikely.

Republican House Speaker Todd Huston’s proposal would create an Indiana-Illinois Boundary Adjustment Commission tasked with exploring the secession and transfer of counties that have already voted to leave the state of Illinois.

Huston said House Bill 1008, part of the majority caucus’ priority agenda, seeks to show disgruntled Illinois residents that Indiana “welcomes” those counties “to consider joining our state.”

Odd how you never find ‘secession movements’ seeking to leave a Red State for a Blue State.

Actually, it’s not odd at all.

Read it.

U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman is now in port in Greece for repairs following a collision with the cargo ship M/V Besiktas-M this past week. The service is continuing to assess the full extent of damage to the flattop, which is in the middle of a deployment that has already included combat operations in and around the Red Sea.

The Navy announced yesterday that Truman had arrived at Naval Support Activity (NSA) Souda Bay in Greece for what it has described as an Emergent Repair Availability (ERAV). The carrier had made a port stop in Souda Bay just days before the collision, which occurred on Feb. 12 in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt as it was about to enter the Suez Canal. The incident remains under investigation.

The photographs are better than one normally sees in such news reports.

Read it.

If Florence Stoker had had her way, I wouldn’t be writing this post. Bram Stoker’s widow tried to destroy all copies of the 1922 film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and she was very nearly successful. She did have her reasons.

The film is very clearly a rip-off of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. It’s a great novel, using the epistolary (letter writing) format very well. Not only can it still give a reader chills, it’s quite surprisingly a Christian story. Count Dracula as a character is still easily one of the most widely recognized characters in fiction.

Fred Saberhagen did a wonderful series of novels using Dracula as the protagonist.

German screenwriter Henrik Galeen and director F.W. Murnau made no effort to hide the fact that they were using the Stoker novel as a blueprint for their story. Not only is it a vampire story, but such plot elements as a real estate agent going to a foreign land, a death ship, and a Transylvanian count whose nemesis is a scholarly doctor are clear steals.

They did change names, such as Dracula becoming Orlock, but even the original credits acknowledge the debt to Stoker. They never officially sought permission or made payment to the Stoker estate. It was a naive but costly mistake.

Florence brought the filmmakers to court (I assume a German court), which ruled that all copies of the film were to be destroyed. Fortunately for cinematic history, not everyone followed the court order, and some copies survived. It is a black and white, silent film that holds up as a great work. The German Expressionist set design and cinematography are beautiful and unsettling. The villain, played by the mysterious actor Max Schreck, is hideous and imposing. (Another film worth watching is Shadow of the Vampire, a Gothic drama about the making of Nosferatu that theorizes that Schreck really was a vampire.) And the tale leads to a thrilling, sunlit conclusion.

Read it.

President Donald Trump is calling for the reversal of several Biden-era green energy regulations on household appliances.

Trump announced in a Tuesday post on Truth Social that he was directing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Secretary Lee Zeldin to begin reversing water standard regulations on household appliances including sinks, dishwashers, showers and washing machines. Trump’s announcement comes after he has enacted a slew of executive actions since returning to the White House aimed at overturning many Biden-era green energy policies.

Read it.

After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades.

The state Insurance Department today approved a request from the provider, the FAIR Plan, to impose the charge and ensure it stays solvent as it covers claims from victims of the Los Angeles County fires, the department said in an order by Commissioner Ricardo Lara.

Most California home and fire insurance customers will see temporary fees added to their insurance bills as part of the charge, known as an assessment — marking the first time insurance companies will have imposed an assessment directly on customers.

The FAIR Plan is a pool of insurers required by law to provide fire insurance to property owners who can’t find insurance elsewhere. Its customer base has grown dramatically in the past several years as insurance companies have increasingly refused to write or renew policies in the state, citing increased risk of wildfires. It now has more than 451,000 policies.

Many LA fire victims have insurance through the FAIR Plan. Residents of the Pacific Palisades, where thousands of structures burned last month, held 85% more FAIR Plan policies in September than they had a year prior.

Read it.

The New York Stock Exchange, part of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE), a leading global provider of technology and data, today announced plans to launch NYSE Texas, a fully electronic equities exchange, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Pending the effectiveness of regulatory filings, NYSE Chicago will reincorporate in Texas and be renamed NYSE Texas, offering companies the opportunity to list their securities on NYSE Texas.

“As the state with the largest number of NYSE listings, representing over $3.7 trillion in market value for our community, Texas is a market leader in fostering a pro-business atmosphere,” said Lynn Martin, President, NYSE Group. “We are delighted to expand our presence in the Lone Star State, which plays a key role in driving our U.S. economy forward.”

Building on the NYSE’s 230 years of experience as the world’s leading exchange operator, the launch of NYSE Texas will provide public companies with a listing and trading venue centered within the vibrant economy of the southwestern U.S. With this launch, NYSE Texas will deliver a listing exchange to companies incorporated both in Texas and around the world that are attracted to Texas’ growing population, strong economy and business-friendly regulatory agenda. The NYSE plans to make regulatory and corporate filings to effect the reincorporation in the near term.

Everybody’s moving from blue states to red states.

Read it.

Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel “Photo Big 5” predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes. Unlike traditional survey-based personality measures, the Photo Big 5 is readily accessible and potentially less susceptible to manipulation, making it suitable for wide adoption in academic research and hiring processes. However, its use in labor market screening raises ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.

Read it.

“Exterior damage of USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) viewed from a ship’s rigid-hull inflatable boat following a collision with merchant vessel Besiktas-M, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt. USS Harry S. Truman, the flagship of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG), is on a scheduled deployment in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations supporting U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa to defend U.S., Allied and partner interests.”

The picture, a full uncropped version of which is seen below, shows multiple large tears through a sponson on the starboard side of the stern end of the ship near one of the aircraft elevators. Whether there is damage elsewhere on the ship is unknown.

Read it.

The origins of COVID-19 remain uncertain despite extensive research. A new study published in Advances in Biomarker Sciences and Technology (ABST) takes an AI-driven approach to analyze DNA methylation patterns at 865,859 CpG sites in blood samples from early COVID-19 patients.

Led by Zhengjun Zhang from the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Statistics, the study used max-logistic intelligence to identify strong genetic links. The findings suggest that COVID-19 may have resulted from the natural fusion of two rare infectious diseases — glanders and Sennetsu fever — combined with common human illnesses.

Which, of course, doesn’t speak to whether it arose naturally or by means of ‘gain of function’ research by ill-intentioned people.

Read it.

Scientists have uncovered a new way that cells control their genes — and it may rewrite our understanding of “epigenetics.”

Epigenetics is a form of DNA modification that doesn’t affect the DNA sequence itself. Instead, it describes when chemical groups attach to specific genes, thus switching those genes on or off, or else changing the 3D shape of chromosomes.

Now, in a study published Jan. 17 in the journal Cell, scientists have uncovered a whole new method of gene regulation that involves epigenetic tweaks made to both DNA and its molecular cousin RNA, at the same time.

Read it.

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) have been documented to prey on white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), in some cases causing localised shark displacement and triggering ecological cascades. Notably, a series of such predation events have been reported from South Africa over the last decade, with killer whales specifically targeting sharks’ liver. However, observations of these interactions are rare, and knowledge of their frequency across the world’s oceans remains limited. In October 2023, a 4.7?m (total length) white shark carcass washed ashore in southeastern Australia, coinciding with reports from citizen scientists of killer whales hunting a large, unidentified prey item in the area. Visual inspection of the carcass revealed that the liver, digestive, and reproductive organs were missing, and the presence of four distinctive bite wounds, one of which was characteristic of killer whale liver extraction as seen in South Africa. Genomic analyses performed on swabs taken from the bite wounds confirmed the presence of killer whale DNA in the major bite area, while the other bites were embedded with genetic material from the scavenging broadnose sevengill shark (Notorynchus cepedianus). These results provide confirmed evidence of killer whale predation on white sharks in Australia and the likely selective consumption of the liver, suggesting predations of this nature are more globally prevalent than currently assumed.

Read it.

After Oklahoma approved a request by the Catholic Church to open a charter school in 2023, lawsuits quickly followed. Courts at both the state and federal levels ruled against the church, finding that a publicly funded school promoting religion would be unconstitutional.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken up the case, signaling that the justices are willing to consider overturning a longstanding legal precedent protecting the separation of church and state. If the court allows St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School to become the first government-funded religious school in the country, the consequences for religious education — including for Jewish schools — could be far-reaching.

The school’s backers argue that charter schools should be allowed to teach religion because they are not technically government institutions. They also contend that as long as a state permits charter schools — and nearly all states do — excluding only religious ones violates the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

In St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, the fate of the school will be decided by a court whose conservative supermajority has steadily expanded religion’s role in public life. The court previously ruled in favor of a public high school football coach who wanted to pray with students on the field, and has allowed government voucher funding for religious schools.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

When Dr. C. Michael Gibson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, goes to heart disease meetings, he can’t help noticing a change.

“We will sit around at dinner and halfway through the meal, we will simultaneously push our plates away,” Dr. Gibson said. “We look at each other and laugh and say, ‘You, too?’”

They share what is becoming an open secret: They tried for years to control their weight but are now taking the new obesity drugs manufactured by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.

Dr. Robert Califf, the former chief of the Food and Drug Administration, says he hardly recognizes his colleagues. So many are now so thin.

“Looking good,” he says he tells his fellow cardiologists at conferences and meetings.

Read it.

Two states advanced proposals this week to amend their constitutions to require citizenship for voting.

The South Dakota Senate voted 33-2 on Tuesday for an amendment banning noncitizen voting.

Two days later, the Kansas House of Representatives voted 90-28 for a similar amendment to its state’s constitution.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

Delaware has long been considered a business-friendly state due to its corporate tax advantages, and is home to multiple large companies. However, backlash against the First State has intensified after Delaware Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s record-breaking $56 billion compensation package was excessive.

Musk, who has become increasingly influential in both the political and corporate world, urged companies to pull out of the Democratic-led state. In February 2024, he announced that SpaceX was relocating its incorporation from Delaware to Texas, following Tesla’s corporate move from California to Texas in 2021.

The Register.

Scientists analyzing samples from asteroid Bennu have found something remarkable: Despite being a cold, lifeless rubble pile that formed around 65 million years ago, it holds a rich inventory of organic molecules – key ingredients for life.

Read it.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., introduced a bill with 10 other Senate Republicans that would allow victims of migrant crime in sanctuary cities and/or states to file suit against those jurisdictions.

Tillis introduced S 185, Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act of 2025, on Jan. 23.

“For far too long, we have watched local jurisdictions in North Carolina and across the country ignore the lawful notification and detainer requests made by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents and instead release dangerous criminals back into their communities, putting innocent lives at risk,” Tillis said in a release. “I am committed to working with President [Donald] Trump to end illegal immigration and fight sanctuary cities that prioritize reckless, lawless policies over public safety.”

Read it.

Despite the Biden-Harris administration’s “whole of government” attempt to increase unionization, the percentage of American workers belonging to unions notched down each of the past four years of their administration.

Marking yet another record low, 9.9% of American workers belonged to unions in 2023. This follows a steady decline from 13.4% at the turn of the century in 2000, and from a high of about 33.5% in the mid-1950s.

While the media reports have documented new unionization efforts—including some successes—in recent years, those newly-unionized jobs haven’t been enough to replace unionized job losses and other workers choosing to ditch their unions.

Watch it.

Is fruit good for you or bad for you? Why is everybody bad-mouthing High Fructose Corn Syrup?

I am currently doing a ketogenic diet, and I move fruit, so I had Questions. This podcast gave me answers.