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The Department of Energy is putting down its guns and withdrawing troops in the war on the incandescent bulb that began in 2007. It’s pretty late in the day; the last factory to make them in the U.S. shut down in 2010. It’s hard to find them in a store, in which case: thank goodness for Amazon!

Still, the damage can be reversed. Our houses can again be warm and beautiful, and legally. You can turn on the lights in the morning and not have your eyes lacerated by blindingly fake electric “light.” As the Wall Street Journal summed up the current moment: “If you like old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, you can keep buying them.”

God bless Trump.

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team of engineers, dentists, and biologists from the University of Pennsylvania developed a microscopic robotic cleaning crew.

With two types of robotic systems one designed to work on surfaces and the other to operate inside confined spaces the scientists showed that robots with catalytic activity could ably destroy biofilms, sticky amalgamations of bacteria enmeshed in a protective scaffolding.

I’ve been waiting for this.

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Especially to your credit card.

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Trump keeps hitting them out of the park.

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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A material that remains a superconductor when heated to the boiling point of water has been predicted by physicists in China. Hanyu Liu, Yanming Ma and colleagues at Jilin University have calculated that lithium magnesium hydride will superconduct at temperatures as high as 473 K (200 °C).

The catch is that the hydrogen-rich material must be crushed at 250 GPa, which is on par with pressures at the centre of the Earth. While such a pressure could be achieved in the lab, it would be very difficult to perform an experiment to verify the prediction. The team’s research could, however, lead to the discovery of more practical high-temperature superconductors.

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How convenient.

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The NTSB released its final report today on a crash involving a Tesla Model S smashing into the back of a fire truck that took place in Culver City, CA, on January 22, 2018.

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…a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. At its heart is a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), that acts like a sponge: It sucks water vapor out of air, even in the desert, and then releases it as liquid water.

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To build the prototype, the researchers installed a water distiller on the back of a solar cell. When in sunlight, the cell produces electricity and releases heat like a typical solar panel. But instead of sending that heat back into the atmosphere, the device directs it to the distiller, which uses the heat as an energy source to power the desalination process.

Very clever.

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Researchers at the University of Göttingen have developed a new method that takes advantage of the unusual properties of graphene to electromagnetically interact with fluorescing (light-emitting) molecules. This method allows scientists to optically measure extremely small distances, in the order of 1 ångström (one ten-billionth of a meter) with high accuracy and reproducibility for the first time. This enabled researchers to optically measure the thickness of lipid bilayers, the stuff that makes the membranes of all living cells. The results were published in Nature Photonics.

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Of all the scandals in which Ilhan Omar is enmeshed, one might think the Daily Mail’s revelation this past July of her affair with political consultant Tim Mynett would be the least of them. The news last week of Beth Mynett’s divorce filing, however, has begun to disillusion a Somali community that has taken Omar at face value. Not cool — not cool at all, and it has thrown Omar off her game.

Omar’s denial of the affair is a lie that is both obvious and bald-faced. She has therefore run from the tabloid newspapers and the local media as they have sought to report on the scandal. See, for example, Emily Bowden’s New York Post article and accompanying video “Ilhan Omar dodges questions from The Post about alleged affair.”

For Omar, offense has always proved the best defense. In this scandal she has run out of plays.

As with all corrupt Democrat politicians, it will catch up with her.

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Apparently the plastic erasers that curators ordinarily use to clean manuscripts can non-destructively remove enough DNA-containing material for analysis.

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Funny thing how Trump ‘keeps trying to destroy the economy’ and yet the economy keeps not getting destroyed. Is puzzle.

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The structure of ultra-white beetle scales could hold the key to making bright-white sustainable paint using recycled plastic waste, scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered.

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Scientists say they’ve found artifacts in Idaho that indicate people were living there around 16,000 years ago, providing new evidence that the first Americans arrived here by following the Pacific Coast.

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Nuclear scientists and engineers have not been idle over the last decade in designing new small nuclear reactors that can’t melt down, and that will be essential to address our environmental and industrial needs in the coming decades.

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A new study, published in Psychiatry Research, has concluded that psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders.

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The successor to silicon may be upon us.

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That’s a nicer chain than any job I ever had.

Seriously, when I worked at Dewey Ballantine after college, my office was ten times nicer than my apartment — the furniture was more comfortable, people came in every day to clean, the caterer came around twice a day with the snack trolley, the library had interesting books I could read on the firm’s dime, the cafeteria had nice food that I didn’t have to cook — every way an improvement.

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US Magistrate Judge Virginia Demarchi, of the Northern District of California, has ruled that unlocking a device such as an iPhone is “inherently testimonial.” She said it amounted to forcing incriminating testimony from an individual.

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I’m good with that.

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We have the technology.

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And it will never belong to a union. Win-win.

Hurry up with the ones that replace teachers, please.

UPDATE: What Percentage Of U.S. Workers Are Union Members?

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

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Figure ten to fifteen years before it finds its way to your dentist.

Just sayin’.

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Take a guess.

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If I had to watch a graphene film I wouldn’t be biting either.

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Prediction:

1. Nobody gets fired.
2. Nobody goes to jail.
3. DemLegHump Media will whine about it forever.

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Well, that was easy…

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Japan is robotizing not only manufacturing but also the service sector.

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The FBI and IRS raided the home of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) Chief President Gary Jones Wednesday and discovered wads of cash.

As many as 12 agents enacted a “knock and announce” protocol as they raided Jones’s Detroit home, according to the Detroit Free Press. Authorities also raided the former UAW chief’s California home, Dennis Williams, the UAW Michigan conference center, and several other UAW spots in Wisconsin and Missouri.

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How about that GREAT government provided health care! Oh, wait….

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Well. There it is.

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

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I am tempted to say ‘women and minorities hardest hit’, but I refrain.

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Scott Adams explains it all to you.

You can skip the first 14 minutes, which deals with politics. Or you can watch it – your call.

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This is a big week for the Minnesota media. They are now permitting their consumers to catch up with the news delivered last month by the Daily Mail. That is, Ilhan Omar has separated from the husband she just got around to marrying last year (i.e., Ahmed Hirsi) and taken up with a married man (i.e., Tim Mynett) who works for her as a consultant. The Daily Mail even tracked down the expensive apartment into which Omar has moved and tracked down Ahmed Hirsi in Minneapolis for a “no comment.” The Minnesota media haven’t gotten there yet, but they have opened the door to the subject.

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Or you could get the Knots 3D app for your phone (although I don’t think the phone will actually tie the knot for you).

The water knot is the start for a lot of necktie knots.

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A research team from India’s IIT (Institute of Technology) Madras has officially developed the world’s first iron-ion battery, which promises a low-cost stable alternative to the existing mainstream lithium-ion battery.

Asok’s alma mater.

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‘Bio-concrete’ is infused with limestone-producing bacteria in capsule form, along with calcium lactate. The bacteria that Jonkers used, either Bacillus pseudofirmus or Sporosarcina pasteurii, thrive in alkaline conditions and are found naturally in highly alkaline lakes near volcanoes. Being mixed with concrete and distributed evenly throughout it, they can lay there in a dormant state for up to 200 years; only when the concrete cracks, air and moisture awaken the bacteria which use the calcium lactate as a food source and start to produce limestone, sealing off the cracks in 3 weeks’ time. The technology, currently able to seal cracks of any length but only up to 0.8 mm wide, was a finalist for the European Inventor Award 2015, an initiative of the European Patent Office (EPO).

We have the technology.

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Is there anything a YouTube video can’t do?

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The U.S. ought to move it’s capital to Wichita. Warren Buffet could take over the Treasury and we’d all breathe easier.

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An interesting notion.

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National developers are behind the proliferation of luxury apartments near college campuses, and they’re driving low-income students farther away.

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That Elon — just burnin’ it up.

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It’s amazing how many ’emergency’ taxes become effectively permanent.

In the U.S., the Federal government in 1898 established an excise tax on long-distance telephone calls to help pay for the Spanish-American War.

Since 2006, after litigation, the tax is no longer collected … because the way telephone services are billed no longer falls within the definition in the statute. It remains, however, on the books.

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In their study, the researchers teleported the quantum state of one photon (light particle) to another distant one. Previously, only two-level states (“qubits”) had been transmitted, i.e., information with values “0” or “1”. However, the scientists succeeded in teleporting a three-level state, a so-called “qutrit”. In quantum physics, unlike in classical computer science, “0” and “1” are not an ‘either/or’ – both simultaneously, or anything in between, is also possible. The Austrian-Chinese team has now demonstrated this in practice with a third possibility “2”.

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While some researchers theorise that nuclear fusion is just around the corner, we have yet to see a reactor that can successfully recreate the power of the sun for any useful length of time. However, a physicist at the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has developed a mathematical technique that simplifies the design of complex magnetic coils within the twisty machines that house fusion reactions.

Using this new technique, these machines, referred to as stellarators, could be made significantly cheaper, which would potentially bring nuclear fusion within closer reach.

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Which just might have saved the owner’s life. Just sayin’.