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Connecticut-based company LiquidPiston is developing a portable generator for the US Army that uses its X-Engine, a fresh and extremely powerful take on the rotary engine that’ll deliver as much power as the Army’s current-gen-set at one-fifth the size.

We’ve written a few times before about the fascinating LiquidPiston rotary engine. It’s not a Wankel – indeed, it’s closer to an inside-out Wankel – and with only two moving parts, it’s able to deliver extraordinary power density at up to 1.5 horsepower per pound (0.45 kg).

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And about time.

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A string of high profile tech investors and executives are leaving San Francisco, too: Last week, Elon Musk said he has moved to Texas after selling his Bel Air homes earlier this year.

Such moves are to be expected during the pandemic, when people are working from home anyway. Several tech firms have said they’ll give employees the option to permanently work from home even after the pandemic ends.

But the relocation of corporate headquarters, company founders and big-name VC investors points to a corporate diaspora of the tech industry — and what some have called a “tech exodus” from the Bay Area.

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A drone converted into a flamethrower is being used on a mission to eliminate more than 100 wasp nests in central China, The Associated Press reported Saturday.

Blue Sky Rescue and Zhong county residents joined forces to annihilate the wasps, the AP reported. Blue Sky Rescue is composed of volunteers dedicated to emergency work, including search and rescue operations.

Video footage from Blue Sky Rescue shows the drone hovering over a wasp’s nest before turning igniting fuel through a nozzle affixed to the drone to incinerate a nest in a treetop.

I wonder whether this would work against AntiFa?

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Silicon Valley and San Francisco are over. Everyone is leaving California.

And who could blame them?

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Time to leave.

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Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen are planning to move to South Florida, where they will become Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s new neighbors on an exclusive Miami island. According to Page Six….

That ‘No State Income Tax’ gets ’em every time.

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St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and her whole staff have been removed from the case against Mark McCloskey, who with his wife Patricia was charged with brandishing weapons against Black Lives Matter protesters earlier this year, after the prosecutor referred to the case in her fundraising emails.

…

Circuit Judge Thomas Clark II said Gardner’s emails “raise the appearance of impropriety and jeopardize the defendant’s right to a fair trial,” according to The Associated Press.

Suffice it to say that Kim Gardner is a Soros puppet and racist black female.

UPDATE: St. Louis Prosecutor Removed From McCloskey Case After She ‘Initiated A Criminal Prosecution For Political Purposes,’ Court Says

UPDATE: “Like A Needle Pulling A Thread”: Prosecutor Kim Gardner Kicked Off McCloskey Case

UPDATE: Kim Gardner disqualified from prosecuting Mark McCloskey

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While there aren’t any species of mushroom large enough to live in, one Bay-area designer thinks he can make one if he only cranks out enough of his patented “mushroom bricks.”

 

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In a landmark phase 3 clinical trial, the international team, coordinated by Dr. Patrick Yu-Wai-Man from the University of Cambridge and Dr. José-Alain Sahel from the University of Pittsburgh and Institut de la Vision, Paris, successfully treated 37 patients suffering from Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON). Subject to further trials, the treatment could help thousands of people across the world to regain and retain some of their sight.

If the Corporate Media weren’t so focused on bashing Trump we might get some decent coverage of amazing news like this.

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One small Georgia county has reportedly tossed a monkey wrench into Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s recertification that gave Joe Biden the win over President Donald Trump, doubting the “credibility” of its recount.

Coffee County Board of Elections officials sent out a letter last week saying they couldn’t certify the electronic recount numbers given its “inability to repeatably duplicate creditable election results,” WALB.com reported Tuesday.

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I’m a sucker for multitools.

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Musk cited business interests as the primary reason for the move in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Tesla is opening a new factory outside Austin and SpaceX uses a launch site in south Texas, according to The Verge.

Musk said that California had become complacent and too used to “winning” like a dominant sports team might. “They do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled, and then they don’t win the championship anymore,” Musk told the Journal.

Megan McArdle.

Megan does this feature every year (usually) and it’s always a treat.

The microplane lemon zester is, of course, a popular tool in every interrogator’s kit.

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A team of University of Arkansas physicists has successfully developed a circuit capable of capturing graphene’s thermal motion and converting it into an electrical current.

“An energy-harvesting circuit based on graphene could be incorporated into a chip to provide clean, limitless, low-voltage power for small devices or sensors,” said Paul Thibado, professor of physics and lead researcher in the discovery.

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Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) researcher Junyong Zhu in co-collaboration with colleagues from the University of Maryland and University of Colorado, have developed a transparent wood material that may be the window of tomorrow. Researchers found that transparent wood has the potential to outperform glass currently used in construction in nearly every way.

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Flush with cash, city dwellers from New York City have been panic buying condos in the suburbs as homes in these outline areas become too pricey, according to Bloomberg.

Following the virus pandemic, social unrest, and surge in violent crime, an exodus of New Yorkers have fled to the surrounding rural communities over the last eight or so months. Dwindling supply of suburban homes created the next chapter in the flight out of the city; that is, buying interest for apartments in suburbia has erupted this fall.

Time to leave.

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“We assembled five genes from maize that code for five enzymes in the C4 photosynthetic pathway into a single gene construct and installed it into rice plants,” said lead author Dr. Maria Ermakova, who works at The Australian National University (ANU), as part of the international C4 Rice Project, led by Oxford University.

Rice, one of the main world food staples, uses the less efficient C3 photosynthetic pathway. Scientists predict that the introduction of the more efficient C4 photosynthesis traits into rice can potentially increase photosynthetic efficiency by fifty percent, improve nitrogen use efficiency and double water use efficiency.

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Everybody goin’ to Texas.

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Dying retinal cells send out a rescue signal to recruit stem cells and repair eye damage, according to the findings of a new study published today in the journal Molecular Therapy. The findings open the door to restoring eyesight by modifying stem cells to follow the signal and transplanting them into the eye.

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Last week we saw the first successful virtualization of ARM Windows 10 on an M1 Mac. The good news is that it even appeared to be “pretty snappy.” Now we’ve got a look at a helpful walkthrough and peek at real-world performance in a new video, including the M1 Mac mini blowing away Microsoft’s Surface Pro X.

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Quick, to the Biden!

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The scientists have created A.I. software that uses a protein’s DNA sequence to predict its three-dimensional structure to within an atom’s width of accuracy.

The achievement, which solves a 50-year-old challenge in molecular biology, was accomplished by a team from DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company that is part of Google parent Alphabet. Until now, DeepMind was best known for creating A.I. that could beat the best human players at the strategy game Go, a major milestone in computer science.

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Developer Alexander Graf has successfully virtualized the Arm version of Windows on an M1 Mac, proving that the M1 chip is capable of running Microsoft’s operating system (via The 8-Bit).

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A state judge in Pennsylvania temporarily blocked the state Wednesday from further certifying its general election results, after the state certified President-elect Joe Biden’s win Tuesday, while a Republican-led lawsuit attempting to block Pennsylvania’s election results plays out in court, though the order has now been paused due to an appeal.

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According to Trump officials, the judge set a Dec. 3 hearing date and is allowing 15 depositions. What’s more, the campaign plans to present its evidence that could result in the rejection of tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in Democratic Clark County where Biden ballots outnumbered Trump ballots by 91,000 in unofficial results.

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I was wondering when someone would get around to that.

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MLive.com reported that the Kalkaska County Board of Commissioners voted 4-2 on a resolution backing calls for Whitmer’s impeachment. The measure will now be sent to the Michigan legislature for consideration.

County Commissioner David Comai blamed what he called Whitmer’s “unconstitutional executive orders” for Kalkaska’s economic crisis. Many conservatives have expressed outrage at actions Whitmer has taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

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President Donald Trump’s legal team held a press conference Thursday afternoon, explaining the alleged evidence of voter fraud they believe would have impacted the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The press conference was led by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was joined by Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, lawyer Sidney Powell, and lawyer Joe Digenova. Giuliani, explained that they believe there is “direct evidence” to show there was voter fraud in the presidential election.

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Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have demonstrated that the CRISPR/Cas9 system is very effective in treating metastatic cancers, a significant step on the way to finding a cure for cancer. The researchers developed a novel lipid nanoparticle-based delivery system that specifically targets cancer cells and destroys them by genetic manipulation. The system, called CRISPR-LNPs, carries a genetic messenger (messenger RNA), which encodes for the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 that acts as molecular scissors that cut the cells’ DNA.

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A new bioinspired material is here to overtake petroleum-based plastics. A team led by Prof. Shu-Hong Yu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) reports a method to manufacture materials with similar structure as nacre from wood-derived fiber and mica, with adaption to mass production, good processability, and tunable coloration.

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In the 1980s, Howard-Yana Shapiro, now chief agricultural officer at Mars, Incorporated, was looking for new kinds of corn. He was in the Mixes District of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, the area where the precursors to maize (aka corn) first evolved, when he located some of the strangest corn ever seen. Not only was it 16 to 20 feet tall, dwarfing the 12-foot stuff in American fields, it took six to eight months to mature, far longer than the 3 months needed for conventional corn. Yet it grew to those impressive heights in what can charitably be called poor soil, without the use of fertilizer.. But the strangest part of the corn was its aerial roots–green and rose-colored, finger-like protrusions sticking out of the corn’s stalk, dripping with a clear, syrupy gel.

Shapiro suspected that those mucousy fingers might be the Holy Grail of agriculture. He believed that the roots allowed this unique variety of corn, dubbed Sierra Mixe and locally bred over hundreds or even thousands of years, to produce its own nitrogen, an essential nutrient for crops that is usually applied as fertilizer in epic amounts.

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The U.S. Navy has shot down an intercontinental ballistic missile over the Pacific Ocean with an SM-3 Block IIA missile in a milestone test that demonstrated a potential scheme to defend Hawaii, the Missile Defense Agency announced Tuesday morning.

The test, which comes on the heels of the revealing of a larger North Korean ICBM in October that could potentially strike the U.S. East Coast, is the first time the United States has shot down an ICBM with anything other than a ground-based interceptor, an MDA official said.

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Materials stay cooler when water evaporates off of them, but once all the water is gone, the cooling effect stops. Bearing this in mind, MIT scientists have developed a camel fur-inspired material that could keep items cool without using electricity.

Although it might initially seem like a bare-skinned camel would stay cooler overall than one covered with fur, that isn’t the case. The fur acts as a gas-permeable insulating layer, shading the animal’s skin from external heat while still allowing sweat to evaporate off of it. As a result, the evaporative cooling effect lasts longer – the camel still sweats, but not as much as the hypothetical bare-skinned one would before becoming dehydrated.

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The lawsuit was filed by four voters on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. The litigation seeks to overturn ballots in Washtenaw, Ingham, and Wayne counties. Wayne County has already been the target of a federal lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign one week after the election.

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A Pennsylvania judge ruled on Thursday that the state cannot count late ballots which required voters to provide proof of identification to ‘cure’ them by an arbitrary deadline set by the Secretary of State.

After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots could be accepted three days after Election Day, a separate issue in dispute, PA Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar submitted her own guidance that said proof of ID could be provided up to Nov 12, three days from the ballot acceptance deadline.

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I usually watch the news in the evenings. Unfortunately, the “all maps all the time” channels grow boring fast. So instead, I spent my evenings over the last week looking at barcodes. (I know, sounds equally boring. But I was fascinated!)

Barcodes are everywhere. EAN/UPC codes are on every product and package (and on every book at the library). QR codes are common for web-related content. Even my Halloween candy bars have a QR code that takes you to their nutritional breakdown. (See! Chocolate is nutritious!)

While UPC and QR codes are common, there are dozens of other types of barcodes. Visually, they all look different. (Wikipedia has a great list of the most common formats.)

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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered county election boards in Pennsylvania to comply with guidance requiring them to keep ballots received after 8 p.m. Election Day “in a safe, secure, and sealed container separate from other voted ballots,” as Newsweek and other outlets reported Friday. How could Alito’s directive affect returns for the presidential election?

Additionally, The Associated Press reported that 24 Wisconsin counties had completed canvassing of election results as of Monday morning, but that “all 72 must be in before President Donald Trump could call for a recount.” How long will that take, and will other states besides Georgia recount?

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Even though former vice President Joe Biden has claimed victory in the presidential election, the Trump campaign has filed lawsuits contesting the results with current litigation in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona.

• Arizona — 11 Electoral Votes at stake. As of the time of this writing, less than 20,000 separate the candidates. Plus, allegations of widespread voter fraud.
• Georgia — 16 votes. Close enough to trigger an automatic recount.
• Michigan — 16 votes. Biden allegedly ahead by 150,000  votes, of which 130,000 appeared suddenly in the wee hours. Also, voter machine irregularities alleged.
• Nevada — 6 votes. There are massive numbers of out of state voters voting illegally here, and many more ballots opened without two observers, which renders them invalid.
• North Carolina — 15 votes. As of the time of this writing, with 99% of countries reporting, it is mathematically impossible for Trump to lose.
• Pennsylvania — 20 votes. One of the five ongoing legal challenges in this state is whether the State Supreme Court’s overstepping their authority to rewrite the ballot laws at the last minute is constitutional. This is an open and shut case, and only blatant corruption on the part of the US Supreme Court will not find for Trump. Numberwise, removing the illegal ballots, Biden loses Pennsylvania.
• Wisconsin — 10 votes. Biden is apparently ahead by 20,000 votes. However, more ballots were counted in this state than the number of registered voters. Also, Wisconsin election clerks illegally modified thousands of ballots, which renders them invalid. Also, this is the state where, after calling an end to vote counting for the evening, some tens of thousands of ballots, 100% in favor of Biden, were somehow found at 4.00 AM.

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President Donald Trump’s reelection effort filed another lawsuit in Pennsylvania on Monday that will seek to halt Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar from “hurrying” to certify the results of the 2020 election.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

An election fraud lawsuit was filed today in Detroit. It is supported by affidavits by eyewitnesses who describe systematic voter fraud. The lawsuit seeks an order requiring preservation of evidence.

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Here’s a couple of papers which establish the life saving value in early hydroxychloroquine treatment. The first is the one referred to in the op-ed.

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Curious as to why they’re not doing this in Germany.

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US startup NDB, a company that says it has created the first and only universal, self-charging nano-diamond battery that provides thousands of years of charge, announced that two of its proofs of concept achieved a breakthrough 40% charge.

This is a significant improvement over commercial diamonds, which have only a 15% charge collection efficiency.

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Generally speaking, you don’t see a wide variety of crops being grown in arid regions – especially when irrigation isn’t practical and/or affordable. That could be about to change, though, with the development of what’s being described as “self-watering soil.”

Created by engineers from The University of Texas at Austin, the material consists of a 1:3 weight-ratio combination of hydrophilic (water-attracting) hydrogels and natural sandy soil. It’s known as SMAG-soil, with SMAG standing for “super moisture absorbent gels.”

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‘Engineered wood’ and cross-laminated timber seems to be the coming thing in construction.

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For height, DNA is largely destiny. Studies of identical and fraternal twins suggest up to 80% of variation in height is genetic. But the genes responsible have largely eluded researchers. Now, by amassing genome data for 4 million people—the largest such study ever—geneticists have accounted for a major share of this “missing heritability,” at least for people of European ancestry. In this group, they’ve identified nearly 10,000 DNA markers that appear to fully explain the influence of common genetic variants over height.

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A protester accused of punching a police officer was arrested after he was identified by facial-recognition software that has not been publicly disclosed before: the National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System (NCRFRILS).

The software is currently employed by 14 local and federal agencies in the US and was revealed in court documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Reports said that the NCRFRILS – apparently a pilot program of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments – has run 12,000 searches as of last year, and attempts to match faces against a database of 1.4 million people.

We have the technology.