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Find the ‘black woman’ in this picture:

For reference, this is a picture of an actual black woman:

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I am always fascinated by products that operate through applied physical principles.

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One main part of life is the ability for processes to reproduce themselves. This means that a chemical system has to be maintained. Up until now, this was only ever possible naturally.

Now, a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry has found a way for a system to regenerate parts of its own DNA and protein building blocks, all on its own.

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Global manufacturer Rolls-Royce is the latest entrant in the tech race to provide small-scale nuclear power. Last month, the company announced plans to build 10-15 small modular reactors (SMRs) in the United Kingdom by 2029, with each unit compact enough to sit on the back of a tractor-trailer. The plants would be constructed on so-called “brownfield sites” in Cambria and Wales where aging or decommissioned nuclear power stations are still in place. Rolls Royce has thus far received £18 million ($23.1 m) from the British government, and is requesting £200 million ($258 m) more.

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According to the cohesion-tension theory, mangrove trees desalinate salty water using highly negative pressure (or tension) that is generated by evaporative capillary forces in mangrove leaves. Here, we demonstrate a synthetic mangrove that mimics the main features of the natural mangrove: capillary pumping (leaves), stable water conduction in highly metastable states (stem), and membrane desalination (root). When using nanoporous membranes as leaves, the maximum osmotic pressures of saline feeds (10 to 30 bar) allowing pure water uptake precisely correspond to expected capillary pressures based on the Young-Laplace equation. Hydrogel-based leaves allow for stable operation and desalination of hypersaline solutions with osmotic pressures approaching 400 bar, fivefold greater than the pressure limits of conventional reverse osmosis. Our findings support the applicability of the cohesion-tension theory to desalination in mangroves, provide a new platform to study plant hydraulics, and create possibilities for engineered membrane separations using large, passively generated capillary pressures.

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An Australian fusion startup called HB11, a spin-off from the University of New South Wales, claims to have found a way to revolutionize current nuclear fusion technology, potentially laying the groundwork for a new era of power generation — without running the risk of a nuclear meltdown.

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An experimental nuclear reactor in Idaho could be the first of its kind in the United States: a commercial reactor providing power using fuel that reduces nuclear waste. The small power plant could power about 1,000 homes and can run almost autonomously for 20 years.

UPDATE: Exclusive: Why Oklo’s Demonstration of HALEU Could Be Groundbreaking for New Nuclear

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Your mouth is currently teeming with giant viruses that, until very recently, no one knew existed.

Unlike Ebola or the new coronavirus that’s currently making headlines, these particular viruses don’t cause disease in humans. They’re part of a group known as phages, which infect and kill bacteria. But while many phages are well studied, these newly discovered giants are largely mysterious. Why are they 10 times bigger than other phages? How do they reproduce? And what are they up to inside our bodies? “They’re in our saliva, and in our gut,” says Jill Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the team that discovered the new phages. “Who knows what they’re doing?”

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Save this for when civilization collapses again.

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The Israeli company Tactical Robotics is partnering with US aerospace giant Boeing to develop “flying cars” using “ducted fan propulsion” technology, called “fancraft,” for piloted and autonomous vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) air-crafts.

The Israeli company has already developed an unmanned vehicle, called the Cormorant, that is powered by internal lift rotors that allow takeoff and landing in small areas, which could revolutionize the way militaries deploy and rescue troops.

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I like it. it has texture, and scope.

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I’ve been waiting for that to happen once we had ‘gay marriage’.

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From blood storms to honeycomb lungs, here’s an organ-by-organ look at how COVID-19 harms humans.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Thanks to support from the U.S. Forest Service and the Softwood Lumber Board, developer Placetailor and Boston-based architecture firm Generate have collaborated to design a carbon-neutral apartment block in Roxbury, a neighborhood in the south end of Boston. Named Model-C, the 5-story, 19,000-square-foot building will contain 14 residential units above an affordable co-working space on its ground floor.

I love the way journalists tag some building as ‘affordable’ or not, as if that were some objective measure rather than just one person’s opinion.

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Researchers worldwide are racing to develop potential vaccines and drugs to fight the new coronavirus, called SARS-Cov-2. Now, a group of researchers has figured out the molecular structure of a key protein that the coronavirus uses to invade human cells, potentially opening the door to the development of a vaccine, according to new findings.

Previous research revealed that coronaviruses invade cells through so-called “spike” proteins, but those proteins take on different shapes in different coronaviruses. Figuring out the shape of the spike protein in SARS-Cov-2 is the key to figuring out how to target the virus, said Jason McLellan, senior author of the study and an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Here we show that thin-film devices made from nanometre-scale protein wires harvested from the microbe Geobacter sulfurreducens can generate continuous electric power in the ambient environment. The devices produce a sustained voltage of around 0.5 volts across a 7-micrometre-thick film, with a current density of around 17 microamperes per square centimetre. We find the driving force behind this energy generation to be a self-maintained moisture gradient that forms within the film when the film is exposed to the humidity that is naturally present in air.

We have the technology.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Would a ‘mass shooter’ attempt to shoot up a crowd if he knew many of them were armed? The question  answers itself. One of the distinguishing characteristics of ‘mass shootings’ is that the perps target places that are ‘gun-free zones’, from schools to theaters to (God help us) military bases.

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With the recent federal lawsuits filed against California, New Jersey and Kings County, Washington, the Trump administration has finally launched a fierce counterattack against the sanctuary movement. States and local jurisdictions that provide a safe haven for dangerous criminal aliens and obstruct federal immigration enforcement are on notice.

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Tentative title Days of Whine and Poses.

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“They do exist,” says Michael Alexiades, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, “and they don’t necessarily need to be 3D-printed.” Instead, medical-device companies like Zimmer or Stryker manufacture full replacements or sections of a femur, and surgeons can adjust the size of the implant to fit the patient. An artificial humerus, the big bone in the upper arm, also exists.

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DoNotPay, the family of consumer advocacy services meant to protect people from corporate exploitation, is launching a new app aimed at helping end our long national nightmare surrounding robocalls by giving you a burner credit card to get their contact details then giving you a chatbot lawyer to automatically sue them.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

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Iran’s latest attempt to launch a satellite into orbit marked the fourth recent space launch operation in a row ending in failure, and yet Iran’s space program and Defense Ministry still praised the launch as “remarkable” and vowed to continue to program.

This elicited a response from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who on Tuesday repeated Washington’s longtime charge that Tehran is using the satellite launch program as cover to hone technology related to its ballistic missile capability. Pompeo said technological elements to the launch were “virtually identical” to those necessary a long-range ballistic missile.

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In keeping with our storied history of presenting readers with plausible theories and allowing them to make their own decisions often times weeks, months or years in advance of the mainstream media figuring them out and/or having the courage to finally touch on them, we’re not surprised to see some of the critical questions we raised about the coronavirus origins weeks ago finally bleed into the mainstream media this morning.

ZeroHedge is a great site, and very entertaining — and that’s about all you can really expect fromthe ‘news’ these days.

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I love these things.

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The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has finally decided — after more than four years — that the government can’t keep someone locked up indefinitely for contempt of court charges.

Former Philadelphia policeman Francis Rawls has been locked up since 2015 for refusing to decrypt external hard drives the government claims contain child porn images. The government’s claims are based on Rawls’ sister’s statements. She said Rawls showed her “hundreds” of child porn images that were located on these drives.

The government obtained an All Writs Order demanding Rawls decrypt the devices. This was challenged by Rawls, but unfortunately he did not preserve a Fifth Amendment challenge, so the Appeals Court let the government have its victory. It was a limited victory. It still had two locked drives Rawls claimed he could not remember the passwords for. But it also had Rawls jailed on civil contempt charges.

Rawls will be a free man again, but probably not for long. He challenged the indefinite incarceration, asserting that the law only provides for a maximum of 18 months in jail for civil contempt charges.

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An interesting new development.

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With CRISPR sucking up all the attention, Stafforst says, people reacted to his paper with indifference. They asked, “Why do we need this when there’s DNA editing?”

But CRISPR editing — at least as a therapeutic technique in people — has turned out to be more difficult than initially thought. Researchers have documented ways that Cas9, one of the enzymes used in CRISPR gene editing, could trigger immune responses, or cause accidental changes to the genome that would be permanent. RNA editing, by contrast, could allow clinicians to make temporary fixes that eliminate mutations in proteins, halt their production or change the way that they work in specific organs and tissues. Because cells quickly degrade unused RNAs, any errors introduced by a therapy would be washed out, rather than staying with a person forever.

I see great potential for bio-weapons like this latest coronavirus.

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A completely passive solar-powered desalination system developed by researchers at MIT and in China could provide more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area. Such systems could potentially serve off-grid arid coastal areas to provide an efficient, low-cost water source.

This could be huge.

Unlike some desalination systems, there is no accumulation of salt or concentrated brines to be disposed of. In a free-floating configuration, any salt that accumulates during the day would simply be carried back out at night through the wicking material and back into the seawater, according to the researchers.

That’s key.

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I am prepared to believe it.

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Remember Jussie Smollet, Mister Hollywood Hate Hoax?

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

(Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.)

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We like to have useful stuff here, and with the Democrats going Full Socialist on us….

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Ought to have done that long since.

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My question is: What does Bill Gates need with a yacht?

On the other hand, it does look like the Nautilus from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen….

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US Vice Admiral Andrew Lewis, the head of the Navy’s 2nd Fleet, raised eyebrows this week with alarming comments made at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event.

He told the think tank audience that a recent uptick of Russian submarine presence of the US East Coast means that the coastal area should no longer be considered “uncontested” nor should any longer be deemed a “safe haven” for US ships or submarines.

Perhaps they could arrange for marine biologists to tag them, the way they tag sharks. I’m always reading about sharks that have appeared off the east coast because they picked up the tags. Maybe the Navy ought to get on that.

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Around 45% of plastic waste is recycled annually in the UK and is on the increase. However, one of the problems with current plastic recycling methods is that you end up with a lower-quality plastic with worse properties than the original.

This means that plastic drinks bottles cannot simply be recycled into new drink bottles continuously, but instead are used for other lower-grade products such as park benches and traffic cones.

Now, scientists from the Universities of Bath and Birmingham have developed a new way of chemical recycling—converting plastics back into their constituent chemical molecules—so that they can be used to make new plastics of the same quality as the original.

Will it persuade the plastic-bag nannies to shut up? Don’t bet on it.

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Viruses are some of the most mysterious organisms on Earth. They’re among the world’s tiniest lifeforms, and because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living things. Now, scientists have discovered one that has no recognizable genes, making it among the strangest of all known viruses. But how many viruses do we really know? Another group has just discovered thousands of new viruses hiding out in the tissues of dozens of animals.

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A week ago, we published details that raised questions about the source of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, specifically questioning the official theory for the spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan seafood and animal market as a fabricated farce.

The real reason behind the viral spread, we suggested, was that a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan’s Institute of Virology (presumably accidentally ), China’s only top, level-4 biohazard lab, which was studying “the world’s most dangerous pathogens.”

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Trump is not the pushover that the Bushes were. You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

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

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has written a letter to the House Ethics Committee requesting an investigation into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to tear up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address, arguing that “Her unseemly behavior certainly warrants censure.”

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Their grandchildren may actually see it approved.

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Two can play this Congressional Fishing Expedition game.

The Democrats are going to learn hat sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

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Here are some pictures and video of the creepy culty Women in White sitting on their fat asses while Trump announced stuff like the lowest level of black poverty ever, or the lowest rate of black teen unemployment ever recorded.

I received a text message on my phone from a Bloomberg operative asking whether they could ‘count on me to support Mike’. I texted back that I’d first like to get an explanation for why a Republican is running for the Democrat Presidential nomination. No response as yet. Nor do I expect one. If I can find out where the Democrats are holding their primary caucuses I may track him down and ask him that in person. That would be fun.

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

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Actually, I wasn’t all that curious.

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An international team of researchers has discovered the hydrogen atoms in a metal hydride material are much more tightly spaced than had been predicted for decades — a feature that could possibly facilitate superconductivity at or near room temperature and pressure.