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Sure, why not.

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An NPR report suggests the global response to COVID-19 may have been based on a flawed assumption about the volatility of COVID19. We already know that the model used to initially predict infection and death rates was completely flawed, and now discredited, along with the modeler Neil Ferguson of London’s Imperial College.

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Glucosamine is a polysaccharide that is found naturally in cartilaginous joint tissues, bones, skin, ligaments, and nails, and it is involved in protein and lipid synthesis. In the context of joints, synovial fluid contains glucosamine and occupies the space between joints, helping to reduce the friction of joint surfaces.

The evidence for its usefulness in addressing conditions such as arthritis is, however, small at best, though there is some data for its effectiveness as an anti-inflammatory, according to the results of a randomized clinical trial in 2015 [1].

However, glucosamine supplementation seems to correlate with lower all-cause mortality and other mortality risks, such as cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, respiratory and digestive diseases. A recent analysis published in the journal BMJ showed that glucosamine supplementation conveys around a 15% reduction of all-cause mortality [2]. This is a considerable amount when compared to other lifestyle interventions as well as other supplements. The data gathered is from a large number of people, and the trend of reduced mortality is unmistakable.

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In the past few weeks, a new vocabulary has emerged in parenting groups on social media: pandemic pods, copods, microschools, homeschool pods. All describe cobbled-together groups of students who plan to study at home together this fall as the pandemic creeps into a new academic year.

Homeschooling, this is not. As local and federal governments continue to squabble over the risks of sending kids back to school, parents are frantically gathering groups of similar-age kids to be taught at home. The idea is that they band together to pay for private tuition or delegate supervision to a single parent, allowing the rest to get back to work. Pods should also supply some of the social aspect of school without the infection risk inherent in cramming dozens of kids in a room together.

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Well, shucks.

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“We make decisions based on what customers purchase, as well as the feedback we receive from our customers and Crew Members. If we feel there is need for change, we do not hesitate to take action,” the statement reads.

“Recently we have heard from many customers reaffirming that these name variations are largely viewed in exactly the way they were intended­—as an attempt to have fun with our product marketing. We continue our ongoing evaluation, and those products that resonate with our customers and sell well will remain on our shelves,” the statemtent added.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Materials that can heal themselves after becoming damaged have opened up some interesting new possibilities over the past decade or so, pointing to a future of scratch-resistant car paints and space ships that can plug their own holes. A newly developed squid-inspired self-healing material is claimed to act faster than most, with the ability to repair itself in just a second.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

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They go for the headlines, the stuff that looks bad, in the hopes they can pin everything on Trump, or deflect criticism from Cuomo in New York, and generally make people afraid. But there’s a lot of stuff happening that doesn’t make it into the headlines or is ignored.

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The fact that the Czech are attempting, with some success, to make the philosophical and political case for self-defense and gun ownership is good news.

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A Chinese biology researcher has taken refuge in China’s San Francisco consulate to evade arrest by the FBI after lying about her connections to the Chinese military to obtain a visa and gain access to the United States.

The revelation came in court documents filed Monday that detailed several instances in which Chinese nationals supposedly lied to hide their military connections in order to obtain U.S. visas.

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“What we showed is: up to four years before these people walk into the hospital, there are already signatures in their blood that show they have cancer,” says Kun Zhang, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the study. “That’s never been done before.”

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Even the most expensive bike locks can be compromised in just a few minutes, and mostly serve as deterrents so your ride is a less appealing target. But researchers from Durham University in the UK and the Fraunhofer Institute have created what they’re claiming is the first man-made material that is non-cuttable, by actively destroying tools that are trying to slice through it.

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

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That would be … all of them? Except maybe Hillsdale.

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Nevertheless we still need to PANIC!

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Facebook engineers have developed a new robot that winds fibre-optic cable around existing medium-voltage (MV) power lines, enabling the cost-effective expansion of high-speed internet infrastructure.

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Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid solar energy converter, which uses energy from the Sun to create both electricity and steam. The device reportedly has high efficiency and runs at low cost, allowing industry to make use of a wider spectrum of solar energy.

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Well, that didn’t take long.

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These creatures have evolved special “nanobodies” that may have an edge over human antibodies when it comes to developing a new treatment.

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In a paper in Nature Sustainability, researchers in the laboratory of Chunlei Guo, professor of optics, demonstrate how a burst of femtosecond laser pulses etch the surface of a normal sheet of aluminum into a superwicking (water-attracting), super energy-absorbing material.

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“Igor! Where’d I put my stapler?”

There are, of course, instructional YouTube videos.

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Not to mention constant political pressure to raise the minimum wage.

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

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The nation’s largest abortion provider’s political arm is launching ads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The ads contrast Biden and Trump’s leadership and highlight how each candidate approaches abortion rights, Axios reports.

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We do get good news occasionally.

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Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is throwing some of his money at a plan to provide universal basic income for Americans. Dorsey tweeted Thursday that he is donating $3 million to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.

I’d be more in favor of this if I didn’t know that it’s just a big step toward making taxpayers pay for the greater program if the results can even possibly be spun in that direction.

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Energy Transfer LP said it’s not making any moves to empty its Dakota Access oil pipeline after a judge on Monday ordered the conduit shut while a more robust environmental review is conducted.

The Dallas-based company run by billionaire Kelcy Warren said it’s also accepting requests for space on the pipeline in August. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had ordered the pipeline to be drained by Aug. 5.

“We are not shutting in the line,” Energy Transfer spokeswoman Vicki Granado said in an email when asked if the company had begun emptying the pipeline. Judge James E. Boasberg “we believe exceeded his authority and does not have the jurisdiction to shut down the pipeline or stop the flow of crude oil.”

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That’s going to chap some buns.

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The swine!

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Let’s hope to God it works better than their cars.

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Well, I’m glad that’s settled.

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n a rare unanimous decision for the US Supreme Court, on Monday the nine Justices ruled unanimously that states can require presidential electors to back their states’ popular vote winner in the Electoral College. The ruling arose out of a case from Washington state, essentially gives states the right to outlaw so-called “faithless electors” who cast their votes for people other than those chosen by their voters.

Of course, that wasn’t the system the Founders set up, but hey, nobody cares about that any more.

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If the Democrats were hoping that the pandemic would trash Trump’s performance on the economy, this will come as a bitter pill.

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Triso— short for “tristructural isotropic”—fuel is made from a mixture of low enriched uranium and oxygen, and it is surrounded by three alternating layers of graphite and a ceramic called silicon carbide. Each particle is smaller than a poppy seed, but its layered shell can protect the uranium inside from melting under even the most extreme conditions that could occur in a reactor.

This appears to be a variant of the existing pebble-bed reactor design.

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Over the past couple of days, the dominant left-leaning media have again demonstrated a tendency to ignore gun owners who intervene to fight back against violent criminals as most national news shows ignored the fact that an alleged gunman in Louisville, Kentucky, Steven Lopez, was taken down by a bystander with a gun who shot him in the leg.

So far, Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends is the only national news show to inform their viewers of this key detail of a story about one of the liberal protest gatherings that got out of hand.

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According to this report by CNBC (which can’t be happy about it), a social medium platform called Parler is suddenly making huge strides. After a Wall Street Journal story reported that Team Trump is looking for alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, and mentioned Parler as such an alternative, Parler quickly became the top-ranked iPhone app in the news category, ahead of Twitter and Reddit. The number of Parler users increased from 1 million to 1.5 million in about a week, according to Parler’s 27-year-old founder and CEO John Matze.

UPDATE: Conservatives are flocking to the social media app Parler

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Most engineering projects in the U.S. have used the international foot since 1959, but land surveys—which map boundaries and infrastructure locations—use whichever foot an organization or state wants. (The international foot is exactly 0.3048 of a meter, whereas the U.S. survey foot, 1200/3937 of a meter, has an unending decimal.) This means that anyone working in multiple U.S. locations or with different agencies must keep careful track of which foot is in use. A recent poll of 530 attendees of a National Geodetic Survey Webinar, who were mostly surveyors, found that 62 percent blamed confusion between the two feet for problems in their work.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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Woodrow Wilson was not only a thoroughgoing racist but also a thoroughgoing fascist (before fascism was coo)l. The fact that it took this long and gratuitous outside pressure for them to make this change tells you everything you need to know about the Princeton coven of the new clerisy.

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Traditional folded steels combined two steels that varied by carbon content and in their microscale structure, which is controlled by how quickly it cools (by quenching). In this case, the researchers were using a nickel-titanium-iron alloy steel that works well with these 3D printing techniques, in which metal powder is fed onto the work surface and heated with a laser.

Rapid cooling of this steel also produces a crystalline form as in quenched high-carbon steels. But further heat treatment leads to the precipitation of microscopic nickel-titanium particles within the steel that greatly increase its hardness—a pricey material called “maraging steel.”

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Smead said that although taxes in Seattle are lower, candidate recruitment is harder and the cost of living within the city is more expensive than Phoenix.

“We’re hearing rumors of 40-story buildings that will be only 20-percent occupied by October,” Smead said.

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Back in 2011 the United States and China both introduced electronic fire control systems for 40mm long-barrel grenade launchers. Nearly a decade later both of these longer range, highly accurate 40mm weapons are still in production. Both are niche weapons and popular enough to keep getting made and upgraded.

40mm is about an inch and a half.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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The DynaRig concept has proven itself as an effective alternative to conventional rigs for superyacht owners who are looking to reduce crew numbers and optimize sailing time. This is a new chapter for the innovative rig solution and aims at making the efficient, safe, and high-performance rig more accessible.

Totally automating the process of setting and furling sails.

We have the technology.

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Cheaper, more efficient, and much smaller, yet less risky and less powerful that traditional nuclear plants, the new technology offers a new path forward for a source of carbon-free energy whose progress has stalled since the 1970s.

And about time, too.

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But but but … I thought Trump was Putin’s puppet?

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This could get interesting.

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A team of researchers in Louisiana has proposed a method of combating the coronavirus: issuing booster doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, CNN reported.

The MMR vaccine is a “live vaccine,” using highly weakened versions of the measles, mumps and rubella viruses to provide protection to the immune system that goes beyond just the injected viruses. The MMR vaccine works to boost general immunity, as well as train the body to recognize specific viruses, which may be effective in combating COVID-19.

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Now a lofty new air taxi being built by the Israeli startup firm Urban Aeronautics hopes to cash in on those promises with its new Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) car that unites technology with Jetsons-like futuristic dreams mostly only observed in films like Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Back to the Future, and most recently on TV in Season 3 of HBO’s Westworld.