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For almost a century, physicists have been intrigued by the fundamental question: why are complex numbers so important in quantum mechanics, that is, numbers containing a component with the imaginary number i? Usually, it was assumed that they are only a mathematical trick to facilitate the description of phenomena, and only results expressed in real numbers have a physical meaning. However, a Polish-Chinese-Canadian team of researchers has proved that the imaginary part of quantum mechanics can be observed in action in the real world.

Democrat budgets, for example, are based almost entirely on imaginary numbers.

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Using the organic combustion method, researchers added heat to citric acid, hydrogen, and a catalyst made of iron, manganese, and potassium to CO2, producing liquid that would fuel a jet. But they were only able to produce a few grams of the substance.

“This does look different, and it looks like it could work,” Joshua Heyne, associate professor of mechanical and chemical engineering at the University of Dayton, told Wired. “Scale-up is always an issue, and there are new surprises when you go to larger scales. But in terms of a longer-term solution, the idea of a circular carbon economy is definitely something that could be the future.”

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In this application case, the researchers tested a 3D printed motorboat on the Swedish west coast in the middle of December, while live-streaming the event. The 3D printed boat handled the water perfectly. “This is the pinnacle of a remarkable collaborative effort,” Johansson said. “Printing a boat is something my colleagues Lenny Tönnäng, Jan Johansson and I at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden have dreamt of for many years. Together with an innovative team at Cipax and Pioner boats, led by Dag Eirik Thomassen and Lars Haugli, we decided to make it happen.”

 

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Healy, who is based in Dallas, said hundreds of people per day are moving to his city. He pointed out that 70% of the people moving in are from California and increasing “luxury price points.”

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In AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing, scientists in China report the development of a highly efficient desalination device powered by solar energy. The device consists of a titanium-containing layer, TiNO, or titanium nitride oxide, capable of absorbing solar energy. The TiNO is deposited on a special type of paper and foam that allows the solar absorber to float on seawater.

When sunlight strikes the titanium layer, it heats rapidly and vaporizes the water. By placing the unit in a transparent container with a sloped quartz roof, the water vapor can be condensed and collected, producing a copious amount of freshwater.

Perhaps California ought to invest is some desalination plants rather than sucking up all of the water in the Colorado River. (Drought-hit California moves to halt Nestlé from taking millions of gallons of water)

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It’s the first malaria vaccine to exceed the WHO’s goal of 75% efficacy.

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The Autonomous Weeder kills weeds without harming soil or water, and it operates autonomously, eliminating the reliance on manual laborers.

Thank you, minimum wage.

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For decades the Rick Desautel had been told by courts and governments that his people no longer exist in Canada.

But Desautel and others in his community in Washington state have long argued that they are descendants of the Sinixt, an Indigenous people whose territory once spanned Canada and the United States.

On Friday, Canada’s highest court agreed, ruling that Desautel and the 4,000 other members of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington state were successors to the Sinixt – and as a result, that they enjoy constitutionally protected Indigenous rights to hunt their traditional lands in Canada.

And a beer….

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For centuries, using a sextant, a sailor could mark a ship’s location by making a few calculations to determine a star’s position relative to the horizon. Now a high-tech version of this maritime tradition is finding its way back into practice.

GPS is indispensable these days—but it’s still incredibly fragile. It can be spoofed with a fake satellite signal, hacked by an adversary, or simply destroyed. Spoofing, hacking, or destroying the stars? Not happening.

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The new system—named Advanced Superconducting & Cryogenic Experimental powertrain Demonstrator (ASCEND)—is in ground-based demonstrations. The three-year project “aims to show that an electric- or hybrid-electric propulsion system can be more than 2 to 3 times lighter than a conventional system without compromising a 97 [percent] powertrain efficiency,” Airbus says.

If it works, ASCEND could be a landmark achievement in future-looking aeronautics. The snag facing electric aircraft designs mostly comes down to a matter of weight. On the ground, cars can add up to 1,000 pounds worth of batteries. But in the sky, that could mean the difference between an aircraft flying or sinking. Passenger planes in particular are already a very finely balanced system.

Yeah, well , maybe.

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Vertical farming is nothing less than exactly what it sounds like. As opposed to spreading crops out along the ground, beds are effectively turned on their side, and grown on vertical panels. This isn’t exactly new; some of the earliest indigenous farmers would plant crops on layered terraces to achieve similar results. But the modern form of vertical farming is barely two decades old. While it’s proven hyper-efficient, the technological cost of entry has also traditionally proven to be high, requiring expensive lights, temperature and irrigation control systems, and enormous amounts of electricity — to say nothing of capital. Until now.

Like ‘green’ energy, these guys talk a good fight, but I’ll believe it when it comes to my local grocery store. (No, not Whole Paycheck.)

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Amazon One, which debuted in September and is currently in use at about a dozen Amazon physical stores, allows shoppers to pay for items by placing their palm over a scanning device. The first time shoppers use the kiosk, they have to insert a credit card to link it with their palm print. But after that, shoppers can pay simply by holding their hand over the kiosk.

Amazon One is distinct from the company’s Just Walk Out technology, which allows shoppers to pick up items and walk out of the store without going through a checkout line. However the two technologies can work together, and Amazon employs them both at its cashierless Amazon Go stores.

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Or, in his case, waddle.

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Unlike at a conventional natural gas plant, the energy startup’s technology burns natural gas with pure oxygen, instead of the air, only producing carbon dioxide and water as byproducts. Most of the CO2 is reused as part of Net Power’s four-step cycle, with the excess CO2 captured and “pipeline ready” for underground storage.

Cue handwaving by the people who want to ban ‘fossil fuels’ no matter what.

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A new study by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Fukui, however, may offer some hope. The team reports that an antibody for one gene — uterine sensitization associated gene-1 or USAG-1 — can stimulate tooth growth in mice suffering from tooth agenesis, a congenital condition. The paper was published in Science Advances.

For some reason, just reporting the news is apparently not enough, even in a publication allegedly devoted to science; it’s necessary to lead off with some sort of cutesy story, as in this report.

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“Researchers can produce tetraalkoxysilane from sand through a reaction with alcohol and a catalyst by removing water, which is a byproduct of the reaction,” says Yuya Sakai, lead author of the study. “Our idea was to leave the water to shift the reaction back and forth from sand to tetraalkoxysilane, to bond the sand particles with each other.”

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And who could blame them? It’s usually a safe bet that the right thing to do is the opposite of what Democrat politicians and the Narrative Media are yelling at you to do.

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In an announcement on Tuesday, America’s telecoms watchdog said it had written to cellular network operators asking them to detail the free robocall blocking tools they provide to consumers. It also released two cease-and-desist letters against two robocalling hosts and said it would track the agency’s actions in implementing a new anti-robocall law.

Just as with an announcement yesterday pushing an internet speed measuring app, the measures taken are soft, rather than strong enforcement, but indicate a clear shift in priorities under the FCC’s new chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.

NoMoRobo is your friend.

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Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority (SCA) announced Tuesday that the Ever Given, a cargo ship that wedged itself in the canal late March, had been impounded pending $900 million in compensation.

The figure covers the costs of dislodging and maintaining the ship, along with the losses Egypt bore as a result of the six-day blockage, chairman of the SCA Osama Rabie told local outlet Al-Ahram.

Not unexpected.

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“Imagine you work at a chemical research part of a base. Its location is secret. But you have a smart car. Through other espionage activities, I found out you work there. I hack your phone or your car’s online account,” Keatron Evans said. “I track your location as you go to work every day. Now I know the specific GPS location of your work facility. It goes downhill quickly from there.”

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Researchers interested in nuclear power’s capacity to help transition the world’s energy supply toward carbon neutrality suggested extracting uranium from a source other than raw ore, opting instead to use a new hydrogel capable of effectively “straining” uranium from seawater, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

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Take whatever action you consider appropriate.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

The Trump campaign filed lawsuits in several jurisdictions, arguing that last-minute changes to voting procedures by Democratic Secretaries of State loyal to the Biden campaign were illegal. Those cases are now wending their way through the courts. In Michigan, Trump won a victory at the trial court level last month, when a state court judge held that the Secretary’s “guidance” on counting of unverified mail-in ballots was issued in violation of Michigan’s Administrative Procedure Act. In other words, the Secretary of State needed to follow the statutorialy-required legal process, not just issue an order to help her party by encouraging cheating.

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This is from The Guardian and so needs to be verified.

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And, then again, maybe not.

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The Belgian plod says it seized 27.64 tons of cocaine worth €1.4bn (£1.2bn, $1.65bn) from shipments into Antwerp in the past six weeks after defeating the encryption in the Sky ECC chat app to read drug smugglers’ messages.

“During a judicial investigation into a potential service criminal organization suspected of knowingly providing encrypted telephones to the criminal environment, police specialists managed to crack the encrypted messages from Sky ECC,” the Belgian police claimed, CNN reports.

“This data provides elements in current files, but also opened up new criminal offenses. The international smuggling of cocaine batches plays a prominent role in intercepted reports.”

Good practice for the next war.

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Numerically, the fine-structure constant, denoted by the Greek letter ? (alpha), comes very close to the ratio 1/137. It commonly appears in formulas governing light and matter. “It’s like in architecture, there’s the golden ratio,” said Eric Cornell, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “In the physics of low-energy matter — atoms, molecules, chemistry, biology — there’s always a ratio” of bigger things to smaller things, he said. “Those ratios tend to be powers of the fine-structure constant.”

The constant is everywhere because it characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic force affecting charged particles such as electrons and protons. “In our everyday world, everything is either gravity or electromagnetism. And that’s why alpha is so important,” said Holger Müller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Because 1/137 is small, electromagnetism is weak; as a consequence, charged particles form airy atoms whose electrons orbit at a distance and easily hop away, enabling chemical bonds. On the other hand, the constant is also just big enough: Physicists have argued that if it were something like 1/138, stars would not be able to create carbon, and life as we know it wouldn’t exist.

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When you think about Hunter Biden, what is the first thing that comes to mind? And please don’t crack any jokes. Come on, pipe up. What do you associate Hunter Biden with? Laptops? Perhaps but it could be another L-word, namely locomotives.

Yes, did you now that Hunter Biden is a noted locomotive expert? You don’t believe me? Well, that is how Politico’s “Transition Playbook” described him on Friday in “How high speed trains got railroaded in Biden’s infrastructure plan.”

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Chinese submarine, identified as the Type-100 Class is reportedly contesting Russian Navy’s mighty Pr.941 Typhoon Class submarine as the largest ever built.

he new submarine is reportedly armed with 48 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs). It can also carry massive nuclear-powered nuclear-armed autonomous torpedoes.

I like big subs, and I cannot lie….

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Dr. Matthew Sullivan and his colleagues from Griffith University found that guaA, a specialized gene that encodes guanosine monophosphate synthetase, allows it to exploit natural chemicals found in urine as a way to produce new DNA.

So watch it.

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We research Brands and Products confirmed to be made in the USA, Canada or Europe.

In case you’re interested in joining the China Boycott.

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Need to go where no man has gone before? We have the technology.

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It’s powered by nuclear waste, but still safe for humans.

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School districts are slowly beginning to reopen in-person instruction after being closed for nearly a year—or, in many places, for over a year. While this is a wonderful development, it will never erase what parents experienced last year: uncertainty, inconsistency, and, in some cases, ineptitude from public schools.

The events of the last year have demonstrated to many families that public schools are not always the reliable institutions many thought they were. It also opened their eyes to just how powerful the teachers unions are, and revealed what many already suspected: that their modus operandi is not to support teachers who want to teach but to score political wins.

Thankfully, in response to these disappointments, multiple state legislatures are undertaking one of the biggest expansions of school choice in history.

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We have the technology.

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Boston Dynamics on Monday revealed a new warehouse robot called “Stretch,” designed to move 800 boxes per hour, equivalent to a typical human employee. The new robot could be a solution for Amazon to replace some of its human warehouse employees as unionization threats emerge at various warehouses.

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We have the technology.

I’ve always suspected Nancy Pelosi of being a lizard creature.

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On Friday Sylvia Gonzalez—a retiree and former Castle Hills, Texas, councilmember thrown in jail for speaking out against her local government—got the news she has waited more than a year to hear. In a powerful ruling issued Friday afternoon, Judge David Alan Ezra dismissed the city’s motion to dismiss and ruled that her case alleging First Amendment retaliation against the city’s chief of police, the mayor, a detective, and the city itself can proceed.

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The refrain is all too familiar: Widening income inequality is a fatal flaw in capitalism and an “existential” threat to democracy. From 1967 to 2017, income inequality in the U.S. spiked 21.4%, and everyone from U.S. senators to the pope says it’s an urgent problem. Yet the data upon which claims about income inequality are based are profoundly flawed.

We have shown on these pages that Census Bureau income data fail to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments—including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and some 100 other government transfer payments—as income to the recipients. Furthermore, census data fail to count taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. When official government data are used to correct these deficiencies—when income is defined the way people actually define it—“income inequality” is reduced dramatically.

We can now show that if you count all government transfers (minus administrative costs) as income to the recipient household, reduce household income by taxes paid, and correct for two major discontinuities in the time-series data on income inequality that were caused solely by changes in Census Bureau data-collection methods, the claim that income inequality is growing on a secular basis collapses. Not only is income inequality in America not growing, it is lower today than it was 50 years ago.

Phill Gramm and John Early do some debunking.

(I have yet to see anyone attempt to justify the common assumption on the Left that ‘income inequality’ is per se a Bad Thing.)

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The good news is that the picture in America is changing for the better. Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a surge in payments online and experimentation by consumers with new services provided by digital-payments firms. In the past quarter the volume of transactions on PayPal was 36% higher than a year earlier. The number of people using Square’s digital Cash App rose by 50% to 36m during 2020. Investors are now betting that these two firms, together with Stripe and Adyen (which is Dutch), form a quartet that can take on America’s stodgy financial establishment. (The chairman of The Economist’s parent group is a director of Square.) PayPal is worth $275bn, nearing Bank of America, the country’s second-biggest lender.

Yet there is a catch. Despite the rise of innovative firms, fees for American consumers have yet to fall by much. Square charges 2.6% on the average transaction; Stripe’s fee nears 3%. By contrast, China’s big fintech firms charge below 0.5%. Fees have been kept low by a fierce price war.

Pretty sad when Communist China has more competition than the U.S.

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Scientists at NASA have done the impossible: quantum teleportation. For the first time, the NASA scientists used quantum entanglement to teleport information stored in particles over a large distance. The instant transfer of units of quantum information, known as qubits, were instantly teleported by a distance of 44 kilometers, or roughly the distance between Muntinlupa to Quezon City.

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Kathy Hannun wants to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making geothermal heat pumps mainstream.

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Oops.

Jonathan Turley.

While it has received little coverage in the mainstream media, the conservative group Project Veritas won a major victory against the New York Times this week in a defamation case with potentially wide reach.  In a 16-page decision, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood ruled against the newspaper’s motion to dismiss and found that Project Veritas had shown sufficient evidence that the New York Times might have been motivated by “actual malice” and acted with “reckless disregard” in several articles written by Maggie Astor and Tiffany Hsu. The decision will allow the Project access to discovery which can be extremely difficult for a news organization.

Notably, this follows another significant loss by the New York Times to Sarah Palin last year. Having two such losses for the New York Times in the defamation area is ironic given its role in establishing the precedent under New York Times v. Sullivan.

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First announced a few years ago by the Norwegian Coastal Administration, this mile-long, 118-feet-wide tunnel will burrow through the mountainous Stadhavet peninsula in northwestern Norway.

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The notion of a kitchen with a built in robot chef capable of whipping up a lobster bisque at the push of a button sounds like something out of Futurama. But it technically exists — at least as a demo prototype. UK startup Moley Robotics has been working on the concept for several years now, starting off in 2014 and showing off a demo unit last year.

The Moley website is here.

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From the New York Times news section, a particularly shameless work of fake news in collaboration with the Biden Administration.

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About 8500 years ago, hunter-gatherers living beside Eagle Lake in Wisconsin hammered out a conical, 10-centimeter-long projectile point made of pure copper. The finely crafted point, used to hunt big game, highlights a New World technological triumph—and a puzzle. A new study of that artifact and other traces of prehistoric mining concludes that what is known as the Old Copper Culture emerged, then mysteriously faded, far earlier than once thought.

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CrowdStreet, which operates an online marketplace for investing in commercial real estate, announced March 19 that it’s shifting its headquarters from Portland, Oregon, to Austin. CrowdStreet is considering office space in downtown Austin and around North Austin’s Domain complex. CrowdStreet is targeting a June 1 opening date for the new office.

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Lentz proposes that conventional energy sources could be capable of arranging the structure of spacetime in the form of a soliton – a robust singular wave. This soliton would act like a “warp bubble’”, contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Unlike objects within spacetime, spacetime itself can bend, expand or warp at any speed. Therefore, a spacecraft contained in a hyper-fast bubble could arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws, even Einstein’s cosmic speed limit.