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With all the frightening things that are happening in the world right now, we thought we would focus on something truly magical: Namely, fungi. Last summer, we wrote about the use of psilocybin to treat depression in The Growth of the Psychedelic Industry. While an effective treatment for something that causes so much pain to so many is awfully exciting, it turns out that mushrooms are good for a whole lot more. Aside from aiding mental health, those tasty little pizza toppers are being used to create environmentally safe packaging and construction products, consumer goods, and even cleaning up one of the biggest messes humans have ever made.

Now, we aren’t saying that we’ll be getting a shipment of MeUndies inside a portobello mushroom, but rather what can be done with mycelium, which is the root structure of mushrooms. It consists of a network of branching, interconnected fine threads which can be grown into any shape and has no size limit. The Armillaria ostoyae mycelial network in Oregon occupies around 2,400 acres or roughly 1,665 football fields and is the world’s largest known organism.

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The Russians reportedly have launched multiple assassination attempts against Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. So far none has succeeded.

Movie of the Week: The Hitman’s Bodyguard, with Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds.  Highly recommended.

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I like the fact that they can do that sort of thing pretty easily these days.

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If and when they work. I’m not holding my breath.

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Too bad it’s going to be an electric car. Otherwise I’d be tempted to buy one. Even a hybrid would tempt me, but a totally electric car is not in my future.

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Replacing them with titanium would be pretty cool, but probably too expensive.

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Amazon.com Inc said on Wednesday it plans to close all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, pop ups and shops carrying toys and home goods in the United States and United Kingdom, ending some of its longest-running retail experiments.

Guess the Pandemic Panic underlined how vulnerable to political meddling brick-and-mortar operations increasingly are.

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Can a pair of unique spectacles banish nearsightedness without surgical intervention? Japan’s Kubota Pharmaceutical Holdings says its wearable device can do just that, and it plans to start releasing the product in Asia, where many people grapple with myopia.

The device, which the company calls Kubota Glasses or smart glasses, is still being tested. It projects an image from the lens of the unit onto the wearer’s retina to correct the refractive error that causes nearsightedness. Wearing the device 60 to 90 minutes a day corrects myopia according to the Japanese company.

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The motorist, 26-year-old Jose Angel Hernandez, is alleged to have shouted at a couple cycling to get off the road as he drove his vehicle at a woman, apparently on purpose.

The man she was riding with then opened fire on the driver –carrying a concealed weapon is permitted in Texas under licence, although even that requirement will be scrapped from 1 September.

A police officer at the scene was reported as saying: “He was in fear of his life, and he was trying to defend himself.”d

Don’t mess with Texans.

In a Blue State, she’d be dead and he’d be injured.

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Vellum is still a healthy industry, says Paul Wright of William Cowley Parchment Makers in a small workshop just outside Milton Keynes. The market has shifted from monks to megayachts (vellum makes a lovely sofa). But his company is the last vellum maker left in Britain. The lack of competition is good for Mr Wright but bad for the craft in general.

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As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, the name Maxar has suddenly taken on more significance with detailed eye-in-the-sky images of military movements on the ground being passed to media – including a 40-mile convoy headed for Kyiv. But what is Maxar, and where did it come from?

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Australian researchers have developed a smart and super-efficient new way of capturing carbon dioxide and converting it to solid carbon, to help advance the decarbonisation of heavy industries.

…

The “bubble column” method starts with liquid metal being heated to about 100-120C.

Carbon dioxide is injected into the liquid metal, with the gas bubbles rising up just like bubbles in a champagne glass.

As the bubbles move through the liquid metal, the gas molecule splits up to form flakes of solid carbon, with the reaction taking just a split second.

“It’s the extraordinary speed of the chemical reaction we have achieved that makes our technology commercially viable, where so many alternative approaches have struggled,” Chiang said.

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Sandra Kim, a resident of Loudoun County, Virginia, started homeschooling her three children in the summer of 2020.

She doesn’t necessarily have a problem with public schools, Kim says, but realized her children—Yenna Elizabeth, now 13, Emily, 10, and Teddy, 8—could do more.

The Virginia mother’s second grader, Teddy, now is doing higher-level math and her fourth grader, Emily, is writing essays, which normally wouldn’t have happened until sixth grade.

“Homeschoolers also do really well in college because they learn executive functioning skills from being at home,” Kim says.

In other words, factory-model government schools (Thank you, Prussia!) aren’t the best choice for your kids.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order raising the alert status of Russia’s massive nuclear forces this week in the midst of an invasion of neighboring Ukraine is presenting a test of a 2012 agreement that calls on China to provide a nuclear deterrent umbrella for Kyiv.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Lockheed produces the Javelin anti-tank missile.

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MIT spin-off Quaise says it’s going to use hijacked fusion technology to drill the deepest holes in history, unlocking clean, virtually limitless, supercritical geothermal energy that can re-power fossil-fuelled power plants all over the world.

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Smartwatches have a reputation for losing battery power at the worst time — like in the middle of a jog. The all-day sync drains the power quickly.

But imagine being able to power up while you run: with a built-in, ultrathin solar panel, a Fitbit or any wearable device could keep a constant charge by just soaking up the sun.

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Why is learning effortful? Why do we struggle to learn calculus but easily learn our mother tongue? How can we make hard skills easier to learn? Cognitive load theory is a powerful framework from psychology for making sense of these questions.

Cognitive load theory, developed in the 1980s by psychologist John Sweller, has become a dominant paradigm for the design of teaching materials. In this essay, I explain the theory, some of its key predictions, and potential applications for your learning.

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For all the recent improvements in artificial intelligence, the technology still cannot take the place of human beings in situations where it must frame its perceptions of the world in words that people can understand.

You might have thought that the many apparent advances in speech recognition would have solved the problem already. After all, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home are all very impressive, but these systems function solely on voice input: They can’t understand or react to the environment around them.

To bridge this communications gap, our team at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories has developed and built an AI system that does just that. We call the system scene-aware interaction, and we plan to include it in cars.

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General Motors (GM) and self-driving car company Cruise have asked regulators for permission to deploy the Cruise Origin — an autonomous vehicle (AV) with no steering wheel, rearview mirrors, or pedals.

If approved, it could be on the assembly line within a year.

“The Cruise Origin is among the most innovative vehicles in history: a zero-emission, shared, electric vehicle that has been purposefully designed from the ground up to operate without a human driver,” Rob Grant, a senior VP at Cruise, wrote in a blog post.

You first.

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We’ve gone beyond “the revolution will be televised,” and are in a reality where the the latest European war is live-streamed not just through social media, but on online mapping services without Google or Apple intending it.

The sheer volume of mapping data now available at our fingertips means it was possible for civilians half a world away to see when Russian forces began moving. Specifically, that data pinpointed a traffic jam starting on the Russian side of the border, actively moving into Ukraine in the first few minutes of the Russian and Ukraine conflict.

Just as with any cartography, this information required interpreting. Google Maps did not specifically say that it was troop movements, nor was its satellite imagery up to the minute. During the process of researching this story, we’ve confirmed that Apple Maps presented similar inbound troop movement information — but it wasn’t setting out to do that either.

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Let’s just head over the to the stock market and place some bets….

May I suggest MPLX?

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Beware of writing critical things about Eileen Gu, a teenaged skiing triple-medalist at the Beijing Olympics. You’ll be accused of racism.

Gu was born and raised in San Francisco, but after competing for the USA, she decided in 2019 that she was going to ski for communist China, where her mother grew up. The most pronounced irony of this flip-flop is how she’s cashing in by straddling the two countries.

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Ammonia is commonly used in commercial crop fertilizers, which in turn can pollute waterways when they run off of fields. New research, however, suggests that engineered bacteria could one day take the place of such fertilizers.

In a study led by Asst. Prof. Florence Mus, scientists at Washington State University genetically engineered new strains of a soil-inhabiting bacteria by the name of Azotobacter vinelandii. While the bacteria was already known to convert ambient nitrogen gas into ammonia, the new strains are able to consistently produce and excrete ammonia at much higher concentrations, regardless of environmental conditions.

And if this means there is less ammonium nitrate fertilizer around for terrorists to make bombs out of, that’s even better.

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For nearly eight hours one day in late January, the power to Sam Bryan’s house blinked off after a transformer near his greater Third Ward lot blew a fuse.

The same transformer has long had issues, he said, leading to blackouts at Bryan’s house and those of his neighbors several times a year. But in January, Bryan’s lights stayed on, thanks to 43 photovolatic solar panels bolted onto his roof and a battery system stored in his garage. Instead of comforting his 4-year-old, who had grown anxious during power outages since the freeze of February 2021, they played a game.

“It was a pretty neat experience,” he said. “Part of the fun was that I don’t have to explain why we can’t turn the lamp on.”

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A new smart type of food packaging promises to eliminate food poisoning by killing harmful bacteria.

According to scientists, the packaging destroys hazardous bacteria like E.coli, Salmonella, and Listeria, allowing meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables to last longer.

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The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.

Cloud People have this fantasy that everybody wants to ride trains. They don’t.

The Economist.

Clunky, costly, highly regulated health systems, often dominated by rent-seeking middlemen, are being shaken up by firms that target patients directly, meet them where they are—which is increasingly online—and give them more control over how to access care. Scientific advances in fields such as gene sequencing and AI make new modes of care possible. E-pharmacies fulfil prescriptions, wearable devices monitor wearers’ health in real time, tele-medicine platforms connect patients with physicians, and home tests enable self-diagnosis.

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

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Now watch governments screw it up.

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Be the first on your block….

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In an era in which crooks are willing to drive dump trucks into a 7-11 in order to crack the ATM, and the contents of containers on railroad cars cover the L.A. tracks like a landfill, how are they going to prevent these clever little ‘ bots from being stolen and disembowelled?  Maybe it won’t be a problem in Carmel but I can’t see it working in Compton.

UPDATE: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

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There’s a company called GO-OPV and they make this ORENgE technology, it’s Orenge with an E. It’s basically making a solar panel more like a film that you can put on top of anything and Pepsi (NASDAQ:PEP) is already actually using this both at distribution station on top of the building, but also on top of the trucks themselves.

Yeah, that would do it. Call me when they offer it for sale.

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Chatham University in Pennsylvania did away with tenure in 2005. Now the university is poised to transition to a tenure system once again.

Joseph MacNeil, interim dean of the School of Arts, Science and Business at Chatham, said two main factors are at play: faculty recruitment and faculty morale.

“We have some stories where people we’d made offers to declined us because—while they were happy to participate in the job search—when they were getting offers, the fact that we didn’t have tenure disqualified us from the conversation,” MacNeil said. “And the part that no one can quantify is the number of good faculty that never applied for a job here because it wasn’t tenure-track in first place.”

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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In response to increasing missile threats from regional terrorist groups, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that a new laser defense system will be deployed within a year to intercept incoming missile attacks. This news highlights the increasing pace of development and utility of using high-energy lasers—a directed energy weapon—for missile defense.

Hopefully our next Republican President will buy it from them.

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Last year was a record-breaking year for robots joining the American workforce. But in China, the advent of robotic workers was equally – if not more – intense.

According to a report from Nikkei, Yum China’s network of KFC and Pizza Hut outlets has seen significant growth over the past year, even as the size of China’s workforce has remained steady.

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I’m holding out for titanium.

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Radically transparent, low cost versions of high cost generic drugs.

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A new bionic pacemaker bested normal heart implants in a recent study — by causing the heart to beat irregularly.

That may sound like a flaw, not a feature. But by matching the pacemaker to the lungs, the heart beat more naturally — dramatically improving blood flow.

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You first.

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The smart roof coating uses a simple physics trick to switch between warming and cooling properties.

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But what if instead of strapping on a FitBit or Apple Watch every day, you could pull on a T-shirt or pair of pants that instantly tracks health metrics as you move?

That’s the future that designers of E-textiles, or smart textiles, want to build.

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What you’re seeing here is the equivalent of a skateboard, only for cars. It contains the underpinning features such as an (unspecified) battery which should recharge by induction, a LOT of electronics, and what appears to be four moons on each corner of the car.

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WaterLight works through ionisation. Electrical energy is produced when salt water electrolytes react with magnesium inside the device.

As well as a portable light source, WaterLight also charges small devices through a USB port. In emergency situations, it can be powered by urine.

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I was under the impression that regular duct tape worked perfectly well for medical purposes; certainly I have seen it used to hold wounds closed. Ah, well.

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Ever wonder what would happen if somebody (somebode@!) nuked your town? Or somebody else’s town?

With NUKEMAP, you can find out.

Even more interesting is who wants to know….

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Natural Fiber Welding uses an innovative process to treat cotton and make it behave more like synthetic fibers.

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The Freedom Convoy in Canada has grown beyond just the truckers. Farmers on their tractors have joined in, and the movement enjoys widespread popular support. From my vantage point here in the Sunny South, the moment looks ripe for a general strike in the Frozen North.

The window of opportunity is a narrow one, however. The current push against the Trudeau regime cannot be maintained indefinitely, and Baby Doc has yet to roll out his big guns to try and crush what he considers a seditious rebellion. The globalists who pull his strings will want those unwashed upstarts suppressed at all costs — if they succeed, the dominos will start to fall all across the West, and who knows where that might lead?