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Obama-appointed federal judges blocked parts of the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan on Monday in response to Republican states’ lawsuits.

Judge John A. Ross of Missouri and Judge Daniel Crabtree of Kansas blocked parts of the administration’s SAVE Plan, which was an income-driven repayment program intended to lower monthly costs for borrowers. The court rulings prohibit the Department of Education from further lowering payments or eliminating more debt through the program, Politico reported.

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So essentially, while details are scant at this point, it seems what’s happening here is that for one or more of Fortescue’s mining sites, the team has calculated that there’s enough downhill slope and braking opportunities in the loaded direction to charge up the battery regeneratively, and the train is so much lighter when it’s unloaded that the battery can take it all the way back to the mine and start the journey again without needing a charge.

Not clear how that helps anything outside of that ‘little engine that could’ scenario.

Wired.

An extra membrane that once had digestive functions let marine microbes boost their yield from photosynthesis. Today, they’re responsible for locking carbon in the ocean and putting oxygen in the air.

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When you absolutely, positively must have it destroyed overnight.

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If your shoes, when tied, have the “bow” of your shoelaces tilt to one side and refuse to stay horizontally across your shoes, there’s an extremely good chance that you’ve been tying your shoes all wrong your entire life. There’s a mathematical reason for it, and a straightforward way to fix it.

Or you can avoid the whole problem by not buying shoes that need laces. I haven’t worn shoes with laces in thirty years, and never missed them.

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“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”

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Iron is one of the most abundant metals on Earth, and the most produced. It has an energy density of about 11.3 kilowatt-hours per liter—better than gasoline. Burning iron powder produces heat that can be used directly or converted into electricity by a steam turbine, leaving behind iron oxide, or rust. This can later be reduced—that is, the oxygen can be stripped away—back into iron powder. “You can think of iron fuel as a clean, recyclable coal,” says Bergthorson.

Iron oxide can also be reduced to iron using hydrogen. Hydrogen is already a carbon-free green fuel if produced by splitting water using renewable electricity. But it is also an ultralight, voluminous gas, so it must be converted using high pressures and extreme cold into liquid, which then has to be stored and transported in special containers. Iron, by contrast, is already moved in dry containers for a lower cost.

Nature.

For most of the history of life on Earth, genetic information has been carried in a code that specifies just 20 amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which do most of the heavy lifting in the cell; their side-chains govern protein folding, interactions and chemical activities. By limiting the available side chains, nature effectively restricts the kinds of reaction that proteins can perform.

As a doctoral student in the 1980s, Peter Schultz found himself wondering why nature had restricted itself in this way — and set about trying to circumvent this limitation. Several years later, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Schultz and his team managed to do so by tinkering with the machinery of protein synthesis. Although confined to a test tube, the work marked a key early success in efforts to hack the genetic code.

Since then, many researchers have followed in Schultz’s footsteps, tweaking the cellular apparatus for building proteins both to alter existing macromolecules and to create polymers from entirely new building blocks. The resulting molecules can be used in research and for the development of therapeutics and materials. But it’s been a hard slog, because protein synthesis is a crucial cellular function that cannot easily be changed.

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A new navigation system that tracks subatomic particles constantly bombarding Earth could help us get around indoors, underground, and underwater — all the places GPS fails.

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New research has shed light on the effects of protein-rich diets on the gut microbiome and overall health. Despite the increasing protein intake in Western diets, especially among athletes and individuals with obesity, the fate of undigested protein and its impact on human health remains largely unknown. A new study, presented at ASM Microbe, explores how excess undigested protein in the colon can be fermented to produce beneficial metabolites, such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), or lead to the production of harmful metabolites like ammonia and sulfides, which are linked to gastrointestinal disorders and other health issues.

The research team conducted a series of experiments on mice, discovering that a switch to a protein-rich diet resulted in significant weight loss, reduced body fat and induced immediate changes to the gut microbiome. The study also compared different protein diets to examine the effects of individual amino acids on the gut microbiome’s composition and activity. Notably, the mice consuming aromatic amino-acid-rich proteins experienced the greatest weight and fat mass loss compared to those on standard protein and branched-chain amino-acid-rich protein diets.

UPDATE: 5 Best High-Protein Foods for Gut Health, According to Dietitians

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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There is a company in Maryland that is working on doing this for structural purposes.

There is a lot of room for exploring natural polymers like lignin, cellulose, and chitin.

(One of the most disturbing aspects of this video is the burdens on firearm possession and use in the People’s Republic of Canada. Go, Second Amendment!)

Reuters.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided on Thursday with Starbucks (SBUX.O), opens new tab in the coffee chain’s challenge to a judicial order to rehire seven Memphis employees fired as they sought to unionize in a ruling that could make it harder for courts to quickly halt labor practices contested as unfair under federal law.

The justices unanimously threw out a lower court’s approval of an injunction sought by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordering Starbucks to reinstate the workers while the agency’s in-house administrative case against the Seattle-based company proceeds.

The justices ruled that lower courts had used an improper legal standard – one that Starbucks argued was too lenient – to issue a preliminary injunction requested by the agency under a federal law called the National Labor Relations Act.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

PBS.

Gates was in the tiny community of Kemmerer Monday to break ground on the project. The co-founder of Microsoft is chairman of TerraPower. The company applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March for a construction permit for an advanced nuclear reactor that uses sodium, not water, for cooling. If approved, it would operate as a commercial nuclear power plant.

The site is adjacent to PacifiCorp’s Naughton Power Plant, which will stop burning coal in 2026 and natural gas a decade later, the utility said. Nuclear reactors operate without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases. PacifiCorp plans to get carbon-free power from the reactor and says it is weighing how much nuclear to include in its long-range planning.

Why Wyoming? Well, Wyoming is in the Middle of Nowhere, so there are no close urban areas full of activist robot Democrat mobs to cause trouble–like this one:

Edwin Lyman co-authored an article in Science on Thursday that raises concerns that this fuel could be used for nuclear weapons. Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the risk posed by HALEU today is small because there isn’t that much of it around the world. But that will change if advanced reactor projects, which require much larger quantities, move forward, he added. Lyman said he wants to raise awareness of the danger in the hope that the international community will strengthen security around the fuel.

Let’s hear it for the effectiveness of the ‘international community’ which can’t even keep Russia from invading Ukraine (both of which have nuclear power plants), or Iran from buying enriched uranium from Niger for its bomb-the-Jews-until-they-glow-in-the-dark project. Yeah, I’m holding my breath.

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Won’t that be fun?

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It is as important to avoid the bad as it is to support the good.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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The first clinical trial to administer gene therapy to both ears in one person has restored hearing function to 5 children born with a form of inherited deafness, astounding the research team..

Two of the children even gained an ability to appreciate music.

The success of the new approach is detailed in a new study published in Nature Medicine. The work builds on the first phase of the trial, published earlier this year, in which children were treated in a single ear.

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Identifying hit songs is notoriously difficult. Traditionally, song elements have been measured from large databases to identify the lyrical aspects of hits. We took a different methodological approach, measuring neurophysiologic responses to a set of songs provided by a streaming music service that identified hits and flops. We compared several statistical approaches to examine the predictive accuracy of each technique. A linear statistical model using two neural measures identified hits with 69% accuracy. Then, we created a synthetic set data and applied ensemble machine learning to capture inherent non-linearities in neural data. This model classified hit songs with 97% accuracy. Applying machine learning to the neural response to 1st min of songs accurately classified hits 82% of the time showing that the brain rapidly identifies hit music. Our results demonstrate that applying machine learning to neural data can substantially increase classification accuracy for difficult to predict market outcomes.

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In the years following the revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the island nation for South Florida, setting the stage for what would become one of the most important linguistic convergences in all of the Americas.

Today, the vast majority of the population is bilingual. In 2010, more than 65% of the population of Miami-Dade County identified as Hispanic or Latina/o, and in the large municipalities of Doral and Hialeah, the figure is 80% and 95%, respectively.

Of course, identifying as Latina/o is not synonymous with speaking Spanish, and language loss has occurred among second- and third-generation Cuban Americans. But the point is that there is a lot of Spanish – and a lot of English – being spoken in Miami.

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On the cover of Lisa Birnbach’s “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a tongue-in-cheek 1980s guide to looking, acting and thinking like a US prep school elite, a pattern along the border depicts a fabric that has become synonymous with casual American luxury: madras.

The colorful plaid cotton cloth has been used by brands like Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers for decades. Think light summer dresses, shirts and shorts worn at the country club or on sailing holidays in the Bahamas — the kind of attire that might be complemented by a pair of leather boat shoes.

But this staple of preppy American fashion has humble origins, far from Martha’s Vineyard or the hallways of Yale or Harvard, in Chennai, India, the coastal city from which it takes its name. (Chennai was known as Madras during British rule.)

The Guardian.

Study participants born unable to hear could locate sound sources, recognise speech and dance to music after treatment

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The upper 10 kilometers of the Earth’s crust contains vast geothermal reserves, essentially awaiting human energy consumption to begin to tap into its unstinting power output—which itself yields no greenhouse gasses. And yet, geothermal sources currently produce only three-tenths of one percent of the world’s electricity. This promising energy source has long been limited by the extraordinary challenges of drilling holes that are deep enough to access the intense heat below the Earth’s surface.

Now, an MIT spin-off says it has found a solution in an innovative technology that could dramatically reduce the costs and timelines of drilling to fantastic depths. Quaise Energy, based in Cambridge, Mass., plans to deploy what are called gyrotron drills to vaporize rock using powerful microwaves.

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Dyson Spheres have been a tantalizing digression in the hunt for alien intelligence. Just recently seven stars have been identified as potential candidates with most of their radiation given off in the infrared wavelengths.

Potentially this is the signature of heat from a matrix of spacecraft around the star but alas, a new paper has another slightly less exciting explanation; dust obscured galaxies.

There are a number of ways to hunt for aliens and one of them is to look for signs of large scale projects in space. Enter the Dyson Sphere. The idea was first proposed by Freeman Dyson in 1960 to describe that an advanced civilizations would position power collectors and even habitats around a star to harness its power.

SciTechDaily.

Researchers have discovered a neurodevelopmental disorder linked to mutations in the RNU4-2 gene, a non-coding gene, which could impact tens of thousands globally. This finding enhances our understanding of genetic factors behind such disorders and paves the way for improved diagnostics.

Scientists have identified a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused by mutations in a single gene, that affects tens of thousands of people worldwide. The work, published in the May 31 online issue of Nature Medicine, was conducted by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK; KU Leuven, Belgium; and the NIHR BioResource, currently based at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The findings will improve clinical diagnostic services for patients with neurodevelopmental disorders.

UPDATE: Mutations in a non-coding gene associated with intellectual disability (Ars Technica)

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A New York state appeals court said Donald Trump can sue his niece Mary Trump for giving the New York Times information for its Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 probe into his finances and his alleged effort to avoid taxes.

The Appellate Division in Manhattan found a “substantial” legal basis for Donald Trump to claim that his niece violated confidentiality provisions of a 2001 settlement over the estate of his father, Fred Trump Sr.

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also deliver treatment and allow remote monitoring of a wound. Researchers are working on smart bandages that allow healthcare providers to observe the progress of the injury and accelerating healing with bursts of light or electricity.

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At its Build conference this week, Microsoft announced it has inked an AI partnership with education nonprofit Khan Academy.

Specifically, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy’s AI teaching assistant, dubbed Khanmigo, to run on its Azure cloud platform. The infrastructure support will let Khan Academy offer Khanmigo, which launched last March, to teachers at no cost.

Previously, it cost $4 per month, with the fees going toward enabling Khanmigo to access the large language models (LLMs) that power it. With Khanmigo now running on Microsoft’s cloud, it’s able to directly tap into the Azure OpenAI service, which provides programmatic access to a library of major LLMs.

“As your planning ally and instructional collaborator, Khanmigo leverages Khan Academy content to simplify AI for teachers,” Microsoft’s education team wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “No prompting is required. Khanmigo will help create engaging lesson hooks, provide insights on student performance, recommended assignments, and support for refreshing your knowledge.”

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Researchers hope to soon produce 66 tons of ‘electric concrete’ within just two hours. University of Cambridge

Researchers may have cracked the code on crafting practically zero-emission “reactivated cement” by recycling it with its partner-in-pollution, steel. The University of Cambridge team detailed their process in a study published on Wednesday in Nature—an “absolute miracle,” according to first author and professor of engineering and the environment, Julian Allwood.

Popular Mechanics.

• Ground-penetrating radar has helped archeologists identified buried wonders below the surface.
• Now, a new study from Japanese and Egyptian researchers reveals the discovery of an L-shaped structure along with an accompanying anomaly right next to the Great Pyramids of Giza.
• Although its impossible to know for sure what the anomaly is, the researchers guess that the L-shaped discovery could be an entrance to a deeper structure.

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There is a quickly growing trend among some of the largest grocery sellers in the US. Target (NYSE: TGT) cuts prices on thousands of items sold at its stores, including groceries. At the same time, Walmart (NYSE: WMT) said it would slash prices on nearly 7,000 items, many of which are in the grocery category. Walmart is the largest grocery retailer in America. Not to be outdone, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) also cuts grocery prices. It has far fewer stores than its bricks and mortar competitors. People who thought Amazon would crush Walmart were wrong.

According to CNN, Amazon’s grocery cuts include thousands of products. The decision is likely meant to hang onto market share. However, another incentive for the huge e-commerce company is that grocery prices are so high that Americans have cut back on shopping altogether. Prices are up over 20% since the start of the pandemic, based on data collected by the Federal Bank of St Louis.

Americans will likely cheer the cuts at these huge retailers. Research firm DriveServe polled people who shop for groceries regularly. Over half said they expect to pay more for groceries in 2024 than in 2023.

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Researchers have uncovered the properties of a rare earth element that was first discovered 80 years ago at the very same laboratory. Their discoveries open a new pathway for the exploration of elements critical in modern technology, from medicine to space travel.

Promethium was discovered in 1945 at Clinton Laboratories, now the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and continues to be produced at ORNL in minute quantities. Some of its properties have remained elusive despite the rare earth element’s use in medical studies and long-lived nuclear batteries. It is named after the mythological Titan who delivered fire to humans and whose name symbolizes human striving.

NewsMax.

On Tuesday, Crook County, Oregon, voted in support of a ballot measure to begin negotiations to secede from the state and join Idaho.

The movement known as Greater Idaho seeks to move the border between Oregon and Idaho to include 14 full eastern Oregon counties and 3 partial ones. According to the group’s website, the Crook vote now brings the total to 13 counties that have passed Greater Idaho measures. In 2023, the Idaho House passed a memorial inviting the Oregon Legislation to begin border talks.

Nature.

Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes written in DNA serve as the template for making RNA molecules, which are then translated into proteins. That tidy textbook story got a bit complicated in 1970 when scientists discovered that some viruses have enzymes called reverse transcriptases, which scribe RNA into DNA — the reverse of the usual traffic flow.

Now, scientists have discovered an even weirder twist1. A bacterial version of reverse transcriptase reads RNA as a template to make completely new genes written in DNA. These genes are then transcribed back into RNA, which is translated into protective proteins when a bacterium is infected by a virus. By contrast, viral reverse transcriptases don’t make new genes; they merely transfer information from RNA to DNA.

“This is crazy molecular biology,” says Aude Bernheim, a bioinformatician at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who was not involved in the research. “I would have never guessed this type of mechanism existed.”

Interesting Engineering.

The researchers use a phenomenon called thermodiffusion, a temperature gradient to move salt from the warmer to the colder side to bring about desalination. In this process, water remains in the liquid phase, and no energy is spent turning it into vapor and cooling it back.

In a technology demonstrator, the researchers used a narrow channel for the seawater. They sandwiched it between two plates maintained at different temperatures. The top plate was heated to over 140 Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), while the lower plate was cooled to 68 Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius).
The channel was a little over one and a half feet long, and low-salinity water emerged from the top while high-salinity water emerged from its bottom. After a single pass, cooler and saltier water was removed, and warmer and less salty water was put back into the setup.

Each pass saw the water’s salinity decrease by three percent, and using multiple cycles, the salinity decreased from 30,000 parts per million to less than 500 ppm.

Interestingly, the heat needed to carry out the process can come directly from sunlight or even waste heat generated during industrial processes.

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Many families with children research an area’s school district before considering buying a home. Furthermore, homes in good-quality school districts tend to have higher value than those in less desirable school districts. Although all children in America have access to public education, in reality, the quality of that education can vary widely based on location.

Teachers are critical in providing students with a quality education, however, many teacher positions are left unfilled. Unfortunately, 79% of public schools with open positions reported hiring difficulties in August of 2023 (per the Department of Education.) Most recently, test scores have fallen in students. For example, the share of eighth graders who are proficient in core subjects has fallen is only 26% in math and 31% in reading, according to government data.

In response to this, Americans have less confidence in the education system than ever before in history. A 2023 Gallup poll revealed less than a quarter of Americans (23%) expressed a high level of confidence in public schools. In 1975, confidence was at a record high of 62%, and just a few years ago in 2020, it was at 41%.

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Many Americans carry a firearm for personal protection, but the laws for doing so vary drastically by state. Although the same federal laws apply to each citizen of the United States, states have additional restrictions within their borders. In fact, between federal, state, and local municipalities, there are over 20,000 gun laws on record, and in some parts of the country, gun owners are subject to far more restrictions. One of the most noticeable differences, however, is how states and localities regulate guns (especially concealed firearms) in public areas.

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Almost two centuries after California’s gold rush, the United States is on the brink of a lithium rush. As demand for the material skyrockets, government geologists are rushing to figure out where the precious element is hiding.

In September 2023, scientists funded by a mining company reported finding what could be the largest deposit of lithium in an ancient US supervolcano. Now public researchers on the other side of the country have uncovered another untapped reservoir – one that could cover nearly half the nation’s lithium demands.

It’s hiding in wastewater from Pennsylvania’s gas fracking industry.

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Doesn’t surprise me. He wants Kennedy to take votes only from Biden, so he needs to bring out the fact that Kennedy is, in the last analysis, Just Another Democrat.

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Silica glass, known for its brittleness, weight, and non-biodegradable nature, faces challenges in finding suitable alternatives. Transparent wood, made by infusing polymers into wood, shows promise but is hindered by limited availability of wood in China and fire risks associated with its use. This study explores the potential of utilizing bamboo, which has a shorter growth cycle, as a valuable resource for developing flame-retardant, smoke-suppressing, and superhydrophobic transparent bamboo. A 3-layered flame-retardant barrier, composed of a top silane layer, an intermediate layer of SiO2 formed through hydrolysis-condensation of Na2SiO3 on the surface, and an inner layer of Na2SiO3, has been confirmed to be effective in reducing heat release, slowing flame spread, and inhibiting the release of combustible volatiles, toxic smoke, and CO. Compared to natural bamboo and other congeneric transparent products, the transparent bamboo displays remarkable superiority, with the majority of parameters being notably lower by an entire order of magnitude. It achieves a long ignition time of 116 s, low total heat release (0.7 MJ/m2), low total smoke production (0.063 m2), and low peak CO concentration (0.008 kg/kg). Moreover, when used as a substrate for perovskite solar cells, the transparent bamboo displays the potential to act as a light management layer, leading to a marked efficiency enhancement of 15.29%. The excellent features of transparent bamboo make it an enticing choice for future advancements in flame-retardant glasses and optical devices.

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The largest pyramid field in Egypt is clustered along a narrow desert strip, yet no convincing explanation as to why these pyramids are concentrated in this specific locality has been given so far. Here we use radar satellite imagery, in conjunction with geophysical data and deep soil coring, to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids. We identify segments of a major extinct Nile branch, which we name The Ahramat Branch, running at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, where the majority of the pyramids lie. Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past. We suggest that The Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites.

UPDATE: Found at last: long-lost branch of the Nile that ran by the pyramids

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Democrats are deeply divided over President Joe Biden’s handling of both the war in Gaza and the U.S. campus protests against it, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found, fraying the coalition that he relied on four years ago to defeat Republican Donald Trump.

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As heat pump adoption spreads and more options become available, some companies are considering aesthetics without sacrificing function. A new heat pump system from Quilt, a California-based climate control company, promises top-of-the-line efficiency and indoor units that can be painted or wallpapered to match your interior decorating.

Watch it.

Very impressive.

Ars Technica.

Most current heat pumps rely on materials that exhibit large changes in temperature in response to changing pressures, but the energy required to pressurize them gets lost when they’re cycled back to a low-pressure state, absorbing heat from their surroundings. That has gotten people interested in electrocaloric devices, where changes in temperature are driven by storing charges in a material. Since it essentially acts as a big capacitor, much of the electrical energy involved can be pulled back out as the system cycles.

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The GM Purple Tomato was engineered by scientists at Norfolk Plant Sciences in the UK. Led by biochemist Cathie Martin and her team, the project aimed to harness the natural properties of anthocyanins, compounds found in blueberries and blackberries, to enhance the nutritional profile of tomatoes.

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I don’t eat wog food, so it’s of no use to me, but it must be good for somebody.