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Vance, whose book was seen in 2016 as helping explain Donald Trump’s appeal to struggling white, working-class voters, plans a “special announcement” and rally at the steel fabricator Middletown Tube Works in his Ohio hometown on Thursday. ABC News reported.

Vance, a venture capitalist who became a popular TV political commentator, was dubbed “the Trump whisperer” for his ability to explain the Republican’s rise to the presidency. His book became a Ron Howard-directed movie

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A prominent conservative has finally launched a payment processor so Americans won’t have to worry about PayPal or other woke corporations blacklisting them.

The pro-free speech payment processor solves a critical problem for the conservative movement online. “Dan Bongino and I have formed an entity, Liberatio Protocol LLC. Liberatio means liberation, and our launch of AlignPay represents our first investment in our Align For Freedom ecosystem,” strategic investor Jeffrey Wernick declared on Bongino.com. AlignPay described itself on its website as a “new payment processing solution that’s built for freedom and driven by the time-tested American conviction that everyone – no matter their race, religion, gender, or ideology – has the right to pursue happiness and live the American dream.”

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The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a Houston case that Facebook is not a “lawless no-man’s-land” and can be held liable for the conduct of pimps who use its technology to recruit and prey on children.

The ruling came in a trio of Houston civil actions involving teenage trafficking victims who met their abusive pimps through Facebook’s messaging functions. They sued the California-based social media juggernaut for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims.

The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009.

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

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Hint: Eat protein first.

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Don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

REMINDER: WD-40 IS NOT A LUBRICANT.

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he face of nuclear energy is changing, and one of the companies working to redefine what nuclear energy looks like is Oklo. The 22-person Silicon Valley start-up has a plan to build mini-nuclear reactors, powered by the waste of conventional nuclear reactors and housed in aesthetically pleasing A-frame structures.

“Microreactors are an exciting innovation that completely flips the technology story for nuclear energy,” Alex Gilbert, a project manager for nuclear power think tank the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, told CNBC.

But, of course, not everyone is happy about that: Nuclear energy isn’t a safe bet in a warming world – here’s why

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Each year, Apple becomes more involved in the health and fitness industry. It’s become a major player with products like Apple Watch and AirPods and services like Fitness+ and Research. Currently, Apple has working out, mental health, women’s health, heart health, blood oxygen measurements, and even hearing covered. But they’re missing one very important component of the healthy life story, and that’s nutrition and cooking.

To complement the Fitness app, Apple should create a nutrition-focused one. I think it’d be called something along the lines of “Apple Kitchen,” and it’d have an accompanying service called “Apple Kitchen+.”

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A new study by engineers at MIT, Caltech, and ETH Zürich shows that “nanoarchitected” materials — materials designed from precisely patterned nanoscale structures — may be a promising route to lightweight armor, protective coatings, blast shields, and other impact-resistant materials.

The researchers have fabricated an ultralight material made from nanometer-scale carbon struts that give the material toughness and mechanical robustness. The team tested the material’s resilience by shooting it with microparticles at supersonic speeds, and found that the material, which is thinner than the width of a human hair, prevented the miniature projectiles from tearing through it.

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Researchers had previously thought that a human signaling protein, called interleukin 11 (IL-11), may help livers damaged by acetaminophen toxicity — but this new study found just the opposite.

“This discovery could have implications for treating drug-induced liver failure, which can cause death if a liver transplant is not possible,” Duke-NUS professor of cardiovascular medicine and IL-11 expert Stuart Cook said in a statement.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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Let’s check out Biden.

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Graphically design your farm by dragging and dropping plants into the map. The game-like interface is learned in just a few minutes so you’ll have the whole growing season planned in no time.

And it will only cost you ten times the wage of an illegal immigrant. (When it’s actually available, of course, which it isn’t really, yet, but Real Soon Now….)

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I find this vaguely disturbing.

How long before they can 3D-print a replacement?

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A trio of boffins at the Georg August University Göttingen and Münster University have put together a low-cost yet high-resolution microscope for educational users – using smartphone parts and Lego bricks.

We have the technology.

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday held that a state law permitting labor union organizers to enter farmland without permission to try to organize workers was unconstitutional under the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

The ruling was 6 to 3.

In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the court considered a California regulation that allowed union agents to “take access” to farmland for up to three hours a day, 120 days per year in order to try to unionize workers.

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In a landmark decision on campus free speech, the Supreme Court today ruled in an 8 to 1 vote in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. that students’ social media speech conducted off campus is protected by the First Amendment.

The high school student, identified as B.L. in the lawsuit, initially sued the Mahanoy Area School District after her school kicked her off the cheerleading squad due to a profane rant about school that she posted to Snapchat. B.L. made the junior varsity cheer team, not the varsity one, and used a four-letter word regarding her school in a Snapchat post expressing her frustration; she was off campus when posting the Snapchat on a weekend day. A lower court decided that the school overstepped by kicking B.L. off of the junior varsity squad, but the school district appealed.

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Due to an abundance of one specific type of DVD drives, plans were made to give a useful afterlife to these devices. A laser scanning microscope seemed to be the most useful project.

Be the first on your block….

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There are windows of opportunity in nature, and one of my annual favorites is “sugaring time.” In late winter, tree sap begins to flow, and from the right trees, this sap can be collected and concentrated into a very special (and very delicious) caloric resource—sweet tree syrup. Most of us focus on how to make maple syrup during this window. But maple trees are just the beginning. Here’s what you need to know about the history of tree tapping and the basics on how to tap trees for syrup.

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Thank God. I look forward to the day when I don’t need to explain what I want to a person whose first language is not English over a bad audio system.

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Cue hysteria by Eco-Nazis.

Cue shakedown by government bureaucrats.

Cue lawsuits by The Usual Suspects.

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And Oregan has SO many people who would benefit society by being composted….

For example, everybody living west of the Hood River County – Klamath County line.

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Copenhagen startup Seaborg Technologies has raised an eight-figure sum of Euros to start building a fascinating new type of cheap, portable, flexible and super-safe nuclear reactor. The size of a shipping container, these Compact Molten Salt Reactors will be rapidly mass-manufactured in their thousands, then placed on floating barges to be deployed worldwide – on timelines that will smash paradigms in the energy industry.

Like other molten salt reactors, which have been around since the 1950s, they’re designed to minimize the consequences of accidents, with a pair of very neat passive safety measures the company claims can greatly change the safety equation at the heart of any nuclear power investment.

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Silicon Valley’s most valuable startup told employees they could leave its offices in New York and San Francisco to work remotely from cheaper locales, and many took the deal — despite the catch that they’d be forced to take a 10-percent salary cut.

Stripe, an online payments company valued at $95 billion, said in September that workers who moved to work elsewhere permanently would get a one-time bonus of $20,000 but also a permanent salary cut.

Now, the company’s CEO says many of the company’s 4,000-plus workers took the deal.

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Proteins are molecular origami at its finest. Classically, a protein is imagined as a chain of amino acids that folds into a single stable configuration, one that evolution has selected over the ages for a particular function. But in the last few years, biophysicists have learned how numerous and extraordinary the exceptions to that rule are — including some two-faced proteins that can refold as needed in an instant.

Life as we know it only uses a fraction of the tools available in theory.

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

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Process developed at MIT could turn concentrated brine into useful chemicals, making desalination more efficient.

I’m astonished that they’re not already using it to make gourmet sea salt.

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O’Rourke became a national celebrity in 2018 by failing to defeat Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and a national embarrassment in 2020 by launching a presidential campaign on the cover of Vanity Fair before failing to receive a single vote in the Democratic primary. He is reportedly considering a failed run for governor.

In addition to having a teaching gig at Texas State University, the failed politician has become a community organizer of sorts, registering voters and rallying local Democrats to support the national party’s campaign against so-called Republican voter suppression.

Texas gets hot in the summer, so this line of work involves a lot of perspiration, even for the average Democrat. O’Rourke, however, is anything but average when it comes to his capacity to sweat. The opening line of a 2018 BuzzFeed puff piece described him as a “prolific, prodigious sweater.”

We do what we must, because we can.

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

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In the last few years, law enforcement has begun to cash in on modern genetic technology in a new and more powerful way, one that works on perps that have been careful enough to avoid being genotyped.

The perp’s DNA sample is matched against a large database of genome sequences, and if a moderately long subsequence is identical-by-descent, it’s clear that the perp and the matching person in the database share fairly recent common ancestry. The degree of sharing shows, approximately, how recent that common ancestry is.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve gotten your genes sequenced — if any of your relatives have, you’re under the spotlight.

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Researchers claim to have invented an experimental breath mint that may renew tooth enamel and strengthen teeth, and it’s already headed into human trials.

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After a decade of searching, the UC San Francisco scientists who identified the only human gene known to promote “natural short sleep” – lifelong, nightly sleep that lasts just four to six hours yet leaves individuals feeling fully rested – have discovered a second.

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In a major scientific leap, University of Queensland researchers have created a quantum microscope that can reveal biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see.

This paves the way for applications in biotechnology, and could extend far beyond this into areas ranging from navigation to medical imaging.

The microscope is powered by the science of quantum entanglement, an effect Einstein described as “spooky interactions at a distance.”

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We have the technology … presumably.

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Researchers have created a plant-based, sustainable, scalable material that could replace single-use plastics in many consumer products.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, created a polymer film by mimicking the properties of spider silk, one of the strongest materials in nature. The new material is as strong as many common plastics in use today and could replace plastic in many common household products.

They had to put ‘vegan’ in the headline just so that the Right People would notice.

The Register (UK).

Thus, they created a programme called Mobile Force Protection. This includes a handy Humvee-mounted box that launches friendly drones and guides them toward the enemy buzzbot with “a newly-developed X band radar that automatically senses and identifies unmanned aerial system threats.”

Then, when it gets close enough: “The primary drone negation mechanism shoots strong, stringy streamers from reusable interceptors that foul propellers causing loss of propulsion.”

Or, in common parlance, it sneezes a big glob of pink silly-string snot all over it, which gunges up the rotors and causes the stunned enemy hobbycopter to tumble to the ground.

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Sure, let’s turn the clock back a hundred years or so….

Although I’m not sure many people think of ‘working’ and ‘French’ at the same time.

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But as with other metals like uranium, land-based lithium reserves pale in comparison to what’s out there in the sea. According to researchers at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), there’s about 5,000 times as much lithium in the oceans as there is in land deposits, and a newly developed technology could start extracting it cheaply enough to make the big time – while producing hydrogen gas, chlorine gas and desalinated water as a bonus.

The process relies on an electrochemical cell containing a ceramic membrane made from lithium lanthanum titanium oxide (LLTO), with pores just wide enough to let lithium ions through while blocking larger metal ions. “LLTO membranes have never been used to extract and concentrate lithium ions before,” says post-doctorate researcher Zhen Li, who developed the cell.

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A sheriff in Smyth County, Va., who has twice been elected as a Democrat, has quit the party due to its “relentless attacks on law enforcement,” becoming the third sheriff in the state to do so, reports WJHL-TV.

“I am changing to the Republican Party because of the relentless attack on law enforcement by Democrats in Richmond and Washington,” Chip Shuler said in a release.

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In a new study published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters in April, scientists at UC Riverside took advantage of this phenomenon by immersing a metal vapor in a magnetic field, and then watched it assemble molten metal droplets into predictably shaped nanoparticles. Their work could make it easier to build the exact particles engineers want, for uses in just about anything.

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Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology developed what they believe is an economically viable system to extract high-purity lithium from seawater.

Suck on it, China.

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The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US.

…

Currently, carbon-based overcoats (COCs) – layers used to protect platters from mechanical damages and corrosion – occupy a significant part of this spacing. The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990, and the COC thickness has reduced from 12.5nm to around 3nm, which corresponds to one terabyte per square inch. Now, graphene has enabled researchers to multiply this by ten.

The Cambridge researchers have replaced commercial COCs with one to four layers of graphene, and tested friction, wear, corrosion, thermal stability, and lubricant compatibility. Beyond its unbeatable thinness, graphene fulfills all the ideal properties of an HDD overcoat in terms of corrosion protection, low friction, wear resistance, hardness, lubricant compatibility, and surface smoothness.

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In a first, the digital fiber contains memory, temperature sensors, and a trained neural network program for inferring physical activity.

Coming soon to a celebrity boob near you….

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A federal judge overturned California’s 32-year-old ban on so-called assault-style weapons on Friday, describing it as a “failed experiment” and prompting scathing criticism from the state’s governor and attorney general.

California has prohibited the sale of the weapons since 1989. The ban was challenged in a 2019 lawsuit against California’s attorney general by plaintiffs including James Miller, a state resident, and the San Diego County Gun Owners, a political action committee.

“This case is about what should be a muscular constitutional right and whether a state can force a gun policy choice that impinges on that right with a 30-year-old failed experiment,” judge Roger Benitez of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California wrote in the court order filed late on Friday.

“Government is not free to impose its own new policy choices on American citizens where Constitutional rights are concerned,” the order added.

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The European Union decided on Friday to ban Belarusian airlines from accessing its airspace and finalise new economic sanctions against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, several diplomatic sources in Brussels told AFP.

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Amid the Israel-Gaza war, Jewish communities across the U.S. were targeted in a flurry of anti-Semitic attacks. The Daily Caller spoke with Jewish leaders and found that many of them believed leading progressives in Congress and elsewhere were, at least in part, responsible for the recent uptick.

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The breakthrough graphene aluminium-ion battery cells charge up to 70 times faster than lithium-ion cells, are more efficient, can discharge energy faster and have a longer lifespan. They’re also more sustainable and easier to recycle.

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Unfortunately it won’t fix the fact that United Airlines is the Worst. Airline. Ever.

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I guess they don’t get out much.

A two-dimensional material with similar physical properties to graphene has now turned out to blow graphene out of the water in terms of toughness.

The material is called hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and it’s so resistant to cracking that scientists are gobsmacked. The finding flies in the face of the fundamental description of fracture mechanics that scientists have been using to predict and define toughness since the 1920s.

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And who could blame them?

Austin, Texas, saw the largest influx of tech workers during the pandemic, with a net 217 software and information technology workers moving to the city per 10,000 existing workers. Nashville clocked in second with 154.7 net techies per 10,000, followed by Charlotte, NC, with 145.8; Jacksonville, Fla., with 136; and Denver with 130.4.