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

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He looks to be in good shape for 90 years old. I hope I look that good at that age.

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Enough politics! Let’s geek out….

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Amazon has announced the retirement of its proprietary MOBI file format for eBooks, and a transition to the EPUB format for use on Kindle devices and apps. As of August 2022, you will no longer be able to send the MOBI file format to Kindles or the Kindle app using the Send to Kindle service. The MOBI file format no longer supports the newest document features, while the EPUB format is updated and accepted by Kindle devices.

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Aldo Steinfeld, a professor at ETH Zürich’s Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, says his system for converting ambient air into jet-ready kerosene fuel using a solar refinery tower isn’t science fiction. It’s simply thermodynamics.

In a two-year proof-of-concept test atop ETH Zürich’s Machine Laboratory building in Switzerland back in 2019, Steinfeld’s mini solar refinery first showed how the process works, and laid the groundwork to scale the project. Both carbon dioxide (CO2) and water are extracted directly from ambient air and split using solar energy, as Steinfeld describes his work in a new paper, published late last month in the journal Joule. The result is syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is then processed into kerosene.

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U.S.- German auto parts company ZF has engineered a strut suspension front axle concept that allows the front wheels to turn up to an incredible 80 degrees. The invention is called EasyTurn.

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When a patient suffers an ischemic stroke — when a clot chokes off the blood supply of vital oxygen and nutrients to the brain — those brain cells begin to die within minutes. The resulting tissue damage can lead to long term complications, including paralysis, memory loss, depression, difficulty controlling emotions, and changes in behavior.

There are currently no FDA-approved therapies for repairing the damage caused by a stroke.

Now, researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Case Western Reserve University have identified a new drug which may help repair — not just limit — stroke damage.

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As prices surge, store brands – also known as private labels, white labels or generic brands – have become an even more attractive option for inflation-fatigued shoppers who are looking to switch from pricier name brands. Store brands can be anywhere from 10% to 50% cheaper.

But the origins of store brands remain largely secretive.

…

Although store brands ostensibly compete with manufacturers’ national brands, manufacturers often have excess capacity on their production lines. To generate additional profit, some will use that extra capacity to make private labels.

I always buy ‘store brands’ when they are available. They’re almost always of adequate quality and superior price.

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A French mayor says conditions on Mont Blanc are now so dangerous that climbers should pay a €15,000 (£12,640; $15,370) deposit to cover rescue and possible funeral costs.

Jean-Marc Peillex is mayor of Saint-Gervais, a village at the foot of Western Europe’s highest mountain, whose summit is at 4,807m (15,774ft).

Those who ignored warnings and took the Goûter route up the mountain were playing “Russian roulette”, he said.

I think that’s a great idea. Nothing is more common these days than bozos heading up a mountain or into a wilderness who ought to be in a city somewhere, and the first thing they do when their incompetence does its thing is to call on public authorities for help or rescue.

Mayor Peillex said the average cost of a rescue on the mountain was €10,000 and funeral costs were €5,000. “It is unacceptable for the French taxpayer to cover those costs,” he said in a press release.

Would that American politicians were as sensible.

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Agricultural drones, self-driving tractors and seed-planting robots are among the innovations that could be key to future food supplies, as autonomous farming promises to produce more crops with less effort and less impact on the environment.

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Additive manufacturing is on the cusp of being adopted more widely by industry, as large corporates Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and Boeing as well as small innovative start-ups prove it can work well at scale in manufacturing.

In May, Goodyear opened a $77 million plant in Luxembourg that centers on 3-D printing and can make tires four times faster in small batches than with conventional production. Goodyear also is testing its new 3-D printed airless tire technology on Tesla electric vehicles and Starship Technologies’ autonomous delivery robots. It has been working for the past several years on improved manufacturing techniques at an R&D center near Columbus, Ohio.

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The vessel in question is the Unmanned Influence Sweep System (UISS), a crucial piece of technology packaged as part of the Navy’s suite of systems designed for mine countermeasures. The ship, small enough to deployed from a Littoral Combat Ship, reached “initial operational capability,” or IOC, on July 22, the Navy said late last week.

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For the second time since 2014 the United States is supporting efforts that help Russians to bypass government censorship to reach the outside world and search for information that will clarify what is going on in Ukraine. The official Russian version about what is going on in Ukraine is contradicted by what surviving Russian veterans of the fighting are reporting. The information provided by soldiers who have been there, or parents seeking to find out what happened to their sons in the army, has caused growing reluctance to support the Russian operations in Ukraine. More Russians are refusing to report when they receive a conscription notice. Calls for volunteers to serve in Ukraine are being ignored, even at higher pay, as in three to ten times the average monthly income of civilians. The government refuses to provide any clarification, pointing out that such information is a state secret.

Steve Sailer.

I guess Mexico and California are trading populations.

Apparently, even M.C. was less Woke on COVID than California. Perhaps this way they can get out of the Peoples Republic of the Left Coast without tripping over a bunch of smelly Republicans. (Although, if they’re looking to avoid people carrying guns, this may not work out well for them.)

What proportion of trend articles are based on interviews with career coaches?

That’s our Steve – not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Steve Sailer.

I find this encouraging.

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Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America’s dysfunctional two-party system.

The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters.

This could prove entertaining. I’ve always liked Andrew Yang, and I’ve always disliked Whitman, so I will be paying attention as to how this discomfort with the current UniParty translates into policy. Typically such ‘third parties’ are started by people who aren’t getting what they believe to be Their Fair Share of the political pie, so they have short life-spans; Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, Ross Perot’s Independence Party, and the Dixiecrat party in the late 1940s being the poster children here.

Historically these only survive because one of the two national parties has disintegrated, and the Federalists and Whigs did before the Civil War. Despite gleeful cacklings on the part of activists, I don’t see that happening these days, although the Democrats are skating close to the edge with their embrace of Woke ideology that only a proglodyte could love. But we’ll see.

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Cocoa flavanols have previously been found to lower blood pressure and arterial stiffness as much as some blood pressure medication. However, how effective flavanols are in everyday life in reducing blood pressure has remained unknown, as previous studies in this area have been performed in tightly controlled experimental settings.

Surrey’s new research reduces concerns that cocoa as a treatment for raised blood pressure could pose health risks by decreasing blood pressure when it is not raised, paving the way for it to be potentially used in clinical practice.

Well, there you go.

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Scientists exploring a submerged mountain range in the mid-Atlantic stumbled onto something they can’t explain: An organized series of holes punched in the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

The discovery was made July 23, and photos show the dots connect into nearly straight lines … or trails … or designs.

NOAA Ocean Exploration isn’t yet sure how to explain it.

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Russia will pull out of the International Space Station after 2024 and focus on building its own orbiting outpost, the country’s new space chief said Tuesday amid high tensions between Moscow and the West over the fighting in Ukraine.

Welcome to the new Cold War.

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I’m looking forward to it.

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We have the technology.

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While big cities across the country struggle to fully recover from the pandemic, San Francisco is on another level, as tech companies exit leases and residents bolt for more affordable locations. San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s office estimates that one-third of San Francisco’s workforce is now remote and outside of the city. Last year, that resulted in a whopping $400 million hit to tax revenue, according to the Office of the Controller.

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The Mississippi Board of Education voted today to remove a policy that barred individuals with enhanced concealed carry permits from carrying guns in the state’s elementary and secondary public schools, revising a 1990 policy that previously prohibited anyone other than “duly authorized law enforcement officials” from doing so. The board made the change as part of an ongoing review of its policies to bring them into compliance with state law.

The board said the 1990 policy prohibiting “the possession of pistols, firearms, or weapons in any form by any person other than duly authorized law enforcement officials on school premises or at school functions” is at odds with the state’s 2011 enhanced-carry law.

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Researchers designed, built and tested a system that produces kerosene fuel for flight using little more than water, carbon dioxide and sunlight.

The technology to create jet fuel quite literally from thin air has been around for a few years now; the breakthrough here is scaling the process up from the laboratory to an industrial proof of concept.

“We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system,” Aldo Steinfeld, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), said in a statement.

A useful thing, if they can make it cost-effective.

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You first.

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A man with a rifle walked into an Indiana mall and opened fire in a food court Sunday evening. A law-abiding citizen with a permit to carry a handgun responded in seconds and was able to shoot and kill the suspect, ending the rampage.

The Greenwood Police Department said a lone suspect entered the food court area of the Greenwood Park Mall, located on Highway 31 on the south side of Indianapolis, around 1800 local time. The suspect was armed with a rifle and several magazines of ammunition and immediately began firing. He was identified as an adult male, and police have yet to release a motive.

The suspect killed three people and injured two during the rampage but was stopped short by a 22-year-old man carrying a gun lawfully. Police have not shared the man’s name, but local authorities are already calling the citizen who stopped the shooter a “real hero.”

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This looks extremely interesting. The key, of course, is whether it will wind up on our cars.

Politico.

Ruy Teixeira is one of Washington’s most prominent left-leaning think-tank scholars, a fixture at the Center for American Progress since the liberal organization’s founding in 2003. But as of August 1, he’ll have a new professional home: The American Enterprise Institute, the longtime conservative redoubt that over the years has employed the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, and Robert Bork.

Teixeira, whose role in the Beltway scrum often involved arguing against calls to move right on economic issues, insists his own policy views haven’t changed — but says the current cultural milieu of progressive organizations “sends me running screaming from the left.”

He hasn’t, of course–he’s still On The Left. He has just realized that the other people On The Left are a bunch of assholes and (reasonably) doesn’t want to work in that environment.

But of course he refuses to wake up and smell the coffee; and that sort of willing suspension of disbelief is the very definition of the proglodyte.

My question is why the American Enterprise Institute would waste their money paying this guy for his wrong opinions.

This is yet another brick in support of the thesis that most of the people pretending to be conservatives are merely the Me-Too Wing of the political Uniparty, the Washington Generals of the reigning political class. Their job is to put up a good act but inevitably to lose.

And fools give them money. Astonishing.

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The European Union is set to again boost its funding for military arms shipments to Ukraine, expected to be agreed upon by member states at a meeting of foreign ministers on Monday.

They are expected to set aside 500 million euros ($500 million) more in military aid to Kiev, Bloomberg reports, at a moment Russian forces continue unleashing constant artillery strikes on Ukrainian positions in the Donbas.

“That would bring the total arms financing to 2.5 billion euros,” Bloomberg writes. “The bloc in recent months has agreed to several rounds of arms financing for Ukraine under the so-called European Peace Facility, which reimburses governments for military deliveries to Ukraine.”

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The Heritage Foundation filed an ethics complaint Wednesday against Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., who last month accused a Second Amendment expert with the Washington-based think tank of lying to Congress about the contents of firearms legislation.

In the complaint filed with the Office of Congressional Ethics, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts accuses Porter of “knowingly and intentionally defaming” Amy Swearer, a legal fellow in Heritage’s Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

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Only two weeks after Italy, Denmark becomes the fourth country to sanction Google. As expected, more and more EU member countries are reaching the same conclusion: Google products violate EU law.

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I would certainly encourage them to do so. (Fortunately, voluntary sterilization is still legal.)

Think of it as evolution in action.

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For the last 12 months I’ve been using an adapted version of what seems to be the “standard” advice for cleaning camera lenses. My lenses still seem as good as new (I can’t see any abrasion at all, nor any problems at night), which suggests this is a decent approach. Caveat emptor: I have not conducted a scientific test, so some of what comes next might be placebo, or the results of good fortune, or possibly even dangerous to your health. With that in mind, here’s how I now clean my glasses (note: I don’t use affiliate links, so you don’t have to worry that I’m trying to make money off you).

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was a rulebook for regenerating limbs.

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

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It turns out that the price lists are incredibly unwieldy to use for a number of reasons that I mention later. I blame in equal parts both the hospitals and the lawmakers.

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The building blocks of these microrobots are iron oxide nanoparticles that have both catalytic and magnetic activity. Using a magnetic field, researchers could direct their motion and configuration to form either bristlelike structures that sweep away dental plaque from the broad surfaces of teeth, or elongated strings that can slip between teeth like a length of floss. In both instances, a catalytic reaction drives the nanoparticles to produce antimicrobials that kill harmful oral bacteria on site.

I have been waiting for this for over twenty years, as soon as I read my first story about nanotech. My dentist and I talk about it every time I go in to get my teeth cleaned.

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Governor Youngkin appears to be successful in weeding out some of the dead wood among the state bureaucracy.

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This is a story that would be getting a great deal of play if it advanced a liberal media narrative: two illegal aliens planned to “shoot up” an Independence Day parade in Richmond, Virginia, but were thwarted by an alert citizen.

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Maybe Turkey will be next after Ukraine for Russia.

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Many of us are passingly familiar with circadian rhythms as a way to refer to our sleep cycle. In 1972, scientists discovered that that cycle is mediated by an area in the brain’s hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. This structure coordinates the release of hormones — among them dopamine — that lower body temperature and blood pressure and make us feel sleepy; in the morning, cortisol and other hormones restore our alertness, make us warmer and increase blood pressure. The a.m. surge in blood pressure is believed to be one reason heart attacks occur more often then than in the p.m.

In the past two decades, however, researchers have discovered that the clock in the brain is by no means the only one in our body. It turns out that most of our cells contain a group of genes that might be thought of as gears in a mechanical watch, keeping time everywhere internally. These “clock genes” — there are at least six that are considered integral to the watch’s operation — work together the same way in each cell. And just as they cause the release of hormones in the brain, they dictate other processes in other parts of the body. In the early 2000s, advances in the ability to detect the activity of genes in various tissues revealed that the cell clocks are organized into separate organ-level clocks representing every physiological system: There’s a skin clock and a liver clock and an immune-system clock; there’s a clock for the kidney, heart, lungs, muscles and reproductive system. Each of those clocks syncs itself to the central clock in the brain like an orchestra section following its conductor. But those sections also adjust how and when they perform based on guidance they receive both from the environment and from one another, and their timing can provide feedback to the central clock and cause it to adjust the time it keeps too. The liver, for instance, determines when to rev up your metabolism based on when you eat; if you do that in the middle of the night, the liver will be receiving contradictory cues from the brain, which is telling it to rest. As a result, when the liver starts processing the midnight food, it will do so less efficiently than it would have done after a daytime meal — and it sends conflicting signals back to the brain and other organ systems.

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Polar Night Energy’s system, based on its patented technology, has gone online on the site of a power plant operated by utility Vatajankoski.

The 4×7 metre steel container contains hundreds of tonnes of sand which can be heated to a temperature of 500-600 degrees Celsius. The sand is heated with renewable electricity and stored for use in the local district heating system.

It has a particularly strong use case in Finland which sees long and very cold winters, and was recently cut off from Russian gas supplies over a payments dispute. The storage system’s developers say it is cheap and easy to build.

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The Mountain State’s Republican Attorney General, Patrick Morrisey, released a statement on June 29 detailing his continued commitment to saving the lives of babies by reinstating a 170-year-old law protecting them, according to Life Site News.

The law was crafted in 1849, but was left on the books when Roe v. Wade established a federally guaranteed “right” to abortion. But now that the recent Dobbs decision overturned that 1973 ruling, the law can be re-enacted.

“Enacted in 1849 and never repealed since,” anyone who administers or performs an abortion with the intent to destroy a child “commits a felony punishable by three to ten years in prison,” the rule states.

“The statute covers persons who perform abortions and, at least arguably, women who seek them,” Morrisey added.

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California startup Mojo Vision finally has a human being wearing its smart contact lens — bringing the future of AR, and superhuman sight, a major step closer.

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European lawmakers have given the green light to antitrust law changes targeting self-preferencing by Apple and other big tech companies, but there are fears that it will be difficult to enforce the regulations.

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Only an idiot would sell the same product to everyone at the same price.

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A reader writes to remind me about IN-N-OUT burger, a chain that is popular on the West Coast.  They have a simplified menu, fast service, and fixed low prices.  Sort of the model McDonald’s had back in the 1960’s.  Sadly, the lady who owns the place is not only anti-gay but an anti-vaxxer as well.  She makes Chik-Fil-A look progressive.  Then again, most successful major corporations are run by heartless conservatives.  The companies run by bleeding-heart liberals all went out of business.

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It’s pretty clear that the left is organizing to dump Joe Biden when it becomes evident that he’s a certain loser in 2024. Rather that waiting for a Ted Kennedy-like figure to challenge him in the 2024 primaries, which would likely doom Democrats to certain defeat, the left will need to push him out early, and clear the calendar for one or more Democrats to organize a serious presidential campaign. (It goes without saying the Democratic Party intelligentsia knows that Kamala Harris is a hopeless candidate.)

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USING carrots to create concrete, turning wood into plastic, or even compressing it into a “super wood” that is as light and strong as titanium might sound like a series of almost Frankensteinish experiments. Yet all three are among the latest examples of employing natural fibres from plants as eco-friendly additives or alternatives to man-made materials.

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In southeast Asia, the Philippines has ordered more warships from South Korea. This time it is six OPVs (Offshore Patrol Vessels). This came after a competition involving proposals from Australia, Turkey and several other nations. The South Korean entry was the export version of the new HDP-1500 OPV. The export version is customizable but the basic features are an 81 meter (260 foot), 1,700-ton ship with a top speed of 38 kilometers an hour and endurance of 28 days. There are accommodations for 51 personnel, including the 41 crew. Standard armament consists of a 76mm cannon and four CIWS (Close In Weapons Systems) for missile defense and other threats within a few thousand meters of the ship. There is a landing pad and hangar for a helicopter. Under the helipad there is space for additional weapons or equipment in four cargo spaces. The HDP-1500 can be equipped with anti-ship missiles or to hunt and attack submarines as well for mine-clearing. The Philippines needs the OPVs to patrol the South China Sea waters that China is seeking to steal from the Philippines.

The HDP-1500 is a very clean-looking design and shows a lot of good thought.

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MIT research engineer Paul Woskov spent 14 years developing a technique to employ gyrotrons, normally used to heat plasma, to drill geothermal wells. Gyrotrons emit microwaves and have been used in physics research for decades; Woskov’s repurposing gives the venerable devices a new use case.

…

Despite their age, gyrotrons haven’t been well publicized in the scientific community, Woskov said. “Those of us in fusion research understood they were very powerful beam sources – like lasers, but in a different frequency range. I thought, why not direct these high-power beams, instead of into fusion plasma, down into rock and vaporize the hole,” Woskov said.