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President Donald Trump’s weekend tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China. He stated that these tariffs are necessary to “protect” Americans from “illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl,” asserting that this “extraordinary threat constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.”

By 10:23 ET, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum capitulated to Trump’s tariffs and decided to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops immediately to the Mexico-US border to halt the flow of fentanyl and illegal aliens.

Financial markets bounced on Sheinbaum’s headlines after a gloomy red morning across equities, currencies, bonds, and crypto.

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Trump signed an Executive Order to build an Iron Dome for America, which aims to defend the homeland “against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks.”

And about fucking time, too.

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Homeschool families in Virginia celebrated a victory Thursday after the Virginia state Senate backed away from a bill that threatened religious exemptions for homeschoolers.

SB 1031 sought to get rid of an exemption that permits families in the state to homeschool their children because of their religious convictions. After initially voting to pass the bill, the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee acted on a motion to reconsider and voted 13-2 to pass by indefinitely on the bill, meaning the bill will not go to the Senate floor unless the committee takes the bill up again.

This comes after Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, said he would veto the bill in a statement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

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First Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago following the presidential election. Then, he appointed UFC CEO Dana White (Trump’s friend) to the company’s board, dismantled its woke fact-checking system, and now is reportedly mulling over relocating Meta’s legal residence from Delaware to Texas—a state that has positioned itself as a pro-business alternative to heavily-regulated blue states run by the radical left.

Wall Street Journal report reveals that Meta has been discussing a potential move to reincorporate outside of Delaware. Sources familiar with the matter said Texas had been heavily considered for the company’s new legal domicile but noted there would be no changes to its corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

But tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun….

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The Treasury Department withdrew the United States from a global climate alliance that was launched to push the financial sector to adopt green mandates.

The so-called Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System was originally created to pressure banks and financial institutions to meet sweeping global climate targets, many of which have been set during United Nations summits. The Treasury Department said late Thursday that the alliance’s mission doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s “priorities to grow the U.S. economy and American jobs.”

The announcement is part of the Trump administration’s move to exit what it considers to be harmful global climate agreements. And it is the latest signal to the international community that the United States under Trump’s leadership will seek to prioritize domestic energy production over commitments to bolster green energy and fight global warming.

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Teach them how to learn, not what to learn.

That’s the key concept for classical education, which is enjoying a national resurgence, with Florida leading the way.

Classical education advocates hope their movement will expand from private religious and chartered learning institutions to struggling public schools.

Although What To Learn is important. It doesn’t much matter knowing how to learn if one doesn’t actually make the effort.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Amazon has recently made several major internal changes, including removing statements advocating for LGBTQ rights and racial equity from its public listing of corporate policies. This is a bold move for the second-largest employer in the world, which also just announced a documentary with First Lady Melania Trump.

The deletion of previous statements pledging to commit to “equity for Black people” and “LGBTQ+ rights” were removed from a page on the company’s website in December, as were any mentions of the word “transgender,” according to The Washington Post.

Take the red pill, Jeff!

Reuters.

Good. Let him spend his money rather than stick the taxpayers with it.

LiveScience.

Human populations that left Africa evolved quickly whereas Neanderthals stayed the same, according to an analysis of blood group systems.

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Follow The Science! Until it changes….

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A clandestine tunnel discovered on the US-Mexico border allowing entry from Ciudad Juarez into the Texan city of El Paso will be sealed by Mexican authorities, an army official said Saturday, adding that its construction was under investigation.

Discovered on January 10 by US and Mexican security agencies, the tunnel measures approximately 300 meters (1,000 feet) in length on the Mexican side and is equipped with lighting, ventilation and is reinforced to prevent collapses.

Hidden in a storm sewer system operating between both cities, its access is about 1.8 meters high and 1.2 meters wide (6 feet high and 4 feet wide), making for easy passage of people or contraband, said General Jose Lemus, commander of Ciudad Juarez’s military garrison, which is guarding the tunnel.

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research team led by scientists at Northwestern University has developed the first-ever two-dimensional mechanically interlocked material with high flexibility and strength. In the future, this could be used to develop lightweight yet high-performance body armor and other such tough materials, a press release said.

It was in the 1980s that Fraser Stoddart, then a chemist at Northwestern University, first introduced the concept of mechanical bonds. Stoddart then expanded the role of these bonds into molecular machines by enabling functions like switching, rotating, contracting, and expanding in multiple ways and using them to develop interlocked structures, which also won him the Nobel Prize in 2016.

Researchers have been working on developing mechanically interlocked molecules with polymers for decades but have failed. “In organic chemistry, it is pretty straightforward to form so-called “medium-sized rings” that are 5-8 atoms around. But such rings are too small to thread another molecule through them,” explained William Dichtel, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University in an email to Interesting Engineering.

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At TU Graz, a pioneering research group is leveraging artificial intelligence to drastically enhance the way nanostructures are constructed.

They aim to develop a self-learning AI system that can autonomously position molecules with unprecedented precision, potentially revolutionizing the creation of complex molecular structures and quantum corrals for advanced electronics.

Watch it.

This is one of the most interesting things that was demonstrated at CES this year. Evidently it doesn’t vent to the outside; it just cleans the air and dumps it back into your kitchen.

It’s unclear how effective it would be — JennAir is the poster child for failed potential in this space — but I love that people are thinking about ways to solve the Kitchen Stink problem.

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The Nuwa Pen utilizes three tiny cameras to capture what you write – on paper! – and save your notes in an accompanying app. I demoed the game-changing device at CES 2025.

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2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the iconic Terminator franchise, which has captivated audiences with its thrilling storyline and futuristic concepts. One intriguing question that often arises when watching these films is: How does a time-traveling robot, like the Terminator, never have to worry about running out of battery power during its mission?

Maybe in the future depicted in the movie, they possess advanced technology that allows them to operate with remarkable efficiency and longevity.

The future is now. On January 8, Betavolt Technology, the Beijing-based start-up, announced the successful development of the world’s first micro-atomic energy battery. In a press conference, company CEO Zhang Wei revealed they have created an innovative new power source that combines nickel-63 isotope decay and China’s first diamond semiconductor module. This integration allows the battery to be dramatically miniaturized while maintaining low production costs.

At just 15x15x5 mm, smaller than a coin, the BB100 battery produces 100 microwatts of energy safely and stably for 50 years without recharging. The nuclear battery generates power every second and minute, producing 8.64 joules of energy per day and 3,153 joules of energy per year. The modular design means multiple batteries can be connected to deliver higher output. The stable, zero-emission energy could help power AI and autonomous technologies driving China’s next revolution.

SciTechDaily.

Transitioning to a green economy demands significantly more critical metals—such as copper, rare earth elements, and cobalt—than current supplies can meet. To address this shortage, it is essential to discover new metal resources formed through different geological processes in previously unexplored regions.

New research published on January 8, 2025, in Nature, led by Dr. Chunfei Chen during his postdoctoral work with the Earth Evolution research group at Macquarie University, sheds light on where and how critical metals likely accumulate. The study identifies the margins of ancient continental cores as promising locations for these metal deposits and explains the geological mechanisms behind their formation.

“These cores are the thickest, bowl-shaped, parts of tectonic plates. Melts that form below their centers will flow upwards and outwards towards the edges, so that volcanic activity is common around their edges,” says Chen.

WIRED, a Voice of the Crust.

The recent spate of discoveries has both compounded the mystery of superconductivity and heightened the optimism. “It seems to be, in materials, that superconductivity is everywhere,” said Matthew Yankowitz, a physicist at the University of Washington.

The discoveries stem from a recent revolution in materials science: All three new instances of superconductivity arise in devices assembled from flat sheets of atoms. These materials display unprecedented flexibility; at the touch of a button, physicists can switch them between conducting, insulating, and more exotic behaviors—a modern form of alchemy that has supercharged the hunt for superconductivity.

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Transgenic mice with increased amyloid-? (A?) production show several aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, including A? deposition and memory impairment. By repeatedly treating these A?-forming mice with scanning ultrasound, Leinenga and Götz now demonstrate that A? is removed and memory is restored as revealed by improvement in three memory tasks. These improvements were achieved without the use of any therapeutic agent, and the scanning ultrasound treatment did not induce any apparent damage to the mouse brain. The authors then showed that scanning ultrasound activated resident microglial cells that took up A? into their lysosomes. These findings suggest that repeated scanning ultrasound may be a noninvasive method with potential for treating Alzheimer’s disease.

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At the heart of this effort is the tokamak reactor design, which uses magnetic fields to confine plasma and maintain the necessary conditions for fusion. A critical challenge has been managing the plasma edge instabilities, but recent breakthroughs in understanding how energetic particles interact with these instabilities suggest promising methods for improving reactor performance.

Yeah, well, call me when it starts pumping electricity into the grid.

Actually, don’t call me until I can put one in my back yard.

Read it.

Greater torque and power. Lower cost and weight.

It will be interessting to see whether these things work out in practice. If they do, it could be huge.

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The House of Representatives has passed the Laken Riley Act with a vote of 264–159. Almost all Republicans and 48 Democrats united to push the bill through the lower chamber of Congress.

The legislation requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain illegal immigrants who have committed certain crimes, such as theft, burglary, or shoplifting.

It also allows states to sue the federal government for injunctive relief over “certain immigration-related decisions or alleged failures” if they resulted in harm to that state.

These can include the failure to detain an individual who has already been ordered to be deported, or neglecting to fulfill vetting requirements for immigrants seeking to enter the United States.

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There’s electricity in the air over at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — both the literal and metaphorical varieties.

A team of engineers at the institution have discovered a method of successfully harvesting energy from air humidity in a predictable and continuous manner, and they say the technology can be scaled up and applied broadly. They published their findings last month [January 2023] in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This is very exciting,” lead author Xiaomeng Liu said in a UMass Amherst news release. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”

FreeThink.

Tiny “biobots” made from human windpipe cells encouraged damaged neural tissue to repair itself in a lab experiment — potentially foreshadowing a future in which creations like this patrol our bodies, healing damage, delivering drugs, and more.

The background: In a study published in 2020, researchers at Tufts University and the University of Vermont (UVM) harvested and incubated skin cells from frog embryos until they were tiny balls.

They then sculpted the spheres into specific shapes — dictated by an algorithm — and added layers of cardiac stem cells to them in precise locations.

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In September, Canon shipped the first commercial version of a technology that could one day upend the making of the most advanced silicon chips. Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.

The NIL system offers advantages that may challenge the US $150 million machines that dominate today’s advanced chipmaking today, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanners. If Canon is correct, its machines will eventually deliver EUV-quality chips at a fraction of the cost.

The company’s approach is entirely different to EUV systems, which are made exclusively by Netherlands-based ASML. The Dutch company uses a complex process that starts with kilowatt-class lasers to blasting molten droplets of tin into a plasma that glows with a 13.5 nanometer wavelength. This light is then steered through a vacuum chamber by specialized optics and bounced off a patterned mask onto a silicon wafer to fix the pattern onto the wafer.

In contrast, Canon’s system, which was shipped to Defense Department-backed R&D consortium the Texas Institute for Electronics, seems almost comically simple. Put simply, it stamps the circuit pattern onto the wafer.

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What if a clinician could 3D print something through your skin, constructing an implant or replacement organ underneath layers of tissue? The world of medicine would be transformed: a host of surgical procedures, which come with a variety of risks, could be performed without ever lifting a scalpel.

A collaborative, NIH-funded team is working to make this Star Trek-like fiction a reality. Their work, published today in Science, outlines a method to print biocompatible structures through thick, multi-layered tissues. The principle? Focused ultrasound, combined with a novel ultrasound-sensitive ink.

“Focused ultrasound has been used for decades to treat a wide variety of conditions, underscoring its safety and utility as a clinical tool,” said Randy King, Ph.D., a program director in the Division of Applied Science & Technology at NIBIB. “This potential new application, built on years of technology advancements, could set the stage for something previously thought impossible: through-tissue 3D ultrasound printing.”

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When a pregnant woman had her blood sampled back in 1972, doctors discovered it was mysteriously missing a surface molecule found on all other known red blood cells at the time.

After 50 years, this strange molecular absence finally led to researchers from the UK and Israel describing a new blood group system in humans. In September, the team published their paper on the discovery.

“It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort, to finally establish this new blood group system and be able to offer the best care to rare, but important, patients,” UK National Health Service hematologist Louise Tilley said, after nearly 20 years of personally researching this bloody quirk.

While we’re all more familiar with the ABO blood group system and the rhesus factor (that’s the plus or minus part), humans actually have many different blood group systems based on the wide variety of cell-surface proteins and sugars that coat our blood cells.

Our bodies use these antigen molecules, amongst their other purposes, as identification markers to separate ‘self’ from potentially harmful not-selves.

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Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past 2 decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar. The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society.

Lidar, which allows researchers to see through forest cover and reconstruct the ancient sites below, “is revolutionizing our understanding of the Amazon in pre-Columbian times,” says Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn who wasn’t involved in the new work. Finding such an ancient urban network in the Upano Valley highlights the long-unrecognized diversity of ancient Amazonian cultures, which archaeologists are just beginning to be able to reconstruct.

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Around the world, people celebrate Public Domain Day on January 1, the day in which copyright expires on some older works and they enter the public domain in many different countries.

In the U.S. Constitution, copyright terms were meant to be very limited in order to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” The first copyright act, written in 1790 by the founding fathers themselves, set the term to be up to twenty-eight years.

But since then, powerful corporations have repeatedly extended the length of copyright to promote not the progress of society, but their profit. The result is that today in the U.S., work only enters the public domain ninety-five years after publication—locking our culture away for nearly a century.

2019 was the year in which new works were finally scheduled to enter the public domain, ending this long, corporate-dictated cultural winter. And as that year drew closer, it became clear that these corporations wouldn’t try to extend copyright yet again—making it the first year in almost a century in which a significant amount of art and literature once again entered the U.S. public domain, free for anyone in the U.S. to read, use, share, remix, build upon, and enjoy.

Ever since then, we’ve been celebrating Public Domain Day by preparing some of the year’s biggest literary hits for you to read on January 1.

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The human brain is one of the most metabolically active organs, accounting for about 20 percent of the body’s total energy expenditure. This high level of activity generates significant waste. Smaller byproducts, such as carbon dioxide, urea, and ammonia, diffuse into capillaries and are cleared through the bloodstream. Larger neurotoxic proteins—including beta-amyloid and tau, both widely associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, cannot be eliminated through the bloodstream alone due to their size.

In the past, it was believed that the brain lacked a lymphatic system to remove waste and relied solely on internal mechanisms for clearance.

However, in 2012, researchers discovered a specialized mechanism within the brain, analogous to the lymphatic system and capable of flushing out larger waste products from deep within the brain. This system was named the glymphatic system, a portmanteau of “glial” (referring to glial cells) and “lymphatic.” It is also known as the pseudo-lymphatic system.

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One day in the near future people will look back on this era as the moment that America snatched common sense back from the jaws of unmitigated insanity. Get Woke, Go Broke is becoming a cleansing wind as thousands of companies across the US abandon DEI and social justice programs in an effort to avoid total financial collapse. That said, the last organizations you probably expected to see dumping their woke initiatives are colleges and universities. After all, these “institutions of higher learning” have been ground zero for the woke mind virus for decades.

Surprisingly, even universities are now accepting the reality that social justice is a dead ideology walking. The University of Iowa is following this trend after recently announced that it will be shutting down two social justice related departments and it will eliminate its social justice major as part of an effort to streamline and restructure some humanities offerings.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

With a majority of his caucus now calling on him to resign, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on a ski holiday, reflecting on whether to stay or go.

Trudeau is way down in the polls and facing challenges from within his party about whether he’s the right leader to unite Canadians. His decision comes as Canada braces for a tariff war when Donald Trump returns to the White House in three weeks.

Canadians will head to the polls in 2025, a federal election that could be triggered in late January if Trudeau’s foes topple the minority government when the House returns from break.

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North Korea’s new warship design has emerged and it appears to be the largest the country has yet constructed. The vessel, which looks to be around the size of a typical modern frigate, or at the least a very large corvette, also appears to be designed to accommodate a vertical launch system (VLS) for missiles and a phased-array radar — two advanced items not previously seen on a North Korean design.

Photos of the new warship, the name of which has not been disclosed, were recently released by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central Television (KCTV). The vessel is seen being inspected by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un while under construction in a dry dock at Nampho Shipyard on the Taedong River estuary, on the west coast of the country.

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Every day, in every way, everybody’s going keto.

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“Christmas came early” for the Little Sisters of the Poor earlier this week when the Biden administration dropped its controversial contraceptive healthcare mandate, ostensibly ending the nuns’ 14-year battle over religious liberty with the federal government, the Catholic News Agency reported.

The Department of Health and Human Services on Monday announced its decision to leave in place Trump-era guidelines that allow employers to opt out of birth control coverage over religious or moral objections. The move let stand an existing rule that permits employers to cite “non-religious moral objections” to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to cover contraception.

When Obama said, “If you like your coverage, you can keep your coverage.”, what made that a lie was the fact that, under Obamacare, it didn’t matter how much you liked your coverage — you were going to get the coverage that the government decided you ought to have, whether you could afford it or not.

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“The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world.”

That is the shocking, but true, statement issued by Nigel Farage (on X) as a digital counter on the Reform website showed its membership tally before lunchtime on Boxing Day ticking past the 131,680 figure declared by the Tories during their leadership election earlier this year.

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In something of a stunning development, China appears to already be flying a stealthy, high-performance, flying-wing, sixth-generation crewed combat aircraft, imagery of which began to emerge today. At this early stage, we have very little idea about the precise identity of the new aircraft, but many elements of its design are very much in line with what we already knew about Chinese sixth-generation airpower aspirations.

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Scientists have discovered a remarkable way to destroy cancer cells. A study published last year found stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light caused them to vibrate in sync, enough to break apart the membranes of cancer cells.

Aminocyanine molecules are already used in bioimaging as synthetic dyes. Commonly used in low doses to detect cancer, they stay stable in water and are very good at attaching themselves to the outside of cells.

The research team from Rice University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas, said their approach is a marked improvement over another kind of cancer-killing molecular machine previously developed, called Feringa-type motors, which could also break the structures of problematic cells.

“It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers,” said chemist James Tour from Rice University, when the results were published in December 2023.

“They are more than one million times faster in their mechanical motion than the former Feringa-type motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light.”

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Researchers discovered that the mRNA modification m6A triggers rapid degradation, regulating protein production. This breakthrough could inform drug development to manage protein-related diseases.

Messenger ribonucleic acids (mRNA) are like the architects of our bodies. They carry precise blueprints for building proteins, which are read and assembled by their cellular partners, the ribosomes. Proteins are essential for our survival, as they regulate cell division, bolster the immune system, and make our cells resilient against external threats.

Just like in real-world construction, some cellular blueprints require extra instructions—such as when a protein needs to be produced rapidly or when corrections are needed for a flawed design. In our bodies, this role is fulfilled by RNA modifications. These small chemical changes function like detailed annotations, offering additional guidance to specific parts of the mRNA for optimal protein production.

ZMan:

This was always part of the “invisible man” strategy. Progressive love creating an invisible man to do the dirty work so they can pretend to be observers, commenting upon the natural flow of history. “Some people say you are a polarizing figure” always turns up in whenever a normal person agrees to talk to a crazy from regime media.

Musk buying Twitter has had the unintended effect of buggering up the mechanism these people used to manufacture their invisible men. Not only can they no longer game the algo to artificially get their stuff trending, but many of the crazies also have either quit the game or shuffled off to Bluesky, which has become an isolate echo chamber. They have made themselves in a tree falling in a forest with no one around to heard it fall. Who says there is never any good news?

Nature.

A naturally occurring compound involved in digestion lengthens lifespan in flies and makes old mice more youthful.

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Earlier this week, T-Mobile announced that you can now register to beta test Starlink connectivity on your mobile phone, with actual testing expected to begin early next year – roughly two years after the initial announcement.

Back in 2022, T-Mobile and SpaceX announced a partnership to allow T-Mobile customers to utilize Starlink satellites – in an effort to eliminate deadzones for customers. This required SpaceX to design new direct-to-cell satellites, but according to T-Mobile, there are now more than 300 of them in orbit.

In the press release, T-Mobile announced that these new Starlink satellites will cover more than 500,000 square miles of land that aren’t currently served by cell towers. SpaceX will also continue to launch more of these direct-to-cell satellites over time, though a timeline wasn’t provided for when there’ll be a non-beta rollout.

During the beta, you’ll be able to send text messages – with voice and data support coming later.

Speed the day….

New York Times.

For nearly 250 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a bookshelf-busting series of gilt-lettered tomes, often purchased to show that its owners cared about knowledge.

It was the sort of physical media expected to die in the internet era, and indeed, the encyclopedia’s publisher announced that it was ending the print edition in 2012. Skeptics wondered how Britannica the company could survive in the age of Wikipedia.

The answer was to adapt to the times.

Britannica Group, as the company is now known, runs websites, including Britannica.com and the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, and sells educational software to schools and libraries. It also sells artificial intelligence agent software that underpins applications like customer service chatbots and data retrieval.

Britannica has figured out not only how to survive, but also how to do well financially. Jorge Cauz, its chief executive, said in an interview that the publisher enjoyed pro forma profit margins of about 45 percent.

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Combining phototherapy with chemotherapy may provide a more powerful approach to combat aggressive tumors effectively.

Patients with late-stage cancer often have to endure multiple rounds of different types of treatment, which can cause unwanted side effects and may not always help.

In hopes of expanding the treatment options for those patients, MIT researchers have designed tiny particles that can be implanted at a tumor site, where they deliver two types of therapy: heat and chemotherapy.

This approach could avoid the side effects that often occur when chemotherapy is given intravenously, and the synergistic effect of the two therapies may extend the patient’s lifespan longer than giving one treatment at a time. In a study of mice, the researchers showed that this therapy completely eliminated tumors in most of the animals and significantly prolonged their survival.

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God forbid you should go through life with a fatty liver.

Read it. And watch the video.

Last week, several Russian first-person view (FPV) drones struck a U.S.-made M1A1 Abrams tank in the Kursk region, but the crew was able to survive. The vehicle’s commander lauded the American armor for saving their lives, but also highlighted some major vulnerabilities it has on today’s drone-drenched battlefield. In particular he offered important insights on how Ukraine is adapting its M1s to survive — lessons that could prove very valuable for the U.S. Army in future conflicts.

…

“Well, we got a luxurious shooting practice (around 100 rounds fired by each gunner) and some good overall knowledge about the tank,” he explained. “But the American instructors AND military were completely unaware of the modern battlefield threats. And still are unaware (I communicate with some of the American tankers and try to share information with them).”

Will Our People fix it? Don’t hold your breath….

The sleeper wakes.

The Polish government of Donald Tusk has adopted a draft law that would allow the country to temporarily suspend the right to claim asylum. The prime minister said the right to asylum “is being used today—especially on the border with Belarus—by Poland’s enemies,” and that by adopting the bill “we are taking back control of Poland’s borders.”

The bill has been in the works for a while, and is intended as a response to actions of neighbouring Belarus: the country has been flying in migrants from the Middle East and Africa in recent years, and sending them to the borders of the EU—Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania—in a bid to destabilise the region. Those three EU member states have accused Russia of complicity.

The number of migrants arriving at the borders of EU member states from Belarus has increased by 66% this year, compared with 2023. In Poland, 28,000 attempted illegal crossings were recorded by the end of October. The EU says 90% of migrants illegally crossing the Poland-Belarus border have a Russian student or tourist visa.

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DARPA’s mission was launched after a decade or so of provocative case reports and small uncontrolled studies that revealed improved mental capacities among various neuromodulation patients. These seemingly enhanced abilities included memory, verbal facility, spatial relations, and combined accuracy and speed on specialized learning tests.

The TNT, or Targeted Neuroplasticity Training program was established to test a series of different technologies to see if any could accelerate learning by enhancing the brain’s curious ability to continuously evolve based on experiences. Neuroplasticity is a fancy term that simply means changing neural connections to improve performance, and it encompasses learning, recall, and applying acquired knowledge.

SciTechDaily.

A Northwestern Medicine study has discovered that metformin, a common Type 2 diabetes medication, works by blocking a key part of the mitochondrial energy production, specifically complex I, which helps lower blood glucose levels.

This breakthrough provides insight into the drug’s mechanism which has been unclear despite its broad usage for over 60 years in treating diabetes, reducing inflammation, and slowing cancer growth.