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George P. Bush is having trouble gaining traction in his race for Texas Attorney General (his stepping stone to the governorship and then the White House). He has tried really hard to shake off the family legacy of “compassionate (big government) conservatism” and “illegal immigration is an act of love,” He has tried desperately to brand himself as a MAGA Republican. But the voters aren’t buying it.

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Last month, a student of mine here in Budapest had a surreal experience at an international debate he participated in. The western European moderator opened the event by inviting everyone to introduce themselves by sharing their “preferred pronouns.” The invitation was met with blank stares: in the Hungarian language, pronouns are not gendered.

This little episode is emblematic of woke doctrine’s amusing failure to translate into a central and eastern European context. Some conservatives stateside have started to notice that we here in East-Central Eruope are “based”—or at least, we’re remarkably resistant to wokeness. It’s worth reflecting on why that might be.

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A team of researchers led by Yale University scientists can now quantify the factors causing changes in the DNA that contribute most to cancer growth in tumors of most major tumor types.

In a new paper published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, they say that their new molecular analysis approach clarifies a long-standing debate about how much control humans have over cancer development over time.

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A new enzyme variant can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. It was created by chemical engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin

This discovery, published on April 27, 2022, in the journal Nature, could help solve one of the world’s biggest environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would enable major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level.

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Combination of nucleic acid nanotechnology and cryo-EM gives unprecedented insights into the structures of large and small RNAs, advancing RNA biology and drug design.

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Ralston College, which describes itself as a “new institution of higher education dedicated to free inquiry and human flourishing,” said last week that it had appointed Jordan Peterson as chancellor. Peterson, a psychologist and polarizing self-help guru, resigned from his professorship at the University of Toronto earlier this year, citing academe’s “craven” embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, among other grievances. Ralston, which is located in Georgia, in an announcement called Peterson a “brilliant interpreter of Western culture and a mentor to the millions of students whom the modern university has betrayed.”

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There are fillers for jawlines and there is Botox for foreheads, but height — a major source of anxiety for men — seems unsolvable. The struggles for short men in the dating world are well documented. To improve their odds of matching with people, men have taken to lying about their height on dating apps. This happens so frequently that the dating app Tinder once rolled out an April Fools joke about verifying height, and men got very upset. Just last week, a TikTok went viral for devising a plan to “fact-check” guys who say they’re 6 feet tall. Height is even an advantage in the workplace, where taller men are more likely to end up CEOs and shorter men are less likely to get access to career opportunities. Short men are mocked on social media. Some research suggests shorter men are more likely to be depressed.

The male equivalent of fake boobs? Natural selection is really taking it in the shorts from modern technology.

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Coming to your iPhone? Or maybe your Apple Watch.

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Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration Thursday for allegedly colluding with Big Tech companies.

Fox News reported that the lawsuit claimed that the Biden administration “pressured and colluded” with companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. The plaintiffs also alleged that stories that discussed the origins of COVID-19 and potential fraud in mail-in votes were also censored.

The suit named the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Homeland Security, Nina Jankowicz in her official capacity as director of the “Disinformation Governance Board,” and others as defendants.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry alleged that the censorship occurred “‘under the guise of combating misinformation’ in order to achieve greater censorship,” Fox reported. Schmitt and Landry issued a press release that further explained their complaint.

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The power of nuns!

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Hearing loss caused by aging, noise, and some cancer therapy medications and antibiotics has been irreversible because scientists have not been able to reprogram existing cells to develop into the outer and inner ear sensory cells — essential for hearing — once they die.

But Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a single master gene that programs ear hair cells into either outer or inner ones, overcoming a major hurdle that had previously prevented the development of these cells to restore hearing, according to new research published today (May 4, 2022) in the journal Nature.

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Researchers discover that a spot of molecular glue and a timely twist help a bacterial enzyme convert carbon dioxide into carbon compounds 20 times faster than plant enzymes do during photosynthesis. The results stand to accelerate progress toward converting carbon dioxide into a variety of products.

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In the not-too-distant future, it may be possible to come home, kick off your made-from-fungus sneakers, hang up your kelp yarn jacket, and plop down on a plush sofa upholstered in cell-grown leather.

Those are some of the fabric and materials advancements that, in varying degrees of market readiness, startups have been cooking up in the past few years. With venture funding to the space picking up this past year, many are getting closer to mass-market adoption.

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Milwaukee-based Advanced Ionics has launched a new water vapor electrolyzer that is designed to operate in conjunction with commonly available waste or process heat from industry. The Symbiotic Electrolyzes system runs at temperatures below 650 C, and is reportedly able to produce hydrogen for $0.85/kg or less.

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The result of his research is a simple wristband that uses your DNA to help you make healthy choices as you shop for groceries.

By analysing the part of your genetic code determining susceptibility to nutrition-related health conditions like diabetes, DNANudge tells you which foods are best for you, and which you should avoid.

The wristband scans shop barcodes and shows a green light if a product is OK and red if it may be harmful in the long run. The wristband’s linked smartphone app suggests healthier alternatives when the red light comes on.

We have the technology.

It still creeps me out.

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Professor Giles Oldroyd, who leads research into sustainable crop nutrition at the University of Cambridge’s Crop Science Centre and Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University, is coordinating a global effort to transfer the nitrogen-fixing ability of legumes into non-legume cereals so that crops like wheat, maize and rice can, in effect, make their own fertiliser.

“Analysing the genetics of both legume and non-legume plants, we have discovered that non-legumes already have many of the genes needed to form the root nodules that house the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, Professor Oldroyd said. “There is substantial overlap in the developmental programmes plants use for lateral roots and nitrogen-fixing nodules. Studying the evolution of plant genes also indicates that some non-legumes did once form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria but have lost this ability over time.”

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Taking stuff that’s bad for the planet and changing it into stuff that’s bad for the people.

There’s a breakthrough for you.

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Enamel enables teeth to take a stomping and keep on chomping. The hardest tissue in the human body is tough enough to resist dents, yet elastic enough not to crack during decades of jaw smashing. It’s so incredible that scientists haven’t created a substitute that can match it—until now. Researchers say they have designed an artificial enamel that’s even tougher and more durable than the real thing.

We have the technology.

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In ten low-budget films made by British exploitation studio Hammer, Lee portrayed the monstrous-yet-seductive blood-sucking nobleman as a very proper Englishman with “a certain lascivious sex appeal“—beginning with 1958’s Horror of Dracula (see a trailer above) and ending with 1973’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula. I find Lee’s Dracula so memorable that I was delighted to hear the audio above of him reading an adaptation of the novel, in ten parts. The video begins with titles and an establishing shot from the Hammer films, then segues to images from a 1966 Dracula graphic novel, the source of the “pretty faithful” adaptation by Otto Binder and Craig Tennis, for which Lee wrote an introduction.

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Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities.

The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.

Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

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Australia has become the second country after the United Kingdom to legalize a fertility procedure that mixes genetic material from three people. The technique is meant to prevent couples from having children with certain debilitating disorders caused by faulty mitochondria, the energy-generating structures in our cells. But it’s controversial because it involves a genetic change that can be passed to future generations, so its rollout in Australia will be extremely cautious.

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And without government-provided health care, there was no hope for Him.

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Associate professor Mazhar Ali and his research group at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have discovered one-way superconductivity without magnetic fields, something that was thought to be impossible ever since its discovery in 1911 – until now. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, makes use of 2D quantum materials and paves the way toward superconducting computing. Superconductors can make electronics hundreds of times faster, all with zero energy loss.

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Astrophysicist Avi Loeb thinks that an interplanetary object that crashed into the Earth in 2014 was some kind of spaceship. His thesis is controversial in the science community.

According to information released last week by the United States Space Command (USSC), the object indeed came from another star system. The projectile – which sped across the sky off the shore of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea – was determined to be a meteor by the agency.

I’m sure Putin is involved somehow, with Trump as his sock-puppet.

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Transplants of immune cells that target the Epstein-Barr virus have shown promise for treating multiple sclerosis in an early stage trial. Brain scans suggest the progression of the condition was reversed in some participants, but this needs to be confirmed by larger trials.

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What is it that Rachel Maddow is always saying? “The walls are closing in….”

I have a dream: That Hillary Clinton will spend her golden years in an orange jumpsuit….

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Cue meltdown by anti-GMO Eco-Nazis.

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designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Well, we shall see.

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Bacteria that convert methane in the air into useful products could be a vital tool for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, if we can crack how they do it. A new discovery could kickstart efforts to engineer methane-harvesting bacteria, fight greenhouse emissions, and “mine” the air for useful compounds.

Virginia Postrel has forgotten more about fibers than you or I know.

.. .polyester rules the textile world. It accounts for more than half of global fiber consumption, about twice that of second-place cotton. Output stands at nearly 58 million tons a year, more than 10 times what it was in the early ’80s. And nobody complains about polyester’s look and feel. If there’s a problem today, it’s that people like polyester too much. It’s everywhere, even at the bottom of the ocean.

I highly recommend her book, The Fabric of Civilization.

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Although nuclear power remains controversial, new reactors are being built in surprising numbers and these will provide the second largest share of the world’s carbon-free energy. It’s also an industry undergoing rapid change as new technology comes on line. So, what will nuclear power look like in the decades to come?

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If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Check it out.

Affordable non-polluting power would break a lot of rice bowls. I’m looking forward to it.

That is, of course, from the viewpoint of remaining Woke.

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Lawmakers advance proposals to let police forces across the EU link their photo databases—which include millions of pictures of people’s faces.

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The UK has created a new visa for High Potential Individuals. Under the HPI visa any graduate from a top university as defined by “in the top 50 of at least two of the following three ranking systems: (1) Times Higher Education World University Rankings, (2) Quacquarelli Symonds, (3) The Academic Ranking of World Universities” will be allowed to stay in the UK for two (BA, MA) or three years (PhD). Moreover, a job or sponsor is not required and spouses and dependents are also included.

The US is slowly–very slowly–working towards something similar.

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British outfit First Light Fusion claims it has achieved nuclear fusion with an approach that could provide cheap, clean power.

Rather than rely on expensive lasers, complicated optical gear, and magnetic fields, as some fusion reactor designs do, First Light’s equipment instead shoots a tungsten projectile out of a gas-powered gun at a target dropped into a chamber.

We’re told that, in a fully working reactor, this high-speed projectile will hit the moving target, which contains a small deuterium fuel capsule that implodes in the impact. This rapid implosion causes the fuel’s atoms to fuse, which releases a pulse of energy.

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A woman who was bedridden for 18 months because she fainted every time she stood up is now walking long distances again, thanks to a spinal cord stimulator.

Her doctors at Switzerland’s NeuroRestore research center have published a case study on her successful treatment in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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The $35 Chipolo Card Spot sounds like a great solution to fears of lost or stolen wallets, but there are some caveats. Although it’s the size of a credit card, it’s as thick as three cards. It doesn’t support Ultra Wideband precision finding that enables the Find My app to points you in the right direction with an exact distance. Also—most disappointingly—the battery isn’t replaceable and has an estimated life of only 2 years. Chipolo offers a 50%-off replacement discount and recycles the dead unit, but that’s still annoying and wasteful. Currently, the Chipolo Card Spot is sold out and not shipping until May.

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More than 80 years ago, the Hindenburg Zeppelin LZ 129 exploded and crashed as it approached landing at Lakehurst New Jersey on May 6, 1937.

The behemoth 250-meter long vessel rigid airship had been in service for just under a year. At the time, numerous such vessels had been produced and employed with relative commercial success between the 1900s and the late 1930s. But the dramatic, fiery explosion of the Hindenburg spelled the end of dirigibles as a mode of transport.

The problem with the Hindenburg was a design flaw that is known and can be avoided. Nevertheless, popular mythology has panicked the public about hydrogen dirigibles ever since. This might not prove a problem with cargo craft.

According to the company’s promotional video, the new vessel uses “green hydrogen” for propulsion and with it the company hopes to transform air freight and shipping worldwide.

Using liquid hydrogen and fuel cell technology, the H2 Clipper is claimed to “operate efficiently at service ranges from under 500 to well over 6,000 miles” and travel at 175 mph. It would be able to “deliver goods directly from a factory in China to a distribution center in the U.S. in less than 36 hours.”

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One of the most worrisome trends reported by the Secure World Foundation and Center for Strategic and International Studies is the increase in the number of countries seeking to develop counterspace capabilities.

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Epic Games announced on Monday a new app called “RealityScan,” which will let anyone use the iPhone camera to scan objects and turn them into high-fidelity 3D models. The app was developed using technologies from Capturing Reality, a company specializing in photogrammetry that was acquired by Epic in 2021.

As the company explained, capturing real-world assets can be tricky since this usually requires advanced equipment. However, more creators and hobbyists are embracing 3D photogrammetry, and for these people RealityScan makes the whole process much easier.

We have the technology.

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Promising new research has raised the possibility of treating type 2 diabetes without drugs. Across three different animal models researchers have demonstrated how short bursts of ultrasound targeted at specific clusters of nerves in the liver can effectively lower insulin and glucose levels.

Reporting in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by GE Research, including investigators from the Yale School of Medicine, UCLA, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, demonstrated a unique non-invasive ultrasound method designed to stimulate specific sensory nerves in the liver. The technology is called peripheral focused ultrasound stimulation (pFUS) and it allows highly targeted ultrasound pulses to be directed at specific tissue containing nerve endings.

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A weapon, you will note, that we did not have when space flight was a monopoly of the government.

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Canada will ban most foreigners from buying homes for two years and provide billions of dollars to spur construction activity in an attempt to cool off a surging real-estate market.

The measures will be contained in Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s budget on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter, asking not to be named because the matter is private.

All oligarchs, all the time.

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On Tuesday Amazon announced deals with Arianespace, United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Blue Origin (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ pet project) to launch the majority of its 3,236 Kuiper satellites into low Earth orbit. “It is the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history,” the web giant modestly proclaimed.

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First Light Fusion (First Light), the University of Oxford fusion spin-out, today confirms it has achieved fusion. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has independently validated the result.
This is the first time fusion has been achieved using the unique targets developed by First Light, and the corresponding projectile technology. First Light’s mission is to solve the problem of fusion power with the simplest machine possible. Projectile fusion is a new approach to inertial fusion that is simpler, more energy efficient, and has lower physics risk. First Light has achieved fusion having spent less than £45 million, and with a rate of performance improvement faster than any other fusion scheme in history.

If fusion power becomes commercial, who will the climate change Nazis have to hate on?

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HB11 is approaching nuclear fusion from an entirely new angle, using high power, high precision lasers instead of hundred-million-degree temperatures to start the reaction. Its first demo has produced 10 times more fusion reactions than expected, and the company says it’s now “the only commercial entity to achieve fusion so far,” making it “the global frontrunner in the race to commercialize the holy grail of clean energy.”

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Earlier this month, the FDA approved genome-edited cattle for use in meat production. They were bred with climate change in mind, and they have extremely slick, short hair, which is said to help the animals cope with hot weather more effectively.