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The study authors created customizable wood in their lab from the cells of a flowering plant known as Zinnia elegans, popularly referred to as common zinnia. They claimed their novel approach allowed them to bio-print wooden pieces of any shape and size. This means that if you need a wooden table, you can directly produce a wooden table from the cells.

So no deforestation and no wastage, like what happens in the case of traditional furniture. This was achieved by treating common zinnia cells first with a liquid medium and then with a gel solution. The latter comprised hormones and nutrients.

We have the technology,–allegedly. Let’s see whether it will scale.

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Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

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

Defense & National Security — US plans expansion of training of Ukrainian troops (The Hill)

Russia Vs Ukraine War Update | U.S. To Expand Combat Training For Ukrainian Troops (CNN)

Russia’s ‘Second World War’ Military Tactics Leaving Troops Vulnerable—U.K. (Newsweek)

EU Agrees To 9th Russia Sanctions Package After Fierce Division On Food & Fertilizer

Russia to Double Intercontinental Missile Tests in 2023

Russian Troops in Crimea Battered by Ukrainian Drones

NY Times Columnist’s Bizarre Journey From Iraq Peacenik to Ukraine Warmonger

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Playing through the greenery and litter of a mini forest’s undergrowth for just one month may be enough to change a child’s immune system, according to an experiment in Finland.

When daycare workers rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth (such as dwarf heather and blueberries), and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of the young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time.

Send your kids to Finland. You’ll be glad you did.

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A new cancer vaccine from Moderna is showing breakthrough results in preventing recurrences of melanoma, and could ward off other types of cancer as well, the Wall Street Journal reported.

In a mid-stage clinical trial involving post-surgery patients, the vaccine was paired with Keytruda, an immunotherapy manufactured by Merck. The risk of relapse or death by skin cancer was lowered by 44% from the use of Keytruda alone.

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The party season is in full swing, but nothing kills that festive cheer quicker than a prolonged and painful hangover.

However, a US pharmacist has shared the hangover “cure” she swears is “100 per cent effective” – and those who have put it to the test agree.

Ari, a licenced doctor in LA, revealed she takes vitamin B complex, magnesium and a folic acid supplement alongside an electrolyte drink, claiming it is “single-handedly the most effective way” to beat those awful morning after symptoms.

Describing the concoction as an “oral version of an IV fluid bag”, Ari said it helps ease symptoms of dehydration and replenishes electrolytes.

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Thank you, minimum wage law.

Thank you, Union label.

Too bad for you, low-skilled laborers.

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he machines are coming for your crops—at least in a few fields in America. This autumn John Deere, a tractor-maker, shipped its first fleet of fully self-driving machines to farmers. The tilling tractors are equipped with six cameras which use artificial intelligence (ai) to recognise obstacles and manoeuvre out of the way. Julian Sanchez, who runs the firm’s emerging-technology unit, estimates that about half the vehicles John Deere sells have some ai capabilities. That includes systems which use onboard cameras to detect weeds among the crops and then spray pesticides, and combine harvesters which automatically alter their own setting to waste as little grain as possible. Mr Sanchez says that for a medium-sized farm, the additional cost of buying an ai-enhanced tractor is recouped in two to three years.

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It isn’t ghost- or football-related. And it isn’t some grand conspiracy, though lots of people saw in the synthetic twilight the effects of 5G radiation or government surveillance, a sign of the times. There’s nothing shady going on here. But still: Streetlights aren’t supposed to spontaneously change color.

So I did a little digging. The mystery of the purple lights appears to be both more mundane and more worrisome than anyone has realized — a mood-indigo check-engine light on the entire infrastructure of modernity. When LED streetlights start changing color for no apparent reason, it’s a visual cue that we might need to rethink, just a bit, how we build the future.

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America’s National Institutes of Health funded a group called EcoHealth Alliance, on multiple occasions, to collaborate on research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At least one project consisted of gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. Because of concerns about the dangers of such research, NIH shut it off in 2014, but re-started funding gain of function in 2017, largely at the instance of Anthony Fauci.

From 2014 to 2016, Dr. Andrew Huff worked for EcoHeath Alliance, the latter two years as vice president. He has written a book, which comes out on Monday, titled The Truth about Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History. Dr. Huff is not given to understatement.

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Cancer cells delete DNA when they go to the dark side, so a team of doctors and engineers targeted the ‘backup plans’ that run essential cell functions.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Indiana University have discovered a cancer weakness. They found that the way that tumor cells enable their uncontrolled growth is also a weakness that can be harnessed to treat cancer.

Their machine-learning algorithm can identify backup genes that only tumor cells use, allowing drugs to precisely target cancer.

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In what appears to be the first reported use of Emergency SOS via Satellite, a snowmobiler in Alaska was successfully rescued when he became stranded in an extremely isolated area.

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With 50 spray nozzles and a sophisticated computer system, tractors out in California’s central valley are towing artificially-intelligent robots behind them that look set to launch a fourth revolution in agriculture.

Passing over a field they can specifically target individual weeds and crops at a rate of 20 per second, before blasting them with either de-weeder or fertilizer within a millimeter of accuracy.

Verdant Robotics’ SprayBox robot can identify and treat 500,000 plants per hour while using 95% less chemical weedkiller.

Eventually we will have completely automated farms; companies are already developing small smart tools that are suitable for little acreage and affordable for those whose initials arend ADM.

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A new study reveals that ceramics can be made to bend like metal. This finding could lead to lighter, more efficient engines.

Two words: Body armor.

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Hey, this is serious stuff.

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After several decades, therapeutic cancer vaccines now show signs of efficacy and potential to help patients resistant to other standard-of-care immunotherapies, but they have yet to realize their full potential and expand the oncologic armamentarium. Here, we classify cancer vaccines by what is known of the included antigens, which tumors express those antigens and where the antigens colocalize with antigen-presenting cells, thus delineating predefined vaccines (shared or personalized) and anonymous vaccines (ex vivo or in situ). To expedite clinical development, we highlight the need for accurate immune monitoring of early trials to acknowledge failures and advance the most promising vaccines.

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Last week, Amazon extended buyout offers to hundreds of its recruiters as part of what is expected to be a months-long cycle of layoffs that has left corporate employees across the company angered and on edge. Now, Recode has viewed a confidential internal document that raises the question of whether a new artificial intelligence technology that the company began experimenting with last year will one day replace some of these employees.

According to an October 2021 internal paper labeled as “Amazon confidential,” the tech giant has been working for at least the last year to hand over some of its recruiters’ tasks to an AI technology that aims to predict which job applicants across certain corporate and warehouse jobs will be successful in a given role and fast-track them to an interview — without a human recruiter’s involvement. The technology works in part by finding similarities between the resumes of current, well-performing Amazon employees and those of job applicants applying for similar jobs.

Increasingly, labor costs are coming to be the greatest portion of a business’s expenses, not only monetarily but in terms of exposure to government regulation and labor union agitation. As a result, companies are more and more looking for ways to automate as many jobs as possible.

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New evidence indicates that an effort to stamp out disease-carrying insects is working. The key? Mosquitoes genetically engineered to kill off their own kind.

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A group of researchers may have figured out how. Mice paralyzed by severe SCI regained the ability to walk three weeks after a single injection of their new therapeutic, according to a recent study published in Science.

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A team led by King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) has shown how ultrathin polymer-based ordered membranes can efficiently remove salt from brine and seawater, offering a potential alternative for current desalination systems.

“Water desalination membranes should simultaneously exhibit high water flux and high salt rejection,” says Yu Han, who led the study. Carbon nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes and graphene, are projected to match these requirements because of their unique surface chemistry and tendency to stack into channels with diameters less than one nanometer. However, the challenges of channel alignment and stacking prevent their large-scale use in membranes.

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Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) scientists have invented a new type of insect-repellent delivery device. The active ingredient is first “encapsulated” and shaped into the appropriate shape, such as a ring, which may then be worn and releases an agent meant to repel mosquitoes for an extended period of time. The team published their findings in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics.

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A growing list of Illinois counties disenfranchised with the goings-on in Cook County have voted in nonbinding resolutions to leave Illinois and form a new state.

Residents in three more counties—Brown, Hardin, and a portion of Madison County—voted in favor of a nonbinding resolution allowing their county board to explore the possibility of leaving the state, bringing the total to 27. In all, three counties—close to 75% of residents—were in favor of the idea. Illinois has 102 counties, with Cook the most populous.

The driving force behind the referendums was to allow the county board of each area to coordinate with other county boards to explore the possibility of leaving Illinois because of the influence that Chicago and Cook County have on the state’s political decisions.

The Great Realignment?

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When not accusing their fellow citizens of being fascists, American progressives enjoy cooking up impractical schemes for what they call global governance. The Left-liberal vision of U.S. foreign policy cherished by progressives is more impatient with, and even openly disdainful of, the national interest than it used to be, but no major conservative political figure has refuted the Left’s vision at book length since the Cold War. Until now, when Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton takes up the case in his impressive new book, Only the Strong.

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No, you don’t get to pick which 30.

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Humans eat sweet corn. And only a sliver of Minnesota’s harvest lands for sale on the back of a Ford Econoline or buttered at a summer barbecue. Specifically, just over 1% of the 8 million acres harvested for field corn in 2021 is dedicated to the cash crop’s sweeter cousin.

A lion’s share of what’s grown in the state — roughly two-thirds of those 8 million acres — is for grain that is either devoured by livestock or transported to ethanol facilities.

The market for ethanol is driven by politics, requirements for blending it into gasoline in the name of the ‘climate crisis’. And, of course, once there is profit in making ethanol, there arises a powerful lobbying effort to keep the gravy train on track.

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The spine stiffens.

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All of them voted Democrat in the mid-terms, of course.

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Once your iPhone is connected to the satellite, you can call an emergency service when there’s no cellular signal coverage from your carrier. Satellite connectivity can also be used to share your location with friends and family via Find My.

Since it takes some time to establish the connection with the satellites, iPhone will ask users a few questions while the device is searching for signal. This includes questions such as “What’s the emergency?,” “Who needs help?,” and “Is anyone injured?” Then, iPhone automatically sends a text message with all these details to a local relay station.

A useful thing, if you are accustomed to wandering out in the middle of nowhere.

Not me, but other (crazy) people….

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Not if the Eco-Nazis have anything to say about it.

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

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Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)  are scaling up the production of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT). This incredible material could revolutionize diverse commercial products ranging from rechargeable batteries, sporting goods, and automotive parts to boat hulls and water filters. The research was published recently in the journal Carbon.

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The Dartmouth Review is the conservative alternative student newspaper at Dartmouth College.

From its promotional materials and online presence, it is clear that the University of Austin tries to market itself as something altogether different from its competitors. After all, in a country with more than 5,000 institutions of higher education, it is imperative for a school to separate itself from the pack. Nevertheless, Howland clarified that the difference UATX attempts to offer its potential students is a fundamental one. The University of Austin does not seek to reform America’s traditional model of a university but rather upend it.

Austin, although in the red state of Texas, is as blue as San Francisco, and therefore an odd choice for locating a new non-Woke University.

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A multinational team headed by University College London scientists has discovered a new mechanism that slows down and maybe even prevents the normal aging of immune cells, one of the nine “hallmarks of aging.”

The discovery in-vitro (cells) and validated in mice was “unexpected,” according to the researchers, who believe harnessing the mechanism might extend the life of the immune system, enabling people to live healthier and longer lives, and would also have therapeutic use for diseases such as cancer and dementia. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

Explaining the study, lead author, Dr. Alessio Lanna, Honorary Professor at UCL Division of Medicine, said: “Immune cells are on constant high-alert, always ready to fight pathogens. To be effective they also must persist for decades in the body – but the strategies employed to execute this life-long protection are largely unknown.

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In the wake of Kanelos’s punchy cri de coeur, published last November, the University of Austin was mocked as a haven for aggrieved academics peddling retrograde views, a cynical cash grab, or possibly both. Critics put the word “university” in scare quotes. Someone on Twitter wondered whether “final grades are just skull measurements,” while another suggested re-christening the institution “U Genics.” The Root compiled an imaginary course list with titles like “Karenology 320″ and “White History 101.” The New Republic rolled its eyes, averring that the enterprise “seeks to be higher education’s premier institution of monetizing moral panics.”

Not all the reviews were quite so scathing, and some pundits — generally more conservative ones — applauded the idea. If you believe free inquiry has become anathema on college campuses, or if you think, as Kanelos wrote, that higher-ed might be “the most fractured institution of all,” then you surely thrill to the prospect of beginning anew. If you think that the crisis narrative is overblown, and that those sounding the alarm are hustlers and prima donnas, then the project probably sounds like a boondoggle.

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A new city law going into effect on Tuesday will require companies with at least four employees to post salary ranges for openings, even if the jobs involve remote or hybrid work.

This could be entertaining. I wonder how much this will accelerate the moves to Florida.

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We have the technology.

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The FLASH effect: FLASH radiotherapy is a promising alternative to traditional radiation therapy.

It delivers a dose of radiation that’s over 300 times higher than traditional radiation therapy in just a fraction of a second. This induces something called the “FLASH effect” — a not-entirely-understood phenomenon in which the radiation still attacks the tumor, but doesn’t harm surrounding tissue.

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Just in case, ya know?

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You can look and feel better by keeping up a regular exercise schedule, but did you know that exercise also supports bone and muscle health? Locomotor fragility, which affects people who are unable to exercise, causes the muscles and bones to deteriorate. Recently, Japanese researchers discovered a new drug that, by producing effects comparable to those of exercise, may help treat locomotor frailty.

We have the technology.

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Wooden objects are usually made by sawing, carving, bending or pressing. That’s so old school! Today, scientists will describe how flat wooden shapes extruded by a 3D printer can be programmed to self-morph into complex 3D shapes. In the future, this technique could be used to make furniture or other wooden products that could be shipped flat to a destination and then dried to form the desired final shape.

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Quantum entanglement is the binding together of two particles or objects, even though they may be far apart – their respective properties are linked in a way that’s not possible under the rules of classical physics.

It’s a weird phenomenon that Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance”, but its weirdness is what makes it so fascinating to scientists. In a 2021 study, quantum entanglement was directly observed and recorded at the macroscopic scale – a scale much bigger than the subatomic particles normally associated with entanglement.

The dimensions involved are still very small from our perspective – the experiments involved two tiny aluminum drums one-fifth the width of a human hair – but in the realm of quantum physics they’re absolutely huge.

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Just in time for us all to die from ‘climate change’. How convenient.

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Over the last seven years, hundreds of bills and resolutions seeking to put an end to daylight saving time have been introduced throughout the U.S. Many haven’t passed, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Two states — Hawaii and most of Arizona — already observe permanent standard time (the time between November and March), meaning they don’t change their clocks at all.

Under current federal law, the U.S. as a whole can only abandon the twice-yearly changing of the clocks if Congress enacts a federal law, or a state or local government submits detailed information to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation “supporting its contention the requested change would serve the convenience of commerce.”

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Well, it’s more of a shed than a house, but still…. It would probably do for a burger shack or an ATM hut.

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Terahertz (T-ray) technologies offer the promise to transform how we interact with the world around us, from delivering lightning-fast data transfer beyond 6G to providing X-ray-like imaging without any harmful radiation. Yet effectively and efficiently harnessing T-rays for mainstream commercial applications has continued to elude scientists and engineers, relegating T-ray technologies to the realm of science fiction.

However, recent breakthroughs in how terahertz waves are generated and detected have now brought the technology to a tipping point for mainstream adoption. T-ray scanners can now be small enough to fit on a desktop, and they have enabled widespread terahertz use in medical, corporate, manufacturing and security settings across the world, with more developments to come. Here’s how T-ray technology has evolved over the past few decades and what we can expect in the years ahead.

BBC.

So go out and wallow.

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NASDAQ-listed The Metals Company (THC) says it has successfully collected polymetallic nodules from the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean as part of a trial of a new nodule collection system.

The trial marked the first such test in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) since the 1970s. The CCZ is a 1.7-million-square-mile fracture zone in the eastern Pacific Ocean that contains trillions of potato-size polymetallic nodules lying on the muddy seafloor or just below. The rock-like deposits contain metals needed for the production of batteries that will be critical for the clean energy transition.

Cue hand-wringing by Eco-Nazis.

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They find, first, that unionization throughout one’s career is associated with a $1.3 million mean increase in lifetime earnings, larger than the average gains from completing college. Second, the lifetime earnings gains are channeled entirely through higher hourly wages and occur despite earlier-than-average retirement for persistently unionized men. Third, the union wage premium is not constant throughout a worker’s career; instead it increases with more years of union membership.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Tulsi Gabbard’s announced exit from the Democratic Party via Twitter this morning was only a small slice of the larger video below she has posted on YouTube as episode 1 of The Tulsi Gabbard Show. The whole thing makes for a thoroughgoing denunciation of Democrats and the Democrat Party line. At the same time she sketches out her agreement with key Republican and conservative positions. She is a highly persuasive and winning advocate of the positions she stakes out on the contentious issues she addresses in the video. It is must viewing.

I still wonder what her next move is. I hope she lands on our side. That much I can tell you. I’m counting on John Hinderaker to figure it all out when he hosts her at the Center of the American Experiment’s well-timed if sold-out Fall Briefing this weekend.

UPDATE: Who’s Afraid Of Tulsi Gabbard? Everyone…