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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.

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.

 

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Ford announced it is moving a nearly $1 billion project from Ohio to Mexico, prompting criticism from a major labor union and silence from the Biden administration, which has pledged to invest in domestic union projects.

Perhaps they decided that the easiest place to hire Mexicans is in, you know, Mexico.

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They could always return the capital to Alexandria.

Or Memphis.

There is something to be said for tradition, after all.

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

UPDATE: Smart METL airless metal bike tires use a “shape memory alloy” for deformation

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The more we learn about epigenetics, the stranger it gets.

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Breaking into a gun range doesn’t impress me as a bright move.

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

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Had enough Zoom meetings? Can’t bear another soul-numbing day of sitting on video calls, the only distraction your rapidly aging face, pinned in one corner of the screen like a dying bug? Well, if so, then boy do we have the app for you. Meet Zoom Escaper: a free web widget that lets you add an array of fake audio effects to your next Zoom Call, gifting you with numerous reasons to end the meeting and escape, while you still can.

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Adam Feinberg and his team have created the first full-size 3D bioprinted human heart model using their Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels (FRESH) technique. The model, created from MRI data using a specially built 3D printer, realistically mimics the elasticity of cardiac tissue and sutures. This milestone represents the culmination of two years of research, holding both immediate promise for surgeons and clinicians, as well as long term implications for the future of bioengineered organ research.

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Color me dubious.

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The bladeless turbines stand at 3 metres high, a curve-topped cylinder fixed vertically with an elastic rod. To the untrained eye it appears to waggle back and forth, not unlike a car dashboard toy. In reality, it is designed to oscillate within the wind range and generate electricity from the vibration.

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I bought an app for my phone that shows animated knotting but this appears to be free.

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A consortium led by Rolls-Royce has announced plans to build up to 16 mini-nuclear plants in the UK.

Cue Eco-Nazi outrage.

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With all due respect to sauvignon blanc drinkers, New Zealand’s trendiest liquid export is something far sweeter than wine. Derived from the nectar of a native bush (leptospermum scoparium), manuka honey has stirred enthusiasm among health-conscious connoisseurs since the early ’80s, when a local scientist first confirmed that it possesses unique, antimicrobial properties. Now, the on-trend sweetener is finding mainstream appeal in the United States as a slightly more savory alternative to its domestic counterparts.

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Many industries use heat-intensive processes that generally require the burning of fossil fuels, but a surprising green fuel alternative is emerging in the form of metal powders. Ground very fine, cheap iron powder burns readily at high temperatures, releasing energy as it oxidizes in a process that emits no carbon and produces easily collectable rust, or iron oxide, as its only emission.

 

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Barely a month ago, a 3D-printed house was listed for sale to the public for the first time in the U.S.

Now, a small, 3D-printed community in Texas is following suit. Another, larger community in California is also in the works.

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The hand-powered, 2,000-year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses. But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle.

Now researchers at UCL believe they have solved the mystery – at least in part – and have set about reconstructing the device, gearwheels and all, to test whether their proposal works. If they can build a replica with modern machinery, they aim to do the same with techniques from antiquity.

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The author of the paper, Dr. Erik Lentz, analyzed existing research and discovered gaps in previous ‘warp drive’ studies. Lentz noticed that there existed yet-to-be explored configurations of space-time curvature organized into ‘solitons’ that have the potential to solve the puzzle while being physically viable. A soliton – in this context also informally referred to as a ‘warp bubble’ – is a compact wave that maintains its shape and moves at constant velocity. Lentz derived the Einstein equations for unexplored soliton configurations (where the space-time metric’s shift vector components obey a hyperbolic relation), finding that the altered space-time geometries could be formed in a way that worked even with conventional energy sources. In essence, the new method uses the very structure of space and time arranged in a soliton to provide a solution to faster-than-light travel, which – unlike other research – would only need sources with positive energy densities. No “exotic” negative energy densities needed.

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Adam Castillejo, 40, was declared free of the virus a year ago and remains free of the virus 30 months after having stopped anti-retroviral therapy, according to the Independent.

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New York Times senior writer David Leonhardt had written that Democratic administrations have been more “pragmatic” by being “willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation.”

Economist and Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Brian Riedl rebuked Leonhardt and the media for living in an “ideological cocoon” and pushing talking points on behalf of Democrats. “This is just partisan nonsense,” Riedl said of Leonhardt in an exclusive interview with the Media Research Center.

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This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web

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Airlines in the US are already in the process of leveraging apps and smartphones to allow travelers to offer proof that they have been vaccinated, or recently tested negative for COVID-19, and they’re not alone: Across Europe, a growing number of airlines and countries are adopting, or leaning toward adopting, so-called “vaccine passports”.

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Apparently vegans get uglier scars from surgery than normal people.

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A German virological researcher named Professor Winfried Stöcker has invented a new vaccine which is proving safe and effective against COVID-19. Strictly speaking, it’s an antigen rather than a vaccine — a peptide that confers immunity against the coronavirus without the risks associated with the mRNA vaccines.

It’s no surprise that Prof. Stöcker has aroused the ire of the German medical bureaucracy, to the point where criminal proceedings have been initiated against him. His response is to make the process for manufacturing the new antigen public, without filing for a patent and without asking for payment.

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A mascot for the Narrative Media.

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Swiss voters decide Sunday on a proposal to ban face coverings, both the niqabs and burqas worn by a few Muslim women in the country and the ski masks and bandannas used by protesters. Polls are pointing to a close outcome.

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I wonder whether their software can tell the difference between me and My Brother The Communist.

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Be prepared.

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Backed by $20 million in venture capital funding and building off recent advances in robotics and precision manufacturing, the Culver City company is developing a device the size of a breadcrumb that doctors can insert into the spine or skull and magnetically steer to a target to deliver a precise dose of drugs. The plan is to move to clinical trials by 2023.

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The addition of just a touch of graphene could make the world’s most ubiquitous building material stronger, more durable and even a touch greener.

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Now a group of physicists have put together the first proposal for a physical warp drive, based on a concept devised back in the ’90s. And they say it shouldn’t break any of laws of physics.

 

CNN.

Leading US grocery chains, pharmacies, retailers and auto manufacturers, including Target (TGT), Kroger (KR), CVS (CVS), Walgreens (WBA), Best Buy (BBY), Macy’s (M) JCPenney (JCP), Toyota (TM), GM (GM) and others, say they will continue to require mask wearing at their stores and facilities by both employees and customers. There are exceptions, however, and some business advocates are concerned that the end of these states’ mask mandates will create new challenges for companies and their workers.

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The eye drops don’t treat the cause of presbyopia but help treat its symptoms. Instead of targeting the eyes’ lens, the drops make the eyes’ pupils smaller, creating a pinhole effect that increases the depth of focus.

 

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It seems obvious, once you think about it.

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A billion or two years ago, corals, brachiopods, and other sea creatures took carbon dioxide and calcium out of the seawater to build shells out of calcium carbonate, CaCO3. They were little biological factories capable of building giant structures like coral reefs. When they died they would sink to the bottom of the shallow seas and become limestone.

About 200 years ago, Joseph Aspdin figured out how to reverse the process, cooking limestone and clay at high temperatures, which decomposes after the water and carbon dioxide is driven off, leaving calcium oxide (CaO). This reacts with other ingredients, silicates and aluminates, to make Portland cement. Mix that with aggregate and water, and the mixture crystallizes and glues everything together into concrete.

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Thank you, minimum wage.