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A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled against Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) in a case that could expose the online retailer to lawsuits from customers who buy defective products from third-party vendors through its website.

Numerous other courts, including two federal appeals courts, have held that Amazon cannot be held liable as a seller of products from third-party vendors. The new ruling from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which reversed a lower court decision, appeared to be the first to buck that trend.

A conflict between Circuits is a classic precursor to Supreme Court review.

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A huge development Thursday regarding enforcement of Iran sanctions and the West’s economic war on both Damascus and Tehran: British Royal Marines seized an oil tanker in Gibraltar off Spain’s southern coast while it was en route to Syria in what’s being called an unprecedented and aggressive move to enforce EU sanctions.

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Good riddance. Would that other RINOs had the character to do the same.

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Some good news for a change.

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Factory OS is in the business of designing and building homes using pre-fabricated, modular components. Its first customer was Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which in 2017 ordered 300 apartment units from the company, according to Wall Street Journal reporting from the time. The reported value of that deal was between $25 million and $30 million. Unnamed experts cited by the Wall Street Journal said that modular, pre-fabricated construction can reduce construction costs by 25 to 50 percent in the Bay Area.

In 2018, the company opened a sprawling manufacturing facility in Vallejo which can produce 2,000 to 3,000 units per year, according to local Fox affiliate KTVU. Describing the facility, the KTVU article states that, “[h]ouses will be moved along the assembly line by cranes and industrial air cushions. At two dozen assembly stations, 150 to 250 union employees will build the modules from the inside out. The modules, some as large as 16 feet by 70 feet, will likely contain two or more living units, studio sized to multi bedrooms.”

The housing units are then loaded onto trucks and shipped whole to building sites. Factory OS is currently working on developments in West Oakland and El Cirrito.

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Electroactive bacteria were unknown to science until a couple of decades ago. But now that scientists know what to look for, they’re finding this natural electricity across much of the world, even on the ocean floor. It alters entire ecosystems, and may help control the chemistry of the Earth.

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Go science.

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Researchers at the Gladstone Institutes in California have discovered a potential treatment route for the primary genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, a gene called apoE4.

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But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

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Biological molecules will last a lot longer than the latest computer storage technology, Catalog believes.

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I really hate those plastic thingies.

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Let’s see one of your pierced and tatted Starbucks baristas do that.

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Take whatever action you feel is appropriate.

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Everything good is bad for you.

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In a decision with far-reaching implications for national politics, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal courts do not have power to review partisan gerrymandering claims.

The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority. Justice Elena Kagan led the liberal bloc in dissent.

When district boundaries change to match demographic changes after every decennial census, there are going to be attempts to arrange things so that one side or the other gets an advantage. Aside from having some kind of computer algorithm do it, that’s inevitable.

Some people love the idea of having districts so evenly balanced that a little mood swing one way or the other can tip the election. I don’t, because thees people forget that the more evenly balanced the partisan makeup of a district, the more people are effectively not represented by the final winner of the contest. (Sure, Congresscritters make a lot of noise about ‘representing everybody in the district’, but that’s about as true as most Congressional utterances.)

An ideal district map would be as gerrymandered as possible, with each one being overwhelmingly toward one side or another. Sure, there would be people ‘marginalized’, but that’s always going to happen, and extreme gerrymandering minimizes the number of people who wind up taking it in the shorts. People who have been raised on professional sports teams, and the media who report on them, have been conditioned to want a ‘horse race’ that they can whoop and holler over, and they’ve forgotten the whole point of the system, which is to make people have the best shot of being represented in the legislature by somebody who feels the way they do on issues.

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I must confess that the subject didn’t occupy much of my time, but it’s interesting nevertheless.

With the possible exception of some Big Wheels or other child transportation vehicles, most tires are black. You’d be hard-pressed to find a tire shop and come across a Goodyear or Michelin sample that’s any other color.

Natural rubber, however, is closer to an off-white shade, and early-model cars sported that lighter color. Early tire makers also often added zinc oxide to their natural rubber as a way to strengthen the material, resulting in white tires. But at some point, tire manufacturers decided to go darker. Why?’

Racism would be my guess.

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This would appear to be a good fit for the new Zumwalt destroyers, whose original gun ammunition proved impossibly expensive.

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CMF (Composite metal foam) could provide superior protection against bullets and be much lighter as well, the theory was put to the test and it worked. This was done by modifying existing composite armor designs by substituting CMF for steel. This resulted in armor that weighed less and had superior stopping power. Composite armor is most widely used for tank armor. This is also called Chobham armor, after the place where it was developed in Britain during the 1960s. Composite armor used layers of metal (steel, depleted uranium and now CMF) separated by layers of ceramics to provide the most effective tank armor ever. Composite armor remains popular because it provides superior stopping power compared to the same weight of just high-quality steel plate armor. CMF takes this one step further by adding another lighter material, this time to replace some of the steel layers.

..

What makes CMF so effective is that the metal foam compresses when it is hit by a high-speed projectile.

Such as an APDS penetrator rod, the most common form of anti-tank ammunition. Chobham armor was developed to defeat shaped charge weapons, like RPGs, which is why RPGs aren’t used on tanks any more.

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The Italian government is really cracking down on the trafficking of migrants from Libya across the Mediterranean. Not only are they denying entry to the NGO migrant-ferries, they are intercepting and arresting the people-smugglers before they can return to Libya.

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It would appear that Trump has succeeded in getting ghe Mexican government’s attention.

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Doing well by doing good.

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Recently, scientists from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences cracked this intriguing black box by fully elucidating the biosynthetic pathway of MPA.

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Apparently there is a collection of such things in Dallas. Who knew?

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We developed a noninvasive stimulation procedure for modulating long-range theta interactions in adults aged 60–76 years. After 25?min of stimulation, frequency-tuned to individual brain network dynamics, we observed a preferential increase in neural synchronization patterns and the return of sender–receiver relationships of information flow within and between frontotemporal regions. The end result was rapid improvement in working-memory performance that outlasted a 50?min post-stimulation period.

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Now, biophysicist Joshua Weinstein and colleagues have invented an unorthodox type of imaging dubbed “DNA microscopy” that can do just that. Instead of relying on light (or any kind of optics at all), the team uses DNA “bar codes” to help pinpoint molecules’ relative positions within a sample.

With DNA microscopy, scientists can build a picture of cells and simultaneously amass enormous amounts of genomic information, Weinstein says. “This gives us another layer of biology that we haven’t been able to see.”

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Companies can’t advertise on social media — so they have female influencers do it for them.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was an International Yoga Day.

I’m not sure about the need for ‘breathing exercises’. Are we in danger of our lungs getting flabby?

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Most people have this idea that trade just stopped during the ‘Dark Ages’, but there were always people willing to take a risk.

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Whenever I see a picture of El Capitan I want to put a castle on top of it.

Perhaps with a Nazgul perched on it.

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THERE ARE MORE THAN 9 million dairy cows in the United States, and the vast majority of them are Holsteins, large bovines with distinctive black-and-white (sometimes red-and-white) markings. The amount of milk they produce is astonishing. So is their lineage. When researchers at the Pennsylvania State University looked closely at the male lines a few years ago, they discovered more than 99 percent of them can be traced back to one of two bulls, both born in the 1960s. That means among all the male Holsteins in the country, there are just two Y chromosomes.

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I guess being all tatted up is something we got from the Indians…?

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I guess it’s a fan.

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A useful site for people who make things.

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Swiss journalist Urs Gehriger recently visited African migrants who breached the border and hung out on the streets of San Antonio, Texas, waiting to go elsewhere in the country, and he met hostility from people who didn’t want to share details about their experiences, conflicted each other, and had rolls of $100 bills.

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You want fast food, go Chinese.

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It sounds amazing, like an organ for strings.

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Not bad for s guy who reportedly hates Jews.

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In the past, troops, of course, had their weapons with them when in a combat zone. But when not in a combat zone, troops rarely handled their weapons. The rifles and such were locked safely away in the “arms room,” and, for most troops, only taken out every week or so for cleaning, and once or twice a year for a trip to the rifle range. Combat troops would take their weapons out of the arms room when they trained, but the rifles and machine-guns still spent most of their time locked up in the arms room. After 2003 recruits spent their first three months in the army carrying around an M-16, and ammunition. The ammo was special training rounds, or “blanks”. These contained propellant, but no bullet. If one is fired, it sounds close enough to the real thing. If someone is really close (a few inches/40-70cm) to the barrel when the blank fires it can cause blast injury that can take an eye out, burst an eardrum and so on. The blanks were deadly enough to have the desired effect on the troops.

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Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer points out the obvious: Low wages create and sustain poverty, not lousy schools.

Although lousy public schools certainly contribute to the problem.

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This is Newsweek, so I’d wait for confirmation from a reliable source.

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We’ll know they’re serious when they come for #BitterBeerFace Maxine Waters and Elijah Cummings.3

BUT it could get very entertaining.

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A team of UK scientists have identified the mechanism behind hardening of the arteries, and shown in animal studies that a generic medication normally used to treat acne could be an effective treatment for the condition.

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Perhaps God is growing impatient. He sometimes does that.

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I used to do the same thing to help support myself in graduate school. It will definitely get you over any fear of needles.

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Probably good advice.

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

Why pollute the ground, where it’s your problem, when you can pollute the air, which makes it everybody’s problem?

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There have been talks about power outages for over a decade. The California Public Utilities Commission has rejected previous attempts, but following the deadly 2018 fires, allowed shutoffs under the guise of protecting public safety.

Yet this comes as California has taken nuclear power plants offline while increasing mandates for wind and solar. Nuclear power is clean and reliable; wind and solar power, while clean, are unreliable and significantly more expensive.

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Heated gloves, bracelets, and even rings are some of the potential applications of highly conductive MXene, a 2-D material made of alternating atomic layers of titanium and carbon. In a new study, researchers have fabricated MXene flakes, then electrostatically adhered the flakes to threads, and finally sewed the threads into ordinary fabrics that can be safely heated under a low voltage.

We have the technology.