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Dirigible airships are like flying cars in their populatiry in science fiction. It will be interesting to see whether they can get these things to work.

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A Venezuelan navy ship fired shots at a German-owned cruise ship on March 30 and rammed into the passenger vessel, leading to the sinking of the warship in the Caribbean.

The Iranian regime-allied Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro accused the captain of the RCGS RESOLUTE cruise ship of “terrorism and piracy” and sought to force the ship into a new direction on the high seas. The cruise ship, which had no passengers on board and was flying under a Portuguese flag, has a reinforced hull that enables it to sail through ice water.

Oops.

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My, what a surprise.

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t predictably evoked immediate backlash from leaders across Europe and the West, given he’s already long been under scrutiny for allegedly weakening Hungary’s judicial and parliamentary systems in what critics have long complained is a bid for greater ‘authoritarian’ control. From the start, it should be remembered, he was loathed by EU technocrats for rejecting the so-called open door response to migrants and refugees in 2015.

Their basic objection is that he won’t buy into the ‘invade the world, invite the world’ outlook of the EU bureaucracy. (Kinda like Trump.)

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Could, but probably won’t. People don’t want hydrogen for fuel for the same reason they don’t use it in dirigibles any more — it’s explosive and difficult to store.

Check it out.

1.4 million free e-books (supposedly).

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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Some good news for a change.

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German researchers report in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology that they have identified and characterized a strain of bacteria capable of degrading some of the chemical building blocks of polyurethane.

“The bacteria can use these compounds as a sole source of carbon, nitrogen and energy,” said Dr. Hermann J. Heipieper, a senior scientist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ in Leipzig, Germany and co-author of the new paper. “This finding represents an important step in being able to reuse hard-to-recycle PU products.”

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Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson – who originally estimated 500,000 deaths in the UK due to Coronavirus, now says that the virus will peak in just two or three weeks, and that UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, according to NewScientist.

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If you reach the age of 110 or older, you’re called a supercentenarian and you’re known for having remarkable health. There are only 28 recorded supercentenarians alive in the world today, so when scientists managed to reprogram the cells of a 114-year-old woman for the first time ever, there was cause to celebrate.

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A report released earlier this month outlines steps that the United States can take to become closer to obtaining a commercially-feasible source of fusion power. The report, authored by 300 researchers, hopes to align the fusion community to realize this goal.

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Passed on without  comment.

Scott Adams shows you how.

CDC guidelines say that you need to get tested before being treated, This could take up to five days, and in that time YOU COULD DIE. (Your tax dollars at work.)

The cost of the test is $1000. You might be able to get a free test, and you might not.

The meds (hydrochloroquine and azithromycin, already approved for malaria) cost about $20.

Ace of Spades is on the case.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

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In case you’re feeling the pinch.

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As of now, that fuel is carbon monoxide, but the team’s goal is to produce methanol.

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I am not making this up.

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The broad-spectrum antiviral was developed by US drug firm Gilead for Ebola and was used to treat the Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey when she suffered a relapse 18 months after being cleared of the disease which she contracted while volunteering in Sierra Leone.

Currently remdesivir is being tested in five Covid-19 clinical trials including by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) on 13 patients hospitalised after contracting coronavirus on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan.

The first person to test positive with the virus in the US was also treated with drug and has since fully recovered.

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In what he called a “game-changer or maybe not,” President Donald Trump on Thursday directed the Food and Drug Administration to clear regulatory hurdles and move toward expanding use of a malaria drug to battle the coronavirus.

The drug chloroquine has shown “very, very encouraging early results,” Trump said during the daily press conference on the coronavirus disease, which health officials call COVID-19. The drug has been used to treat malaria since 1944.

“If treatments … in Europe, Japan, or other nations are known to be safe against the virus, we’ll use that information to protect the health and safety of the American people,” Trump said….

Good. I doubt that we’d get this kind of cut-through-the-red-tape action out of one of the Deep State Usual Suspects like, oh, Mitt Romney or one of the Democrat Presidential candidates.

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This is not chloroquine but something that the Japanese developed.

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You heard it here first.

If we left it up to the bureaucrats at the FDA, of course, we wouldn’t have anything before ‘twelve to eighteen months’. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Trump Waives FDA Regulations, Opening Door For Chloroquine And Other Drugs To Be Used For Coronavirus Therapy

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Something to do while you’re waiting for the proles to calm down.

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Cement and concrete haven’t changed much as technology in over a hundred years, but researchers in Colorado are revolutionizing building materials by literally bringing them to life. The method developed, presented on January 15, 2020, in the journal Matter, combines sand and bacteria to build a living material that has structural load-bearing and biological function.

The team created a scaffold out of sand and hydrogel for the bacteria to grow in. The hydrogel retains moisture and nutrients for the bacteria to proliferate and mineralize, a process similar to the formation of seashells in the ocean. Combining the three, the researchers created a green living material that demonstrates similar strength to cement-based mortar.

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“If we were to have simply cut out the lung alone, awaiting a transplant, the patient’s condition would continue to be life-threatening,” Dr. Yuri Faischowitz, director of the Chiropractic Unit for Beilinson, told Ynet News.

So, the doctors decided to try a new process of removing the lung and cleaning it. The operation was a tricky one as the patient had to breathe through his right lung while the surgeons cut off the left lung. He had to continue breathing in this manner until the lung was cleansed from the tumor and re-inflated to check that it was still functioning.

“While we were inflating it, we saw that the upper lobe of the lung remained healthy,” explained Faischowitz, “so we were able to transplant it back.”

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Michael Levitt praised Israel for its preventative measures. He said most people are naturally immune, and that since the infection rate in China is slowing down, “the end of the pandemic is near.”

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According to the National University of Singapore (NUS), only 40 percent of discarded tires are recycled – the rest are either burned to generate power, or thrown in landfills. Now, however, the university has developed a method of converting old tire rubber into a high-value aerogel.

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Oklo, a developer of a micro nuclear reactor design that it claims will be a technological leap ahead of current operating power reactors, has become the first of the so-called “advanced reactors” to submit a combined construction and operating license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the company said Tuesday.

The submission comes weeks after NRC staff decided to begin work on a streamlined process for reviewing the environmental impacts of advanced reactors, a move that the staff estimated could cut the length of the years-long approval process by 25%, but also a decision that has been criticized by nuclear watchdog groups.

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Stuck rationing toilet paper because you didn’t stockpile during the coronavirus panic over the last few days? Don’t worry, according to supply chain experts.

“All the grocery stores are going to have pallets of toilet paper sitting in the aisles, and nobody is going to buy it, because who needs to buy toilet paper when you’ve got a year’s worth sitting in your garage?” Daniel Stanton, a supply chain expert and author of “Supply Chain Management for Dummies,” tells CNBC Make It.

But what about food?

Even if the COVID-19 pandemic stretches over months (President Donald Trump said it could last until August), there will be no big food shortages, especially on staples like milk, eggs, cheese, bread and meat, according to three supply chain experts who spoke to Make It.

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Cambridge University Press is making higher education textbooks in HTML format free to access online during the coronavirus outbreak.

Over 700 textbooks, published and currently available, on Cambridge Core are available regardless of whether textbooks were previously purchased.

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Researchers at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford have discovered a new toolkit that may help repair DNA breaks that are linked to aging, cancer, and even motor neuron disease. The key to this toolkit lies in a protein called TEX264.

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Encouraging news: three new medical studies show a commonly available anti-malaria drug known as chloroquine aka chloroquine phosphate is showing strong results against COVID-19 infections in both China and South Korea. Excerpts from three studies, including one published in Nature are below.

Told you so.

Next up: Many government-connected doctors and professors who poo-poo these studies and deny that any effective drug has been found.

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Never let a crisis go to waste.

My wife is being set to work from home during the Current Crisis, and that means using my desk since hers is a blizzard of odd papers. So I won’t be able to hover obsessively over the news feeds as is my wont, and the blogging will be (probably) lighter then usual. (Or maybe not. You know me.)

If you get the Wuhan SARS-2, ask your doctor about Chloroquine, an already-available anti-malarial drug that has been demonstrated effective against the Wuhan SARS-2 virus.

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I guess Trump was right … again.

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Mice get all the neat stuff.

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Some bacteria and viruses have lipid membranes that resemble double-layered micelles with two bands of hydrophobic tails sandwiched between two rings of hydrophilic heads. These membranes are studded with important proteins that allow viruses to infect cells and perform vital tasks that keep bacteria alive. Pathogens wrapped in lipid membranes include coronaviruses, H.I.V., the viruses that cause hepatitis B and C, herpes, Ebola, Zika, dengue, and numerous bacteria that attack the intestines and respiratory tract.

When you wash your hands with soap and water, you surround any microorganisms on your skin with soap molecules. The hydrophobic tails of the free-floating soap molecules attempt to evade water; in the process, they wedge themselves into the lipid envelopes of certain microbes and viruses, prying them apart.

“They act like crowbars and destabilize the whole system,” said Prof. Pall Thordarson, acting head of chemistry at the University of New South Wales. Essential proteins spill from the ruptured membranes into the surrounding water, killing the bacteria and rendering the viruses useless.

Told you so.

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Viruses aren’t considered to be alive in the technical sense, but are more like nano-robot warheads that operate strictly by mechanical-chemical operation — once they bump up against a target cell, something on the outside of the virus binds to something on the outside of the cell and this event triggers the remaining processes that proceed automatically.

If you look at the diagram accompanying this article, you’ll see that the ‘payload’ of the virus is contained in a ‘lipid membrane’. Apparently hand-washing and other cleaning methods are effective against the coronavirus because soaps and other surfactants destroy this ‘lipid membrane’ and cause the virus to disintegrate. (It doesn’t ‘kill’ the virus, which isn’t really alive, but the effect is much the same.)

UPDATE: SARS-CoV-2 Point of Entry Into Cells Captured by Cryo-EM

UPDATE: How Long Does the Coronavirus Last on Surfaces?

UPDATE: A human monoclonal 1 antibody blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection

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It begins with the proprietary SeaQuantum Skate silyl acrylate-based coating being applied to the ship’s hull. While this resists biofouling all on its own, it’s also designed to not be damaged by the HullSkater robot, which is the system’s other main component.

That robot stays aboard the ship full-time, in a portable station that includes a launch and recovery ramp. An internet-based system – which monitors the ship’s status and location, along with marine conditions – lets the crew know when hull-cleanings should be performed. The ship has to be anchored or docked at the time.

Once launched, the HullSkater clings to the underside of the vessel using its four magnetized wheels. Motors in each of those wheels proceed to move it along, while a rotating brush on its front end preemptively scours away the “biofilm” that forms in advance of outright biofouling.

Not quite a Roomba for the ship’s hull, but close.

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Speed the day.

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I’ll refrain from making the obvious joke.

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Researchers from Canterbury Christ Church University have confirmed that human remains kept in a southeastern English church are almost certainly those of St Eanswythe. Dating back to the seventh-century, these are the earliest verified remains of a medieval English Saint.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Valley Authority have signed a memorandum of understanding to evaluate a new generation of flexible, cost-effective advanced nuclear reactors.

Under the agreement, ORNL and TVA will collaborate on ways to improve the economic feasibility of potentially licensing, building, operating and maintaining one or more advanced nuclear reactors, such as a small modular reactor, at TVA’s 935-acre Clinch River site in East Tennessee. Such advanced reactors offer the potential of lower-cost carbon-free energy through reduced construction times and greater operational flexibility. TVA has not made a decision to build and would first need approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a specific design.

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The combined $39.7 million in contracts are from “Project Pele,” a project run through the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), located within the department’s research and engineering side. The prototype is looking at a 1-5 megawatt (MWe) power range. The Department of Energy has been supporting the project at its Idaho National Laboratory.

Pele “involves the development of a safe, mobile and advanced nuclear microreactor to support a variety of Department of Defense missions such as generating power for remote operating bases,” said Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a department spokesman. “After a two-year design-maturation period, one of the companies funded to begin design work may be selected to build and demonstrate a prototype.”

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Small-scale nuclear reactors are starting to be developed around the world. Proponents say they are a safer and cheaper form of nuclear power. But will they keep up with renewables?

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Pennsylvania’s largest public employee union needs to stop evading a landmark Supreme Court ruling, an art teacher argues in a lawsuit that could undo key provisions of state labor laws.

The Pennsylvania State Education Association continues to negotiate provisions to give it “fair share fees” in collective bargaining agreements, despite the fact that the highest court in the land ruled those fees unconstitutional, a lawyer who represents the art teacher told The Daily Signal in an interview.

‘We don’t obey the law. Only the little people obey the law.’

This blog stays on Nature’s Time all year ’round.

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God alone knows why — I mean, any liquid you need to load up with cream and sugar to make it drinkable has something wrong with it.

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Cropster started as a tool to lift coffee producers out of poverty. Now it has a bigger mission: to save the entire global food supply.

No pressure, but….

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Yet another in a long series of ‘journalism’ that starts out by insulting its readers. Gets tiring after a while.

In a recent study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we compared the complete genomes of over 100 organisms (mostly animals), to study how the animal kingdom has evolved at the genetic level. Our results show that the origins of major groups of animals, such as the one comprising humans, are linked not to the addition of new genes but to massive gene losses.