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Until now, archaeozoologists have been unable to reconstruct the earliest stages of domestication: the process of placing wild animals in captivity remained beyond their methodological reach.1

Using the wild boar as an experimental model, a multidisciplinary team made up of scientists from the CNRS and the French National Museum of Natural History 2 have shown that a life spent in captivity has an identifiable effect on the shape of the calcaneus, a tarsal bone that plays a propulsive role in locomotion.

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

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

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Now that’s over: a study by a Chinese research group has emerged that offers concrete proof of race differences in susceptibility to Corona virus are very real.

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The authors explain that “2019-nCov was reported to share the same receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)” as the SARS disease, an outbreak of which in 2003 seemed almost exclusively to kill Northeast Asians.

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You might already be familiar with SETI@Home. This uses spare processing power from personal computers all around the world to analyze data from radio telescopes, looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. That program is ceasing at the end of the month, as the university now has enough results to do a back-end analysis to make sense of it all…

But there’s a similar distributed computing project geared to finding cures for diseases, Folding@Home (FAH), and that has started work on trying to find a cure for the coronavirus.

So far, FAH has been working on four different cancers, three neurological diseases, and five infectious diseases.

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

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SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, SETI@home has been a popular project where people from all over the world have been donating their CPU resources to process small chunks of data, or “jobs”, for interesting radio transmissions or anomalies. This data is then sent back to the researchers for analysis.

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SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data.

UPDATE: SETI@Home Is Over. But the Search for Alien Life Continues

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A patient recently had it done at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland for an inherited form of blindness, the companies that make the treatment announced Wednesday. They would not give details on the patient or when the surgery occurred.

It may take up to a month to see if it worked to restore vision. If the first few attempts seem safe, doctors plan to test it on 18 children and adults.

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“Given that this research brings us past the known ability to split one photon into two entangled daughter photons, we’re optimistic that we’ve opened up a new area of exploration.”

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Six years ago he tried to tell the Beaverton City Council there’s a problem with its red light cameras. Then there was the State of Oregon, which fined him for practicing engineering without a license.

He had to file a federal lawsuit to continue his research to prove drivers making turns at intersections often get caught in a dilemma when they’re slowing down to make a turn and the yellow light isn’t long enough.

Järlström said he used 8th-grade math skills to prove drivers have been getting tickets they can’t avoid.

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Slicing open one of these trees or running the leaves of its bush cousin through a peanut press produces a sap that oozes a neon blue-green. This “juice” is actually one-quarter nickel, far more concentrated than the ore feeding the world’s nickel smelters.

That certainly sounds encouraging.

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Doing well by doing good.

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Rather late to the party, seems like.

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This sort of thing is why Trump was right to focus on filling judgeships and why most previous Republican administrations were seriously foolish not to do so.

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Iran has emerged as an epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak, where 15 people have died as a result of the virus, according to Iranian state news media. At least 95 people have been infected with the virus, most of them in the city of Qom, which the state news site describes as a major destination for Muslim pilgrims across the world.

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Feel free to worry about that, if you have nothing better to do.

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Jussie Smollett was back in an Illinois court on Monday, and things are not looking good for the ambitious actor.

This time, an independent special prosecutor has filed a six-count felony indictment against Smollett in Chicago and his lawyers are crying foul, claiming the state already has prosecuted him for the same conduct.

It’s going to get interesting.

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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….