DayVectors

23 entries including: US Constitution (series), repairing the welfare state (series), boosting the koala & rhino microbiomes, California Green Deal, using muons to probe matter, DNA privacy considerations, hachimoji DNA, ATS & XQ-58 combat drones, rethinking NGAD next-gen fighter, & using CRISPR for disease diagnostics.

[TUE 30 APR 19] NEWS COMMENTARY FOR APRIL 2019

* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR APRIL 2019: On 11 April, "hacktivist" Julian Assange -- the driving force behind the WikiLeaks website, which distributed stolen government secrets to the world -- was bodily hauled out the Ecuadorian embassy building in London by British police. He had sought asylum in the embassy in 2012, jumping bail while under criminal proceedings from the British government, and had been there since that time. The new Ecuadorian president, Lenin Moreno, had enough of Assange, and arranged for his removal.

The announcement of his arrest stated that there had been no request for Assange's extradition; the Americans requested it mere hours later, on charges of helping to crack into US government computers. It is expected that the list of charges will grow longer. An essay from ECONOMIST.com ("Julian Assange: Journalistic Hero Or Enemy Agent?", 12 April 2019), posed a question:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

Wikileaks proved a prolific source of leaks of classified information, including suppressed evidence of atrocities conducted by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with a massive haul of US diplomatic cables released by Chelsea Manning, then a junior enlisted soldier. Wikileaks then really turned up the volume in 2016 by releasing Democratic Party National Committee emails, obtained by Russian hackers, in an attempt to discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

There was little of significance in the DNC emails, no "classified information", just personal comments that were "cherry picked" for their value in undermining Hillary Clinton. This wasn't leaking secret government information; it was an invasion of privacy worthy of a tabloid sheet, but without the titillation. The end result was to help hand a narrow win to Donald Trump. Assange thereby ended up antagonizing many on the Left, save the extreme; he's never had any friends on the Right -- least of all Trump, who has no sense of obligation to anyone. Assange still has his defenders, but they're on the back foot:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

Assange, however, went beyond journalistic norms, prominently in helping Chelsea Manning crack a Pentagon network, becoming an accomplice in the crime. Wikileaks also contacted Russian hackers, operating under the pseudonym of "Guccifer 2.0" -- who turned out to be agents of Russian GRU intelligence -- asking them for compromising materials. Reputable journalists would not do such things, and feel safe; and if they had information they felt it was proper to release, they would make it clear, in general terms, where it came from. Patience with Assange gradually ran out:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

A later essay from ECONOMIST.com made a case for the extradition of Assange. Britain's Leftist Labour boss Jeremy Corbyn is of the camp that sees Assange as heroic, but that doesn't wash:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

British courts now have to judge on whether the American request for extradition is legal, and then it will fall into the lap of the home secretary, Sajid Javid. The case for extradition is strong, but there's a complicating factor, in that from 2010, he was wanted by the Swedish government on a sexual assault rap. The Swedes closed their case in 2017, but could re-open it. In that case, the Swedes would get Assange first, and the Americans would need to extradite him from Sweden.

How that plays out remains to be seen, but it can be assumed everyone will get their piece of Assange. On consideration, it seems less important that Assange be punished than he answer for his actions in court. He will have an opportunity to make a case that what he did was right -- though it is unlikely a jury will buy it.

* Although Assange is now in lockup, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the puppet master, remains active in the shadows. As discussed by an essay from BLOOMBERG.com ("Europe Needs a Plan to Fight Putin's Trolls", 24 March 2019), elections for the European Parliament are to take place in May. The European Union (EU) is expecting trouble, with the European Commission (EC) warning that Russian disinformation operations will be "systematic, well-resourced, and on a different scale".

Putin sees the world as a zero-sum game; he believes that weakening the EU will make Russia stronger. His goal, then, is to help elect Euroskeptics to the Parliament. To counter Russian interference, the EC has more than doubled its spending on counter-disinformation, to 5 million euros this year, and is growing its staff of analysts dedicated to tracking disinformation. That won't be enough: Europe will need to educate its citizens, and be prepared to make use of legal and diplomatic countermeasures.

The EU is confronted with a formidable threat. Russia's Internet Research Agency alone has a budget that substantially exceeds all EU counter-disinformation agencies combined -- and that doesn't include the 1.4 billion euros the Russian government spends annually on RT and other mass-media outlets that disseminate Kremlin propaganda.

The EU, as a confederation of independent states, usually does not come to agreement easily, and so obtaining more funding is troublesome -- but the EC should at least give more money to two EU bodies, the "East StratCom Task Force" and the "EU Hybrid Fusion Cell", which monitor fake news and coordinate responses of EU governments to it. The Commission should also push member states to get on board its proposal to create a pan-European "Rapid Alert System" that would zero in on and expose suspicious social media activity close to elections; and it should make sure social media companies take down fakebot accounts and disclose the funding sources behind political ads on their platforms.

And then there's the public education angle. European governments can, for example, support fact-checking sites such as Lithuania's Debunk.eu, which is a collaboration among journalists, civil society groups, and the military. They can also reinforce digital-media literacy instruction in public schools, as Sweden has. Estonia, a country with a substantial minority of Russian-speakers, has even set up its own Russian-language public broadcasting channel as an alternative to Kremlin-backed media like the odious RT.

European leaders should also be willing to push back directly on Russia, giving fair warning that attacks will not be passively accepted; the EU will retaliate with the kind of sanctions and indictments the US has imposed on both Russian election meddlers and Chinese corporate hackers. The EU can make it clear that the present set of EU sanctions against Russia, imposed after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, will be automatically extended if evidence of Russian interference surfaces. Germany could also cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which critics see as more serving Putin's interests more than Europe's. Europe needs to remind Putin that election interference is a form of hostile foreign aggression that cannot, and will not, be ignored.

* The arrest of Julian Assange was upstaged on 15 April, when the roof of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris -- built from 1160 to 1260 -- caught fire. It took French firefighters 15 hours to extinguish the blaze; onlookers sang, wept. The damage was severe, but fortunately the structure did not burn to the ground, the stone vaulted ceiling under the roof preventing the fire from reaching the lower sections of the structure. Some works of art and artifacts were damaged or destroyed, but many others were rescued. The cathedral's two pipe organs, and its three 13th-century rose windows, were not significantly damaged.

There was a global wave of sympathy for the French; within days, over a billion dollars had been donated to restore the building, the lion's share of that being from France's ultra-rich. There were criticisms that so much money was being spent on saving a building, instead of helping people when there was so much else wrong with the world. The truth of the matter is that there are some things in the world that are irreplaceable, priceless, treasuries of the souls of our ancestors.

If all of Las Vegas burned down, that would be a tragedy, but there would be little lost of real significance that couldn't be replaced -- indeed, some people who would be glad to see it reduced to ashes. Not so with the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. It carries too much history, too much ancestry, too much soul -- mostly of France, but by extension, the rest of the world as well.

ED: I ran into a Frenchman on Twitter the day of the fire, who was reporting on the event. He said it was "hardly damaged" -- an interesting linguistic misfire, since it revealed the peculiarity of the word "hardly". I gently asked if he meant "severely damaged", since "hardly" implied "only slightly".

He apologized, but I then took pains to reassure him: "Your English is vastly better than my French." He was flattered when I said I would donate a little money. I slipped them a fifty -- which, at least as far as I was concerned, put the complaints about priorities into perspective. I have a fixed budget for charity; along with my regular targets, I set aside $50 USD, a small portion of it, to donate to whatever catches my fancy, whatever comes along. I don't know about anyone else, but I have my priorities thought out.

* It was worth a fifty. The planet seems to have become a more dismal and hostile place in this decade, and it is good to know there still are better values in the world. I'm getting tired of all the bad-mouthing. Speaking of which, the troll media of course exploited the fire, distributing a video of a mysterious figure in the upper levels of the cathedral, the hint being that Islamic terrorists had started the fire. A better video of the same scene showed it was a fire-fighter.

Along the same lines, there's been a nasty measles outbreak in the USA as of late, with the troll media blaming it on illegal aliens. That's preposterous, the legal traffic across America's southern border being substantially greater than the illegal traffic. More importantly, when epidemics are traced down to a source, they are usually due to citizens visiting a foreign country, picking up the bug, then bringing it back home. The airports are the portal. A Twitter poster said there were tales of outbreaks in detention camps -- but if so, outbreaks elsewhere would be easily traced back to them. The poster also plausibly suggested that the measles outbreak in California was due to students coming back from spring vacation.

[MON 29 APR 19] REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (5)

* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (5): The question of state welfare systems intersects with the issue of immigration, with concerns often raised that immigrants exploit welfare and drag down the countries they immigrate to. An article from ECONOMIST.com ("Crossing Continents", 25 August 2018), suggests that's a simplistic read on a complicated matter.

To start with, take a Syrian refugee named Tarek. He has a degree in economics and work experience at a bank in Damascus. When the fighting in Syria got too intense, he made his way from Syria to Sweden, where he applied for asylum in 2014. He ended up in a maze of bureaucracy, Tarek saying: "For one and a half years I had to do nothing." He got food and shelter, but he wasn't allowed to work or take Swedish-language classes -- existing in a bubble, disconnected from Swedish society.

Sweden is known for its benign attitude towards refugees. For a time, almost anyone fleeing Syria could get asylum, with 163,000 refugees admitted in 2015 -- about 1.6% of the population. They got welfare benefits, but weren't allowed to work. The result of this conflicted policy has been to fuel a backlash and help boost an anti-immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats -- which has obtained enough support to pressure other parties to take an anti-immigrant stance as well.

The Syrian Civil War has, more than any one other factor, led to a heated debate in the developed world about what to do with immigrants. There are supposedly two categories of immigrants: refugees from war or persecution, who have a right to safe haven; and economic migrants, who do not. In practice, the categories tend to create confusion: many countries have become increasingly resistant to offering safe haven, while many economic migrants pose as refugees to allow them to enter a developed country. The distinction is more than blurry to many voters: they don't care why foreigners are arriving, they just don't like them.

According to a Gallup poll, 700 million people, 14% of the world's adults, would like to emigrate to another country, preferably a developed one. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 31%. There's no way all the developed countries could absorb so many refugees, and there's widespread unhappiness with the idea of accommodating them. Politicians exploiting this anti-immigrant sentiment are either winning elections -- as in Hungary, Italy, Austria, and America -- or forcing other parties to rethink their open-door policies -- as in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Britain.

Anders Olin, who is handing out leaflets for the Sweden Democrats outside Malmo station, says: "We can't take care of everybody. It's a burden on the welfare state. [Refugees] become citizens after a couple of years. Then the whole family comes." He adds that over the past decade that "we've had many problems with violence and shootings." -- though he concedes that Malmo is still a good place to live, and he doesn't worry about his personal safety.

Niels Paarup-Petersen, the leader of the liberal Center Party in Malmo, says that Sweden fumbled the refugee crisis of 2015: asylum claims were processed too slowly, and more money was spent on the newcomers than necessary: "We were treating refugees under the age of 18 the same way we would treat a vulnerable, homeless Swedish kid, spending 2,000 kronor ($220) a night on giving them all kinds of nurturing. It wasn't sustainable." Paarup-Petersen thinks the newcomers should have been offered job training and language classes: "We have lots of vacancies for plumbers and welders." Like the rest of Europe, Sweden has tightened its borders since 2015. Asylum applications have fallen by five-sixths.

The ethnically touchy are not happy to see any newcomers, but the economic benefits of immigration are potentially tremendous. An unskilled Mexican who moves to America raises his wages by 150%; a Nigerian, by 1,000%. Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development, author of the forthcoming book THE WALLS OF NATIONS, estimates that if everyone who wanted to move were allowed to do so, the world would be twice as rich. In short, immigrants aren't inevitably a drain on a society, they can be a benefit. Yes, immigration is troublesome, but sensibly handled, it's more of an opportunity than a threat. However, sensibility doesn't seem to prevail when it comes to immigration. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 26 APR 19] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (55)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (55): Abraham Lincoln was in general agreement with the Radicals on the need to kill off slavery for good. The Emancipation Proclamation had been a huge step to that end, but it was an ad-hoc measure, flimsy from a legal point of view, and Lincoln knew it. All through 1864, a "13th Amendment" banning slavery had been working its way through Congress, the Senate having voted for it on 8 April 1864; it then went to the House, where it needed a two-thirds majority to then be sent out to the states for ratification.

On 15 June, the House failed to provide the necessary two-thirds vote. There matters stood, for the time being; not much more than could be done until after elections in the fall. There was never any doubt of the election being held: there was nothing in the Constitution that gave real support to its suspension, and Lincoln was too good a lawyer to assume the power to do so.

The war against the Confederacy was not going well at the time: a Union offensive in northern Virginia that began that spring, with Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant driving against Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee, had ground down into a ghastly war of attrition, with massive casualties on both sides.

By late summer, the fighting in Virginia had settled into a stalemate, with trench warfare at the town of Petersburg, to the south of the Confederate capital of Richmond. The sitting war was not satisfactory to the Union cause, but Robert E. Lee's forces were finally pinned to the defensive, and the massive bloodletting of the spring offensive was over.

To the west, a drive through northern Georgia towards Atlanta by Union forces under General William T. Sherman, opposed by Confederate forces under General Joseph E. Johnston, was not making rapid progress. To be sure, the far-sighted could see that the war of attrition in northern Virginia favored the Union, which had more troops and resources, while Sherman was making fitful progress towards Atlanta. Nonetheless, it was anyone's guess as to which way the voters might go.

On 1 September, Atlanta fell to Sherman's forces; now few Northerners saw any reason to give up the fight. In the elections on 8 November, Lincoln was re-elected by an electoral landslide and a comfortable margin in the popular vote, giving him a mandate for prosecuting the war to its end.

On 6 December 1864, Lincoln's State of the Union address was delivered to Congress. The address attended to the mundane details of foreign and domestic affairs of government. It said little about the war itself, other than that it was going well for the Union, a fact obvious in both North and South. To drive home the fact that the Confederacy didn't have a future, Lincoln pointed out that the Union could "if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely."

Lincoln also mentioned the determination of the "insurgent leader" -- Jefferson Davis -- to continue the fight for Southern independence to the bitter end, Lincoln saying Davis had made it entirely clear that he would "accept nothing short of the severance of the Union, precisely what we will not and cannot give." That was a rebuke to those in the North who believed that the fighting would have ended had it not been for the failure of Union leadership to come to a reasonable agreement with the Confederacy.

The President was saying in very clear terms that the Union would continue the war until the Southern states gave up their bid for independence -- but softened the harshness of that position by offering such "pardons and remissions of forfeiture" that were in his power to grant.

Lincoln also pushed for passage of the 13th Amendment. There were still plenty of Democrats in the House who might block its passage; they would be gone once the Republicans who had replaced them in the 1864 elections took their seats -- but Lincoln didn't want to wait, since banning slavery would help persuade the South to give up the fight more quickly. As long as the rebels felt there was a chance that continued resistance might allow them to cut a deal to preserve slavery in the reconstructed Union, they might try to hold out.

Slavery was doomed in any case, but a Constitutional amendment would dash any hopes they had left. Any Southerner who didn't realize the cause was lost by that time was delusional, and Lincoln wanted to do everything he could to deflate their delusions in hopes that they came to their senses.

At the time, General Sherman's army -- having abandoned and burned Atlanta in mid-November -- was engaged in a march through Georgia to the sea, leaving a path of destruction behind them. The march made it clear that the Confederacy no longer had the capability to offer serious resistance to Union forces. The Federals reached the sea at Savannah, Georgia, on 21 December, to go into winter quarters.

In the meantime, the Lincoln Administration was making a concerted effort to get the 13th Amendment passed through the House. The Constitution gave the White House no formal role in the passage of amendments; but there was nothing to prevent the administration from exerting all the leverage it could, and Democratic representatives were showered with all the government favors the White House could scrape up. The House voted through the 13th Amendment on 31 January, the amendment then going to the states for ratification.

To be adopted, it required ratification of three-quarters of the states -- which was made problematic by the fact that a good number of states were still fighting the Union. However, those that weren't, were generally quick to approve. Over the following month, most of the states of the North, and Louisiana, had ratified the amendment -- with a few laggards remaining in the North, while the Confederate states hoped a miracle would save them. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 25 APR 19] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: During the Vietnam War, the US fielded an "anti-radar missile (ARM)" designated the "AGM-45 Shrike", to be carried by aircraft into combat areas to shut down adversary radars. It was an improvisation, being an AIM-7 Sparrow air-to-air missile with a radar-seeking head. After the conflict, the US introduced what amounted to a scaled-up Shrike, designated the "AGM-88 High-Speed ARM (HARM)".

Since that time, the HARM has been progressively upgraded to the "AGM-88E" variant, known as the "Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM)". Now the manufacturer of the AARGM, Northrop Grumman, is developing a ground-launched version of the AGM-88E for the US Army.

The current AGM-88E Block 1 AARGM features an advanced digital anti-radiation homing sensor; a millimeter-wave (MMW) radar terminal seeker, allowing attacks to be pressed home even if an emitter shuts down; a "Digital Terrain Elevation Database-aided GPS/INS" guidance system; and a datalink. Range is given as over 110 kilometers (70 miles / 60 NMI), and speed is over Mach 2. Specific details of the "Surface-Launched AARGM (SLAARGM)" missile are not yet available. Presumably, it will have a solid-rocket booster for launch. Implementation of the launcher system is unclear.

* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("First US Air Force Rapid Response Hypersonic Weapon: AGM-183A" by Guy Norris, 17 August 2018), in early August the Chinese tested a hypersonic flight demonstrator, named the "Starry Sky 2". It was ground-launched by a rocket booster, and attained speeds of Mach 5.5 to 6 at an altitude 30 kilometers (100,000 feet). The Starry Sky 2 was developed China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics. It is a "waverider", riding the shockwave generated by the vehicle's leading edge to increase lift and reduce drag. The demonstration was primarily intended to test guidance, navigation and control, thermal management, and separation from the booster at high speed.

In response to Chinese and Russian efforts to develop hypersonic munitions, the US Air Force is stepping up work on their own hypersonic vehicles. The lead project in the work is the "AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW)" -- a contract having been awarded to Florida-based Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. The ARRW is to be an air-launched, rocket-boosted unpowered hypersonic glider. The ARRW work is an extension to Lockheed's pre-existing DARPA contract under which it is building the virtually identical "Tactical Boost Glide (TBG)" demonstrator.

The other major Air Force system is the "Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW)", for which Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Huntsville, Alabama, was awarded a contract in April. The HCSW will be a solid-rocket-powered, GPS-guided missile, the intent being to have an initial operational capability on existing combat aircraft in fiscal 2022. Neither the ARRW and HCSW require any technology breakthroughs, and their aggressive development schedule is seen as low-risk.

For the mid-to-longer term, development of more operationally flexible air-breathing systems also continues. Both Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works and Raytheon are working under contract with DARPA to develop the "Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC)" -- a scramjet-powered missile that follows the Air Force Research Laboratory/Boeing X-51A scramjet-powered vehicle, which exceeded Mach 5 in a 2013 flight test.

Raytheon, which is partnered with Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems (formerly Orbital ATK) on the scramjet for HAWC, is also in final negotiations with DARPA to develop and test a TBG glide demonstrator. Raytheon's newest work is believed to be supporting DARPA development of a ship-launched TBG for the US Navy. In July, Lockheed was awarded a Navy "Hypersonic Booster Technology Development (HBTD)" contract, also believed to be related to this effort.

US work on hypersonic weapons is confusing, both because of the diversity of efforts with some degree of interaction, and because of secrecy. Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering says the projects will be gradually sorted out, saying: "Which of those is going to prove to be a winner is an interesting question. I don't know what's going to work yet."

* As reported by AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Airshow China Surprises With New, Flyable Stealth UAS" by Steve Trimble, 7 November 2018), the "Airshow China" in Zhuhai featured a number of surprises for watchers of Chinese miltech. This year, the surprises included two military drones -- Casic's Skyhawk and an unnamed product in one of Avic's static display areas -- appear to be real flying machines, either demonstrators or advanced prototypes. This is something new, in that Airshow China has more traditionally displayed concept models of military drones, which are never heard from again.

Avic set out a small flying wing drone in one of its display corrals, the machine apparently being a subscale flight demonstrator. It was of stealthy configuration, featuring cranked-kite wing shape and semi-hexagonal engine inlet, but it had rivets and other non-stealthy protrusions, showing it wasn't intended as an operational system. It was not placarded, an Avic worker in the display saying it was only set up for pictures.

Casic's flying wing, in contrast, was displayed as an operational system, not just a demonstrator. Oddly, the manufacturer of the operational CH-4 and CH-5 medium-altitude, long-endurance drones named the new flying wing "Skyhawk," the same name as a series of micro-sized flying wing drones built by the same company. Little data was provided, the drone being described as comparable to the US Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel drone, with a placard reading:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

[WED 24 APR 19] MICROBIOME BOOST

* MICROBIOME BOOST: The emerging field of fecal transplants in biomedical research has been discussed here in the past, last in 2014. An article from NATURE.com ("Faecal Transplants Could Help Preserve Vulnerable Species" by Sara Reardon, 11 June 2018) discussed the potential of using fecal transplants to help animals faced with extinction.

The Australian koala is a very fussy eater, consuming only the leaves of eucalyptus trees, and just a few varieties of eucalyptus at that. Research now suggests that their narrow range of diet is influenced by their gastro-intestinal microbiome, which can help digest some species of eucalyptus leaves, but not others. That gives the possibility of using altering the koala microbiome -- through changes in diet, and also possibly fecal transplants -- to give koalas a wider diet.

Koalas are in decline in Australia, due to encroachment of humans on their habitats. However, even in places where eucalyptus is common, their populations are often small; and when koalas are transplanted to other eucalyptus forests, some die. Research by ecologist Ben Moore, a koala specialist, and his colleagues at Western Sydney University in Australia now points to an incompatibility between eucalyptus varieties and the makeup of an individual koala's gut microbiome.

Moore and his colleagues collected feces from 200 koalas at 20 sites around Australia. On analysis of the plant materials in the feces, they found that some koalas ate only a highly nutritious eucalyptus species known as "manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis)", while others ate the less-nutritious "messmate (E. obliqua)". Only a fraction of the animals ate both, even at the same site; animals living a stone's throw apart might have different food preferences.

The difference in preference was clearly not due to genetics. When the researchers catalogued the microbial make-up of the feces, they found that the koalas that preferred manna-gum eucalyptus featured different bacteria from those that ate messmate. As a test, they transplanted feces from six wild koalas that ate messmate into six wild koalas that preferred manna-gum. Within 18 days, the recipient koalas had microbiomes that were very similar to those of the donors, with the recipients showing some greater inclination to eat messmate.

Researchers at the San Diego Zoo in California are also interested in tweaking the microbiome of the southern white rhinoceros; captive-born southern white rhinos do not reproduce well, with the researchers wondering if it had something to do with the rhino microbiome. They compared the feces of captive white rhinos with those from one-horned rhinos, which do reproduce well in captivity.

The white-rhino feces contained chemicals known as "phytoestrogens", which are present in plants such as soya and alfalfa and affect female reproductive hormones. Since both species of rhino had the same diet, the researchers suspected that their gut microbes might break phytoestrogens down differently. To test this, the zoo workers switched the female white rhinoceros' diet to grass pellets, which are low in phytoestrogens. Within two years, two females that had never successfully reproduced became pregnant, to go on to give birth to healthy calves.

Candace Williams, a molecular biologist at the Zoo, says that the facility is now feeding grass pellets to all its rhinos. The researchers are now trying to identify which bacteria might be responsible for the shift, and are comparing the microbiota of captive rhinos to those of wild rhinos in South Africa. Williams says: "In zoo settings, people don't think too much about microbes that live in these amazing animals."

Williams believes that growing availability of DNA sequencing tools will lead to an expanded knowledge of the microbiomes of zoo animals and their kin in the wild that will show just how influential the microbiomes are: "I think it's more common than we've been able to document -- in part, we just didn't have the tools to do this until recently."

[TUE 23 APR 19] CALIFORNIA GREEN NEW DEAL

* CALIFORNIA GREEN NEW DEAL: As discussed by an article from TIME.com ("California Already Has a Green New Deal" by Justin Worland, 29 March 2019), there's been a lot of talk in the halls of Congress about a "Green New Deal (GND)" -- a comprehensive program to address climate change. It hasn't gone smoothly so far, the proposed program being poorly-defined, much too overblown, and preposterously expensive, to become an easy target of gibes from the Right.

The GND doesn't sound like an inherently bad idea, it's just a question of putting together a technically, economically, and politically workable program. For a hint of how to do that, go to Fresno, in California's Central Valley, and talk to Ashley Swearengin, previously the Republican mayor of that conservative city. Her vision, like that of the GND, takes on climate change while addressing other social ills. She speaks of rethinking the city's development paths, zoning code and transportation infrastructure while reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% and addressing a range of environmental problems. Swearingen says: "This is the response to the realities of climate change [and] the existing environmental burden that this corner of the state bears."

The tale is similar elsewhere in California. The City of Los Angeles -- with almost 4 million people, the biggest city in California, the second biggest in the USA -- has a goal of reducing emissions 45% by 2025, and the city's electric utility is studying how it can chart a path to 100% renewable energy. At the same, the city's sustainability program includes other measures to clean up communities and create green jobs.

For years, state and local officials have been piecing together a set of programs that look like they might be useful pieces of the GND, applied to a national scale. Kevin de Leon -- who pushed through several key pieces of climate legislation as president pro tempore of the state senate -- comments: "What we've done so far in California could be used as a model, not just for the sub-nationals but for national governments throughout the world."

California does not have a silver bullet in its fight against climate change, the state having done everything from working on high-speed rail systems, to funding for clean energy research and development, to rules requiring green initiatives that aid low-income communities. All such programs working towards the state's overall target, establish in 2018, of reaching net-zero emissions by 2045.

Possibly the most significant program in the effort is California's five-year-old cap-and-trade program. It was the first such program in the USA, setting a cap on carbon-dioxide emissions in multiple sectors, and requires companies to pay if they emit too much. The money is then used for of clean energy projects, and, thanks to a follow-up law, a quarter of the funding is used to the benefit of disadvantaged communities such as Fresno.

The exercise is starting to show results. In Oakland, a group named "Rising Sun" prepares workers to hold green jobs, just as the state is implementing a requirement that all new homes are net zero. In Fresno, a public-private partnership is deploying a fleet of electric vehicles as a van pool for underserved areas. The $7 million program was funded by cap-and-trade dollars, and will improve access for low-income communities while reducing emissions.

More importantly, emissions are falling. In 2018, the state announced that it had reduced its emissions to 1990 levels; they weren't expecting to get there until 2020. Now Californians emit less on a per capita basis than any state except New York, according to Energy Information Administration data, even though many Californians drive over long distances.

Critics of the Federal GND say it will be economically ruinous. California officials reply that the state's economy is larger than that of all but four countries, and has been growing along with the USA. They add that the savings from avoided health costs, avoided costs of climate-proofing the state, and the creation of green jobs, make the effort a bargain.

The GND is more ambitious than California's plan, calling for more rapid reductions in emissions. The GND also factors in policies not directly relevant to dealing with climate change, including a universal health care plank, and ignores moderate proposals such as carbon taxing. Worst of all, according to Vien Truong -- president of Green for All, a progressive environmental group -- backers of the GND seem to disregard big business, even demonize it. She says that's a "missed opportunity", adding that: "When we began to see businesses involved in the California fight, we were able to move much further along and much faster."

The national GND is not going anywhere until Donald Trump leaves office; what happens then remains to be seen. In the meantime, states like California -- and a few others taking action on climate change -- are performing experiments, establish precedents that will guide a national effort.

[MON 22 APR 19] REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (4)

* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (4): The solution to the welfare traffic jam now being increasingly offered is the "universal basic income (UBI)". It comes in different flavors, but the basic idea is that it replaces many conditional benefits with a single unconditional one, which is available to all. Scotland and the Netherlands are running experiments involving UBI, with many other countries poised to follow. However, no country has yet adopted it as a basic policy.

The OECD has modeled two forms of basic income:

• In the first, a country's spending on benefits was divided equally among everyone. In other words, the amount of spending didn't change, it was just, in principle, distributed to all.
  
  
• In the second, everyone would get benefits equal to the guaranteed minimum income, with taxes raised to pay for it, if needed.

The studies pointed to a difficult balancing act between program cost, poverty reduction, and work incentives. The studies also showed that the success of UBI depended greatly on the program that preceded it. Countries such as Italy, Greece, Spain, Austria and Poland all spend more on welfare for the richest 20% than for the poorest. For them, spreading benefits more evenly would benefit the poor, even under a revenue-neutral model. However, in countries that target welfare spending on the poor, such as the UK, UBI would either lead to large tax rises, to maintain a minimum income for everyone, or see benefits cut for the worst-off.

A more realistic alternative for many countries might be a "negative income tax (NIT)", an idea that Milton Friedman greatly liked. The NIT means that, below a certain income threshold, the government makes up the difference. As one's income rises above the threshold, the tax bite increases. NIT has an appealing cleanliness. One particular attraction is that it doesn't give the rich a payout, only to then tax it back.

Elements of an NIT have long been part of welfare policy in the UK and the USA, in the form of tax credits that are paid to those with low incomes. Britain's Universal Credit, an attempt to merge six working-age benefits into one, takes the approach further, though it hasn't gone smoothly. A recent analysis by the OECD judges NIT a better way at helping the poor than UBI. A paper published in 2015 by Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan, and colleagues, suggested that money from current welfare programs such as food stamps and housing subsidies could be replaced with a NIT that made sure no American had an income below the Federal poverty line. The top tax rate assumed, 50%, is high, but the work shows an NIT may not be out of reach.

Beveridge might have had difficulties with some forms of UBI -- but he believed reform had to address "modern social risks". We need to have a welfare state -- and if we have one, it needs to be the most efficient and effective that we can devise. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 19 APR 19] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (54)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (54): On 8 December 1863, Lincoln's annual State of the Union address was presented to Congress. Lincoln expressed his satisfaction with the progress of Union arms, which had led to revived public support for the war, with stronger support for Republican policy. Of course, Lincoln would have hardly been a politician had he not suggested that his Emancipation Proclamation had been a major factor in the successes of the Federal war effort:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

Lincoln then listed other matters of administration, such as the budget; foreign relations; immigration; relations with the Indian tribes; and then moved on to the heart of the address, which concerned the processes by which the rebel states would be readmitted to the Union, contained in an appendix to his address titled: "A Proclamation Of Amnesty And Reconstruction".

The proclamation suggested that all rebels should be granted amnesty if they took an oath of loyalty to the US government, and proclaimed their support of the Emancipation Proclamation and all Federal laws on slavery. Senior Confederate government officials, military officers, turncoat US government officials, and those guilty of war crimes were to be denied amnesty. Once 10% of a state's citizenry, the number being determined by the 1860 census, took the oath, the state would be readmitted to the Union as if nothing had happened. The Federal government would repudiate all Confederate war debts.

It was not a strictly theoretical discussion. Lincoln had already written General Nathaniel Banks -- in charge of occupied Louisiana, like Ben Butler a Massachusetts politician in uniform -- suggesting that state might make a good place to perform an experiment along such lines. In the letter, Lincoln also made some necessarily vague but optimistic comments on the mechanisms of coexistence between white and black in the new post-slavery order.

The Constitution said nothing about the reconstruction of a state under rebellion; it had never happened before, and Lincoln had no real precedent to fall back on. Such Democrats as remained in Congress found the President's ideas radical and harsh. They believed that the Union should be restored with no change in the status quo as prevailed before the war. That was unrealistic, given that the clashes of armies had already effectively destroyed the status quo, and the Democrats were a minority anyway. In contrast, the Radical Republicans in Congress didn't think the President's ideas were harsh enough. To them, the wayward states were to be treated like the military conquests they were, or soon would be. If the South were to be readmitted to the Union, it would be in a form acceptable to the Radical Republicans.

Nonetheless, Nathaniel Banks pushed forward on Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan, with a reconstructed Louisiana electing one Michael Hahn, an immigrant from Bavaria, governor of the state on 22 February 1864. Although Banks had banned slavery from Louisiana by decree, the new state constitution was ambiguous on the rights of free black people. The ambiguity was deliberate, Banks and Hahn having struggled to hold the line against the state constitution specifically stating that black men would not be given the right to vote. Still, it all seemed like a step in the right direction, and at the time a similar exercise was taking place in occupied Arkansas, with a new state government -- which constitutionally banned slavery and secession -- in place before the end of March.

The Radical Republicans in Congress found the Ten Percent Plan too lenient, and were also determined to put paid to slavery once and for all. Their ideas congealed that spring in a bill promoted by the Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, one of the hottest of the Radicals, and his opposite number in the House of Representatives, the equally uncompromising Congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. Their legislation raised the proportion of voters taking the loyalty oath to 50%; specified that military governors run the state until state conventions drafted a new constitution banning slavery, as well as repudiating secession and Confederate war debts; and gave amnesty only to those who could prove they hadn't willingly supported the rebellion.

The Wade-Davis bill passed both houses of Congress easily in May; the bill would come before Lincoln in early July, and he would refuse to sign it, saying it was an attempt by Congress to usurp executive powers. Besides, the bill was an attempt to address "a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way." The Radicals reacted with fury. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 18 APR 19] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for March included:

-- 02 MAR 19 / SPACEX CREW DRAGON DEMO 1 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0749 UTC (local time + 5), carrying an uncrewed "Crew Dragon" space capsule on a demo flight. It docked with the International Space Station (ISS) 27 hours after launch, carrying about 180 kilograms (400 pounds) of supplies and an instrumented test dummy. The capsule splashed down in the Atlantic six days later, and was recovered.

The "Crew Dragon" AKA "Dragon 2" was derived from the Dragon freighter spacecraft, used for supply flights to the ISS, paid for under NASA "Commercial Resupply Services (CRS)" contracts. To this time, the Dragon freighter had flown eighteen times, performing two test flights under NASA's "Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS)" program, before beginning operational cargo delivery flights under CRS.

First flight of the Dragon freighter was in 2010, with the spacecraft performing three orbits of the Earth. Next flight was in mid-2012, with the first docking with the ISS. Operational missions began in October 2012, and are ongoing. In 2020, the Dragon freighter will fly with upgraded Crew Dragon technology.

Like the Dragon freighter, the Crew Dragon consists of a pressurized capsule and an unpressurized trunk. The Crew Dragon capsule can seat up to seven astronauts, and is re-usable. Although SpaceX considered land-based landings early on, the company decided on splashdown and recovery at sea, like the Dragon freighter.

Power is generated by solar panels mounted on the exterior of the trunk. This was a change from the Dragon freighter, which uses deployable solar arrays. Another difference between the two spacecraft is the nosecone:

• Dragon freighters jettison their nosecones to reveal a "Common Berthing Mechanism (CBM)". The berthing process used with the CBM requires Dragon to hold position close to the station, where it is captured and positioned by the station's robotic arm.
  
  
• The nosecone on Crew Dragon hinges open to provide access to the spacecraft's docking port. Crew Dragon's use of the NASA Docking System (NDS) instead of the Common Berthing Mechanism allows it to dock with and undock from the space station directly, under its own control. For a crewed spacecraft, which may need to facilitate a quick exit for its crew should an emergency occur, docking is preferred to berthing.

Dragon V2 also incorporates eight SuperDraco thrusters -- liquid-fueled engines which serve as a launch escape system to carry Dragon clear of its Falcon 9 carrier rocket, should an anomaly occur before it reaches orbit. First flight of a Crew Dragon carrying a crew to the ISS is scheduled for later in 2019.

In order to meet NASA's requirements for human-rating the Falcon 9, SpaceX needed to freeze the design of the Falcon 9, ending a pattern of incremental upgrades that had been made over the original design. This has resulted in the "Block 5" version of Falcon 9, which is expected to represent its final configuration. It is considerably longer and more powerful than the first Falcon 9, which flew in 2010.

SpaceX has focused on recovery of elements of the Falcon 9. While initial attempts to recover the first stage relied upon parachutes, and proved unsuccessful, from the sixth flight onwards SpaceX began attempting controlled, powered landings. The first significant upgrade to the Falcon 9 design, the "Falcon 9 v1.1", incorporated more powerful engines and stretched first and second stages that gave the rocket enough extra performance to give it leftover fuel for a soft landing. Falcon 9 v1.1 also introduced the "OctaWeb", an octagonal arrangement of engines, replacing a square grid layout used on earlier versions.

A further upgrade was introduced in December 2015 with the Falcon 9 "Full Thrust" AKA "v1.2", which was further stretched and began use of supercooled liquid oxygen -- which permits more oxidizer to be carried by increasing its density. The "Block 3" and "Block 4" upgrades that followed were tweaks, leading to the "Block 5" upgrade that first flew in May 2018. The Block 5 is "human-rated", with the first stage supporting multiple re-launches -- previously, it could only fly twice -- with less refurbishment between launches.

-- 09 MAR 19 / CHINASAT 6C -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1728 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Chinasat 6C" AKA "Zhongxing 6C" geostationary comsat into space. The Chinasat 6C satellite was built by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), and was based on the CAST DFH4 spacecraft bus. It had a payload of 25 C-band transponders, and a design lifetime of 15 years. The comsat featured "enhanced" anti-interference technology, such as beam and frequency switching, and suppression of unauthorized uplinks to the satellite.

Chinasat 6C was placed in the geostationary slot at 130 degrees east longitude, to provide television broadcast services for China Satcom, with coverage of China, Southeast Asia, Australia and islands in the South Pacific. This was the 300th launch of a Long March booster, since 1970.

-- 14 MAR 19 / SOYUZ ISS 58S (ISS) -- A Soyuz booster was launched from Baikonur at 1914 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 58S" AKA "MS-12" crewed space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) support mission.

The crew included commander Alexey Ovchinin of the RKA (2nd space flight), flight engineer Tyler "Nick" Hague of NASA (1st space flight) and astronaut Christina Koch of NASA (1st space flight). Both Ovchinen and Hague had attempted to fly to the ISS on Soyuz ISS 56S / MS 10 on 11 October 2018, but the mission was aborted two minutes after launch, due to a booster failure.

The capsule docked with the ISS Rassvet module six hours after launch. They joined the ISS "Expedition 58 / 59" crew of station commander Oleg Kononenko of RKA, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques of CSA, and NASA flight engineer Anne McClain.

-- 16 MAR 19 / WIDEBAND GLOBAL SATCOM 10 (USA ---) -- A Delta 4 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0026 UTC (previous day local time + 4) to put the US Department of Defense's "Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) 10" AKA "USA 291" geostationary comsat into space.

WGS 10 was based on the Boeing BSS 702 comsat bus; the satellite had a launch mass of 6,000 kilograms (13,200 pounds), carried a payload of Ka / X-band transponders, and had a service life of 14 years. This was the final WGS satellite needed to complete the WGS constellation as planned. The booster was in the "M+ (5,4)" configuration, with five solid-rocket boosters and a payload fairing with a diameter of 4 meters (13 feet 2 inches).

WGS 10 is the fourth and final "Block II Follow-On" WGS satellite, and it's the third with the digital channelizer, which handles communications signals more efficiently, nearly doubling the bandwidth provided by earlier spacecraft in the series.

-- 22 MAR 19 / PRISMA -- A Vega booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0150 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put the "Precursore Iperspettrale della Missione Applicativa (PRISMA / Hyperspectral Precursor of Application Mission" Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit for the Italian space agency. PRISMA was a test flight for a new smallsat bus that also performed operational observations with an innovative payload.

The PRISMA mission followed the "Hyperspectral Satellite for Earth Observation (HypSEO)" effort, which was canceled in the early 2000s. The PRISMA satellite had a launch mass of 879 kilograms (1,938 pounds), the primary payload being a hyperspectral imager (HSI) which operated across 237 visible-light, near-infrared, and short wave infrared bands, with a spectral resolution of 12 nanometers. The HSI could image a 30-kilometer (18.6-mile) swath of the Earth's surface at a resolution of 30 meters (98 feet).

A panchromatic imager provided complementary observations, providing five-meter (16-foot) resolution over the same swath. Both imagers observed the Earth via a three-mirror telescope with a 21-centimeter (8.3-inch) aperture. PRISMA was solar-powered, using panels fixed to the spacecraft, and had a design life of five years. The satellite bus was three-axis stabilized, and used hydrazine thrusters for on-orbit maneuvering. PRISMA was designed and manufactured by an Italian consortium led by OHB Italia SpA and Leonardo SpA, with OHB Italia responsible for the satellite, and Leonardo for the HSI.

-- 27 MAR 19 / LINQUE 1B (FAILURE) A commercial OS-M light booster was launched from Jiuquan at 1039 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Lingque 1B" remote sensing CubeSat into space, but the booster veered off course, and did not reach orbit.

Both the booster and CubeSat were built by OneSpace. The solid-fuel four-stage OS-M booster is about 19 meters (62 feet) tall, with the ability to put about 112 kilograms (250 pounds) into polar low Earth orbit (LEO). OneSpace launched two suborbital rockets, designed "OS-X", on test flights from Jiuquan in 2018. The company plans to develop the more powerful "OS-M2" and "OS-M4" boosters with two or four strap-on solid rocket boosters (SRB). With uprated SRBs, the OS-M4 will be able to put 522 kilograms (1,150 pounds) into LEO. Linque 1B was built for ZeroG Labs, which plans to deploy a fleet of fleet of Earth-observing nanosatellites.

OneSpace has competitors in China. LandSpace launched "Zhuque 1" its first orbital-class rocket from Jiuquan on 27 October 2018, but the vehicle's third stage failed to attain enough velocity to reach orbit. LandSpace is moving on from the solid-fueled Zhuque 1 to the bigger "Zhuque 2" booster, fueled by methane and liquid oxygen. Another Chinese launch startup, iSpace, is preparing for the first flight of the "Hyperbola 1" satellite launcher. LinkSpace is also using Chinese private capital to develop a new smallsat launcher with a reusable first stage.

-- 28 MAR 19 / R3D2 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from a facility on the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island at 2327 UTC (next day local time - 11) to put the "Radio Frequency Risk Reduction Deployment Demonstration R3D2)" satellite into orbit for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

R3D2 had a launch mass of 150 kilograms (330 pounds). It demonstrated a new design of a unfurable antenna, with a kapton membrane, and a deployed diameter of 2.26 meters (7.4 feet).

-- 30 MAR 19 / TIANLIAN 2-01 -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1550 UTC (local time - 8) to put the first "Tianlian 2" geostationary space communications satellite into orbit. It was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), being based on the civil DFH4 comsat bus, its mission being to support communications between ground stations and space platforms. The Tianlian satellites are conceptually similar to the US Tracking & Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). They have a launch mass of about 5,200 kilograms 11,465 pounds), and a design life of 15 years.

The four first-generation Tianlian satellites were launched between 2008 and 2016, supporting different kinds of missions and especially the ones related to the Chinese manned space program. The satellites were based on the CAST's DFH-3 satellite platform. The Long March booster for Tianlian 2-01 was the "3B/G2" variant, featuring four up-rated strap-on boosters, and a lengthened core stage compared to the Long March 3B.

* OTHER SPACE NEWS: On 1 January 2019 the NASA New Horizons deep space probe, following its 2015 pass by Pluto, performed a flyby of the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) 2014 MU69, nicknamed "Ultima Thule". Closest approach was about 6,700 kilometers (4,200 miles).

Ultima Thule was discovered in 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope. The initial image of the object downloaded revealed a "contact binary", or two bodies joined together, described as something like a "snowman", about 31 kilometers (19 miles) from end to end. A later download showed the two joined bodies were distinctly flattened. The large body has been nicknamed "Ultima", the smaller one "Thule", with diameters of about 19 kilometers (12 miles) and 14 kilometers (9 miles) respectively. No moonlets were observed.

Ultima Thule, at the time of encounter, was about 6.6 billion kilometers (4.13 billion miles) from Earth -- about a third farther away than Pluto. It takes over six hours for the probe's radio signal to reach Earth. Transmission from that distance is at a snail's pace, so it will take 20 months to download all the data.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio TX, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("DARPA Wants To Assemble, Demo Nuclear Rocket in Orbit" by Graham Warwick, 20 March 2019), the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's "blue sky" development office, plans to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) propulsion system that can be assembled on orbit to support US operations in space beyond the Moon.

DARPA is now seeking $10 million USD in 2020 to start up the "Reactor On A Rocket (ROAR)", the objective being to develop a "high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)" rocket system. An NTR involves pumping liquid hydrogen through a reactor core, which heats up the hydrogen, resulting in high-impulse thrust. An NTR can be twice as efficient as a chemical rocket.

HALEU is being developed as a fuel source for next-generation US nuclear reactors. While US naval reactors use highly enriched uranium with a concentration -- "assay" of the fissionable isotope uranium-235 (U-235) greater than 90%, commercial reactors use low-enriched uranium with 3 to 5% U-235. HALEU has a U-235 assay of more than 5% but less than 20%. The higher concentration means a compact reactor that doesn't have to be refueled as often, and produces less waste.

Initial work in the ROAR program will include investigation of 3D printing to produce engine elements, and orbital assembly of the modularly-designed engine -- the longer-term goal being to conduct a technology demonstration. It is somewhat puzzling as to why DARPA is interested in NTR propulsion, because it's primarily focused on deep-space exploration, which doesn't have much military application.

[WED 17 APR 19] PROBING MATTER WITH MUONS

* PROBING MATTER WITH MUONS: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Muons: The Little-Known Particles Helping To Probe The Impenetrable" by Elizabeth Gibney, 25 May 2018), elementary particles like the electron, proton, neutron, neutrino, and photon are more or less household words; but mention the "muon", and the response is usually a blank stare. Nonetheless, the muon is starting to attract more attention, muons having been used by archaeologists in 2017 to discover a hidden chamber in the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Muons are created in cosmic-ray impacts in the upper atmosphere. A muon has a mass 200 times that of the electron, the same negative charge as the electron, and an average lifetime of 2.2 microseconds, before it (usually) decays into an electron and two neutrinos. The cosmic rays that give birth to muons give them velocities near the speed of light, with the muons able to penetrate hundreds of meters of solid matter before being absorbed.

Their commonness and penetrating power makes muons perfect for imaging large, dense objects without damaging them -- according to Cristina Carloganu, a physicist at the Clermont-Ferrand Physics Laboratory in France. The technique, known as "muography", is based on the fact that denser materials, not surprisingly, absorb more energy from muons passing through. Physicists accordingly place detectors that can measure muon energies around a target, with the energy spectra obtained allowing a model to be built up of the interior of a target.

Physicists have been tinkering with muography since the 1950s, for example an unsuccessful search for hidden chambers in the second-largest pyramid at Giza. Raffaello D'Alessandro -- a particle physicist at the University of Florence in Italy, and a specialist in muography -- says early muon detectors were too big, expensive, and troublesome to be practical. They could weigh more than 10 tonnes, and relied on the ability of muons to ionize particles of sometimes explosive gases.

Much improved technologies to track the paths of charged particles, developed at atomic-research labs like CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, have led to much cheaper, compact, safer, and sensitive muon detectors -- down to pocket size, though of course there's trade-offs between size and capability. In any case, muon detectors are easily transported, and can run off solar panels at remote sites.

The discovery of the new chamber in the Great Pyramid is not the only example of the use of muography in archaeology. Italian researchers have used it to map cavities and tunnels under Mount Echia, a settlement in Naples that has been occupied since the eighth century BCE; and plan to use it to search for a rumored aqueduct beneath the nearby ancient city of Cumae.

Volcanoes have become a popular target for muography, thanks to pioneering work by Japanese researchers. Mapping lava channels, which absorb less energy from muons than does the dense surrounding rock, might help predict eruptions. In 2018, researchers will try to image the solidified plug of lava inside Italy's Mount Vesuvius. When combined with more conventional geophysical methods, these images could help volcanologists infer which parts would blow up first during an eruption.

Commercial applications are emerging as well -- typically using a slightly different muography technique, tracking how muon trajectories change when they hit atomic nuclei in a material, instead of measuring energies. By placing detectors on both sides of a sample, physicists can track a muon's trajectory; and since the angle of deflection correlates with density of the substance the muon hits, the deflection data can be used to create a density map of the material being probed.

The technique can be used to inspect nuclear waste, even when it's encapsulated in concrete or steel. There's work to monitor the security of spent nuclear fuel, and to spot smuggled nuclear material at border crossings. There are also plans to use muography to track the wear of oil-industry pipelines and search for minerals in old mines.

The technology is not yet in widespread use, and remains unfamiliar to many potential users. Giulio Saracino -- a physicist at the University of Naples and one of the researchers probing Mount Echia -- comments: "It's a new, very specialist technique that comes from the high-energy-physics world. "The first time I say to geologists that we have muon technology, they say: 'What are muons?' They are fascinated, but also a little bit wary."

[TUE 16 APR 19] DNA PRIVACY?

* DNA PRIVACY? As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("No One Is Safeguarding Your DNA" by Krisen V. Brown, 26 February 2019), new worries about personal privacy are bubbling up all the time. Consider, for example, DNA testing -- which has proven a forensic goldmine, nailing wrongdoers who otherwise couldn't be touched, and exonerating people who were falsely convicted.

That sounds good, and it is, but it presents a difficulty: privacy protection for genomic data is weak. Law enforcement already has a substantial database of genomic information; nobody worries about that too much, but millions of consumers are sending spit samples to genetic testing companies to get a genetic analysis, and the flood of genetic data obtained poses a huge problem: relationships.

Yaniv Erlich -- of Columbia University in New York City, chief science officer at DNA testing company MyHeritage -- estimates that only 2% of people with European ancestry, the majority of DNA testing customers, would need to reveal their genetic data to allow identification of identify samples from the other 98%. What makes genetic data most powerful, and troubling, is its combination with other online data obtained from, for example, public records and social media.

In 2018, California police arrested a man they suspect to be the Golden State Killer, having fingered him through genetic profiles of distant cousins, on a geneology website named "GEDmatch", which has about a million users. Police obtained crime scene DNA, and found a family bloodline that matched it; police then used other sources to build an extended family tree. Other details allowed them to zero in on the suspect.

Also in 2018, a second website, "FamilyTreeDNA", with about two million users, opened up to law enforcement. Given the two websites, investigators could potentially identify hundreds of millions of people from their DNA samples. The more genetic data the authorities obtain, the easier it becomes to identify anyone from a DNA sample. James Hazel -- a researcher at the Center for Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville -- comments: "The recent revelations surrounding FamilyTreeDNA, coupled with law enforcement's increasing reliance on public resources like GEDmatch, demonstrate that we continue to move closer to an under-regulated, de facto universal database."

Given that genetic data is going to keep on piling up -- and there's no stopping it -- then, as Hazel suggests, we need to regulate access to it. Several states already have strict laws regulating police searches of DNA databases to hunt down criminals; and Maryland and the District of Columbia have forbidden such searches altogether, even with a warrant. However, these strictures only apply to government databases; the commercial space is a genetic Wild West, the only rules being each company's terms of service. The companies have little control over how law enforcement, or anyone else for that matter, makes use of their services. What's the technical difference between a genealogy search, and a hunt for a criminal?

FamilyTreeDNA officials are increasingly concerned about law enforcement making use of its data in investigations. Company officials want to cooperate with the law, but they also want to protect the privacy of the company's users. Laura Hercher -- a genetic counselor and researcher at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville NY -- believes that it isn't right to force the companies to figure out the rules, that new laws will be needed to define access rights. Hercher says: "We would create limits that would be analogous to search warrants and restrict access to law enforcement. It's a great way to catch serial killers, but less savory uses are easily imagined."

Some legislators are already moving ahead on new laws. Maryland state legislator Charles Sydnor, a Democrat, has proposed a bill to ban police use of DNA databases, calling such use an overreach of authority. Maryland has led on genetic privacy matters in the past, and other states may follow along. However, for the moment, there is no consistent policy on access to DNA databases across the USA.

Hazel and other researchers at Vanderbilt suggested the establishment of a nationwide DNA database that could establish a higher floor for privacy protection. Completely denying access would be unreasonable, but access would have to be carefully controlled -- for example, requiring a warrant for a search, and limiting the amount of data the search acts on. Hazel says:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

[MON 15 APR 19] REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (3)

* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (3): Another factor needed to support the welfare puzzle is the ability of governments to maintain a welfare state, while successfully promoting economic growth. Since the 1990s, Scandinavian countries and Canada have liberalized their economies -- selling public monopolies, cutting regulation, and reducing trade barriers -- while generally maintaining high levels of public spending. The Scandinavian countries, misleadingly labeled as "socialist" by the Left, have had to become more energetic capitalists.

The welfare state faces three ongoing challenges, the first being graying populations. In the OECD, longer life expectancies and, since 1990, stagnant fertility rates, have raised the ratio of adults over 65 to those of working age from 19.5 in 100 in 1975 to 27.9 today. That means more old people in need of pension money, and fewer working people to generate the money.

On average, as the median voter in OECD countries ages by one year, the share of GDP spent on pensions increases by 0.25 percentage points. The same applies to health spending. Today, the share of state spending that goes on public pensions averages 8.2% of GDP across the OECD. In France, it is 14%; in Italy, 16%. It is estimated that Britain's retiring baby boomers will get back a fifth more in benefits and services than they paid in. However, to maintain those benefits in the future will mean that Britain's public spending as a share of GDP would need to increase from about 37% now to 45%.

Some countries have adjusted their systems to cope with the age penalty. Denmark and Finland, among others, have linked state retirement ages to life expectancy; the Netherlands will do so in 2022. In Germany, Japan, Portugal, and Sweden, pension levels are adjusted according to the ratios of workers to non-workers. However, trimming back on retirement benefits is not popular with voters. Of the six countries in the OECD that changed their retirement ages in the past two years, three canceled previously planned rises.

The second challenge is immigration. In 1978, the American economist Milton Friedman argued that we could have open borders or generous welfare states open to all, but not both, without swamping the welfare system. In addition, citizens are more tolerant of benefits for "people like them" than for people who aren't. Studies have found, for example, that Swedes are more reluctant to give to Bulgarian than to Dutch migrants. Another study published in 2017 using survey data from 114 European regions found a correlation between areas with higher shares of migrants, and a lack of support for a generous welfare state -- or at least one that's generous to "outsiders".

A survey of changing attitudes in European countries between 2002 and 2012 found rising support for redistribution for "natives" -- along with strong opposition to migration and automatic access to benefits for new arrivals. Populists like the National Rally in France, the Sweden Democrats, and the Danish People's Party have all exploited this hostility to immigrants. The result has been a scaling back of assistance to newcomers almost everywhere.

However, studies suggest that some assistance to outsiders is more acceptable than others. Christian Larsen of Aalborg University found that a small majority of Danes thought immigrants should have immediate access to health care and public education -- but few thought that generosity should extend to unemployment or child benefits.

Attitudes towards immigrants are also volatile, shifting with the political winds. In 2011, for example, 40% of Britons said immigrants "undermined" the country's cultural life, and just 26% said they enriched it -- but by 2017, in backlash against the Brexit vote, the ratio flip-flopped, with only 23% saying "undermined", compared with 44% for "enriched". Of course, countries worried about supporting aging populations can readily see a solution in immigration. Economic research from Britain and Denmark has found that since at least 2002, EU migrants have contributed much more in taxes than they have cost in public services.

The third challenge is the shifting landscape of labor. As Andrew Gamble of Cambridge University wrote in his book CAN THE WELFARE STATE SURVIVE?: "The welfare state developed in an era of big government, big companies, and big unions." The assumption was that effectively all working-age males would have full-time jobs, but now there's a high proportion of citizens who don't have permanent employment, the "gig economy" having become more widespread.

The welfare state doesn't do well for people who don't have full-time jobs. In many countries, when the jobless do find work, their benefits are withdrawn, in some cases leaving them economically worse off. There's also the bureaucracy: for example, some may have to wait weeks after losing a job to get benefits. Welfare systems have an unfortunate tendency to work at cross purposes -- partly because of the inevitable bureaucracy, partly because of the ambivalent attitudes of citizens on the subject. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 12 APR 19] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (53)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (53): The Republicans suffered in the elections in the North in the fall of 1862, but not enough to divert Union war policy. 3 January 1863 came and went, passing the deadline for the Emancipation Proclamation, with no Confederate state indicating any desire to rejoin the Union -- indeed, the general tone in the South was belligerent rejection of the idea. As an expression of determination to destroy the Confederacy, in March Lincoln signed the "Enrollment Act" into law, this being the first military draft in the history of the US government.

The Enrollment Act required all males from the ages of 20 to 45 to enroll for possible selection, with exemptions for disability or being the sole provider of a family. States were tasked with actually bringing in the manpower, with bounties offered for enlistment. A citizen could also hire a substitute to serve in his stead, or pay a fee of $300 to be exempt from the draft for a year. The act proved very troublesome, being clearly unfair to poorer Americans -- and also encouraged recruitment of thieves and other dubious individuals, who would collect bounties, then desert.

The Enrollment Act would go down in American history as an example of how not to conduct a draft. The Taney court was prepared for legal challenges to the draft law, but though there were decisions from the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on the law -- which strongly upheld it -- no challenge reached the US Supreme Court. Support for the war was strong in the North, and those who were inclined to challenge the authority of the Federal government had learned to be circumspect about it.

* In any case, the Federal war machine continued to grind on. During 1863, the Union regained the initiative on the battlefield, on 3 July driving back the last major Confederate offensive into the North at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and taking full control of the Mississippi River with the fall of the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, the next day, effectively cutting the Confederacy in half. Confederate fortunes would, from that time, be on a gradual, if fitful, path of decline.

On 19 November 1863, on the occasion of the dedication of a military cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln delivered arguably the most famous speech in American history, which would effectively become an addition to the Constitution. It significantly concluded not only that the Union would endure, in repudiation of the doctrine of nullification, but that the era of slavery was over -- that "the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The war was far from over, but the Lincoln Administration still was thinking in the long term. In that same year, 1863, Congress established by charter the "National Academy of Sciences (NAS)", an independent organization dedicated to progress in the sciences, with the government calling on its expertise when needed. It would evolve into the modern "National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine".

Scientific societies were not a new idea -- the archetype is Britain's Royal Society, founded in 1660; frontier America hadn't seen the need for such a thing, but with industrialization and economic expansion, in 1863 it seemed a good idea. It was yet another demonstration of the long-term thinking of the Lincoln Administration, as well as of the flexibility of the congressional charter mechanism.

In another significant, but little-noticed, exercise of authority, in 1863 Lincoln signed "General Order No. 100", which established a "code of conduct" for military operations. It was more generally known as the "Lieber Code", after its prime mover, a German-American professor of law named Franz Lieber. Efforts to codify the laws of war were nothing new, going back to antiquity, but the Lieber Code was one of the first to express the laws of war in modern legal terms.

The Lieber Code was comprehensive, dictating humane treatment of civilian populations in occupied areas; humane treatment of prisoners; no use of torture to extract intelligence; no use of poisons; and so on, while providing careful legal definitions of states, insurrections, rebellions, and wars. How much influence it had on Union military operations is arguable, but it proved a useful basis for discussions of the international law of war, beginning with the first Geneva Convention the next year. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 11 APR 19] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("This 'Two-Faced' Membrane Can Create Electricity From Nothing But Salty Water' by Frankie Schembri, 26 October 2018), there's a lot of work being done on new power generation schemes. One angle being investigated is generating electricity using osmotic membranes.

When ionic salts dissolve in water, they break apart, leaving positively and negatively charged components floating in solution. By placing charged, thin membranes in between salty water and fresh water, scientists can create an expressway for the flowing particles, generating electric current. Unfortunately, these membranes are often expensive to manufacture, and they tend to get leaky over time -- allowing particles to pass back through in the wrong direction, cutting into how much electricity they can produce.

Researchers have developed a "two-faced" osmotic membrane -- with different properties on either side, including the size of the pores, and the charge of the membrane -- to encourage a steady flow of charged particles from one side to the other, while preventing them from drifting back in the wrong direction. The researchers tested their "Janus membranes" -- named after the two-faced Roman god of gates and passages -- with salty sea water on one side and fresh river water on the other.

The found they were able to convert 35.7% of the chemical energy stored in the salty water into useable electricity. That's as efficient as most wind turbines, and higher than most solar cells. Now the researchers plan to build larger membranes, and see how well they work in real-world conditions.

ED: This almost sounds like a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, but not really: there's an energy difference between water with ions in solution, and water without the ions. In effect, the ionized water stores an electric charge, with scheme resembling the discharge of a battery.

* As reported by an article from TECHCRUNCH.com ("This Startup Got $2.3M To Identify Physical Objects Using Diamond Dust" by Ron Miller, 14 November 2018), a Boston-based startup named "Dust Identity" is now working on a scheme for product identification based on diamond dust. The idea is that some product gets a spray of diamonds, each the size of a dust particle, with the dusting then covered in polymer.

Company CEO and co-founder Ophir Gaathon says: "Once the diamonds fall on the surface of a polymer epoxy, and that polymer cures, the diamonds are fixed in their position, fixed in their orientation, and it's actually the orientation of those diamonds that we developed a technology that allows us to read those angles very quickly."

The dust is not expensive, a company spokesperson saying: "We start with diamond waste -- for example, [from] the abrasive industry -- but we developed a proprietary process, that's of course highly scalable and economical, to purify and engineer the diamond waste into dust." The diamond pattern would be very difficult to fake. No doubt the scanning process can compensate for scratches and such in the polymer that could confound readout by use of a statistical analysis.

* As discussed by an article from ENDGADGET.com ("Police Are Using Fake Amazon Boxes With GPS To Catch Thieves" by AJ Dellinger, 12 December 2018), the rise of e-commerce has led to a corresponding rise in thefts of Amazon boxes left at residences.

It's just too easy a theft, right? OK, since it's easy, it's also easy to catch people at it. Police in Jersey City, New Jersey, hit back by placing fake Amazon boxes on the doorstep of residences, with doorbell cameras installed to keep an eye on activities. The boxes contain GPS trackers so the police can follow the thieves. Given the volume of Amazon shipments, the police focused on areas where high numbers of thefts had been reported. In one case, a package was stolen just three minutes after it was set up on a porch, with the suspect promptly nabbed by police.

[WED 10 APR 19] HACHIMOJI DNA

* HACHIMOJI DNA: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Four New DNA Letters Double Life's Alphabet" by Matthew Warren, 21 February 2019), it is generally known, at least to the scientifically literate, that the DNA molecule -- the "code of life" -- is a twin-chain polymer, made up of four molecular building blocks, or "bases": guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A), and thymine (T). Now a consortium of US researchers led by Steven Benner -- founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida -- has put together a "DNA-plus" molecule that uses eight bases.

Normally, the two chains in the DNA molecule form the famous "double helix", with the bases linking the two chains together: A bonds to T, C bonds with G. Researchers have long tried to add new bases -- Benner was tinkering with "unnatural" DNA back in the 1980s. Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, was the first to score a breakthrough, his lab making headlines in 2014 after inserting a pair of unnatural bases into a living cell.

Romesberg's work was a proof of concept, just to see if it could be done. Benner's work builds on that, systematically demonstrating that the complementary unnatural bases recognize and bind to each other, and that the double helix that they form maintains its structure.

The new bases were molecular variations on the established ones. The bases pair up because they form hydrogen bonds: they contain hydrogen atoms on the linking end of the molecule, which are attracted to nitrogen or oxygen atoms in their partner. Benner like to compare the scenario as like Lego bricks that snap together when the holes and studs line up. His team tweaked the arrangement of holes and studs, leaving the rest of the molecules unchanged, to come up with several new pairs of bases -- including a duo named "S" and "B", and another called "P" and "Z2".

They call the new eight-base system "hachimoji", which is Japanese for "eight letters". Having devised the hachimoji scheme, they then put it to the test. They created hundreds of molecules of the hachimoji DNA, to find that the letters bound to their partners predictably; and the DNA double helices that resulted were as stable as those of ordinary DNA, no matter what the order of the base pairs was. Earlier attempts to build DNA with unnatural bases could not produce reliably stable molecules.

Finally, they showed that the hachimoji DNA could be readily transcribed into RNA -- the single-chain "working copy" of DNA that's fed into a cellular ribosome, which uses the list of commands in the RNA chain to assemble a protein. Some RNA sequences, known as "aptamers", also bind to specific molecular targets. Benner's team created hachimoji DNA that codes for a certain aptamer, generating RNA aptamers that successfully bound to a target molecule.

There's still more work to be done to validate the hachimoji scheme -- but the work so far confirms that there doesn't have to be just one DNA scheme in the cosmos; life elsewhere might use a different DNA. To be sure, alien life might use something entirely different from DNA, but nobody has yet conceived of any other plausible coding molecule. There may be applications of the hachmoji DNA as well. For example, Benner's group previously showed that strands of DNA that included Z and P were better at binding to cancer cells than sequences with just the standard four bases. Benner has set up a company to commercialize synthetic DNA for use in medical diagnostics. The hachimoji DNA might also be used to synthesize new proteins.

Benner's team has continued to work on new pairs of bases, suggesting the possibility of new DNA forms with 10 or 12 bases -- "juumoji" or "juunimoji". Romesberg says that he's impressed enough with hachimoji: "It's already doubling what nature has."

[TUE 09 APR 19] LOYAL WINGMEN

* LOYAL WINGMEN: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Boeing Unveils 'Loyal Wingman' UAV Developed In Australia" by Graham Warwick, 26 February 2019), US aerospace giant Boeing has announced work on a fighter-like unpiloted aerial vehicle (UAV) -- drone, in popular terms -- intended to operate in conjunction with piloted aircraft, at only a fraction of the cost of a piloted aircraft.

A full-scale mockup of Boeing's "Airpower Teaming System (ATS)" drone was unveiled at the Australian International Airshow in Avalon, which ran in the last week of February 2019 into the beginning of March. The ATS drone is being developed by Boeing Autonomous Systems and Boeing's Phantom Works International unit in Australia, with a demonstrator to fly in 2020. The ATS drone will be sold to defense customers around the world; it is being developed in Australia because that's a better starting point for global sales.

Boeing is working in partnership with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), with funding from the Canberra government, and with the involvement of local suppliers. The demonstrator is funded under "Loyal Wingman Advanced Development Program" -- which is being supported by $40 million AuD ($28.5 million USD) over four years in Australian government funding, and by Boeing as an element of its $62 million AuD investment in research and development in Australia in 2018.

The ATS demonstrator will be 11.6 meters (38 feet) long; it will have high-mounted swept wings, a butterfly tail, and stealthy contours. The production machine will be powered by a derivative of a commercial business-jet turbofan. It will have an AI-based flight / mission system that will allow it to safely accompany other aircraft. It will have a range of 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles / 2,000 NMI), and will have adequate performance to keep up with US Navy or RAAF Super Hornets.

According to Kristin Robertson, vice president and general manager of Boeing Autonomous Systems, the ATS drone is low-cost, modular, and flexible, able to be quickly reconfigured for different missions using "snap-on, snap-off" payloads. The initial multi-mission variant is intended for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and electronic warfare. Boeing came up with the ATS drone after discussions with customers internationally, Robertson saying:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

The ATS effort is part of Autonomous Systems' portfolio, along with Insitu's small tactical drones, Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider unpiloted surface vehicle, and Boeing's Echo Voyager large unpiloted undersea vehicle. The lineup also includes the X-37B reusable spaceplane, and the Phantom Express reusable launch vehicle now being built for DARPA. In addition, Boeing is converting QF-16 target drones for the US Air Force, and developing the MQ-25 Stingray carrier-based drone aerial-refueling aircraft for the US Navy -- discussed here in 2018.

Boeing's largest presence outside the US is in Australia, where since 2000 the company has acquired most of the major names in local aircraft manufacturing -- including the former Government Aircraft Factories and Hawker de Havilland. The ATS drone is one of the first aircraft developed with Boeing Australia in the lead. Much of the reason for doing so is the close linkage with the RAAF, which has been conducting visionary studies to consider future threats, and has worked with Boeing on new technologies. It is possible that avoiding US government weapons export controls is another motive.

* As discussed by another article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Kratos Steals Boeing's Thunder With XQ-58A First Flight" by Steve Trimble, 8 March 2019), the Kratos company of the US is already flying a drone somewhat like the ATS drone, with the first flight of the "XQ-58A Valkyrie" on 6 March 2018.

The XQ-58A is being developed as an experimental program under the direction of the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). It was the first flight demonstrator launched under the AFRL's "Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology", which is intended to produce relatively cheap combat aircraft.

The first flight of the XQ-58A was only 2.5 years after contract award. It is a stealthy design, with swept wings and a butterfly tail, and an engine intake for a small turbofan on the back. The aircraft was launched from a rail and recovered by parachute. The demonstrator is 8.84 meters (29 feet) long, making it smaller than the ATS drone -- though it has longer range. The XQ-58A is intended to be cheap and "attritable", meaning operationally expendable if need be; while the Boeing ATS drone is more comparable to a piloted combat aircraft, and proportionally more expensive.

[MON 08 MAR 19] REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (2)

* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (2): The experience of the Great Depression and the subsequent Second World War led to the modern welfare state. War brought people of different backgrounds together, promoting a sense of unity against a common enemy. Britain's middle class was the backbone of the war effort; their needs meant the welfare state had to be more than just looking out for the poor.

Beveridge had to address questions, still pertinent, such as: When is a benefit a right, and when is it conditional on conduct? Will benefits undermine the will to work? And most significantly, how to pay for it all? And how much to pay? He argued that there should be "bread for all ... before cake for anybody" -- but added that people "should not be taught to regard the state as the dispenser of gifts for which no one needs pay."

Britain's postwar government implemented much of his plan, and reforms soon followed elsewhere. By 1954, the core institutions of the welfare state were in place across the rich world, including social-insurance schemes, means-tested support for the poorest, free or subsidized health care, and employment rights. That same year, American President Dwight Eisenhower said -- words that may prove prophetic -- that if any politician tried to dismantle social security, "you would not hear of that party again in our political history."

Different countries have always taken their own approaches to the welfare state -- but they began to diverge significantly in the 1970s. In 1990, Gosta Esping-Andersen, a Danish sociologist, described three varieties of "welfare capitalism":

• The "social democratic" versions in Scandinavia, with high public spending, strong trade unions, universal benefits, and support for women to stay in the workplace.
  
  
• "Conservative" welfare states, such as Germany's, built around the traditional family, and with a strong contributory principle.
  
  
• Anglo-American welfare states, with greater emphasis on guaranteed minimums than universal benefits.

One of the most common charges against modern welfare states is that they have created a culture of dependency. As a result, policymakers have made welfare programs more conditional, for example requiring recipients to look for work. If the state actually helps them do it, it seems like a good idea; many countries have expanded "active labor-market policies" such as retraining.

However, there hasn't really been a rolling-back of the welfare state; it's just become static. In a 2011 paper Paul Pierson -- of the University of California, Berkeley -- described a "frozen landscape". Pierson showed that for several kinds of benefits, such as unemployment, disability, and state pensions -- generosity rose up to the 1980s, and then has hardly budged since.

The myth of a shrinking welfare state is accompanied by another myth, that the welfare state is primarily about redistributing income from rich to poor. That's not entirely so. Nicholas Barr of the London School of Economics points out that it's more about allowing people to smooth consumption over their lifetimes -- in effect, shifting money from their younger selves to their older selves.

A third myth is that welfare spending drags down economic growth. That's not necessarily so, either. As countries become wealthier, public spending increases as a share of GDP: Spending on "social protection" programs -- such as pensions, benefits, and the like in the OECD club of countries grew from 5% in the 1960s; to 15% in 1980; to 21% in 2016. Some economists have estimated a fall in GDP growth, on the order of a percentage point, with growth in public spending. However, since 2000, Canada and some Scandinavian countries, for example, have combined high levels of public spending with high rates of economic growth.

Peter Lindert of University of California, Davis, describes this phenomenon as the "free-lunch puzzle" -- but that's not really the right term, since taxpayers still pay for the lunches, it's a question of expenditures of groups instead of individuals. One factor in the puzzle, as Lindert points out, is that economic growth depends heavily on what public spending is used to buy. Subsidized child care, which helps (mostly) women stay in the labor market, is more growth-friendly than pensions, say. The introduction of the Children's Health Insurance Program in the USA in the late 1990s increased the rate of parents opening their own businesses. Welfare is, overall, not really a zero-sum game.

ED: One of the interesting things about SNAP, the US food stamp program for the poor, is that it has an aspect of a crop subsidy, helping support American farmers and food manufacturers. In poorer parts of town, it also helps retailers stay afloat. SNAP can be seen to be at least as much capitalist as socialist. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 05 APR 19] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (52)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (52): In the spring of 1862, there was cause for hope that the rebellion would soon be crushed. The fall of the city of New Orleans late in April seemed a particular blow to the Confederacy. However, in the summer of 1862, the Confederacy retook the initiative in the war, conducting offensives into Maryland and Kentucky that threw the Union on the defensive.

The change in fortunes of the war suggested to Union leadership that more drastic action was needed to suppress the rebellion. On 19 June, Congress abolished slavery in the territories in the Far West without compensation. That was symbolic, since there were effectively no slaves in those territories; the exercise nonetheless indicated the way the winds were blowing. Lincoln dropped a hint to Congressional border state leadership in a message on 12 July:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

They paid no attention. Lincoln had by that time realized that compensated emancipation was going nowhere, and also that undermining slavery profoundly undermined the Confederate war effort. However, he was still not convinced of the necessity of drastic action. Congress continued the push against slavery, passing a "Second Confiscation Act" on 17 July, emancipating the slaves of Southerners in rebellion against the United States, and also passed a "Militia Act", which authorized the enlistment of "persons of African descent" into the Union Army. Lincoln was hesitant to sign the Second Confiscation Act, questioning its constitutionality, but was persuaded to do.

Lincoln was not against what Congress was trying to do; he was just struggling to figure out a better way of doing it. On 22 July, Lincoln held a cabinet meeting to propose a general emancipation, without compensation, of all the slaves in the Confederacy. The consensus of the cabinet was that it was a good idea -- but needed to be put off until the Union's military situation improved, lest it seem an act of desperation.

The Confederate offensive into Maryland was halted in a blood-soaked battle at the town of Sharpsburg, on Antietam Creek, on 22 September; Confederate forces, overextended and vulnerable, would withdraw from Kentucky the next month. The day after the victory at Antietam, 23 September, the White House released a radical document: the Emancipation Proclamation.

It remains much misunderstood, described as: "Lincoln freed the slaves". That is not a full truth. The document specified that it was issued under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief, with the sole objective of winning the war and restoring the Union. To that end, the Emancipation Proclamation declared:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

In short, all the slaves in the states in rebellion against the Union were declared free. This was done for no more stated rationale than to undermine the Confederate war effort, by depriving it of manpower -- and to increase Union manpower, the document encouraging the enlistment of ex-slaves into the army and navy. Lincoln had no authority to end slavery; but as Commander-in-Chief, he did have the authority to seize property of rebels, and dispose of it as the Federal government saw fit. It was arguably the most significant exercise of executive power in the history of the American presidency.

The document was strange in some ways. It said nothing critical of slavery, and didn't touch a single slave in any of the loyal slave-hold border states -- or for that matter, not even in occupied Louisiana. It only freed slaves in states where, at the time, the Union had no capability of enforcing the decree. The Emancipation Proclamation did encourage compensated emancipation in the border states, but did nothing to mandate it; and also made clear that if the states in rebellion came back to the fold by the end of 1862, they would keep their slaves.

Nonetheless, the simplistic message was true enough: Lincoln did free the slaves. By destroying slavery in its heartlands, he guaranteed the collapse of the entire wretched system. He also crushed any pretense that the Union would be restored as it was. He gave the Confederate states -- and, indirectly, the slaveholding border states -- a grace period to draw back from the precipice he had presented them, but with no expectation that they would do so. If they didn't, they would be responsible for, and suffer, the consequences.

In a letter to T.J. Barnett of the Interior Department during that interval, Lincoln wrote: "The character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation and extermination ... The South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas." The Constitution had been designed around slavery, both in terms of tap-dancing around it, and supporting it. The old rules had been drastically changed; with the implication that the Constitution would have to be amended to reflect the new reality. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 04 APR 19] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from GIZMODO.com ("The Great Barrier Reef Is Becoming More Heat-Resistant" by Maddie Stone, 10 December 2018), it is well-known that warming ocean temperatures are hell on coral reefs. In 2016 and 2017, back-to-back heat waves killed off half of all the corals on the 2,250-kilometer (1,400-mile) long Great Barrier Reef that wraps around northern Australia. When ocean temperatures get too high, corals lose the algae that live with them; the end result is that the reef becomes "bleached", its stony architecture turning white. If the bleaching lasts too long, the corals will starve to death. If the reef gets much too hot, the corals simply die.

It was fortunate that the heat didn't kill all of them, leaving about 10 billion corals alive. The ones that didn't die are the ones that can take the heat, as shown in a paper by researchers from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. Reefs that suffered in the summer of 2016 could tolerate more heat in 2017 without suffering the same damage.

The research team examined patterns heat stress seen in satellite-derived temperature data, along with bleaching patterns determined through aerial surveys. The conclusion was that while the first heat wave took a disastrous toll on the northern third of the Great Barrier reef, causing more than 80% of individual reefs to suffer severe bleaching, the second heat wave resulted in far less bleaching. It seems that the most temperature-sensitive species, including branching and table-shaped Acropora corals, were largely wiped out by the first heat wave.

The southern third of the reef didn't suffer much bleaching in 2016, because the heat wave was cut short by a cyclone. However, even there, the researchers saw less bleaching than they expected in 2017, indicating the shorter heat wave still had some selective effect. In fact, the only area where bleaching was worse in 2017 than 2016 was the reef's middle section -- since the 2017 heat wave was proportionally stronger there than the 2016 heat wave.

The latest UN IPCC climate report suggests that just 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming could cause 70% to 90% of the world's reefs to die. Terry Hughes, lead author of the paper, comments: "Our study shows that's not necessarily correct ... the mix of species is shifting very quickly, and that's clearly having an effect."

That's not good news; it's just not quite so bad. As Hughes and his colleagues noted in a paper out earlier this year, the Great Barrier Reef is quickly becoming a "highly altered, degraded system" as the corals that provide the most nooks and crannies to shelter reef fish vanish. Hughes predicts that the corals that will be the ultimate winners in our hotter future are slow-growing, hemispherical brain corals and Porites, which he described as good at protecting shorelines but not so great at supporting biodiversity. Continued rises in temperature may well kill them off, too.

* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Humpback Whale Songs Undergo A 'Cultural Revolution' Every Few Years" by Virginia Morell, 20 November 2018), it is well-known that humpback whales produce elaborate "songs" of squeaks and groans as they cruise the oceans. The whales seem to be saying something, but nobody has any clear idea of what.

One reason to think the songs do have meaning is that they change periodically. All male humpbacks in a population sing the same song, and they appear to pick up new ones in much the same way that people do. Males in the eastern Australian population of humpbacks, for example, pick up a new song every few years from the western Australian population at shared feeding grounds, or while migrating. Over the following years, the songs spread to all South Pacific populations.

Researchers decided to investigate how the whales learn songs, by recording eastern Australian whale songs over 13 consecutive years. Using spectrograms of 412 song cycles from 95 singers, the scientists scored each tune's complexity on the basis of the number of sounds and themes, and studied the subtle idiosyncrasies added by individual males. Complexity of the songs, the researcher found, tends to increase over time -- but after a revolution, the songs become shorter with fewer sounds and themes. The suggestion is that the whales tend to notice new tunes that are different, but relatively simple and easy to pick up.

* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Gut Bacteria May Hold Key To Creating Universal Donor Blood Type", by Stephanie Pappas, 22 August 2018), researchers have found that enzymes made by bacteria in the human digestive tract can strip the sugars that determine blood type from the surface of red blood cells. These sugars act as "antigens" that can trigger an immune response in a host incompatible with the blood type being transfused.

Enzymes have been found that can change type B blood to type O, but the newly-discovered group of enzymes is the first to effectively change type A to type O. Type O blood is in high demand, since it lacks antigens on its cell membranes, making it the "universal donor" blood type: it works with anyone, no matter what their blood type is. In contrast, type A, B and AB red blood cells have specific antigens on their surfaces, meaning that people with type A blood can donate only to type A or type AB recipients, while people with type B blood can donate only to those with type B or type AB.

The solution to the problem sounds simple in concept: get rid of the antigens. That hasn't proven so simple, nobody having found enzymes that can do the job -- until now. A team under Stephen Withers, a biochemist at the University of British Columbia, believes it has cracked the problem, having come up with enzymes made using DNA extracted from human gut microbes could remove type A and B antigens from red blood cells.

The researchers used metagenomic analysis to come with the enzymes, obtaining the collective genome for all the microorganisms in the human gut. In the set, they found codes for enzymes that help the bacteria tear sugar-studded proteins called "mucins" off the walls of the digestive tract, so the bacteria can eat them. Mucins are molecularly similar to blood cell antigens, and the enzymes produced by the DNA codes worked against red blood cell antigens as well. In fact, they were about 30 times more effective than enzymes previously used to "neutralize" blood types.

The scheme is promising -- but there is still the question of how cost-effective it will be in practice. Nobody pools blood donations, because of the risk of spreading diseases, so the conversions would have to be one donation at a time. It might be useful to neutralize a donation in an emergency, if type O blood were needed, but not available.

[WED 03 APR 19] RETHINKING NGAD

* RETHINKING NGAD: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("USAF Acquisition Head Urges Radical Shift For Next-Gen Fighter Program" by Steve Trimble, 5 March 2019), the Pentagon's new F-35 fighter is a marvel of technology -- but its development was painfully expensive, and suffered from delays. Now the US Air Force is considering a new fighter, under the "Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) " program, to address threats in the decades beyond 2030. To date, concepts for NGAD have envisioned a futuristic, tailless, super-dogfighter -- that past history suggests will be even more expensive and troublesome to develop than the F-35. Need that be so?

At the US Air Warfare Symposium in February 2018, Will Roper -- an Oxford-educated theoretical physicist who now is assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics -- suggests not. Instead of spending the next decade developing a single new air combat platform, the NGAD program may instead create a pipeline for acquiring, developing, and fielding a series of new aircraft types, with a new design entering service possibly as quickly as every two years.

Instead of placing all the bet on a single aircraft, diversity would give Air Force brass a range of options to deal with unexpected threats, and would challenge adversaries with unexpected capabilities. According to Roper, NGAD still remains in the study phase, with no commitment to anything yet. He believes that has opportunities: "I have a strong opinion that we need to not have it devolve into a traditional program."

Traditionally, combat aircraft acquisition programs begin with a painstaking analysis of the environment anticipated when the aircraft becomes operational. From that, a detailed set of requirements is drawn up. Roper regards this process as naive: "I think we have to accept that we cannot predict the 2030 threat. That is the way the Cold War acquisition system works. It predicts the threat, then designs systems that beat them."

Roper believes that it is too hard to predict the future, that there are too many variables with too many unknowns to use such projections to design a combat aircraft. He suggests an alternate scheme, based on the development of the "Century Series" of fighters in the 1950s.

The Century Series was the first generation of truly supersonic combat aircraft obtained by the USAF, including the F-100, F-101, F-102, F-104, F-105, and F-106. They were developed on fast tracks and fielded very rapidly by modern standards. To be sure, they were much less sophisticated than an F-35, but Roper still thinks the Century Series represents a model for NGAD:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

"Cost imposition" means forcing an adversary to spend money. It's a favorite topic of Roper's, who came from academia into defense in 2010, to enjoy a rapid climb. His first defense job was as the acting chief architect for the Missile Defense Agency. Another physicist, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, appointed Roper to become the first director of the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) in 2012, a post he held for five years. According to Roper:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

Roper is not the first to challenge the military's 20-year acquisition development cycle for advanced new weapons -- but efforts to change things haven't gone well. The failure of the US Army's excessively ambitious Future Combat Systems program a decade ago presents a sobering example of how things can go wrong, while fielding a diverse fleet of combat aircraft presents severe managerial, logistical, and sustainment challenges.

Roper is aware of these difficulties, but points to the Missile Defense Agency's "highly integrated systems architecture", of which he was one of the architects. In the example of missile defense, the system is composed of a radar, an interceptor missile, and a kill vehicle. The overall system had a design architecture, but the three different elements obtained from different vendors.

What about sustainment costs for a diverse fleet? With modern digital life-cycle engineering systems -- including component and subsystem standards, as well as 3D printing on demand -- Roper suggests the problem is manageable, that it won't be any more difficult to sustain a fleet of multiple aircraft types than it is to sustain a fleet of one type.

The F-35A achieved initial operational capability in 2016, 15 years after contract award. The Air Force now has less than 11 years to produce an NGAD capability against increasingly sophisticated threats. Roper says:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

ED: Miltech appears to be stuck in a vicious cycle of ever-expanding development costs and schedule stretchouts. Need this be so? Possibly not. First, we are entering an era of flexible manufacturing, in which different products can be rolled of the same assembly line, using programmable fabrication tools like 3D printers. It's not as efficient as a manufacturing process that's dedicated to producing a single product, but for low product volumes -- which is the reality for combat aircraft, they're built in thousands at most -- the cost and effort of tooling such a line is disproportionate. Smarter software can also, in principle, automatically convert design specs into a production process.

Second, there is increasing standardization and modularization in miltech, such as common computer operating systems that can accommodate new and diverse apps, databuses that allow new elements to be simply plugged in, and containerized missiles or other munitions.

Third, the attitude that a new weapon system must be new across the board is counterproductive. Instead of building a completely new combat aircraft, why not just build a new airframe, fitted with existing engines and combat avionics? The airframe would be designed to be easily upgraded. New engines and combat systems can be then built in parallel or sequentially, with the aircraft updated as they become available. That does mean ongoing test and evaluation of the aircraft, but it's hard to see that would leave us worse off.

[TUE 02 APR 19] CRISPR FOR DISEASE DIAGNOSTICS

* CRISPR FOR DISEASE DIAGNOSTICS: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Faster, Better, Cheaper: The Rise Of CRISPR In Disease Detection" by Amy Maxmen, 19 February 2019), the CRISPR gene-editing tool has proven almost revolutionary, being put to an ever-growing range of uses. One of the latest is in disease detection.

An outbreak of Lassa fever in Nigeria has claimed dozens of lives, having become the worst Lassa outbreak ever. To deal with the outbreak, researchers are trying out a new CRISPR-based diagnostic test. The test relies on CRISPR's ability to hunt down snippets of genes -- in this case, the RNA from the Lassa virus. Jessica Uwanibe, a molecular biologist developing a Lassa diagnostic at Redeemer's University in Ede, Nigeria, says that death rates from Lassa can be as high as 60%. She adds: "I'm working on something that could save a lot of lives."

If the diagnostic works, variants of it could be used to detect a wide range of viral infections early on, allowing treatments to be more effective. Researchers in Honduras and California are testing CRISPR diagnostics for dengue viruses, Zika viruses, and strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) associated with cervical cancer -- while work is underway towards evaluating a CRISPR test for the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Diagnostics for infectious diseases tend to require specialized expertise, sophisticated equipment, and plenty of electricity -- all of which tend to be scarce in places where illnesses such as Lassa fever occur. The CRISPR test promises to be highly accurate, and about as easy to use as an at-home pregnancy test. It is not hard to engineer CRISPR to target specific genetic sequences; those working on the technology see no problem in a turn-around time of a week to devise a test for a viral strain that's in circulation.

Jennifer Doudna -- a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is developing some of these tools -- is enthusiastic about her work: "This is a very exciting direction for the CRISPR field to go in." Doudna and her team are conducting trials of a CRISPR diagnostic developed by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge. CRISPR, when used for gene editing, is associated with the "Cas9" enzyme to do the job. On tinkering with use of the "Cas13" enzyme instead, they found it would cut out the genetic sequence it was engineered to target; but would then start chopping up RNA indiscriminately. That's no good for gene splicing -- but for diagnostics, the assault on RNA following a match provided a useful signal.

The Broad team worked on a test based on CRISPR-Cas13, naming it SHERLOCK for its sleuthing abilities. The test includes RNA molecules that will be sliced up by Cas13 after a match -- and then produce a dark band on a paper strip -- similar to the visual cues in a pregnancy test -- that indicates a match. The Nigerian research team is now testing a variant of SHERLOCK to detect the Lassa virus.

To this time, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to assay the Lassa virus. According to Kayla Barnes -- a geneticist at the Broad who is working with the group in Nigeria -- SHERLOCK is much easier than PCR, cutting the price of testing in half, and only taking about two hours, instead of four. SHERLOCK is also not so affected by power outages, which are common all over Nigeria.

Other CRISPR tests developed by Doudna and her team at Berkeley to target other maladies use different Cas proteins. Their diagnostic for HPV uses the "Cas12a" protein, instead of Cas13. Cas12a also cuts indiscriminately after locking onto its target, but it slices DNA instead of RNA. The test distinguishes between two types of HPV that studies have linked to cervical or anal cancer. Doudna hopes the test will be able to curb the growing death toll from cervical cancer in African countries, where it's often not detected until it's too late. Researchers are also looking into newly discovered "Cas14" and "CasX" proteins, whose small size makes them easier to incorporate into diagnostics.

"These are exciting innovations," says Dhamari Naidoo, a technical officer at the World Health Organization, based in Nigeria. However, she adds that to have real impact with the diagnostics in developing countries, researchers must ensure that the technology is licensed, manufactured, and priced affordably. Naidoo says that Researchers often fail to think about this side of the equation.

Squabbles over patents and economic obstacles have in fact hindered a number of promising diagnostic tools -- but Doudna and Pardis Sabeti, who leads the SHERLOCK project at the Broad, say they're committed to licensing their tools so that the people who need these diagnostics can use them. Uwanibe is impatient: "I wish we could do this even faster."

[MON 01 APR 19] ANOTHER MONTH

* ANOTHER MONTH: I have a keen eye for gadgets, and found a few of interest this last month. First was that the Loveland Public Library installed a new book drop. It didn't look much different from the old one, except it had no buttons: it recognized somebody at the slot, then opened the door, giving voice instructions to explain what was going on. It also allowed all books to be shoved in at once, instead of one at a time; it had a sorting mechanism downstream. After a week or two of using it, I went up to it, and it announced in a Darth Vader voice: "MAY THE SORT BE WITH YOU!" A librarian told me they planned to come up with new voices every now and then.

I mentioned buying an ultra-cheap RCA Cambio tablet-notebook a few months back, and I like it -- but I figured it would be more useful on a stand, so I could adjust viewing angle. That would prevent me using it with the magnetic-lock keyboard that came with it, but I didn't like that keyboard anyway. I got onto Amazon.com, and looked around for wireless keyboards. Most required a USB plug-in receiver, but the Cambio has bluetooth, so I zeroed in on bluetooth keyboards instead.

I found a very small bluetooth keyboard from an outfit named Fosmon, presumably Chinese or Taiwanese. I wasn't too sure of what to make of it, but it was less than $25 USD -- so I bought it, along with an adjustable tablet stand. On setting it all up, I'm very happy. The keyboard is about the size of slimline TV remote; it has a full set of keys in a QWERTY format, along with a little touchpad. I can hold it my hand and type conveniently with it, and can press a button to backlight the keys if it's dark in the room.

The keys have a firm click action, so I don't make many mistakes even with "fat fingers". It's charged with a USB cable; I have an AC / USB charging station in my kitchen, I charge all my gadgets every Monday morning, so no worries about running out of juice. If I need for another appliance computer, I'll probably buy a Cambio with similar accessories again.

Incidentally, while I was poking around on bluetooth keyboards on Amazon, I found another cute made-in-China gimmick: a bluetooth speaker that also projected a keyboard onto a tabletop. It's a fun idea, but reviews said it didn't work so well. Give it some time.

Another thing that came up was that my earbud earphones broke. That happens ever now and then; I buy cheap earphones, not being very concerned about sound quality, and they're expendable. I went over to Walmart to get a replacement, and found they were pushing earphones for less than five bucks each. That sounded like too cheap even for me, but I shrugged and decided to buy two sets of them.

On trying one set out, I found they weren't high-fidelity, but they worked fine. They were a bit tinny, so I set the bass boost on my pocket MP3 player. On consideration, five bucks is a reasonable price; all they consist of is a stereo jack, dual insulated wires, a few little plastic shells, and cheap piezoelectric speakers. Product cost is likely less than a buck. I'll see how well they hold up.

And finally, I have my nephew Graham and niece Jordy, being my heirs, on an allowance, with them buying stuff from my Amazon.com account. Graham decided to splurge and get a Nintendo Switch portable game box. The fun part is that Nintendo has these "Labo" accessory kits for the Switch, with props made out of cardboard. Come mid-April, Nintendo is shipping a "Labo VR" kit that allows playing virtual reality games on the Switch. For example, it includes a "blaster" prop in which the player gets to, say, fight off an alien invasion.

It appears that the VR kit includes a set of "minigames" whose environments can be tweaked by the user, allowing users to tailor their own minigames. Presumably, user-generated games will accumulate on the Switch website. People who have trialed the VR kit also say they don't get nauseous at all, nausea a long-standing problem with VR. I really like interactive gaming with my XBOX 360 / Kinect; it's like having a theme park ride in my living room. I knew that I'd be moving up to VR gaming eventually, and I'll likely spring for a Switch with the VR kit sometime,

Not right away, I'll sit on it for a while. There are rumors that Nintendo is coming up with a reduced-price Switch that can't be used as a console, and I don't need a console. I also don't particularly like the cardboard props, but the Switch is so popular that 3rd parties are likely to come up with equivalent plastic props. I'll bug Graham to get the VR kit; he graduates from Baylor University in Texas next year, I'll go down for graduation, maybe I can try it out then.

* As for the real fake news of the month, it started out subdued, everyone hanging fire on Trump's attempt to declare a national emergency to get his border wall. The Democrats managed to push through a bill to nullify Trump's declaration, obtaining enough Republican votes -- twelve in all, almost a quarter of the GOP there -- to pass the Senate. Trump said he would veto it, and he did. He did late on Friday the 15th, as usual trying to get some buffer time from the weekend before the system reacted.

The veto was of course expected. The real reason for pushing through the bill was to let Trump know that he did not have congressional support, and also to exploit tensions among the Republicans -- not all of them being infatuated with Trump. In any case, the controversy then fell into the lap of the judiciary.

Although states had filed suits against the national emergency declaration early on, nothing happened in the courts. While that seemed puzzling, it was less puzzling on reconsideration: the courts were staying out of way until Congress formally disapproved, and Trump exercised his veto. If Congress hadn't disapproved, the judiciary would have been in an awkward position to slap an injunction on the state of emergency. The veto left the way clear for the courts. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, the legal firestorm circulating around Trump continued without a letup. On 8 March, Paul Manafort -- once Trump's presidential campaign chairman, convicted of a list of crimes including money laundering and tax evasion -- was sentenced for his wrongdoing. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had recommended 19 years at least, since Manafort had lied to the investigation. It was expected that the sentence wouldn't be that long, since Manafort was a nonviolent first-time offender; but there was consternation that the sentence was only 47 months, far under guidelines.

However, Manafort had also been convicted for lying to the investigation, and that meant another sentencing a week later. That sentence wasn't so tough, either, giving Manafort a total of seven and a half years in lockup -- but it was still far from trivial, and judge Amy Berman Jackson gave him a thorough chewing-out. CNN commenter Phil Mudd, an ex-CIA official advising on counterterrorism, said: "She took him, she ground him up, sprinkled him in her coffee, and drank him for breakfast. She crushed him. ... She crushed him like a bug,"

The Democrats are now after Trump's tax returns, which he has refused to release. A per a 1924 law, the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee has the authority to request anyone's tax returns, and the IRS, normally strictly secretive about tax returns, has to hand them over. A House resolution was passed to authorize obtaining the returns -- and surprisingly, the vote was unanimous, even though Trump has his toughest allies among the GOP in the House.

Then again, maybe it wasn't so surprising, since no doubt his supporters believe that nothing will be found in Trump's tax returns. However, that would make it most puzzling as to why he was so reluctant to release them. It would be a bit much to think they will reveal income tax evasion, at least not without a lot of digging -- but it's not hard to believe they would embarrass Trump, by showing how little taxes he paid. That, despite the fact that he boasted in the 2016 campaign of being slick on taxes. Of course, that's not the only thing that Trump said in 2016 that's likely to come back to sink its teeth into him.

* All such concerns came to a head on 22 March, when the Robert Mueller investigation released its report. That was noteworthy in itself, the investigation having been completed without any visible interference. The next question was whether there was anything of real interest in the report. A careful consideration of the realities of the matter suggested caution about inflated expectations; from early on, commenters had pointed out it was unlikely the report would accuse the Trump campaign of collusion, since that would be hard to prove; it seemed more likely that the investigation would focus on other malfeasance, such as money laundering or tax evasion.

In short, the safest bet was that the report would not change the status quo in any major way. That proved a good bet when, on 24 March, Attorney General Bill Barr issued a four-page summary that said: NO COLLUSION. OK, that wasn't a surprise, but then it got murkier, saying there was no basis for charging Trump with obstruction of justice, then adding that wasn't saying he was exonerated of it.

That was a strange thing to say. When the authorities announce they don't have a case, that's normally the end of it; saying there still might be a case is absurd and reprehensible. It's much like the way Jim Comey, during the 2016 election, cleared Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in her handling of emails -- to then publicly condemn her, with Clinton having no way to defend herself. So why the comment about NO EXONERATION? Hedging bets? A big hint?

In any case, if release of the report changed anything in the status quo, it was to intensify the furor -- and the longer Barr sits on it, the problem will only get worse. In two years, Trump leaves office, the next administration will get the report, then take action of it if there is basis for doing so.

For myself, I was assuming that Trump would be in legal hot water after he left office -- but though that still may happen, there's no sense in banking on it. The important thing is that he leaves. By the end of the month, Trump was renewing his assault on ObamaCare, this time trying to work through the courts. It was unlikely he was going to get very far with the effort; the Republicans couldn't kill off ObamaCare for the two years they controlled Congress and the White House, and so it wasn't going to happen now.

Apparently, Republicans in Congress groaned at Trump raising the issue, since it's been a loser for them in election campaigns. Trump, having run out of new tricks to play, is now recycling old ones. This is getting dull. Trump is a temporary affliction; he will be gone in time, and his misadventure in politics is not likely to end well for him.