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Scientists in China have synthesized spider silk from genetically modified silkworms, producing fibers six times tougher than the Kevlar used in bulletproof vests.

The study, published September 20 in the journal Matter, is the first to successfully produce full-length spider silk proteins using silkworms. The findings demonstrate a technique that could be used to manufacture an environmentally friendly alternative to synthetic commercial fibers such as nylon.

“Silkworm silk is presently the only animal silk fiber commercialized on a large scale, with well-established rearing techniques,” said Mi. “Consequently, employing genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk fiber enables low-cost, large-scale commercialization.”

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A low-carbon cement developed by two MIT grads has officially exceeded industry standards for strength, durability, and more, clearing a major hurdle to commercialization.

Sublime Systems, a startup founded by two MIT grads, has developed a process that slashes the emissions generated during cement production.

Instead of using heat to extract lime from limestone, it uses a series of electro-chemical reactions — powered by electricity from renewables — at ambient temperatures to pull the cement ingredient from the rock.

Because the CO2 that remains is pure — that is, not diluted by other exhaust gasses — it’s easier to capture and store than the emissions from the traditional process.

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Gardening is often pitched as a relaxing, therapeutic activity—and it is relaxing and therapeutic! But it’s also a sign of how advanced society has become that we can regard growing food as a charming hobby instead of an absolute necessity. On the one hand, that’s a clear sign of mankind’s mastery over the world. On the other, it’s left us remarkably dependent on a system of farming and delivery logistics that has been shown to be distressingly fragile.

Anyone who has ever successfully grown a tomato plant in their backyard has wondered if they could go “off-grid,” grow their own food, and be done with their local supermarket. The answer is yes, but that’s the wrong question. The question isn’t whether it’s possible—the question is how. It’s all about the logistics: How much space do you need to grow enough crops to feed you and your family?

Watch it. And creak along … if you can.

Like the narrator, I suck at vocal fry. (Is that a Good Thing?)

Wall Street Journal.

In one of the most consequential decisions in decades for America’s most prominent city, Hochul soon said she was indefinitely pausing congestion pricing—less than a month before it was set to take effect on Sunday, June 30.

The abrupt reversal, which some attribute to Hochul’s reluctance to impose a new fee in an election year, leaves metro New York grappling with a historic missed opportunity and fiscal mess. There is no relief in sight for the city’s traffic congestion, which is the worst in the world, according to data published last week.

The epic collapse in New York shows how a fear of dramatic change can give the status quo stubborn power over those trying to solve some of America’s most intractable challenges. That leaves policymakers nibbling at the edges of deeply rooted problems, even after investing huge sums of money and political capital.

“The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” 

— Thomas Jefferson in his 1813 letter to John Adams

Read it.

A court in Pakistan sentenced a Christian man to death for sharing what it said was hateful content against Muslims on social media after one of the worst mob attacks on Christians in the eastern Punjab province last year, his lawyer said Monday, adding he will appeal the verdict.

In August 2023, groups of Muslim men burned dozens of homes and churches in the city of Jaranwala after some residents claimed they saw two Christian men tearing out pages from Islam’s holy book, the Quran, throwing them on the ground and writing insulting remarks on other pages, authorities said. The two men were later arrested.

No casualties were reported at the time as terrified Christians fled their homes to safer areas. Though the police arrested more than 100 suspects following the attacks, it remained unclear if any were convicted.

What would it be like if Muslims were sentenced to death for posting hateful content about Christians? Well, there would be a lot of dead Muslims….

ZMan is not impressed with Joe Biden … or his handlers.

Since the Thursday night debate at which Joe Biden looked like a hospice patient, there have been competing theories about whether it was a setup in order to push Biden out of the way or whether it was just another screwup. Basically, we have two competing theories of the crime. One says it is the work of those mysterious people in the hollowed-out volcano who control the world and the other theory says it is the work of people who are too stupid to run the machine they inherited.

The hollowed-out volcano theory side had the momentum on Thursday night as regime media started bellowing for Biden to step aside. It had the feel of that first weekend of the Ukraine war when every talking hairdo on television had a Ukraine flag lapel pin and was spasmodically saying “keev” at one another. The same people who were telling one another that Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack were suddenly competing with one another to condemn his family for rolling him out on stage.

The Other McCain.

We’re living in a 21st-century Salem, and the folks who want to hang witches all claim to be “progressive.” Basically anybody who votes Republican nowadays is suspected of witchcraft — “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi”! — and whatever actual danger there may be from such extremism is obscured by the hysterical paranoia of self-appointed witch-hunters like Casey Newton.

If everybody is a Nazi, nobody is Nazi. If you start exaggerating the extent of extremism by expanding the definition to include anyone you disagree with, don’t pretend that your diminished credibility is anyone’s fault but your own. That’s basically what happened to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which began putting dots on its annual “Hate Map” to represent alleged threats that reasonable people might doubt were very harmful. One of the tricks the SPLC employed was to list every local chapter of, e.g., the Eagle Forum as a separate “hate group.”

Read it.

The number of people with criminal convictions caught entering the United States illegally per month so far this fiscal year has risen to a record high, data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) show.

Washington Free Beacon.

The Biden administration is flying previously deported Cameroonians whose asylum claims were determined to be invalid back into the United States, according to interviews with Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff and internal agency memos reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The program, which has not been announced to the public, appears to be a response to a February 2022 Human Rights Watch report about dozens of Cameroonians deported between 2019 and 2021 and then allegedly mistreated by their government. An estimated 80 to 90 Cameroonians were deported during that period of time.

But now some are arriving back in the United States under a program with little precedent, both current and former ICE officials say. All of the individuals deported under the previous administration were found not to have valid asylum claims in the United States.

Read it.

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect—sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of them detects the attractive, relatively low levels of salt that make potato chips taste delicious. The other one registers high levels of salt—enough to make overly salted food offensive and deter overconsumption.

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English- speakers now tend to associate words drawn from Germanic roots with the ordinary and everyday, not the theoretical and academic, however technical their original usage might have been. Trying to use them as scientific vocabulary sounds folksy and quaint, so earthlore was never likely to catch on. Perhaps the most familiar form of lore, folklore, was coined in 1846 deliberately to evoke these associations: the word’s inventor wanted what he called a ‘good Saxon compound’ to describe the oral traditions of ‘the People’. Ironically, that’s not what lore would have implied to an Anglo-Saxon at all. The lore/ology distinction follows this well-established pattern: lore suggests oral, not written; anecdotal, not source-based; intuitive, not scientific. Where two bodies of knowledge about the same topic co-exist, the distinction can be a useful one. Think for instance of the difference between meteorology and weather-lore, the scientific study of weather versus knowledge about the subject gathered through experience and passed down through tradition. Information in the category of weather-lore might not meet scientific standards for verifiability, but may still have a cultural value that makes it worth transmitting.

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Another indicator that the worm is turning.

U.S. Department of Energy issued a final rule effective November 30, 2020, that will once again permit American households to purchase dishwashers that actually clean dishes, as they had done for most of the machine’s 130 year history.

The October 30 final rule does not force anyone to change their currently installed dishwasher. And new machines will not be available for this year’s Thanksgiving meal, as future rulemaking is contemplated and manufacturers must produce the new class of machine. But the Department of Energy is giving consumers the choice to buy dishwashers that clean again while using less energy and less water.

Some might think it crazy that the federal government regulates dishwashers?

Read it.

The new party, called the Democrats, is the latest attempt to stem the more than 20-year decline of the Israeli left. Labor, which governed Israel for its first three decades, is now the smallest party in Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Meretz, to Labor’s left, did not receive enough votes in the most recent election to enter Knesset at all — effectively wasting the votes it got.

How appropriate.

Read it.

Two new trends seem to have emerged recently in Europe, and especially in Germany.

The first involves arguments that arise out of nowhere. After their emergence they escalate, and then the second trend kicks in: knives appear. Subsequently, through some mysterious process that is never quite explained in the media, badly wounded people are sent to the hospital, and bloody corpses are left in the street.

For unknown reasons, both trends correlate with the incidence of cultural enrichment in the regions where they occur.

Read it.

Who could have guessed that after multiple Ivy League university presidents publicly humiliated themselves during congressional testimony – and then it broke that Harvard’s president, among others were likely involved in plagiarising key parts of their “academic” work – that confidence in U.S. universities has plunged to a new low?

The data is according to two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Americans were asked “How much confidence, if any, do you have in U.S. colleges and universities?”

Associated Press.

In the Narrative Media, of course, there is no ‘right’ but the ‘far-right’.

UPDATE: “Far Right” Leads In France

UPDATE: Some Thoughts on French Elections