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In a world-first, an ESA-led team has built and fired an electric thruster to ingest scarce air molecules from the top of the atmosphere for propellant, opening the way to satellites flying in very low orbits for years on end

…

There are no valves or complex parts – everything works on a simple, passive basis. All that is needed is power to the coils and electrodes, creating an extremely robust drag-compensation system.

As best I can figure, this works similarly to the magnetohydrodynamic drive made famous in The Hunt For Red October.

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Inside the gin bottle was a note written in German and dated 12 June 1886. Ms Illman’s husband, Tim Illman, later helped translate the note.

The Western Australian Museum (WAM) confirmed the authenticity of the find, saying it believed the bottle was thrown from a German sailing ship attempting to find efficient shipping routes.

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Judge Titus noted early on that the issue before him is not whether DACA is lawful. Rather, the issue is whether the Trump administration “made a reasoned decision to rescind DACA based on the Administrative Record.” “Any alternative inquiry,” he wrote, “would impermissibly require a court to “substitute its judgment for that of the agency.”

…

Judge Titus also found that “the Administrative Record — the basis from which the Court must make its judicial review — does not support the notion that [the president’s order] was targeting a subset of the immigrant population, and it does not support any supposition that the decision was derived on a racial animus.” He rejected the argument that Trump’s harsh comments about illegal immigrants, and others, provide a basis for invalidating a program as improperly motivated.

A judge who doesn’t pretend to be a mind-reader. How refreshing.

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Applying to everything from the pictures researchers take in the library’s reading rooms to the 1.7 million high-resolution Newberry images currently available online, the revised policy is intended to encourage users to interact more freely with collection items as they produce new scholarly and creative work.

For anybody interested in medieval books, this is great news.

Lileks.

Definition: To recognize someone but ignore them (Merriam-Webster Online).

I’ve been doing that for decades; didn’t know there was a word for it.

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On Monday, CaliBurger started its newest “employee,” a learning robot that can cook 150 hamburgers an hour. Flippy doesn’t just flip hamburgers, he exposes why raising the minimum-wage hurts workers.

Flippy, built my Miso Robotics, uses thermal imaging to tell it precisely when to flip each patty, allowing for more or less perfect consistency. And it supposedly will get smarter the more burgers it flips, and various attachments will eventually let it handle other aspects of the burger-making process.

…

In some respects, automation like Flippy is an inevitability, as computers and robotics get increasingly sophisticated. Replacing workers with robots has been going on for decades.

But raising the minimum wage will accelerate this trend by making even costly robots a better deal than increasingly expensive, minimally skilled workers.

Yup. Minimum-wage raisers are terminally ignorant of elementary economics, and their constituents are the ones who will suffer for it.

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Reminds me of the old Monty Python advertisement: ‘It’s a foot ointment! And a laundry detergent!’

Check it out.

For those of you who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you might like.

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Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

If they can give me better services than my bank, I’m in.

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The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against the Wi-Fi Alliance – a non-profit based in Austin, Texas, that promotes Wi-Fi technology and standards – for allegedly laying off an employee because of his ongoing military service obligations.

The government’s complaint, filed on behalf of Charles O’Donnell, a Lieutenant Colonel with the US Army Reserve, claimed the alliance violated the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) of 1994, a law designed to prevent private employers from discriminating against military personnel for fulfilling service obligations.

In a statement, John Gore, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, said on Thursday the complaint underscores the DoJ’s commitment to protecting members of the military. “The men and women of our armed services expect and are entitled to the peace of mind of knowing that their civilian employment will not be jeopardized because they serve our country,” he said.

Pity that we have to depend on a British tech site to report on this incident. Austin is, of course, the Blue pustule on the rosy Red butt of Texas; the state topography is such that all Leftys drain into Travis County (unless they can catch ahold of the other major metropolitan areas in the state).

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Diabetes – or uncontrolled blood sugar levels – is normally split into type 1 and type 2.

But researchers in Sweden and Finland think the more complicated picture they have uncovered will usher in an era of personalised medicine for diabetes.

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American singer and model Taylor Muhl has always had a unique birthmark in the shape of different skin pigmentation divided by a line running straight down the middle of her torso.

It wasn’t till Muhl investigated this that she learned she was one of around only 100 people ever to have a rare condition called chimerism, which means she has two sets of DNA.

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Mark Janus remembers getting his first pay check from the Illinois Department of Public Health, where he works as a bookkeeper, and wondering about the $50 fee deducted to pay dues to a union he’d never agreed to join.

More than a decade later, the disagreement over that fee has brought Janus before the U.S. Supreme Court, as the plaintiff in a case that could change the landscape of public sector unionism in the United States. The high court will hear oral arguments in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees(AFSCME) on Monday morning. Janus and his attorneys are asking the court to overturn a previous decision and “declare [mandatory public sector union] fees unconstitutional.”

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A New York court has dismissed a lawsuit against Google by authors who accused the internet giant of digitally copying millions of books for an online library without permission.

US circuit judge Denny Chin, in Manhattan, accepted Google’s argument that its scanning of more than 20m books, and making snippets of text available for online searches, constituted fair use under US copyright law.

The fact remains that so-called ‘intellectual property’ is not ‘property’ in the sense that the term in used both in the law and in ordinary use. Property is something that, when you have it, other people don’t and can’t use it. You and I can both have and enjoy a copy of a book or a TV show or a poem or a software program at the same time without interfering with anyone else doing the same thing. Copyright is an artificial government-created and government-enforced monopoly designed in pursuit of a particular public policy agenda, as the U.S. Constitution makes clear and most writing on the subject admits. Calling it ‘property’ is an intellectual verbal shell game, like software ‘piracy’ and ‘price gouging’. The world would be a better place if people were just honest.

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The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the midwest. America’s urban coastal cities have enjoyed an explosion in their technology sectors. New York’s Silicon Alley and Boston’s biotech corridor are world-class incubators of talent and startups. Austin (Texas), Seattle (Washington), Washington, D.C, and even Miami Beach claim a piece of the digital economy (and Silicon-something monikers).

But what about Columbus and Indianapolis and Kansas City? After years in the doldrums, their fortunes are rising. Venture capital firms are setting up shop. Startups are clustering in old industrial strongholds. But the region’s tech sectors look different than their coastal cousins.

The midwest is seeing the rise of “mid-tech.”

Alongside the traditional high-flying software jobs that are plentiful in Silicon Valley, mid-tech jobs, loosely defined as tech jobs requiring less than a college degree, are growing fast in the Midwest. While not an official designation, mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesn’t require a college degree: just intense, focused training on the job or in vocational programs like those of blue-collar trades of the industrial past.

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

Steve Sailer tells you what the DemLegHump Media won’t.

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When trying to memorise new material, it’s easy to assume that the more work you put in, the better you will perform. Yet taking the occasional down time – to do literally nothing – may be exactly what you need. Just dim the lights, sit back, and enjoy 10-15 minutes of quiet contemplation, and you’ll find that your memory of the facts you have just learnt is far better than if you had attempted to use that moment more productively.

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The arrival of the robotic arm was not a happy affair at Professional Finishing in Richmond, California, just across the bay from San Francisco. In contrast to the hulking factory arms that have traditionally labored in isolation, this robot was meant to work right alongside humans, delicately sanding and painting things like speaker cases or cabinets for medical devices. Which sounded a lot like a first step toward replacing the company’s workers altogether.

“We did have one employee tell us, ‘Hey let me know when the robot’s up and running and I’ll just quit,’” says Professional Finishing co-owner Dawn White. “We said, just bear with us. Watch what happens. Help us and everybody will keep their jobs.”

Everyone did indeed keep their jobs. Today, three of these machines from Universal Robots handle the brute sanding and painting, while humans handle more complicated tasks like assembly. Some of these workers even turned into robot technicians. It’s called collaborative robotics, and it’s popping up all over the place, thanks to advanced machines that sense when they’ve contacted a person and stop, as opposed to launching them across the room.

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A chemical bath and a hot-press can transform wood into a material that is stronger than steel, researchers report. The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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And about time, too.

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Researchers believe people have begun evolving so they find it so unpleasant it could stop our species from drinking in the future.

I’m already there. I’ve attempted to drink alcoholic beverages, from beer to whisky, and it all tastes like particularly nasty medicine. Yuk.

Hear me, America! I am your future!

(You are in SO much trouble….)

UPDATE: Alcohol Is the Strongest Risk Factor for Dementia (2018)  Heh.

Juliette Wade tells you more than you ever wanted to know.

This week’s topic was inspired by our brief chat about the character Kalr 5 in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword, who is a total connoisseur of dishes. They feature in Alice in Wonderland, and they get their own special scene in The Hobbit. But there’s a lot more to think about here.

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Well. Let’s see whether it works.

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When Mark Gaskell moved to California after working in coffee-growing regions in Central America, he noticed coffee plants growing in gardens and wondered if large-scale production was an option.

In 2001, Gaskell, farm advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension, established transplants and discovered that the sub-tropical plants could thrive in the Golden State. He recruited Jay Ruskey of Good Land Organics to help with trials, hoping coffee could be a valuable niche crop to help sustain small farms.

Ruskey started growing coffee in 2002 on his Santa Barbara, Calif., farm and quickly became a passionate coffee farmer.

“We learned that we had the ability to grow very good coffee with a very unique flavor,” Ruskey explains. “There is a misconception that you can’t grow coffee outside the Tropic of Cancer.”

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

The N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antagonist ketamine has attracted enormous interest in mental health research owing to its rapid antidepressant actions, but its mechanism of action has remained elusive. Here we show that blockade of NMDAR-dependent bursting activity in the ‘anti-reward center’, the lateral habenula (LHb), mediates the rapid antidepressant actions of ketamine in rat and mouse models of depression. LHb neurons show a significant increase in burst activity and theta-band synchronization in depressive-like animals, which is reversed by ketamine. Burst-evoking photostimulation of LHb drives behavioural despair and anhedonia. Pharmacology and modelling experiments reveal that LHb bursting requires both NMDARs and low-voltage-sensitive T-type calcium channels (T-VSCCs). Furthermore, local blockade of NMDAR or T-VSCCs in the LHb is sufficient to induce rapid antidepressant effects. Our results suggest a simple model whereby ketamine quickly elevates mood by blocking NMDAR-dependent bursting activity of LHb neurons to disinhibit downstream monoaminergic reward centres, and provide a framework for developing new rapid-acting antidepressants.

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Light is made up of photons—speedy, tiny packets of energy. Typically, photons do not interact with each other at all, which is why when using flashlights “you don’t see the light beams bounce off each other, you see them go through each other,” explains Sergio Cantu, a Ph.D. candidate in atomic physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In new experiments, however, the physicists coaxed individual photons to cozy up to each other and link, similar to the way individual atoms stick together in molecules.

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Putting it all together in one place.

1. There Have Already Been 18 Mass Shootings in 2018

2. Trump Signed a Bill That Makes It Easier for Mentally Ill People to Get Guns

3. More Guns Means More Crime

4. It’s Easy to Buy a Gun

5. Gun Control Works in Other Countries

6. The Second Amendment Is Obsolete and Doesn’t Apply Today

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And about time, too.

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Yup, we still have ’em. The Great Forest of Electrons.

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You know, as they do.

Well, people said Hong Kong would go to the dogs when it reverted to Communist rule; I guess they were close.

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Sounds about right.

Hmm. Perhaps we could combine this with the border fence….

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If we depend on dentists to do this, it ain’t gonna get done, since then they would be out of work.

My idea of an ideal visit to the dentist is, I sit down in the chair, I get a small cup of fluid containing appropriate nannies, I swish that around in my mouth for a bit, and I leave with clean teeth.

Of course, eventually you’ll be able to do that at home. Bad news for the dentists.

Perhaps this will mark the demise of the ‘dentist’ as a separate medical speciality from ‘medical doctor’.

Even wonder why insurance companies distinguish between ‘dental benefits’ and ‘medical benefits’?

I think about these things.

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No matter what you do, the house just sits there.

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The U.S. Marine Corps wants to form an Irregular Warfare Regiment (IWR) that would be a cross between the French Foreign Legion and the U.S. Army Special Forces. The IWR would have 4,200 troops and about 3,000 would be foreign born and selected because they were physically and mentally able to enlist and had language and cultural awareness skills the marines needed in various parts of the world. All officers and NCOs above the rank of E-5 (sergeant) would be U.S. citizens. If the program is established eventually many IWR officers and senior NCOs would be naturalized citizens. In effect, a foreign legion composed mostly of foreign volunteers seeking a quicker path to citizenship and able to meet Marine Corps standards.

This is an idea that the late Dr. Jerry Pournelle pushed for decades.

Or maybe being a Marine is turning into just another job that Americans ‘won’t do’.

Tuvalu is growing, not shrinking, new research shows

Sinking island nation of Tuvalu is actually growing

‘Sinking’ Pacific nation Tuvalu is actually getting bigger, new research reveals

Pacific nation Tuvalu has grown by 73 hectares over 40 years

Pacific islands ‘growing not shrinking’ due to climate change

And, for the cognitive dissonant True Believers:

Small atoll islands may grow, not sink, as sea levels rise

Uh, yeah — as sea levels rise, small islands grow rather than shrink. I see.

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

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Reality always intrudes eventuallly.

The Usual Suspects will, of course, have a cow. Their fantasy land is so fragile that any chink that lets daylong in might suffice for the whole thing to come crashing down.

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Well, that explains Democrat Congressmen. Isn’t science wonderful?

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A California judge ruled Monday the state couldn’t force a cake shop owner to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, ruling that doing so would constitute a violation of free speech.

Superior Court Judge David Lampe denied the State of California’s request for a preliminary injunction that sought to force bakeshop owner Cathy Miller to design a wedding cake for a gay couple.

An outbreak of sanity in the Land of Fruits and Nuts.

Now let’s see if it lasts.

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Well. There it is.

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High concentrations of heavy metals, like copper and gold, are toxic for most living creatures. This is not the case for the bacterium C. metallidurans, which has found a way to extract valuable trace elements from a compound of heavy metals without poisoning itself. One interesting side-effect: the formation of tiny gold nuggets. A team of researchers from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Adelaide in Australia has discovered the molecular processes that take place inside the bacteria. The group presented their findings in the renowned journal Metallomics published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Kind of like Congressmen that way.

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Over the past months a spate of scientific papers published show sea level rise has not accelerated like many climate warming scientists warned earlier. The reality is that the rise is far slower than expected, read here and here.

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We have the technology — or will soon.

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Crispr, the promising new gene editing technology, promises to eradicate the world of human suffering—but for all the hype and hope, it hasn’t actually cured humans of anything, yet. Medical researchers have the cargo, now they just have to figure out the delivery route.

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With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

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In extending Temporary Protected Status to some 7,000 Syrians currently in the US, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that war-convulsed country remained unsafe for them to return.

“It is clear that the conditions upon which Syria’s designation was based continue to exist, therefore an extension is warranted under the statute,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement.

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Was AlGore in Morocco for some reason?

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We have the technology.

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Well, I’ve always thought so. But that’s me.