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In a study, published in the journal eLife on September 29, 2020, the researchers identified a factor that acts like a molecular switch in the skin of baby mice that controls the formation of hair follicles as they develop during the first week of life. The switch is mostly turned off after skin forms and remains off in adult tissue. When it was activated in specialized cells in adult mice, their skin was able to heal wounds without scarring. The reformed skin even included fur and could make goosebumps, an ability that is lost in adult human scars.

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For the purist – and there are many purists – top-class jamón ibérico de bellota (acorn-fed Iberian ham) must come from Iberian blackfoot pigs that spend the last months of their lives eating acorns on the dehesa, a traditional Spanish or Portuguese pasture shaded by mature oak trees.

After being hung and dry cured for at least 36 months, the meat produced is silky with fat, and, say experts, has a flavour that can only come from the acorns. Spaniards consider jamón ibérico their greatest gift to international gastronomy – the caviar of the Iberian peninsula.

But now two American companies have had the incredible temerity to begin importing blackfoots to the US in order to make their own jamón.

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Carmen Sandi recalls the skepticism she faced at first. A behavioral neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, she had followed a hunch that something going on inside critical neural circuits could explain anxious behavior, something beyond brain cells and the synaptic connections between them. The experiments she began in 2013 showed that neurons involved in anxiety-related behaviors showed abnormalities: Their mitochondria, the organelles often described as cellular power plants, didn’t work well — they produced curiously low levels of energy.

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Absolute pitch, the ability to identify or produce the pitch of a sound without a reference point, has a critical period, i.e., it can only be acquired early in life. However, research has shown that histone-deacetylase inhibitors (HDAC inhibitors) enable adult mice to establish perceptual preferences that are otherwise impossible to acquire after youth. In humans, we found that adult men who took valproate (VPA) (a HDAC inhibitor) learned to identify pitch significantly better than those taking placebo—evidence that VPA facilitated critical-period learning in the adult human brain. Importantly, this result was not due to a general change in cognitive function, but rather a specific effect on a sensory task associated with a critical-period.

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New research by neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh and University of California San Francisco (UCSF) revealed that a simple, earbud-like device developed at UCSF that imperceptibly stimulates a key nerve leading to the brain could significantly improve the wearer’s ability to learn the sounds of a new language. This device may have wide-ranging applications for boosting other kinds of learning as well.

I don’t think a taser counts.

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Researchers in Germany have developed a new drug that can act like a “shredder” for proteins implicated in causing cancer. In tests on lab-grown cancer cells, the drug worked to kill the tumors, suggesting a new pathway to a treatment for the disease.

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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.

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A team of researchers at the USDA and several research institutions say they’ve developed “transparent wood,” a glass-like material made almost entirely out of trees that they claim is stronger, safer, more cost efficient and more thermally efficient than glass.

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When the mob comes for you, you are going to want one of these.

I want one already, although I have no need for one.

Read it. And watch the video.

This looks like a very intriguing design. The orientation doesn’t matter–the vanes on the side funnel the wind from whatever direction into the spinning element in the interior of the unit, so it appears pretty safe.

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The Trump Economy appears to be pretty robust in the face of the Pandemic Panic.

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For the first time, scientists have observed an interaction of a rare and baffling form of matter called time crystals. The crystals look at a glance like “regular” crystals, but they have a relationship to time that both intrigues and puzzles scientists because of its unpredictability. Now, experts say they could have applications in quantum computing.

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A Dallas salon owner who was sent to jail for defying coronavirus lockdown orders and became a symbol of conservative angst over COVID-19 restrictions advanced to a runoff for a Texas Senate seat on Tuesday night.

Republican Shelley Luther finished in a virtual dead heat with four-term Republican state Rep. Drew Springer as both advanced. Luther had 31.7% of the vote in a special election to fill a vacated seat in a heavily Republican North Texas district. Springer, a Muenster tax consultant, tallied 31.83% of the vote. Jacob Minter, the lone Democrat in the six-candidate race and an electrician heading up a quality control team for a union in Sherman, finished third with 21.06% of the vote.

An interesting wrinkle: Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick pays fine for salon owner who refused to close

The subtext is that this was a pissing contest between the Democrat political ruling class in Dallas County and a Republican business owner. Hence the Lt. Governor’s contribution.

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Mice always get the best stuff first.

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Kassenbaum was always a RINO.

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Democrats, Party of the Rich.

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The fuel that powers passenger planes is normally among the most expensive oil products, but in a sign of the times the coronavirus has turned it into a blending component for typically cheaper shipping fuel.

Straight-run kerosene, usually processed into jet fuel, is now being used to make very low-sulfur fuel oil for the maritime industry amid a plunge in consumption by airlines. Higher than normal amounts of diesel and vacuum gasoil are also finding their way into shipping fuel.

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President Donald Trump hosted leaders from Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain to sign the Abraham Accords peace agreement Tuesday, marking what the administration hopes will lead to real peace in the Middle East.

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The molecule, which is a component of an antibody, is the smallest one known to date that “completely and specifically” targets the virus that causes a coronavirus infection, a report published in the journal Cell said according to KDKA News. A full-sized antibody is 10 times bigger than the isolated molecule, according to the report.

Which would mean we wouldn’t have politicians running around with their hair on fire trying to lock everybody down wearing hazmat suits.

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We have the technology.

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When DARPA put money behind the controversial EmDrive in 2018, it looked like a big gamble. Many physicists had dismissed the revolutionary space drive as simply fake science. Now its EmDrive project is greenlit for Phase 2, DARPA told Popular Mechanics in February this year. Meanwhile, other teams are hoping to reach a final demonstration of the technology later this year.

“This is a technology which could transform space travel and see craft lifting silently off from launchpads and reaching beyond the solar system,” says Mike McCulloch, a lecturer in geomatics at the University of Plymouth, U.K., and leader behind DARPA’s EmDrive project. “We can also get an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri in a (long) human lifetime, 90 years.”

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A research team led by scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Northern Illinois University has discovered a new electrocatalyst that can consistently convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency and low cost.

Because carbon dioxide is a stable molecule, transforming it into a different molecule is normally energy intensive and costly.

But the new process can electrochemically convert the carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes—such as fossil fuel or alcohol fermentation plants—into a valuable commodity at reasonable cost. Ethanol is an ingredient in nearly all U.S. gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries.

Unfortunately for the Greenies, alcohol isn’t as energy-dense as gasoline. But they keep trying.

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Much fuss has been made in the UK, not least by teachers’ unions, about recommencing physical school attendance. As this issue applies to many countries, I thought it worth highlighting research findings in Europe.

While it is evident that school age children can be infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it is extremely rare for them to become seriously ill with COVID-19, and their risk of dying as a result of infection is almost zero. The relevant issue is therefore how much children’s contribution to the spread of COVID-19 to adults, by themselves or via other children, is affected by school attendance.

Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic!

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Scott was the blogger at SlateStarCodex until the New York Times decided that they were going to dox him.  (Increasingly, ‘journalist’ is becoming a synonym for ‘egregious asshole’.)

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I first became aware of the uses of wings in place of sale on boats when it was introduced into the America’s Cup race, but I have no idea when it was developed.

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The toll lockdowns have taken on human life and human rights has been incalculable. Increases in child abuse, suicide, and even heart attacks, all appear to be a feature of mandatory stay-at-home orders issued by politicians who now rule by decree without any legislative or democratic due process. And then, of course, there is the economic toll on employment, which will feed negative impacts into the longer term. The economic burden has fallen the most on the young and on working-class families, whose earners are least able to work from home.

 

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Just waiting for the Pandemic Panic to be over.

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South Korea has made it official and is building one or more aircraft carriers for its F-35B stealth fighters. A 30,000-ton LPX II “amphibious ship” was added to the 2021-25 defense spending plan. LPX II would be similar but superior to the Japanese DDH “F-35B carrier” and would be able to carry up to 20 F-35Bs. While the designation LPX II indicates a larger amphibious ship, the LPX II will be built as an aircraft carrier, without facilities for carrying marines and their equipment. For several years South Korean defense officials have discussed building one or more 30,000-ton ships that look like the Japanese DDH (destroyer helicopter carrier) and are modified to handle a dozen or more F-35Bs.

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Could be a trend.

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The shoot-down took place at the White Sands missile range in New Mexico on Wednesday. An M-109A6 Paladin tracked howitzer fired a 155-millimeter-diameter hypervelocity shell at an incoming BQM-167 target drone, blasting it to pieces.

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The first randomized controlled trial (RCT) of vitamin D in COVID-19 has just been published. The results are astounding: vitamin D nearly abolished the odds of requiring treatment in ICU. Although the number of deaths was too small to say for sure, vitamin D may actually abolish the risk of death from COVID-19.

 

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While traditional chemical propulsion have fundamental upper limits, electric propulsion pumps extra energy into the thrust reaction to reach much higher propellant velocities by accelerating propellant using electrical energy. There are many methods of electric propulsion, many of which require electrodes to apply a current, increasing thruster cost and complexity.

By contrast the Helicon Plasma Thruster uses high power radio frequency waves to excite the propellant into a plasma.

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Just in case you feel the need. Not sure whether they handle people who aren’t Japanese.

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Even the Ruling Class’s Pandemic Panic can’t beat Trump.

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Eh, it could be worse. Most of the state flags adopted during the 1800s were, I won’t say as ugly as the South American flags, but still pretty ugly; California is a notable exception. The problem continues that the Confederate battle flag was designed by people who knew what they were doing and is absolutely gorgeous, so it exercises an attraction that transcends ideology.

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Mice always get the good stuff first.

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Venom from honeybees has been found to rapidly kill aggressive and hard-to-treat breast cancer cells, according to potentially groundbreaking new Australian research.

Getting the little suckers to sit still to be stung is the hard part.

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Position your portfolio for the rising odds of President Trump winning re-election, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co., which says the spread between him and challenger Joe Biden are now nearly even.

 

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The New Guinea singing dog, an extremely rare breed, is best known for its unique barks and howls — it’s able to make harmonic sounds that have been compared to the calls of a humpback whale.

Only around 200 captive singing dogs live in conservation centers or zoos, the descendants of a few wild dogs captured in the 1970s. The animals are severely inbred due to a lack of new genes.

None had been seen in their natural habitat for half a century until 2016, when an expedition located and studied 15 wild dogs in the remote highlands of the western side of New Guinea, known as Papua, in Indonesia. A new expedition returned to the study site in 2018 to collect detailed biological samples to confirm whether these highland wild dogs truly are the predecessors of the singing dogs.

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Come on down.

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Especially if Biden gets elected in November.

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He will no doubt be voting by mail for Biden.

Wired ‘Science’.

The cataclysm cut off telegraph communication with the East Coast, swamped the state’s new capital, and submerged the entire Central Valley under as much as 15 feet of water. Yet in modern-day California—a region that author Mike Davis once likened to a “Book of the Apocalypse theme park,” where this year’s wildfires have already burned 1.4 million acres, and dozens of fires are still raging—the nearly forgotten biblical-scale flood documented by Brewer’s letters has largely vanished from the public imagination, replaced largely by traumatic memories of more recent earthquakes.

When it was thought of at all, the flood was once considered a thousand-year anomaly, a freak occurrence. But emerging science demonstrates that floods of even greater magnitude occurred every 100 to 200 years in California’s precolonial history. Climate change will make them more frequent still. In other words, the Great Flood was a preview of what scientists expect to see again, and soon. And this time, given California’s emergence as agricultural and economic powerhouse, the effects will be all the more devastating.

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The man, whose identity has not yet been released, was camping in the Norwegian Arctic Svalbard islands when he was attacked Friday morning. This is the first time someone has died by a polar bear attack in 9 years, according to Reuters.

No doubt Global Warming (or Trump) is to blame.

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There is new evidence in the George Floyd case, posted yesterday (Tuesday, August 25, 2020) at the Minnesota court website. These appear to be exhibits to a motion to compel disclosure in the criminal case against Tou Thao, one of the officers involved in the Floyd incident.

This evidence strongly supports the hypothesis set forth in my prior posts on the Floyd incident, in late May and early June, suggesting that Floyd died of fentanyl overdose. There are two memos by personnel of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office regarding two interviews with the medical examiner who performed the Floyd autopsy, Dr. Andrew Baker. Dr. Baker is identified as the Chief Hennepin County Medical Examiner. There is also a page of handwritten notes, apparently either by Dr. Baker or by someone who talked to him.

UPDATE: Coroner Found ‘Fatal Levels’ of Fentanyl in George Floyd

Check it out.

The Goldback is the world’s first voluntary, complementary currency to be made of a spendable, beautiful, small denomination, physical gold.

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Yeah, these bricks are, like, so 5000 years ago.

But the brick as we know it causes significant environmental problems, by using up raw, finite materials and creating carbon emissions. That’s why Gabriela Medero, a professor of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, decided to reinvent it.

Originally from Brazil, Medero says she was drawn to civil engineering because it gave her passion for maths and physics a practical outlet. As she became aware of the construction industry’s sustainability issues, she started looking for solutions. With her university’s support, Medero joined forces with fellow engineer Sam Chapman and set up Kenoteq in 2009.

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The company, Zero Mass Water, will use renewable energy instead of the fossil fuels that power the many desalination facilities in Dubai and the rest of the United Arab Emirates. The project could offer a model for other parched nations to produce drinking water in a more sustainable way and even spur agricultural breakthroughs to improve food security.

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Seems appropriate.