The Warzone.

With Taiwan’s first domestically made submarine seen entering the water for the first time and about to start at-sea trials, observers have had their best chance to look at the boat in more detail, revealing some intriguing — and advanced — aspects. The Hai Kun (SS-711), which was launched in the southern port city of Kaohsiung last September, as you can read about here, is a diesel-electric design, part of eight planned hulls that are set to revamp Taiwan’s desperately aging submarine force.

I wasn’t aware that Taiwan even had a submarine force.

There has been a lot of discussion of ‘Texas secession’ in various venues of the Web among people who do that sort of thing, much of it focusing on whether Texas would be economically viable as an independent country, with the burden of maintaining its own armed forces a key topic. Well, if Taiwan has its own submarines, surely Texas wouldn’t find it too much to do the same…?

Daily Mail (UK).

Paul Edmonds, 68, who made international headlines last year when he shared his story, still has no traces of either condition five years after being given a transplant of cells that rid his body of both diseases.

In a new article by the medical team who treated him, doctors said he was officially cured of cancer and two years away from being declared cured of HIV – when he will have gone without any medication since 2020.

Typically, British newspapers have better coverage of important U.S. news than American Narrative media.

Newsweek.

Nearly 30 percent of Americans would support Texas leaving the United States and becoming an independent republic, according to a new poll conducted exclusively for Newsweek.

According to the Redfield & Wilton Strategies survey of 1,500 eligible voters across the U.S., 13 percent of the American population would “strongly support” Texas “seceding from the United States and becoming independent” with another 14 percent for “support.”

By contrast, 22 percent said they would be “strongly opposed” with another 14 percent for “opposed,” with 24 percent saying they “neither support nor oppose” the proposition and 13 percent for “don’t know.” The poll was conducted online on 18 and 19 February and has a margin of error of 2.5 percent.

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After nearly a decade of effort the U.S. Air Force has finally developed a MagNav (Magnetic Navigation) system that works reliably enough to supplement or replace GPS for navigation. MagNav takes advantage of the universal presence of magnetic activity worldwide. MagNav uses an AI (Artificial Intelligence) neural network running on a laptop, or any other small computer, to compare the known location of the aircraft and magnetic activity generated by the aircraft to a worldwide map of background magnetic activity. Once this calibration is done the aircraft can takeoff and fly as far as it has to using MagNav as well as GPS to keep track of where it is. MagNav will supplement GPS and also act as a backup if GPS is being jammed or encountering some other form of interference. MagNav also does not rely on a network of space satellites to make it work.

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Australian authorities want to acquire a new class of six optionally-crewed ships for the country’s Navy as part of a cooperative effort with the U.S. Navy. The plan is for these vessels, each of which will have 32 vertical launch system cells, to provide additional distributed magazine depth at a lower cost to bolster the capabilities of the country’s larger surface combatants. This is part of a broader plan to transform and roughly double the size of the Royal Australian Navy’s major surface combatant fleets by the 2040s which also includes the acquisition of up to 11 new general-purpose frigates.

The catamaran in the second picture would make a great yacht.

Interesting Engineering.

Companies have already moved offshore with geothermal exploration, ideally looking for areas to tap near well-known volcanoes included in the Indo-Pacific Ring of Fire. However, according to renewable energy technology company CGG, the areas around the volcanoes are different, and each needs individual attention to maximize its potential.

In contrast, tectonic plates on the ocean floor are a much more consistent geothermal energy resource, per a whitepaper CGG released. This is due to seafloor spreading, where the moving tectonic plates create gaps on the ocean floor, and magma from under the Earth’s crust flows out to create new rock.

Compared to volcanic regions on the ocean floor, tectonic plates offer a much more consistent temperature range, making them suitable for power generation.

Read it.

In our digital age, laptops and smartphones have become appendages for students and professionals alike. But new research suggests we may want to take a break from all that typing.

A recent study from Norway found that the old-school art of handwriting engages parts of the brain that tapping on a keyboard does not. The intricate movements involved in handwriting activate more regions of the brain associated with learning than typing does.

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While fighting Russian electronic warfare (EW), Ukrainian forces have developed new electronic warfare systems faster than Russia can create countermeasures or attack methods. The objective of EW is to tap into enemy electronic signals and hijack or block them while preventing the enemy from doing the same to you. The electronic signals here chiefly involve radio for communicating with or controlling UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). These signals can be blocked by the enemy or even hijacked so the enemy can take control of your UAVs. This can be done so that the owner of the UAV doesn’t realize it until the enemy suddenly takes control and uses your UAV against you.

The same method can be used with radar to either manipulate the signal so that it makes the enemy radar user believe nothing is out there or that what the enemy radar shows is not where it actually is or that there are multiple items indicated when there is actually only one. Radar jamming has become increasingly sophisticated, and aircraft can carry a container of EW equipment, like a bomb underneath a wing. These EW pods contain a wide variety of EW options. These pods are often updated to detect and manipulate certain signals. The Americans obtained current Russian EW equipment and scrutinized them. Their findings were shared with the Ukrainians and some NATO allies.

Read it.

This is going to be huge (for those to whom it matters–like me).

Read it.

On Wednesday night, hundreds of tractors poured into Brussels down the swanky main drag pulling manure spreaders and wagons past luxury shops like Balenciaga and others never before seen through the window of a John Deere cab. The roar of engines, police sirens, and helicopters was ear-splitting. Tractors had been arriving all week, 1,300 in total, setting up camp in the blocks around the European Union buildings. By morning, the entire city centre was gridlocked, traffic was snarled onto side streets, and tractors were packed nose-to-hitch for kilometres. One farmer set up a pen in the middle of the street, laid down straw, and let two bulls out so that the bug-eyed city residents could meet a cow.

The  peasants are revolting.

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A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer says he believes he has found the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane, which disappeared nine decades ago, on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean using sonar data from a deep-sea drone.

Hoping to solve an 87-year-old mystery, explorer Tony Romeo plans to launch a mission later this year or next to find the long-lost plane, which a massive U.S. search failed to do in 1937.

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Ukraine is fighting not one but two hot wars against Russia. The first, a conventional, bloody land war along an 810-mile front line, has descended into stalemate. But the second — drone and missile strikes and sabotage raids deep into enemy territory — may prove to be a game-changing strategy for hitting Russia where it hurts.

Last week, two Ukrainian kamikaze drones scored a spectacular hit on an oil and gas refinery and an oil export terminal in Ust-Luga near St. Petersburg. At a range of 775 miles from Ukraine, the strike has severely dented Russian ability to produce and export naphtha, jet fuel and gasoil, and export liquefied natural gas (LNG). It might take weeks or months before the refinery returns to significant capacity. Effectively, those Ukrainian-made drones have proved more successful at enforcing their own violent brand of sanctions on Russia’s hydrocarbon trade than all the West’s failed efforts to cap prices and embargo Russian exports.

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Two years of fighting in Ukraine have destroyed the Russian tank force. This was unexpected, as was the Russian inability to replace their tank losses. Ukraine’s success against Russian tanks and armored vehicles revived predictions that tanks were obsolete. Tanks are still relevant, and the Russian losses were the result of poor employment of armored units as well as design features of Russian tanks that make them much more vulnerable than Western tanks like the American M1, German Leopard or Israeli Merkava.

Most Russian armored vehicles were lost while they were on the move, or stationery without adequate infantry support. The first Russian armored units going into Ukraine were told the population would be friendly or neutral. The reality was that the Ukrainians were well armed, hostile, and using tactics the Russians were unaware of and unprepared to deal with. As a result, thousands of Russian vehicles were destroyed in the first month, most of them armored, including some of the most modern Russian tanks plus some ancient models taken from storage facilities for obsolete tanks that might be useful in an emergency. The Ukraine War proved to be that emergency.

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Born deaf, the 1-year-old boy had never responded to sound or speech before. But after receiving an experimental treatment injected into one of his ears, he started turning his head when his parents called his name. Five months later, he spoke his first words.

The boy is one of six children with a type of hereditary deafness who are part of a gene therapy trial in China. Five of the children can now hear, according to results reported today in the scientific journal The Lancet. The news follows an announcement this week that yet another child born with profound deafness can hear after receiving a similar treatment developed by US drugmaker Eli Lilly.

“It’s remarkable,” says Lawrence Lustig, a hearing loss expert at Columbia University who was not involved in the trials. “We’ve never had a therapy that restores even partial hearing for someone who’s totally deaf other than a cochlear implant.”

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Or just cold weather breathing, period.

(I wonder, does it work for COVID?)

Read it.

A surgeon who used Google Glass in the operating room is excited by the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, with the mixed-reality headset potentially a great tool for documentation during surgeries.

Check it out.

We created Justwood for one purpose: to give you the very best chance of completing your project quickly, easily and perfectly!

There are many woodworking plans, guides, and books available on the internet but scattered all over the place!

We tackle the research work for you and provide you as many woodworking PDF plans, guides, and books as we possible could and all in one place!

And of course, all these plans are free because they are already free elsewhere!

Full disclosure: I have no connection with these people other then wishing them every success in life.

Read it.

Pigs! They’re not just for breakfast any more….

Under the Laws of the Forest, there were four types of venison or ‘beasts of the chase’: The red deer, the roe deer, the fallow deer, and the wild boar. Hunting any of these required a license from the King. These laws are the basis for modern hunting and game laws in the U.S.

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The technical term for this approach is passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC), so named because it doesn’t require an injection of energy into the system to disperse heat. The surface emits its own heat into space without being absorbed by the air or atmosphere, thereby becoming several degrees cooler than the surrounding air without needing electrical energy.

StrategyPage.

South Korea has become the seventh nation to use Sea Launched Ballistic Missiles or SLBMs. The second version of the KSS-III submarines feature a number of firsts. They were non-nuclear, the first non-nuclear submarines that not only use Air Independent Propulsion or AIP but do so using lithium ion instead of lead-acid batteries. With this AIP system the KSS-III submarines can operate submerged for about three weeks. These subs also have ten Vertical Launch Cells or VLS filled by Hyunmoo 4-4 SLBMs with a range of 800 kilometers. North Korea is developing similar technology, but the north can only manage to build crude imitations of what the South Korean created. South Korea is far wealthier and technically advanced than the north. Both Koreas produce weapons that work often enough to do some damage and kill people. The South Korean weapons do this more reliably and effectively. North Korea is content to be able to say, “We have that too.”

Unlike the Europeans, the Asians realize that they can’t depend on the U.S. (especially with a Democrat administration) to defend them from China, North Korea, and other threats, so they have no choice but to step up to the plate.

Read it.

Since its synthesis in 2009, graphene has been dubbed a wonder material with applications in electronics, medicine, and energy, among other industries. On the other hand, graphyne — a similar material with subtle differences — has long evaded synthesis by chemists and chemical engineers. However, these tiny differences, researchers have hypothesized, would make graphyne a better choice for designing faster electronics.

In research published in Nature Synthesis, scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder and Qingdao University of Science and Technology have reported the synthesis of bulk amounts of graphyne. Like graphene, it exists as a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a symmetric lattice. Unlike graphene, whose atoms are tethered by single and double bonds, the carbon atoms in graphyne are bound to each other in single, double, and triple bonds.

Reuters.

A federal appeals court on Saturday allowed a judge’s ruling that barred California from enforcing a new law that bans the carrying of guns in most public places on the grounds that it was unconstitutional to take effect.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved an order by a different 9th Circuit panel from a week earlier that suspended an injunction issued by a judge who concluded the Democratic-led state’s law violated the right of citizens to keep and bear arms under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Odd–usually the 9th Circuit (which Rush Limbaugh used to call the ‘9th Circus’) is only too happy to support any totalitarian scheme that California comes up with.

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U.S. oil production has increased by 21% over the past five years. According to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), earlier this month U.S. oil producers set a new annual production record.

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Confounding leftists in and outside of major media who’ve spent years portraying Donald Trump as a racist, Hispanic support for the former president continues to surge — to the point that Trump is now the first choice among the increasingly significant US demographic.

Meanwhile, black enthusiasm for Biden has plummeted since 2020, leaving many in the Democrat electoral cornerstone eager to vote for a third-party candidate. These are among several findings of a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll that are sure to compound Democrats worries about the 2024 election.

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Scientists have discovered a new way to destroy cancer cells. 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

CNN.

I am not making this up.

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It has been obvious for quite a while that Americans are deserting blue states in favor of red states. Thus, after the last census states like California and New York lost seats in the House, while states like Florida and Texas gained seats. Just-released census data show that migration from blue to red continues.

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“It’s over” – comments investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg after noticing that The Washington Post quietly deleted a prominent tab from its Masthead.

What was a long featured “War in Ukraine” tab, which had been there from the start of the war going back to Feb. 2022 has disappeared.

NewsMax.

Testing the limits of how far Texas can go to keep migrants out of the U.S., Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday signed into law sweeping new powers that allow police to arrest those who cross the border illegally and give local judges authority to order them to leave the country.

Opponents have called the measure the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since a 2010 Arizona law — denounced by critics as the “Show Me Your Papers” bill — that was largely struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Texas’ law is also likely to face swift legal challenges.

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The science is simple. Localised hyperthermia stops pain. So you plug it into your phone, the app automatically opens, dial your preferred setting, and wait a moment for the device to heat up. Then you push it against the bite, wait a few seconds, and the pain stops. That’s it.

9to5Mac.

Primarily, Rocket Homes lets you browse homes for sale on CarPlay based on location. You can see nearby listings with address, price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and even photo previews.

New Atlas.

In a move that echoes a sci-fi series, researchers have developed a super-small material that was able to not only stimulate nerves in rodents, but reconnect them as well. The finding could lead to injectable particles that take the place of larger implants.

Read it.

We asked 1,234 authors for their 3 favorite reads in 2023

I can recommend The Golden Enclaves (and its two predecessors) by Naomi Novik.

Scientific American.

Mechanical engineers Shervin Foroughi and Mohsen Habibi were painstakingly maneuvering a tiny ultrasound wand over a pool of liquid when they first saw an icicle shape emerge and solidify. The pair shrieked so loudly that their colleagues down the hall at Montreal’s Concordia University could hear them. “Well, they would have heard us, if they hadn’t been at home because of COVID,” Foroughi says. Still, a quick video call let the researchers share their excitement: after months of effort, they had 3-D printed a solid object by exposing a liquid to a focused field of sound waves—transmitted through a solid wall.

The Concordia team’s new “direct-sound printing” technology is the first to create a solid structure using sound waves from behind a barrier. And although it has a long way to go to reach commercial viability, the researchers believe their remote-control 3-D printing opens the door to numerous possibilities. It could, they say, potentially enable minimally invasive tissue engineering and bioimplant repair within the human body. It could also support industrial repairs in other difficult-to-access places such as inside an airplane’s fuselage.

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Raytheon has successfully tested its “Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle,” designed to defend the US by intercepting and neutralizing long-range ballistic missiles in low-Earth orbit.

The kinetic-force weapon successfully destroyed an intermediate-range ballistic missile during a test in the Pacific region by the US Missile Defense Agency and the US Northern Command on Monday.

Quilette.

In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter late last year, the journalist Jon Levine asked him: “I wonder how much Wikipedia would cost?” Musk had recently complained that Wikipedia has a “non-trivial left-wing bias,” and a few months earlier, had commented that “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity.” But regardless of whether Musk would have liked to purchase the site, there never was any real possibility of that happening, as stated by Wikipedia’s symbolic leader Jimmy Wales: “Wikipedia is not for sale.”

Following this exchange, there were several discussions on Twitter (as it was called at the time) about whether Musk might create his own alternative to Wikipedia. In the end Musk did not make such an attempt, but approximately eight months later, someone else did.

This new online encyclopedia, known as Justapedia, is the latest in a long series of attempts by various individuals to create a competitor to Wikipedia. So far all previous attempts have either been unsuccessful, or morphed into something so unlike Wikipedia that they could no longer be considered a competitor. However, one thing working in Justapedia’s favor is that the need for such a competitor is stronger now than it has been in past years, due to several recent controversies revolving around the manipulation and/or politicization of Wikipedia, along with a widespread perception that Wikipedia has not done enough to prevent this type of problem.

Astral Codex Ten.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past (you should still brush for backup and cosmetic reasons).

I talked to Lantern founder Aaron Silverbook to get an idea of how this works, both in a biological and an economic sense. Aaron was very knowledgeable and forthcoming, although he uses the phrase “YOLO” somewhat more often than most biotech founders. This post isn’t a verbatim interview transcript, just a writeup of what I learned based on his answers.

Read it.

In a territorial dispute spanning nearly two centuries, tensions between Guyana and Venezuela have once again reached a boiling point.

As Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti and Nick Routley detail below, the focal point of this dispute is the vast Essequibo region which encompasses around 70% of Guyana’s territory, and is roughly equivalent to the size of Florida.

Venezuela claims historical rights dating back to the Spanish colonial period when Essequibo fell within its boundaries.

In 1840, the British government drew the Schomburgk Line expanding the territory of British Guiana (now Guyana) far beyond the occupied area and to the strategically-located mouth of the Orinoco River.

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I’d characterize this as a tragedy, except that all of the great popular science magazines I knew as a boy (Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, Scientific American, National Geographical) have long since gone Woke and turned to crap. It is, however, a pity.

Check it out.

Allegedly….

Judging by the URL this is hosted in Switzerland, so, there it is.

Read it.

If you were looking for a new large SUV with a hybrid option, Ford just pulled a couple of them from the market. The 2024 Ford Explorer Hybrid and Lincoln Aviator Hybrid just got the ax, because it wants to focus its hybrid production capabilities on the Explorer Police Interceptor Utility Hybrid model. It seems that police forces across the nation just can’t get enough of the 318-horsepower 322 pound-feet of torque hybrid monster.

FreeThink.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) use of its new robot police dog to resolve a situation with an armed man illustrates how the machines can keep both officers and suspects out of harm’s way — but the potential for the tech to be used in more troubling ways in the future remains.

Ars Technica.

While it’s not ready for production, it’s a step in the right direction.

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Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.

Bloomberg.

It seemed ambitious, verging on grandiose, when journalist Bari Weiss used her Substack newsletter in 2021 to reveal plans for a new university in Austin, Texas.

The project — to address the “gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education” — was backed by prominent people in academia and finance, including the historian Niall Ferguson, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale.

But it was hard to envisage how exactly the University of Austin would get off the ground. There was no leafy campus, a glaring lack of accreditation and, of course, no network of notable alumni to entice new students. The idea of the little upstart being able to compete with Ivy League institutions to enroll the nation’s best and brightest seemed far fetched.

Two years on, UATX, as it’s known, is having a moment.

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A heat pump you can install in a window. Could be huge….

Read it.

Researchers at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center have located a “kill switch” that can trigger the death of cancer cells. They identified a protein on the CD95 receptor, which is part of a cell’s communication system, that can “program” cancer cells to die. This significant discovery was detailed in a study published in the journal “Cell Death & Differentiation.”

Receptors like CD95 are proteins that cells use to receive signals from outside. CD95 has earned the nickname “death receptor” because it can send a signal to a cancer cell, causing it to die. This process was hard to control in the past, but the new discovery of a specific part of the receptor to target may change that.

Dr. Jogender Tushir-Singh, an associate professor at UC Davis and the senior author of the study, said, “Previous efforts to target this receptor have been unsuccessful. But now that we’ve identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward to target Fas in tumors.”

Ars Technica.

Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It’s called crash history alerts, and it’s meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data.

If you have the capability to use Waze when you’re driving, and you don’t use it, well, the angels will weep for you….

Read it.

In a fascinating episode from Jubilee Media’s “Ranking” series, a diverse mix of Gen-Z and millennial participants were tasked with assessing each other’s intelligence to establish a ranking within the group. Despite the varied backgrounds, the collective judgment of the group placed a young Marine at the lower end of the spectrum, whereas individuals with college degrees, including some from prestigious Ivy League institutions, were deemed the most intelligent. However, when it came time for the actual IQ test, the Marine outsmarted three college grads.

Interesting Engineering.

Conventional desalination plants work in either of these approaches – thermal or membrane. In the thermal process, seawater is heated till the water evaporates, leaving the salt behind. The evaporated water is cooled, collected, and made available for use.

In the membrane approach, seawater is passed through a semi-permeable membrane that takes in the salt. This approach is also energy-intensive but comparatively better than the thermal treatment.

Oneka’s approach to desalination is an improvement over the membrane approach. This is achieved by using buoyant machines that are anchored to the seabed and using a membrane system that is powered by the waves.