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

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Once or twice a year, a company called Griddy makes headlines for the insanely high electricity bills incurred by consumers in ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. This traditionally happens during the hottest days of the Texan summer, when the world of wholesale energy traders and grid operators are biting their fingernails around near-miss blackouts — days which usually come and go with most consumers remaining blissfully unaware of the creaking and straining grid powering their air conditioners. During the week of Valentine’s Day 2021, the headlines were caused by an extreme cold snap instead of an extreme heat wave, but the market dynamics remain the same: too much demand and not enough supply, with prices held constant at the artificially imposed price cap of $9000 per megawatt hour (MWh) for days on end. This particular consequence of the ERCOT blackouts has predictably caused politicians and pundits from both sides of the aisle to scream foul, but the reality is that the “bad guys” in this situation are not so clear cut. As an entrepreneur and CTO in the wholesale energy space who’s worked with major ERCOT players (as well as in several other global RTOs) for over three years, I’d like to offer some nuance and context for consideration.

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CSEM, a Swiss non-profit technology company, has come up with a technology that lets solar panels do just that. Researchers with CSEM have developed solar panels that can come in different colors and have no visible connections, which gives architects a lot of room to incorporate solar power into buildings without having to give up any aesthetic goals.

The researchers have focused on white solar panels, not just because of the versatility of the color, but because white solar panels would stay cooler, which boosts their efficiency, and using them over large sections like the roof would keep the buildings themselves cooler, which would reduce the energy demand of cooling buildings.

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ON A list of cutting-edge materials for high-tech applications, you might not expect to see wood near the top. But an experiment by Teng Li and Liangbing Hu of the University of Maryland may soon put it there. For Dr Li and Dr Hu, writing in Nano Letters, have just described how wood might be used to make one class of batteries cheaper by permitting the lithium now employed in them to be replaced with sodium.

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ONE of sport’s most controversial categories, Mixed Martial Arts, could get an entirely new outlook if a competition based on Australian technology takes off.

UWM — Unified Weapons Master — plans to run competitions later this year between world-calibre martial artists, with a difference. That difference would be that unlike current MMA bouts, weapon use would be encouraged, because combatants would be clad in high tech armour designed not only to protect but also to register the real force behind each strike.

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The former computer repair shop owner who claimed he came into possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop has sued Twitter for a second time alleging defamation.

John Paul Mac Isaac, who owned a Delaware computer repair shop until closing it last year, filed his lawsuit Thursday in the Southern District of Florida, per the Washington Examiner.

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The metal mesh screens in front are ideal for when BLM/AntiFa come calling.

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Experimental physicists have developed the smallest microchips ever – 100 times smaller than conventional microchips. They believe that this next generation of microchips could lead to computers and phones running thousands of times faster.

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North Carolina Democratic Senate hopeful Jeff Jackson backed a bill that would immediately grant voting rights to convicted felons—including murderers and rapists—upon their release from prison.

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That would be entertaining.

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That would certainly be entertaining.

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But of course that’s racist. Everybody Knows that genes have nothing to do with ability.

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

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The more people we have working on fusion power, the sooner we’ll get it. And I like the idea of a private-sector entrepreneur solving it rather than a government agency or instrumentality.

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The Executive Committee of the Republican Party of Calhoun County, MI, has sent a letter of censure to Rep. Peter Meijer. Meijer is the Representative from Michigan’s 3rd district, which is the district that had previously been represented by Justin Amash.

The censure was in response to Meijer’s vote to impeach President Trump, and also for his vote to certify the election results. Meijer’s district includes only a portion of Calhoun County; most of his district is the Grand Rapids area. There was a censure motion in the 3rd district GOP organization, too, but it failed in an 11-11 tie.

This is a salutory trend in the modern Republican party; I don’t remember RINOs ever being subject to local censure prior to the Age of Trump.

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A Panorama With High Resolution Images

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

The Bayeux Tapestry was done in a form of embroidery called corpus anglicanum or ‘English work’. Having done such embroidery myself I can say that it’s tedious but not particularly difficult, and gives a very nice-looking close color coverage without big floats wandering around to get snagged on objects that the wearer brushes up against.

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Or you could just NOT EAT SO MUCH.

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Website: https://www.buildcover.com

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I like it, but I can’t see it handling tomatoes or beans or corn.

For hipster staples like kale or arugula it’s probably just the thing.

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

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Now that Apple is involved, I’m waiting for the inevitable day when Snoopy reveals that xhr is really transgender dog Snoopina.

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A report on Wednesday claims Apple’s first foray into the automotive industry will be a fully autonomous vehicle designed to operate without a human driver, suggesting it might not be marketed as a consumer product.

UPDATE: First Apple Car to Be Fully Autonomous and Designed to Operate Without a Driver

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With the Prius be dethroned from its Crust-carriage role?

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

(With Trump gone, apparently the News Just Stopped.)

Freeberg invents a useful new word.

I am hereby declaring a word for 2021: Ungaslightable.

Yeah yeah it’s got a red line under it because it isn’t a real word. Well, someone has to get on that and fix it. It is the MOST Important word. It can save your soul.

People talk about “gaslighting” but it seems no one remembers the most important thing about it: It requires consent of the victim. You have to disrespect yourself, and rely on the inferential powers of another.

In other words, nobody can gaslight you without your consent.

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Five years ago, we heard how a team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) had used ultrasound to seemingly “jump start” a patient out of a coma. At the time, the scientists wondered if such results could be repeated, or if their success was just a one-off. They have now done it two more times.

In the 2016 case, a team led by Prof. Martin Monti utilized a coffee cup saucer-sized device to deliver stimulating pulses of low-intensity focused ultrasound to the thalamus of a 25 year-old coma patient. The thalamus acts as the brain’s central processing hub, and it is typically weakened in coma patients.

After receiving the treatment, the patient improved dramatically. Whereas he previously only showed minimal signs of consciousness, he was now fully awake, able to understand questions, and capable of responding by shaking or nodding his head. At the time, though, the researchers wondered if they might have just gotten lucky – they may have treated the patient at the same time that he was coming out of the coma on his own, or his brain might have been uniquely receptive to the treatment.

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Sounds too good to be true. Let’s see whether it makes it to the stores.

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Sanders, an Arkansas native and daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, announced her decision in a recorded message, discussing her time in the Trump administration and criticizing the “radical left.”

“As governor, I will defend your right to be free of socialism and tyranny, your Second Amendment right, your freedom of speech and religious liberty,” Sanders said.

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And about time.

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Wyoming state Sen. Anthony Bouchard announced a primary challenge to Rep. Liz Cheney on Wednesday after her vote to impeach former President Donald Trump last week.

“Liz Cheney’s longtime opposition to President Trump and her most recent vote for Impeachment shows just how out-of-touch she is with Wyoming,” Bouchard said in his announcement, calling for leaders who “stand up for America” and “fight for our way of life.”

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

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Great news, if you’re a paralyzed mouse.

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If I had his money, I’d do the same.

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Follow friends and discover new ones among more than 4.4M people. Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video. All on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free.

As mentioned by Zman.

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The word aquafaba is the common name for the cooking liquid of beans and other legumes like chickpeas. You may know it as the typically discarded liquid found in retail cans and boxes of beans, or as the liquid left over from cooking your own.

Aquafaba can be used to replace egg whites in many sweet and savory recipes. Its unique mix of starches, proteins, and other soluble plant solids which have migrated from the seeds to the water during the cooking process gives aquafaba a wide spectrum of emulsifying, foaming, binding, gelatinizing and thickening properties.

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If you want to map the tiniest parts of a protein, you only have a few options: You can coax millions of individual protein molecules to align into crystals and analyze them using x-ray crystallography. Or you can flash-freeze copies of the protein and bombard them with electrons, a lower resolution method called cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Now, for the first time, scientists have sharpened cryo-EM’s resolution to the atomic level, allowing them to pinpoint the positions of individual atoms in a variety of proteins at a resolution that rivals x-ray crystallography’s.

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Twitter’s share price sunk 11% when markets opened Monday morning for the first time since the site banned President Donald Trump.

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It will no doubt be at a premium price, like Tesla. Unlike Tesla, however, I think we can be confident of premium quality.

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And now for something completely different….

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The report suggests that Apple is in negotiations with Hyundai Motor Group to manufacture an ?Apple Car?. Apple is said to be planning to work with Hyundai to produce electric vehicles and develop batteries due to the “enormous costs” of the technology and the necessary production facilities.

They could do worse. Hyundai makes great, inexpensive cars.

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MATERIALS SCIENTISTS have long sought to emulate biology’s trick of joining materials that have wildly different properties into seamless functional units with no weak points, in the way that bones, connective tissue and skin are joined into limbs. Conventional manufacturing techniques, in which components of different composition are first created, and only then fitted together, make such emulation hard. However, three-dimensional (3D) printing, which permits materials to be blended as they are applied to a growing structure, offers a way to do this in principle. And a group of researchers at America’s Army Research Laboratory and Texas A&M University, in College Station, now think they have turned principle into practice.

The materials they are interested in are called interbonding polymer networks, and those they have lighted on in particular share the same underlying chemistry. A simple polymer is a molecular chain, the links of which are called monomers. Interbonding polymer networks involve a second set of monomers that form chemical links with the first. Crucially, these second monomers are symmetrical molecules, so both ends can make such links. This means they can bind polymer chains together by forming cross-links at numerous places between chains, to create a structure resembling a net. The physical properties of this net will depend on the density of cross-links. And that density is under the control of the chemists doing the mixing.

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So for the new study, researchers at Tohoku and Osaka City Universities set out to find a new catalyst that could break plastics down at lower temperatures. The team found that combining ruthenium and cerium dioxide worked most effectively, creating a catalyst able to recycle polyolefinic plastics at just 200 °C (392 °F).

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Nature often offers promising inspiration for biomimetic man-made materials. In a new report now published in Advanced Science, Faheng Wang and a team of scientists in advanced materials, engineering and science in China developed new cement materials based on unidirectionally porous architectures to replicate the designs of natural wood. The resulting wood-like cement material showed higher strength at equal densities, alongside multifunctional properties for effective thermal insulation, water permeability and easy adjustment for water repulsion. The team simultaneously achieved high strength and multifunctionality to make the wood-like cement a promising new building material for wood-mimetic designs with high performance. They presented a simple fabrication procedure to promote better efficiency during mass production with applications suited across other material systems.

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Both videos after the break are in Russian, but the video and auto generated subtitles are enough to get the main points across. The bolt is an M42 size with a 40 mm pitch, with grooves cut in both directions to allow left-handed and right-handed nuts to be threaded. The large pitch means that instead of a single continuous groove like a normal bolt, ten separate grooves need to be cut for each threading direction to cover the bolt surface. Since this was all machined on a manual lathe, a dial indicator was required to maintain accurate spacing. It took [Oleg] four painstaking attempts to get it right, but the end result looks very good. Instead of a fixed cutter, he used a trimming router mounted on a custom clamp.

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Fortnite developer Epic Games is moving its Cary, North Carolina headquarters across town to a large shopping mall, the company announced. It’s planning to convert the 87-acre Cary Towne Center into its new home base by 2024.

Once development is complete, Epic says the site will include recreational and office space, “customized from the ground up to accommodate its long-term growth.”

Actually, I’m surprised that more big companies don’t do this. So many malls are going broke, especially during the Pandemic Panic, that they can be had for fire-sale prices. Plenty of parking, plenty of space for amenity stores to suit your employees, there’s just no down-side.

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As of December, the company had 50 clinics operating in its stores. Walmart has announced plans to open at least seven more this year, CNBC said.

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As more entrepreneurs and investors relocate from traditional tech hubs to emerging startup ecosystems, Miami—with its tropical climate, diverse population and lack of state income tax—has suddenly become a tech hot spot.

But it’s really about the taxes….

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Pennsylvania election data shows that over 432,000 votes were removed from President Donald Trump during the November election, data scientists say.

According to an analysis by the Data Integrity Group, obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times, votes for Trump – from both Election Day and mail-in ballots – were removed from the totals in at least 15 counties.

Time-series election data shows Trump’s votes decrementing in various counties at numerous time points instead of increasing as would be expected under normal circumstances.

Seems like an easy thing to check.

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That would certainly explain the counter-intuitive election results.

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No indication of whether it will be dragged into orbit by horses.

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For more than two years, Kalamazoo County sheriff’s detectives investigated French’s murder without making any arrests. Then, according to police records obtained by NBC News, one of the detectives learned of an emerging field — digital vehicle forensics — which focuses on extracting the treasure trove of data stored in an automobile’s onboard computers.

They returned to French’s 2016 black Chevy Silverado pickup truck, which had been stolen around the time he vanished, and discovered time-stamped recordings of someone else’s voice using the hands-free system to play Eminem on the radio at the time of French’s murder.

The voice, according to the police report obtained by NBC News, belonged to Joshua Wessel, now 32, who used to tinker on cars and motorcycles with French. Wessel’s voice was identified by relatives, including his wife, key evidence that allowed investigators to reconstruct his movements and the final hours of French’s life, the police report says. In July, Wessel was arrested and charged with French’s murder. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial subject to psychiatric assessment.