* 21 entries including: US Constitution (series), global decarbonization (series), Lego-builder robot, ECJ gene-editing edict, house sparrows & humans, solar booms, farms turned to solar in California, AI & medical diagnostics, perovskite leds, & AI versus protein folding.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR SEPTEMBER 2019: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Assad's Hollow Victory" 5 September 2019), the protracted and agonizing civil war in Syria is drawing to a close. Early on, it seemed as if the regime of Bashar al-Assad was not likely to survive -- but the Western powers, though they made menacing noises, had no stomach for getting seriously involved in Syria. The Russians, Syria having long been a client state, and the Iranians, culturally linked to the Alawite Shia ruling regime, had no such hesitations.
Now the Russians and Iranians claim that order has been restored. That is only true in that the shooting in the rubble has died down. Half of Syria's population has been displaced; eight years of fighting has destroyed the country's economy, with about a half-million dead. Syria is a sick man walking, and the sickness is likely to reach well beyond its borders.
When the shooting finally stops, it will not really mean peace. Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, was an iron-fisted tyrant, but he was a smart one, keeping order by achieving a balance between Syria's religious factions. Bashar, in contrast, painted Sunnis as terrorists to rally Christians, Druze, and secular-minded Syrians to his side. Millions of Sunnis have fled the country, creating what Mr Assad calls "a healthier and more homogeneous society", but millions remain. Their homes have been trashed, their property confiscated, and their districts overrun by Assad supporters. They are not likely to be obedient citizens.
On top of that, Syrians have long-standing grievances. Back in 2011 corruption, poverty, and social inequality united the uprising. To no surprise, now things are much worse. Syria lies in ruins; Syria's GDP is one-third of what it was before the war, and the estimates that more than eight in ten people are poor. The government has plans for reconstruction, but to do the job right demands money and resources that Bashar simply doesn't have. Not surprisingly, he has focused reconstruction on areas that were loyal to him. The Sunni slums that were not are being demolished and redeveloped for his supporters, with profits for the effort pocketed by cronies.
Next, there is Bashar's cruelty. His father kept order with a vicious secret police, and occasional applications of indiscriminate military force. Bashar has carried on the tradition, with estimates of at least 14,000 people tortured and killed in the regime's network of prisons. Another 128,000 are believed to still remain in custody, though no doubt many of those are now dead. The pace of executions is ramping up, as the war draws to a close.
Finally, Bashar owes his survival to Russia and Iran. They expect payment, and they will call the shots. In sum, for Syrians, Bashar's victory is a catastrophe -- and nobody has the power to unseat him. He may remain in power for decades.
During the conflict, Syria became a battleground for outside powers. The Iranians regard Syria as a second front against Israel, along with Hizbullah, the Iranian proxy in Lebanon. Israel has repeatedly and heavily pounded on the Iranians in Syria. Turkey, to the north, wants to crush Kurdish forces that have carved out an enclave in Syria, which the Americans would not like at all.
Refugees, of course, have poured out of Syria, and may not go back, since so many have nothing left to go back to. Their hosts tend to regard them as a nuisance at best, a threat at worst -- and under the circumstances, they are easily radicalized. Although Islamic State was driven out of Iraq and pounded in Syria, jihadists seem to be regrouping and growing again.
The Western powers, for better or worse, refused to seriously intervene in Syria. Some European leaders suggest it is time to engage with Bashar, participate in reconstruction, and send the refugees home. There's an obvious case for that, but an obvious case against it, since it would mean propping up Bashar's unpleasant regime. Better to let Russia and Iran pay,
Of course, the Western powers should offer strictly humanitarian assistance, ensuring that it is distributed properly and not pocketed, while taking military action against vicious acts by the Syrian regime. However, for the most part, assistance money would be better spent on Syria's neighbors. Under the circumstances, outsiders can do little to help Syrians, and indeed may only prolong their suffering.
* As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("The Techlash Is Only Making Facebook Stronger" by Sarah Frier, 14 August 2019), America's Big Tech companies have been under the gun in the last few years, none more so than social-media giant Facebook INC. In July, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) slapped a $5 billion USD fine on Facebook for its mishandling of user privacy, that being the biggest fine the FTC has ever imposed. After the judgement, Facebook released a video of CEO Mark Zuckerberg solemnly telling his people a new era of regulatory compliance was at hand.
Superficially, it seemed like justice had been done -- or had it? Facebook's stock price actually went up after the judgement was announced, since the markets had been expecting worse. In 2018, the company brought in $22 billion USD in profits, so the fine was readily affordable. A minority on the FTC board believed the fine should have been an order of magnitude greater. That's arguable: $5 billion USD is not chicken feed, and it was hard to understand what the point of financially wounding the company would have been. If the goal was to get the attention of Facebook's management, no doubt it succeeded. After all, it was obvious that if the company didn't clean up its act, the next fine would certainly be an order of magnitude greater. However, that leaves the question dangling of what "cleaning up their act" really means.
Facebook lives on data, closely tracking everything its 2.5 billion users -- a third of the world's population -- do on Facebook pages. The company integrates the data its users provide with data obtained from outside sources, to precisely target ads for Facebook and its other apps: Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. That gives Facebook an ad business worth about $70 billion USD a year.
The FTC settlement placed no restrictions on how much data Facebook can collect or analyze, as long as users consent. Any time the personal information of more than 500 users is shared with a third party without those users explicitly agreeing to it, Facebook will be in violation. Alex Stamos, a former Facebook executive, commented that the company had got a really good deal: "I can't believe Facebook didn't pay more for this." For $5 billion USD, Facebook could collect all the data the company could get its hands on, and didn't have to share it with anyone.
Stamos, it seems unintentionally, put his finger on the peculiar state of regulation of online privacy: Facebook had been bitterly criticized for sharing user data, and now it's being criticized for not doing so. As far as collecting user data goes, most users don't worry much about it, as long as they can get perks out of it. They generally like targeted advertising, and indeed may be perfectly willing to help target it more precisely. As far as not sharing user data goes, there's no great need to do so: Facebook can offer precisely targeted markets to advertisers and distribute ads for them, without the advertisers knowing exactly who gets the ads, while Facebook exercises oversight over the ad content.
In other words, Facebook is in an enviable business position, and for all the flak blasted at the company, it is hard to see what substantial basis the authorities have for complaint now. As recent, ill-informed Congressional forays against supposed "online censorship" -- that is, social media outlets throwing out trolls and other bad actors who violate the stated terms and conditions -- have demonstrated, the authorities don't have a clear idea of what they're doing when it comes to Big Tech. Zuckerberg has, rightfully, declared in so many words that he would be happy to follow the rules, if anybody comes up with rules that made sense.
Zuckerberg has decided to combine all the messaging networks so people can communicate securely among them, one of the reasons being to help the company provide users with encryption that not even it can crack. That's another thing that makes some of the authorities unhappy, but then they can't complain that Facebook is failing to protect the privacy of its users. The government is particularly confused on the issue of encryption: the Trump Administration screams about the security threat of communications gear sold by China's Huawei, and then turns around to complain about Apple making smartphone encryption the government can't crack.
In the face of such confusion, Zuckerberg has good reason to think he's holding the well stronger hand of cards. Facebook's size does make people uneasy, with some complaint about the company's efforts to consolidate -- not just combining messaging apps, but also giving employees of the subordinate Instagram and WhatsApp operations @fb.com email addresses. That suggests that Zuckerberg doesn't feel the Facebook brand name is tainted, or at least isn't going to be tainted for long. He's probably right. For now, Zuckerberg's on a "don't be evil" kick, establishing oversight boards and other measures to stay on the straight and narrow. Seen from another point of view, he's handily staying a step ahead of the muddled regulators.
* In closely related news, as reported by GIZMODO.com ("France Vows to Block Facebook's Libra Currency in Europe, Suggests 'Public Digital Currency' Instead" by Matt Novak, 12 September 2019), on considering the Facebook-backed Libra digital currency -- discussed here in July -- the French government has replied with a big thumb's-down. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, bluntly announced:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I want to be absolutely clear: in these conditions, we cannot authorize the development of Libra on European soil. This eventual privatization of money contains risks of abuse of dominant position, risks to sovereignty, and risks for consumers and for companies.
END QUOTE
Le Maire said that he's been talking with the European Central Bank about a "public digital currency", though he didn't discuss specifics. It seems likely he doesn't have them yet. The Libra Association says that it welcomes scrutiny from international organizations, and is working on making Libra fly right. Dante Disparte, a senior official of the Libra Association, cheerfully replied:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The comments today from France's economy and finance minister further underscore the importance of our ongoing work with regulatory bodies and leadership around the world. In the nearly three months since the intent to launch the Libra project was announced, we have become the world's most scrutinized fintech effort. We welcome this scrutiny and have deliberately designed a long launch runway to have these conversations, educate stakeholders and incorporate their feedback in our design.
END QUOTE
Again, it would seem that the Facebook attitude towards the negative response to Libra is: "Punish us more." Just imagine: the Libra Group proposes a commercially-owned digital currency, with the consequence that an intergovernmental organization -- an arm of the World Bank? -- takes it over, sparing the group the bother of managing it themselves. Facebook and friends just want a convenient digital currency, they won't have any reason to complain if it's not directly under their control. Libra would almost certainly be the starting point, there being no sense in re-inventing the wheel, and there would also be no sense, indeed self-defeating, to make it unnecessarily hard to use.
What's not to like? Maybe it's what Facebook planned all along. Indeed, it's not clear that Le Maire's indignation is all that sincere either, since the Europeans would really like to defeat the US dollar as the default international currency -- the Trump Administration has weaponized it against them. Le Maire, after all, didn't reject the Libra concept, instead saying that it not be under the control of private interests. Since such a Libra-derived currency will bypass dollar power, it is unlikely the Americans be enthusiastic about a Libra-derived international currency. However, if it becomes a standard in the rest of the world, the USA may end up going along anyway. Under the circumstances, the global power of the dollar would be very difficult to defend.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (74): Along with establishing an income tax, as fallout from the Panic of 1907, Woodrow Wilson also restored a central bank, or more accurately a network of them, by signing the "Federal Reserve Act" of 1913. The Federal Reserve System was, like the First and Second Banks, created under a congressional charter. As it exists today -- it has modestly evolved over time -- it consists of 12 regional banks, with a total of 25 associated branch banks among them. It has three directory / advisory bodies, including:
The "Fed", as it is known, is one of the most misunderstood and maligned organs of the Federal government, sometimes accused of being dictatorial and conspiratorial. In reality, the Fed is not such an exciting subject. Its strategic mission is to protect the US monetary and banking systems; its tactical mission is to maintain stable prices and maximize employment, which requires a balancing act between "too loose" and "too tight" control over the money supply. Considering that this balancing act is guaranteed to make some people unhappy, it's not so surprising that the Fed is the target of endless complaints.
The Federal Reserve uses three mechanisms to control the money supply:
The regional banks of the Federal Reserve deal with member banks. All US national banks, chartered by the Federal government, are members, and have stock in the Fed. State-chartered banks may or may not be members. Only about 2/5ths of US banks are member banks.
Like the First and Second Banks, the Federal Reserve is a privately-held, profit-making operation, with surplus funds obtained by the Fed going to the US Treasury. Unlike the First and Second Banks, the Fed is under direct government supervision, by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors -- which is a Federal agency, with its seven members appointed by the executive, and confirmed by the Senate. They are in principle to be selected to carry out the Federal Reserve's mission without partisan considerations. They serve 14-year terms; the executive also appoints a chair and vice chair from the board, those two serving 4-year renewable terms in that role.
The board of directors, by tradition and the structure of the system, indeed largely apolitical, resisting the pressures the White House may be under to pursue a short-sighted "easy money" policy. The POTUS can remove board members, but it's not so easy to do. Regional bank presidents are assigned by the board of directors. The Open Market Committee has 12 members, 7 from the board of governors, 5 being presidents of the regional banks, with the Federal Open Market Committee being a policy-making organ. The Federal Advisory Committee has 12 members from the commercial banking industry; it is purely advisory in nature.
Also in 1913, Wilson signed an act establishing the "Federal Trade Commission (FTC)", its mission being to protect consumers. It was a logical follow-on to the Sherman Act of 1890, with the FTC being an expansion of the "Bureau of Corporations", which had been set up under Teddy Roosevelt. Its mission included:
In 1914, to follow up the establishment of the FTC, Wilson signed into law the "Sherman Antitrust Act", which focused on restraining monopolistic business practices, and breaking up monopolies. On the significant minus side, Wilson was a staunch segregationist, even going so far as to allow some government departments to be segregated. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: The "loyal wingman" concept -- of a drone operating in assistance of a piloted combat aircraft -- discussed here earlier in 2019 -- is hot in miltech circles these days, with an article from JANES.com ("UK Pursues Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Aircraft" by Richard Scott, 09 August 2019), revealing that Britain is now getting into the act.
The UK Royal Air Force (RAF) Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) has now awarded contracts for the preliminary design of a loyal wingman to Blue Bear Systems Research, Boeing Defence UK, and Callen-Lenz. The "Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Air (LANCA)" demonstrator initiative, AKA "Project Mosquito" is primarily intended to establish requirements for an operational system The LANCA initiative is also intended to increase understanding of methods to substantially reduce the cost and time of fielding a combat air capability of this class, relative to the burden of development of traditional combat air systems.
LANCA emerged from 2015 studies performed by the UK Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL) to investigate innovative air combat technologies, with the studies then brought into the RAF RCO's broader "Future Combat Air System Technology Initiative (FCAS TI)." Project Mosquito will be split into two parts: a 12-month Phase I to come up with preliminary designs, and then a down-select for Phase II, with two companies building and flying a demonstrator. Flights will be no earlier than 2022.
* As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("A Shape-Shifting Drone Suggests The Future Of Rescue Missions" by Shannon Liao, 20 December 2018), researchers in the Robotics & Perception Group at the University of Zurich have developed a quadcopter drone that can adjusts its configuration to fit through tight spots -- a capability obviously useful for rescue applications.
The quadcopter drone has a square frame, with rotors on pivoting arms at each corner of the square. In normal flight, the arms point straight out from the corners, giving the drone an "X" configuration; when flying straight through a hole, the arms fold to give the drone an "H" configuration; when flying up through a hole, the arms fold up against the sides of the frame. It can also fold into a "T" configuration to position one of its two onboard cameras close to a wall or other obstruction.
Although the drone has an onboard Snapdragon quad-core CPU, at present it doesn't have much ability to determine when it should reconfigure itself. The research team is now working on giving it greater autonomy. They do not see the machine as ready for production yet.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Lockheed Martin-Led Team Unveils New Falcon Mobile Air Defence Solution" by Robin Hughes, 19 February 2019). an international collaboration of defense companies, led by Lockheed Martin, has now unveiled a new mobile air defense system, designated the "Falcon Weapon System".
The Falcon system, developed with private funding, includes:
According to the team, Falcon is designed intended to address "a critical gap in short- and medium-range ground-based air defense" to defeat "current and emerging threats", including weaponized drones, cruise missiles, and fixed- and rotary-wing platforms capable of delivering ordnance at extended ranges. It is being offered at the outset to meet a United Arab Emirates requirement to replace its Raytheon-developed MIM-23 Hawk medium-range surface-to-air missile systems.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* LEGO-BUILDER ROBOT: As discussed in an article from FASTCOMPANY.com ("Autodesk's Lego Model-Building Robot Is The Future Of Manufacturing" by Daniel Terdiman, 20 July 18), a visitor to a San Francisco lab run by design automation giant AutoDesk two Universal Robots UR10 robot arms whirring away, picking Lego bricks out of six little square bins, and carefully snapping them into place on a green pad -- gradually building up a simple 3D copy of San Francisco's trademark TransAmerica Pyramid.
A casual observer might think: "That's cute, but so what?" The trick is that the system, known as the "BrickBot" -- originally named the "LegoBot", but that ran into tradename difficulties -- was simply given a 3D model of the skyscraper, and then had to figure out how to build the Lego model on its own. It is an impressive technical feat, and paves the way for robots to perform more sophisticated assembly. According to Mike Haley, head of machine intelligence research at Autodesk:
BEGIN QUOTE:
You speak to most of our customers, they're all dealing with the same thing. How can we make a broader range of things more quickly? How can we make decisions later in the cycle, change designs? ... can we design a factory so that we don't have to build [a] perfectly pristine, predictable environment where nothing ever [is allowed to go] wrong because the robots can't handle it?
END QUOTE
Haley points out that current robot assembly systems are "incredibly dumb." They have to be programmed exactly what to do, and they have little or no ability to handle any circumstances outside of their programming. Haley says that robots "have no real sense of what they're trying to achieve." Brickbot, he adds, is "about introducing that sense into the system."
The goal of BrickBot is to demonstrate, by going from a pile of Lego blocks to a finished model, that that robots can learn to reason and handle complex tasks -- strategizing which brick to pick from a bin and where to place it, then how to pick up the brick from a bin, turn it to the right orientation, and then snap it into place.
Ken Goldberg -- a professor of robotics, automation, and new media at the University of California at Berkeley -- has a keen interest in BrickBot, since he's working on "Dex-Net", a system to allow robots to grasp objects of myriad shapes and sizes. Goldberg says that problem breaks down into three major sub-tasks:
A robot arm is much less flexible and facile than the human hand, and trying to give a machine the mechanical intuition of any child playing with Lego bricks handles easily is not an easy thing to do. The BrickBot project ran into delays in simply being able to pick bricks out of a bin; the task proved too much of a challenge until they gave the system 3-D color vision. The researchers also had to learn to deal with noise, which was done by taking multiple images as the robot reached into a bin for a brick.
Another facet of the task was to get BrickBot to handle all the different Lego pieces of different configurations -- not just bricks, but wheels, windows, and people. Early on, it was easily stumped, but it's learned better now. Haley says they fed the system a Lego goat: "The system wasn't trained on goats, but it was still able to reasonably deal with it 80% of the time."
Haley says BrickBot is still a research project, but feels the concept has been proven: "This thing is feasible." He's looking ahead to see if BrickBot can learn to adapt assembly processes in a ways most convenient to it. However, he's also looking for AutoDesk customers who are willing to be co-research partners who will let an industrial-scale version of the system into their factories. He doesn't feel that the use of Legos will turn off prospective partners, either: "I wanted something that speaks to [everyone]. If I do a research project, and I want it to affect people, I want it to be in a language that everybody understands. Ship building excites ship builders, but that's all. Lego, everyone knows."
UC Berkeley's Goldberg is impressed with BrickBot, but thinks Autodesk has a long road ahead: "It's very important to be doing these experiments, but we have quite a way to go before we're able to put these into practice in a cost-effective way. Having a robot learn to do one step in an assembly line, that's very exciting. Having it doing multiple steps like this, that's even more exciting. But that's going to take time."
Haley admits the truth in that, but Autodesk users include plenty of visionaries who are willing to take the long view, and Haley knows such people will say: "We'd love to work with you guys. We get that it's not a product, but on the other side, we get to discover something with you guys. If it does turn into something -- great, we're the ones leading it."
* In related news, the creative agency Redpepper has demonstrated just how smart machine learning is becoming by setting up a system that, when given the pages from a WHERE'S WALDO book, zeroes in on Waldo, and fingers him with a robot hand. It's not a leading-edge research project, either; the system is based on a cheap robot arm run by a Rasberry Pi processor, with programming in Python, and using the Google AutoML vision service.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GENE-EDITING EDICT: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("CRISPR Conundrum: "Strict European Court Ruling Leaves Food-Testing Labs Without A Plan" by Heidi Ledford, 23 July 2019), a landmark European court ruling that made gene-edited crops, tweaked using the CRISPR gene-editing scheme, subject to the same tough regulations as other genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has made life very difficult for food-testing laboratories across Europe.
On 25 July 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) delivered a judgement that requires these food-test labs to identify gene-edited crops. The food labs already spot-check freighters and supermarkets for foods that contain unapproved traditional GMOs, but that's not so hard to do; their DNA will contain genes spliced into them that can be readily identified. However, it is not easy to spot gene editing.
While traditional gene-splicing pastes entire genes from one species of organism into another, modern gene editing simply tweaks a few DNA letters in genes, making the alterations difficult to tell from those produced by natural mutations. Martin Wasmer -- a legal expert Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, who studies genomic legal issues -- says: "Some of these [gene-editing] alterations are small enough that they are simply indistinguishable from naturally occurring [mutations]. It will not be possible to enforce in those cases."
The ECJ's decision blindsided many crop scientists, who assumed that the difficulty in detecting gene edits would exempt crops derived using those edits from EU regulations that govern older GM crops using gene-splicing. Not only are gene edits hard to detect because they are hard to tell from natural mutations, there is also no way to show they present any more threat than natural mutations -- they're not chimeras in any way, they're not "frankenfoods". The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced that it does not intend to regulate edited crops with mutations that could have occurred in nature; Brazil, Argentina, and Australia have taken a similar tack.
Gene-edited crops are starting to come onto the market in some of these countries. That means unapproved gene-edited foods could eventually wind up in European supermarkets, and so the ECJ's decision. The spliced genes in older GMO crops can be spotted with simple lab tests that search for those genes. Hunting down more precise gene edits might be possible with DNA-sequencing technologies that analyze genomes for short deletions or insertions. However, Hermann Broll -- a researcher in the Department of Food Safety at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin -- says that few EU labs tasked with enforcement of regulations on genetically modified crops now have the money, expertise, or equipment to carry out such assays.
Broll adds that, even if they could spot the edits, regulators would find it very difficult to prove that the DNA variant they've identified is the product of gene editing, and not a natural mutation: "I do not have a clue as to the solution, and I have not seen anywhere any clue yet."
Regulatory agencies that track gene-spliced crops generally release data about which GM crops have been approved for sale, and where. That allows researchers to devise tests for those crops. However, regulatory agencies that don't track gene-edited crops of course don't release data on them. Without that data, there's little hope of identifying gene-edited crops. The European Network of GMO Laboratories -- a consortium of testing labs -- recently announced. "It is highly improbable for enforcement laboratories to be able to detect the presence of unauthorized genome-edited plant products in food or feed entering the EU market without prior information on the altered DNA sequences."
In short, the ECJ has demanded that European food-testing labs do the impossible. The only way to achieve the testing mandate will be to convince regulatory agencies elsewhere to cooperate. That would be difficult, since those agencies don't recognize the necessity; there will be no way to convince them to care, when they've got better things to do. The only question is how long it will take the ECJ to realize that their judgement is ignorant and absurd. It might take a while -- but thanks to CRISPR, the end of the gene wars may be in sight.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DECARBONIZING THE WORLD (6): Another one of the big challenges for decarbonization is heating. Leeds, Britain's third-largest city, is now considering the replacement of natural-gas heating with hydrogen heating. Northern Gas Networks, a utility, has been working on a project named "H21", in which Leeds will be a pilot project to distribute hydrogen to homes and businesses instead of natural gas. Once the city's old cast-iron pipes are fully replaced by polyethylene ones, the challenge will be to prove that hydrogen can be delivered safely at scale.
If the scheme works, Northern Gas envisions a network that will provide hydrogen for cooking and heating across northeast England. The company sees Leeds as a pathfinder for a global hydrogen. To achieve that goal, it plans to adapt the most common way of making hydrogen -- by steam-methane reforming (SMR), capturing the CO2 emitted in the process.
Except for the need to improve insulation in houses, few pay much attention to heating in discussions about the climate, even though it is a huge consumer of energy, particularly in chilly climates. Britain uses more energy for heating than for generating electricity or for running its transport system. About 70% of this energy comes from burning natural gas, producing more than a quarter of the country's CO2 emissions.
One reason why heating usually doesn't come up in climate discussions is because it's harder to decarbonize than electricity, and so there's an inclination to ignore it. It's not so hard in prospect to create an electric grid driven by renewable energy; it's a much bigger challenge to convert millions of gas-fired boilers in people's homes and workplaces to electricity. Another reason it's ignored is because gas companies are smaller and draw less attention than electric utilities.
True, electricity could be used for home heating, but it isn't all that practical. In the UK, for example, peak heating demand during periods of extreme cold runs to about 300 GW, five times peak electricity demand. That would demand a vast expansion of the power grid. Overthrowing current natural-gas heating networks would also be preposterously expensive. Hydrogen or other gases -- such as biomethane produced from organic matter -- seem like a better option, as long as they can be produced cleanly and cheaply. They won't require complete replacement of the existing network. Once new burners are installed in stoves and boilers, consumers may barely notice.
Electricity will still play a big role, especially in conjunction with energy conservation tricks like better insulation. Electric heat pumps, for example, work like a refrigerator or air-conditioning system in reverse, taking heat from the air or the ground to warm a building. They are expensive to buy but cheap to operate, being highly energy efficient. The European Heat Pump Association says the number of pumps in Europe doubled between 2011 and 2017, to 10.6 million.
Where natural gas is already the main heating fuel, hydrogen is a promising replacement. In Leeds the plan is to produce it by turning steam and methane into hydrogen and CO2, capturing the CO2 using carbon capture and storage (CCS). Once enough zero-carbon electricity is available, it may be possible to produce it sustainably via electrolysis of water -- but for now, doubts remain about the practicality of CCS. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (73):
* The 16th Amendment was followed by another, the 17th, only months later in 1913. It read:
BEGIN QUOTE:
SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT: The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.
When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
END QUOTE
The bottom line of the 17th Amendment was that states now elected senators directly -- in contrast to the traditional scheme, in which state legislatures elected the senators. The push towards direct elections of senators had been more or less put in motion by the Douglas-Lincoln contest in Illinois in 1858; it had gradually built up steam, and by 1913, about half the states had direct elections for senators.
To be sure, as per the Constitution, the legislatures still formally selected the senators, but the legislatures had been obligated to obey the people's vote. The 17th Amendment established direct elections, bypassing the legislature, in all the states. Part of the motivation in adopting the 17th amendment was that competitions between rival candidates for the Senate had an unfortunate tendency to produce gridlocks, bringing state governments to their knees. Direct election of senators also had the fortunate effect of reducing corruption in state governments, since senators were no longer beholden to state legislatures, and didn't have to go along with them if they were acting badly.
The fine print on the 17th Amendment added:
Getting ahead of the story a bit, four years after the passage of the 17th Amendment, at the urging of Wilson, the Senate would introduce a new procedural rule, "Rule 22", allowing the Senate to shut down "filibusters". A filibuster is an attempt to obstruct legislation, with senators taking the floor and talking indefinitely. Rule 22 allowed the senate to invoke "cloture", ending the debate and moving on to a vote, if 60% of the senators voted to do so.
Rule 22 is an ambiguous, and in practice, troublesome tool. Yes, there's something to be said for putting a stop to a filibuster, but it would continue if 41% of the Senate wanted it to, and so a minority could still hold up the show. The House of Representatives had got rid of filibusters decades earlier, allowing debate to be closed by a simple majority vote.
Rule 22 does encourage bipartisanship in the Senate -- but as would be proven later, it is not practical when bitter partisan politics are the norm. However, as discussed later, there's a way around it; as per the Constitution, the Senate makes its own rules, and can readily change them if they become impractical -- with little concern about what the executive or judiciary thinks about it. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SPACE NEWS: Space launches for August included:
-- 05 AUG 19 / BLAGOVEST 14L (KOSMOS 2539) -- A Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 2156 UTC (next day local time - 6) to put the "Blagovest 14L" geostationary comsat into orbit. The satellite was built for the Russian military by ISS Reshetnev, being based on ISS Reshetnev's Express 2000 satellite bus, which has also been used for Ekspress and Yamal communications satellites. Blagovest 14L had a launch mass of 3,227 kilograms (7,114 pounds) and a design life of 15 years.
It provided high-speed internet, television, radio broadcast, plus voice and video conferencing services for Russian domestic and military users. It was the fourth launch in the Blagovest comsat series since 2017. Blagovest 14L was the last of four satellites that made up the initial Blagovest constellation.
-- 06 AUG 17 / INTELSAT 39, EDRS C -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1930 UTC (local time + 3) to put the "Intelsat 39" and "EDRS C" geostationary comsats into orbit. Total payload weight was 10,660 kilograms (23,500 pounds).
Intelsat 39 was built by Maxar Technologies, previously Space Systems / Loral, and was based on the Maxar 1300 satellite bus. It had a launch mass of 6,600 kilograms (14,500 pounds); it had a payload of C / Ku-band transponders, with both wide and steerable spot beams, and had a design life of 15 years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 62 degrees east longitude to provide broadband networking and video distribution services to regions in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It replaced the Intelsat 902 satellite, launched in 2001, at that position.
EDRS C was the second satellite in the European Data Relay System, a network developed by the European Space Agency and Airbus Defense and Space to provide high-speed laser communications links between low-orbiting satellites and ground stations, to establish a "SpaceDataHighway" network. The first node in the network, "EDRS A", was launched as a hosted payload on the EUTELSAT 9B comsat in 2016.
EDRS C was manufactured by OHB System AG, being based on the firm's SmallGEO satellite bus. It had a launch mass of 3,186 kilograms (7,024 pounds). The laser communication terminals were developed by Tesat-Spacecom of Germany and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). EDRS C also hosts a Ka-band broadband communications payload named "HYLAS 3", which was provided by Avanti Communications under a contract with ESA as a customer-furnished item to OHB.
HYLAS 3 complemented the HYLAS 1 and HYLAS 2 satellites, which were launched 2010 and 2012 respectively. While HYLAS 1 and HYLAS 2 were designed to provide communications services to the Mediterranean region, the HYLAS 3 payload primarily served Africa. It had up to 4 GHz of Ka-band capacity, configured across eight beams within a single steerable antenna.
-- 06 AUG 19 / AMOS 17 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2323 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "Amos 17" geostationary comsat into orbit for Spacecom LTD of Israel. Built by Boeing and based on the BSS 702 comsat bus, Amos 17 had a launch mass of 6,500 kilograms (14,330 pounds), carried a payload of C / Ku / Ka-band transponders, and had a design life of 20 years.
It was placed in the geostationary slot at 17 degrees east longitude to provide high-throughput broadband connectivity and other communications services over Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. One of the two payload-shroud halves was recovered -- but no attempt was made to recover the first stage, since the launch trajectory left too little fuel for a soft landing.
-- 08 AUG 19 / AEHF 5 (USA 292) -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1013 UTC (local time + 4) to put the fifth "Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF)" military geostationary comsat into orbit. It featured encrypted / low probability of intercept communications along with jam resistance and resistance to electromagnetic pulse. The launch also carried the TDO smallsat.
AEHF 5 had a launch mass of 6,150 kilograms (13,565 pounds) and was based on the Lockheed Martin A2100 comsat bus. AEHF is planned to eventually replace the long-standing Milstar military comsat network, with one AEHF having more bandwidth than all five current Milstar spacecraft put together. The Atlas 5 booster was in the "551" configuration, with a 5-meter (16.4-foot) fairing, five solid rocket boosters, and an upper stage with a single Centaur engine.
AEHF 5 was the fifth satellite to be launched in the US Air Force's Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) program. This is a system of satellites dedicated to providing global survivable, secure, protected and jam-resistant communications to the armed forces of the United States and her allies.
AEHF augment the legacy Milstar communications system -- a network of satellites deployed from 1994 to 2003, with AEHF being backwards-compatible with the Milstar system. AEHF will eventually replace Milstar, as the Milstar satellites go out of service.
AEHF was originally conceived as a constellation of six satellites -- but that was scaled back to three, when the "Transformational Satellite (TSAT)" was proposed. When TSAT was canceled in 2010, additional AEHF satellites were reinstated -- bringing the constellation up to five, and then back to six satellites. The first three satellites were launched in August 2010, May 2012 and September 2012, all aboard Atlas V rockets.
The AEHF constellation adds new enhancements over its Milstar predecessors, including an extreme data rate (XDR) capability in addition to the legacy low data rate (LDR) and medium data rate (MDR). XDR became fully operational with the entry into service of the AEHF 4 (USA 288) satellite.
Launched in October 2018, AEHF completed the basic geostationary AEHF constellation, allowing signals to be routed around the world. XDR offers data transfer at speeds of up to 8.192 megabits per second - up from maximums of 2.4 kilobits and 1.544 megabits per second with LDR and MDR respectively. A single AEHF satellite provides greater total bandwidth than the entire legacy Milstar constellation. Several different types of communications antennas are carried aboard AEHF 5:
The MRCA and HRCA used phased-array antennas to direct their beams. An AEHF satellite provides enhanced global coverage compared to Milstar, operating up to 68 simultaneous worldwide beams.
Two cross-link antennae allow AEHF satellites to conduct bi-directional communications with other spacecraft in the AEHF and Milstar constellations. This allows signals to be routed across the constellation, passing directly between satellites without using a ground station as a relay. AEHF crosslinks have a bandwidth of 60 megabits per second, compared to the 10 megabits per second possible between Milstar satellites.
Along with the USA, users of the AEHF system include United Kingdom, Canada and the Netherlands. AEHF, with its focus on secure tactical communications, complements other elements of the US defense comsat system:
TDO was a 12U CubeSat, carrying a space debris and tracking experiment.
-- 17 AUG 19 / SMALLSATS x 3: A "Jielong (Smart Dragon) 1" small booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0411 UTC (local time - 8) on its initial operational flight, to put three smallsats into orbit. The payloads included:
The Jielong 1 booster was developed by China Rocket CO LTD, a subsidiary of China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). CALT builds most of China's Long March booster family,
The Jielong 1 booster measures 19.5 meters (64 feet) in height tall and is about 1.2 meters (4 feet) in diameter. Launch mass is about 23.1 tonnes (51,000 pounds). It can put up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) into Sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit. The booster was launched from a road-mobile transporter.
Jielong 1 is the fourth new Chinese solid-fueled smallsat launcher to debut in the last 10 months. All have roughly the same carrying capacity to low Earth orbit. A Chinese startup named i-Space became the first private firm in China to fly a small booster to orbit on 25 July 2019, when it launched the Hyperbola 1 booster and several small satellites from Jiuquan. A company named OneSpace failed in an orbital launch attempt in March, and a rocket launched by another firm named LandSpace also failed before reaching orbit last October.
-- 19 AUG 19 / CHINASAT 18 (FAILURE) -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1203 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Chinasat 18" geostationary comsat into space. The satellite was built by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and based on the DFH 4 bus. The satellite apparently failed to release its solar panels after reaching orbit, and was written off.
-- 19 AUG 19 / LOOK MA NO HANDS -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from a facility on the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island at 1212 UTC (local time - 11) to put four smallsats into orbit. They included:
Except for BRO 1, the Spaceflight company was in charge of the payload manifest. The mission was named "Look Ma No Hands". The flight had an experimental aspect, with Rocket Labs obtaining data towards eventual recovery of the Electron first stage.
-- 22 AUG 19 / SOYUZ ISS 60S (ISS) -- A Soyuz booster was launched from Baikonur at 0338 UTC (previous day local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 60S" AK "MS-14" space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) mission. It was a test flight, and carried no crew except for a robot. The capsule was supposed to dock with the ISS Zvezda module two days later, but the docking failed. A second attempt, two days after that, was successful.
The flight was to evaluate new flight control and navigation systems, a revamped descent control system, and a new abort system software interface with the Soyuz 2.1a carrier rocket. The Soyuz 2-1a had a new feature, in that it could roll to obtain proper flight orientation after take-off; earlier Soyuz versions had to be oriented on the launch pad. The test flight was to confirm that the post-launch roll wouldn't set off the launch abort system.
Skybot F-850, formerly known simply as "Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research (FEDOR)", was a Russian-made humanoid robot, with arms and legs, built to replicate the movements of a remote operator. Skybot could also conduct some actions autonomously. It provided Soyuz flight telemetry feedback, and was also used on board the ISS for experiments. The Soyuz capsule returned to Earth with the robot on 6 September 2019.
-- 22 AUG 19 / GPS 3-02 (USA 293) -- A Delta 4 Medium booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1306 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "GPS 3-02" AKA "USA 293" AKA "Navstar 78" navigation satellite into orbit. It was the second third-generation GPS satellite.
The booster was in the "Medium+ (4,2)" configuration, with a a 4-meter (13.12-foot) payload fairing; a 4-meter Delta Cryogenic Second Stage (DCSS); a 5-meter (16.4-foot) Common Booster Core; and two strap-on solid rocket boosters. It was the last flight of the Delta 4 Medium.
-- 30 AUG 19 / GEO-IK 2-3 (COSMOS 2540) -- A Rockot booster was launched from Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome in Russia at 1400 UTC (local time - 4) to put a "GEO-IK 2-3" geodetic-research satellite into orbit. The satellite was designated "Cosmos 2540".
-- 30 AUG 19 / KX-09, XIAOXIANG 1-07 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2341 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "KX-09" and "XiaoXiang 1-07" smallsats into near-polar orbit. The KX-09 satellite for the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted microgravity technology experiments. Spacety's Xiaoxiang 1-07 spacecraft was a 6U CubeSat technology demonstrator. This was the fifth launch of the solid-fuel Kuaizhou ("Speedy Vessel") booster, and the third launch of the 1A variant. The booster was derived from military ballistic-missile technology. Kuaizhou 1A can deliver satellites of up to 300 kilograms (660 pounds) into low-altitude orbits.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* HOUSE SPARROWS & HUMANS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How The House Sparrow Made Its Home With Humans" by Frankie Schembri, 24 August 2018), there are a number of animals -- notably rats, mice, and cockroaches -- that haven't been domesticated by humans, but have become "camp followers". One of the less obnoxious, and so somewhat overlooked, of these camp followers is the house sparrow, Passer domesticus.
These little, assertive birds live effectively wherever humans live, being found hopping on sidewalks, pecking at discarded food, and sometimes chasing off native bird species. A new study shows how these birds have adapted into their human-aligned lifestyle: the evolutionary process of natural selection appears to have favored genetic changes that altered their skull shape and allowed them to digest starch -- similar to domesticated animals like dogs.
The house sparrow's friendly behavior was referenced in the Bible, early Chinese poetry, and Geoffrey Chaucer's THE CANTERBURY TALES. How did they warm to humans? Other members of the sparrow family tend to be skittish.
In hopes of finding the genetic changes that made the house sparrow what it is, Mark Ravinet -- an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo -- and his colleagues caught dozens of sparrows at sites across Europe and the Middle East. They set up "mist nets" -- long, billowing nets -- to trap the birds; they measured and tagged the captive birds, took blood samples, and then released them. They sampled four of the major Eurasian species: 46 house sparrows, 43 Spanish sparrows, 31 Italian sparrows, and 19 Bactrianus sparrows.
Armed with the samples, they sequenced the bird DNA. When they compared the genomes of house sparrows and their most closely related wild cousin, the Bactrianus, the researchers found that many regions of the house sparrow's genome seemed to have undergone positive selection since the two species split -- these variations being promoted by selection because they made it easier for the birds to live with humans.
The most apparent sign of positive selection in the birds' DNA was in a region with two known genes: one linked to skull development, another that helps generate the enzyme amylase, which helps break down starch in humans, dogs, and other animals. Dogs are genetically better-equipped to handle starch than their wolf ancestors, helping dogs stay fed in human households; house sparrows have also adapted to take advantage of human-provided starches.
Why the variation in skull shape? Ravinet suspects it improved bite force, to allow the birds to deal with the harder seeds of human cultivations. The study suggests the house and Bactrianus sparrows diverged from each other about 11,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, when agriculture was first developed in the Middle East.
His team plans to expand the number of samples to spot variations in these genetic changes, and also learn more about the habits of the sparrows, to see how the adaptations work in practice. Ravinet says: "If you live in a major city, there's way more animals around you than you realize. They have a history and a story to tell. We've changed their histories. I think that's just something that's quite profound, really."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* PUSHY SOLAR: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Giant Batteries And Cheap Solar Power Are Shoving Fossil Fuels Off The Grid" by Robert F. Service, 11 July 2019), the city of Los Angeles, California, has now approved a deal for a huge solar farm, backed up an array of batteries of similar scale. The facility will provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of slightly less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That beats any power generated by fossil fuels.
The new solar + storage effort will be built in Kern County in California by 8minute Solar Energy. The project envisions a solar array rated at 400 megawatts (MW), capable of generating roughly 876,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity annually. [ED: That's 2,400 MWh a day, so the 400 MW rating is, by some calculation, equivalent to an average output of 100 MW per hour, all day.] The 800-MWh battery will provide power when the Sun isn't shining.
In March, an analysis of more than 7,000 global storage projects by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 months -- to $187 USD per MWh. Another market watch firm, Navigant, predicts a further halving by 2030, to a price well below what 8minute has committed to.
Local commitments to switch to 100% renewables are also driving the rush toward grid-scale batteries: 8 US states have mandated a transition to 100% renewable electricity. In 2010, California passed a mandate that the state's utilities install electricity storage equivalent to 2% of their peak electricity demand by 2024.
The efforts are encouraging, but they are still modest in the bigger picture. The energy research firm Wood Mackenzie recently estimated the cost to decarbonize the US grid would be $4.5 trillion USD -- about half of that for 900 gigawatts (GW) of energy storage. Currently, the world's battery storage is only 5.5 GW. However, the world is only started to go up the renewable-energy learning curve, and the challenge is not likely to seem so formidable as experience is acquired. Indeed, once it reaches its stride, growth may well be exponential.
* As discussed by a related article from CNN.com ("Solar Power Is Now Cheaper Than The Grid In Hundreds Of Chinese Cities" by Jack Guy, 15 August 2019), solar power is now cheaper than traditional sources in 344 Chinese cities -- and without subsidies, according to a recent study. Solar is even competitive with coal in about a fifth of these cities.
The Chinese government has pledged to invest 2.5 trillion yuan ($367 billion USD) in renewable power generation -- including solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear -- from 2017 to 2020. Traditionally, China has relied on coal for producing electricity, but it's heavily contributed to ghastly air pollution; in response, the government has started to close mines and restrict the construction of new coal power plants in recent years, particularly in heavily polluted regions. Still, coal accounts for about three-fifth's of China's power-generation capacity.
According to Sam Geall -- a China climate and energy expert at Chatham House -- the Chinese government is committed to renewables: "For China, this is mainly driven by national self-interest: the government sees that solar power can help the country enhance energy security and resilience, mitigate urban air pollution, and position the country as the world's leading supplier of the clean technologies of the future."
Indeed, the state-owned China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation is looking forward operating a commercially viable space solar power station by 2050. However, in the present and back down on Earth, Chinese citizens have been complaining about the waste irresponsibly released by solar-panel manufacturers. In 2011, Jinko Solar Holding Company had to apologize for dumping toxic waste, following angry protests sparked by the death of large numbers of fish in a nearby river.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DECARBONIZING THE WORLD (5): The main technologies used for electrolysis are PEM and alkaline. Alkaline electrolyzers are better established and cheaper, but bulkier. PEM is becoming cheaper and has faster response times, which works better with intermittent renewable power sources, and can be used on a small scale, which is suitable for hydrogen refueling stations. Nikola pushes alkaline electrolyzers, with business picking up steadily. They're still too expensive for widespread use, but the cost curve is steadily downward, as it has been for renewables in general. A carbon tax might help.
Hydrogen production is only part the problem; another big problem is making use of it. The tool of choice is the fuel cell, which combines hydrogen with oxygen to produce water and electricity. The concept goes back to the mid-19th century, and fuel cells were used to power the Apollo spacecraft that took astronauts to the Moon. They are still too expensive for general use. America's Department of Energy (DOE) says the cost of fuel cells for use in small vehicles, currently $53 to $60 USD per kW if produced in volume with available technology, will need to fall to $40 USD per kW to compete with internal combustion engines.
Fuel cells will also have to be more rugged and better able to handle freezing weather. A third part of the problem is the need for more refueling stations, along with better systems for getting the hydrogen to them. A hydrogen refueling station is much trickier and more expensive than a station that dispenses hydrocarbon fuels -- and hydrogen is very hard to ship through pipelines, while shipping it in liquid form demands very low temperatures and very high pressures.
With encouragement from Japan, which wants to be a leader in the hydrogen economy, Australia is working on a solution to this problem that could also benefit another freight sector: maritime shipping. The trick is to convert hydrogen into ammonia. Ammonia is a gas at room temperature, but it can be liquefied under pressure. Strangely, there is more hydrogen in a volume of ammonia than there is in an equivalent volume of liquid hydrogen. Conversion to ammonia would simplify transport, and the ammonia could be used to power the ship as well.
Ammonia is toxic and harsh to the nose, but that is less of a problem than the fact that it requires energy to synthesize it. The traditional Haber-Bosch process is both energy-intensive and dirty. However, researchers at Monash University in Australia have been working on a "reverse fuel cell" that can assemble ammonia molecules from nitrogen and water, the process being driven by electricity, presumably from renewable sources. Other research is being conducted on efficient means of producing ammonia, though none of the projects are ready for commercialization yet.
Unfortunately, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles can't burn ammonia, and so the ammonia would have to be converted back to hydrogen before being used in a car. Researchers at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has made progress on this front, having demonstrated a Toyota Mirai and a Hyundai Nexo fueled by hydrogen extracted from ammonia using CSIRO membrane technology. The membrane allows hydrogen through, while blocking other gases. There has also been work on fuel cells that use ammonia as a feedstock. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (72): Although Teddy Roosevelt's second term proved more difficult for him than the first, it did have its achievements -- one being the admission of Oklahoma as the 46th state in 1907. TR was pressed to run for a third term, but declared that he wouldn't, with his vice president, William Howard Taft, being elected in 1908 as POTUS 27.
Taft was competent, but his presidency remains obscure. His modern biographer, Jonathan Lurie, described him as: "Boring -- honest, likeable, but boring." He was inevitably overshadowed by the firecracker TR, and there were no major new initiatives or crises during his presidency to make him stand out. His administration did continue many of the progressive policies of TR, in fact Taft was more enthusiastic in busting up trusts than TR -- though he was less aggressive in conservation efforts, and disinterested in racial equality.
Taft also signed into law the Treasury Department's "Bureau of Investigation" in 1908, which would later become the modern "Federal Bureau of Investigation". It was a by-product of the expansion of the role of the Secret Service after the assassination of McKinley; there had been suggestions that the Secret Service become a blanket criminal investigation organization, but the consensus was that expanding the powers of the Secret Service felt too much like creating a secret police organization. The Bureau of Investigation was established on the basis of being much more above-board.
Taft's differences of opinion with TR led to a falling-out between the two men. When Taft ran for re-election in 1912, TR ran against him at the head of his "Progressive Party", or "Bull Moose Party" as it was nicknamed. The end result was the election of Woodrow Wilson of Virginia as POTUS 28 -- being only the second Democrat to become president from the time of President Lincoln, and the first Southerner to be elected from that time.
Taft did see the entry of New Mexico and Arizona into the Union during his lame-duck period in early 1912, completing what is now called the "Lower 48" states. Incidentally, in 1921 Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; he was the only president to later go on to being a SCOTUS justice. Being chief justice was a better fit for the solid Taft than the presidency.
Wilson's two terms as president were much more significant in terms of the Constitution than those of his two predecessors -- though not completely from his own efforts, things having been put in motion before he took office, during TR's and Taft's terms. He continued their progressive policies, starting out with the "Revenue Act of 1913", which reduced tariffs and set up a Federal income tax. Since the SCOTUS decision in POLLOCK V. FARMERS' LOAN had effectively banned a Federal income tax, passage of the revenue act required a constitutional amendment -- the 16th, which simply read:
BEGIN QUOTE:
SIXTEENTH AMENDMENT: The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
END QUOTE
The Revenue Act of 1913 quickly followed. One Frank R. Brushaber, a shareholder in the Union Pacific Railroad company, sued the firm to prevent it from paying an income tax. The case went up to the Supreme Court in 1915, as BRUSHABER V. UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD, with the court deciding against Brushaber. He failed to realize that constitutional amendments are, by definition, constitutional. There were later decisions that clarified what was meant by "income". [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("64-Megapixel Phone Cameras Are Coming" by Sam Byford, 8 May 2019), Samsung of Korea has introduced an image sensor for smartphones with an unprecedented level of resolution.
The ISOCELL Bright GW1 is a 64-megapixel sensor, with the same 0.8-micrometer pixels as Samsung's current 48-megapixel component -- meaning the chip will have more area, and will be able to pick up more light. 64 megapixels is something of an absurdity in itself, 8K x 8K photos being unwieldy and overkill, with the high resolution buying little if the optics aren't good enough to make good use of it. However, the idea is that the Bright GW1 will generate 16-megapixel images by combining four pixels into one. This allows the image sensor to pick up more light and also, with a bit of smarts, spot "noisy" pixels, resulting in a camera with better low-light performance.
48-megapixel cameras, producing 12-megapixel images, are now common on smartphones, with Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and others now shipping phones with such sensors. Samsung plans to commercially introduce the Bright GW1 in the second half of 2019.
A more recent article from THEVERGE.com played up Samsung's follow-on effort, the Samsung ISOCELL Bright HMX, designed in collaboration with Xiaomi, with a whopping 108 megapixels of resolution. Ganging up the pixels in fours will give 27-megapixel images; that being major overkill, it seems the goal is really to gang them by nine to get 12-megapixel resolution -- 4000 x 3000-pixel images are perfectly adequate. The new imager may be introduced by the end of the year.
ED: It would be nice to have smartphones with 48-megapixel imagers by default, but my own interest in the matter is proper cameras with high-resolution imaging chips, using AI technology to make the best use of them. It is hard to believe camera-makers won't accept the challenge from smartphone makers.
* As discussed by an article from SPECTRUM.IEEE.org ("This Photocell Generates Both Power and Hydrogen" by Peter Fairley, 1 November), researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) in California have developed a "photo-electrochemical (PEC)" cell that generates both electricity and hydrogen from sunlight.
The concept is not new, but efforts to date have focused on "tandem" designs, in which a PEC cell is mated to a conventional photovoltaic (PV) cells. However, electrical mismatches and contacts between the PV and PEC devices waste much of the PV cell's energy, so hydrogen output has been limited. The LBL design gets rid of the PV cell, with the "hybrid photoelectrochemical & voltaic (HPEV)" cell doing all the job itself, and obtaining high overall efficiency.
The HPEV cell achieves its trick by adding a third electrode, with dual contacts on the back of the cell. One pairing of electrodes supports hydrogen generation, the other pairing provides electrical current. The cell performs hydrogen conversion with 6.8% of the energy in the sunlight, with another 13.4% converted to electricity.
PEC cells to date tend to not be as reliable as PV cells, but the HPEV cell simply trades off more electricity as the hydrogen production declines. The trade-off can also be adjusted by an electrical signal. The LBL team is now exploring use of the HPEV cell to drive other chemical reactions besides hydrogen conversion. It's not ready for commercialization yet, however, but the work is promising.
* As discussed by an article from NBCNEWS.com ("Eco-Friendly 'Algae Curtains' Could Help Curb Air Pollution In Crowded Cities I NBCNEWS.com By Denise Chow, 12 December 2018), two European architects have devised plant-filled plastic curtains that turn building facades into "living walls" that help purify dirty air.
The curtains contain a mazelike network of tubes filled with microscopic algae -- that not only convert CO2 to oxygen, but can also clean some wastes out of the air. Not everyone is impressed by the idea; Gaboury Benoit, a professor of environmental chemistry at Yale, told NBC News: "I appreciate the architects thinking outside the box, but this approach seems more of a gimmick than a real solution." Benoit suggests trees would do a better job, all the more so because the curtains would need to be reconditioned every few years.
The two inventors reply that trees are great, but in compressed urban areas, there's not a lot of space to plant them. The curtains are not really in competition with trees. One might think there's also a possibility of getting some useful product -- biofuel? -- out of the algae, though that apparently hasn't been considered.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* FARMING SOLAR: As discussed by an article from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ("California Farmers Are Planting Solar Panels As Water Supplies Dry Up" by Sammy Rothstaff, 31 July 2019), on the Great Plains, wind turbines have helped struggling farmers stay economically afloat. California farmers are finding that solar can be a life-saver too, as water resources shrink.
Constrained water supplies are hobbling California's $50 billion USD agro-industry. In the San Joaquin Valley alone, farmers may need to take more than 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) out of production to comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which will ultimately put restrictions on pumping. Solar projects, as a result, are booming -- which not only help farmers, but help California meet climate change targets.
According to a recent report by the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, California will need thousands of square kilometers of solar power panels in the coming decades, and it would be useful to build one-third to one-half of that solar capacity on agricultural lands, mostly within the state. California's Central Valley is also a better place for solar development than California's inland deserts, which are home to two dozen threatened and endangered species. The Central Valley, in contrast, has long been settled and cultivated.
One report identified 190,000 hectares (470,00 acres) of "least-conflict" land in the San Joaquin Valley, where salty soil, poor drainage, or otherwise troublesome farming conditions could make solar an attractive alternative for landowners. At least 5,260 hectares (13,000 acres) of solar farms have been built in the valley. Jon Reiter, a farmer turned solar developer, worked with local officials to create a 2,430-hectare (6,000-acre) habitat conservation plan, with solar panels on two-thirds of the land, the other third being set aside as a nature preserve. These "mitigation" lands are now reverting back to habitat for San Joaquin kit foxes, blunt-nosed leopard lizards, burrowing owls, and other species at risk.
However, it's going to take time to fulfill the plan; solar panels have been only set up on 65 hectares (160 acres) to date, with the 20-megawatt Maricopa West solar project set up on land adjacent to almond orchids. The project was built by the German company E.ON and sold to Dominion Energy of Virginia. Reiter says he has further projects in the works.
Some agribusinesses in the Central Valley are pursuing solar with their own needs in mind, as well as to service the power market. Wonderful Company -- which grows tree nuts and owns Pom Wonderful, Fiji Water, and Justin Wines -- plans to power its operations with 100% renewable electricity by 2025. Wonderful turned on its first solar project in 2007; in 2019, the company signed a contract with Florida-based developer NextEra Energy for a 23-megawatt solar installation, to be built on 64 hectares (157 acres) of fallow farmland.
Company vice-president Steven Swartz says Wonderful sees "tremendous potential for siting solar on agricultural land." Wonderful, owned by Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, can make about as much money producing solar power over a 30-year period, Swartz said, as it can growing almonds and pistachios, two of the most profitable crops grown in California and also two of the most water-intensive.
Swartz added that he expects "relatively limited competition" between solar and agriculture because there's already so much farmland that isn't in production in the Central Valley. Wonderful has 4,050 hectares (10,000 acres) it's keeping fallow due either to poor soil conditions or insufficient water. In 2015, at the height of California's most recent drought, Central Valley farmers kept about 4,050 square kilometers (1 million acres) idle all year, according to NASA.
The biggest solar project being planned in the Central Valley is Westlands Solar Park, with construction to begin soon. The developer, Golden State Clean Energy, expects to ultimately build the project to 2.7 gigawatts on 8,100 hectares (20,000 acres), which is bigger than any solar power facility in service today.
The massive solar project is being built on "drainage-impaired" farmlands served by Westlands Water District, where the soil has become loaded with crop-killing salts, and toxic selenium, because clay layers beneath the dirt prevent irrigation water from percolating down into the underground aquifer. As troublesome as pulling lands out of crop production is, the ability to shift such lands to solar power generation gives a silver lining -- helping California to achieve its aggressive renewable-energy goals, while helping farmers to stay afloat.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI & MEDICAL DIAGNOSTICS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Artificial Intelligence Could Revolutionize Medical Care" by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, 17 June 2019), artificial intelligence (AI) is moving into the medical field aggressively. In specialties such as radiology and pathology, which are based on analysis of imagery, AI could boost the efficiency and accuracy of diagnosis. However, Albert Hsiao -- a radiologist at the University of California, San Diego, who has developed algorithms for reading and refining cardiac imagery -- is concerned: "Just working with the technology, I see lots of ways it can fail."
RADIOLOGY, US government scientists, regulators, and doctors generated a road map for putting AI to work in radiology. The recommendations included more collaboration across disciplines in building and testing AI algorithms, plus extensive validation of algorithms before they reach patients. For the time being, Hsiao says: "I would want a human physician no matter what."
AI is already being put to use in research, and regulators have approved some algorithms for radiologists. Testing is being performed on algorithms to read x-rays, detect brain bleeds, pinpoint tumors, and more. The algorithms learn as scientists feed them hundreds or thousands of images -- of mammograms, for example -- training the technology to, in principle, recognize patterns faster and more accurately than a human could. For example, AI could:
All these are futures. Eric Oermann -- a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City -- doesn't believe that AI technology is really up to the job yet. Working with colleagues, Oermann developed a mathematical model for detecting patterns consistent with pneumonia, training it with X-rays from patients at Mount Sinai. He found the system was much too touchy and finicky, being misled by patient characteristics not directly associated with the disease, or the brand of MRI machine, or the angle of the scan.
Once trained, the system worked very well on other Mount Sinai patients, correctly detecting pneumonia in imagery 93% of the time. Oermann then tested the system on tens of thousands of images from two other sites: the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda MD, and the Indiana Network for Patient Care. The success rate of the system fell to the range of 73% to 80%.
One of the problems was that patients at the other two sites had much lower rates of pneumonia; the signal-to-noise ratio wasn't as big. Another problem was that at Mount Sinai, many of the infected patients were too sick to get out of bed, and so doctors used a portable chest x-ray machine. Portable x-ray images look very different from those created when a patient is standing up. The result was that the system began to associate a portable x-ray image with illness.
Along similar lines, a South Korean team reported in the KOREAN JOURNAL OF RADIOLOGY an analysis of 516 studies of AI algorithms designed to interpret medical images. The authors found that just 6% of the studies tested their algorithm at more than one hospital. Efforts are now underway to cast a wider net in evaluating diagnostic AI systems. One system that measures skeletal maturity in hand x-rays -- used to spot growth disorders in youngsters -- is now being tested at nine sites.
Jeroen van der Laak, a computer scientist at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, decided a competitive approach might do the job. In 2015, van der Laak digitized 400 lymph node slides from breast cancer patients at two Dutch centers, then issued a challenge to everyone involved with algorithmic work on to the subject to train their systems on 270 of the slides, then test them on the other 130. The goal was to see if the algorithms could do better than a team of pathologists in hunting for tiny cancers.
Twenty-three teams submitted 32 algorithms. The results, published in 2017, showed that ten of the algorithms matched or beat a panel of 11 pathologists. Van der Laak was impressed at an algorithm doing as well as an expert pathologist, saying that it was "a shock." He and others say that to get that kind of accuracy, AI algorithms should train on data that are diverse not only in their hospital of origin, but also in racial and geographic diversity, since disease can manifest differently across populations.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is still struggling with how to regulate learning systems, though the FDA has announced it is working on a framework for doing so, and has issued some approvals. Hugo Aerts -- who directs the computational imaging and bio-informatics laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston -- says the FDA is confronted with a difficult challenge.
What if an algorithm that works is updated to become more effective? Would it have to go through the regulatory process again? What happens if the FDA approves an algorithm, which is then applied to a patient population outside of the one it was trained and tested on? Nobody thinks regulatory concerns are show-stoppers, it's just a question of how much effort it will take to get a regulatory framework that can do the job. Researchers working in the field are optimistic about its potential, and generally feel the FDA recognizes the potential as well.
[ED: The utility of an AI system increases as the amount of carefully-vetted data is pumped into that system. That implies that adding data to the system needs to become normal practice in the applications domain. In other words, all the people who could use the system will have to feed it data. That will a big organizational challenge.]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DECARBONIZING THE WORLD (4): Trevor Milton -- boss of Nikola, a US startup in Arizona making hydrogen-powered trucks -- is a visionary, in many ways similar to Elon Musk, whose Tesla company seeks to populate the world's roads with electric vehicles. Nikola has pre-orders for 8,000 hydrogen-fueled trucks, running off fuel cells, that will compete with Tesla's battery-powered "Semis", as well as other zero-carbon haulers made by Volvo, Hyundai, BYD and others.
Short-haul trucking is increasingly being electrified -- a major landmark being the Beijing Olympics in 2008, when China deployed battery-powered trash trucks. Electric short-haul trucks have since become ever more common. McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that in Europe and the USA, light- and medium-duty electric trucks could be cost-competitive with diesel ones sometime in the 2020s.
Journeys of more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) are more challenging, since the weight of the battery packs becomes prohibitive; recharging such big battery packs is time-consuming as well. Trucking, however, desperately needs to be decarbonized. At present, trucks produce about 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 a year, out of an estimated total for all transport of about 9.5 billion tonnes. Right now, regulation of truck emissions is weak, and the business is too fragmented -- with a large number of owner-drivers -- to think that anything will happen without regulation.
There are ideas for addressing the problem. Sweden has been tinkering with power lines along a short stretch of road for heavy vehicles to hook up to, just as buses do in some cities. There's also a push towards using more intermodal freighting, hauling containers on trains between cities, with electric trucks then performing local transfers.
Elon Musk, never one to turn down a challenge, believes that long-distance electric trucking can be done -- and is working towards the Tesla Semi, with four battery packs that can be recharged in parallel. There is a weight penalty for the battery pack, but it is not one that will necessarily put off all users. EVs, along with their zero emissions, do have advantages, for example being easier to maintain.
Not everyone believes what Musk has to say. Some advocate the use of biofuels for long-distance hauling, and natural gas is already in some use. There are questions about scaling up use of either, and they also still produce emissions -- though biofuels, and biogas, don't make a net addition to the CO2 in the atmosphere. Nonetheless, it would be better if the CO2 wasn't returned to the atmosphere.
That means hydrogen. As with natural gas, it demands big and heavy tanks to get range, and it requires a lot of electricity to produce. Makers of hydrogen-fueled trucks could be in the vanguard of a hydrogen revolution, paving the way for its use in heating, shipping, and heavy industry. However, getting hydrogen to work means addressing three challenges.
The first problem is production. Free hydrogen tends to react with oxygen to produce water, with a substantial bang if there's enough reactant, and so free hydrogen is unusual. Today, it's mostly produced from fossil fuels, via "steam-methane reforming (SMR)", which uses a catalyst to extract hydrogen from natural gas and steam. SMR is widely used in the chemicals industry but produces lots of CO2, which would have to be captured.
The cleaner way is to use zero-carbon electricity to run electrolyzers that split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That means no emissions, but it demands a lot of electricity: for every unit of energy used, only 0.8 units of hydrogen of equivalent energy value is produced. Right now, the amount of hydrogen produced in this way is trifling, but as renewables become more common and cheaper, it should become more important. Projections of near-future renewable power economics suggest prices of about prices of about $30 USD a megawatt-hour. At that price, hydrogen could be produced at $2 USD per kilo, making it competitive with SMR, which costs $1 to $3 USD per kilo.
With greater production volumes, the production process itself should become cheaper as well. ITM Power of the UK says that the price of the electrolyzers they sell has halved to 800 GBP ($1,000 USD) per kilowatt (kW) in three years, in large part because of increased volume of production. Other firms claim even lower costs. ITM Power officials believe that cost should fall by half again by 2025. The company is now building what is claimed to be the world's biggest Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) electrolyzer, with a capacity of 10 megawatts (MW), for Shell in Germany.
[ED: Rating electrolyzers in kilowatts / megawatts seems counter-intuitive; shouldn't it be, say, kilograms per hour? The trick is that a mass of hydrogen has a corresponding energy value, in the range of 120 to 142 megajoules per kilogram. One kilowatt-hour is equivalent to 3.6 megajoules, so three kilograms of hydrogen amounts to about a kilowatt-hour. Now suppose a plant turns out 10 megawatt-hours of hydrogen in an hour; the hours divide out, so that just becomes 10 megawatts -- or about three tonnes an hour. Of course, compressing or liquefying hydrogen requires more energy, but some of that energy is returned when the hydrogen expands or vaporizes again.]
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (71): Teddy Roosevelt won a second term in 1904. In his second term, he moved to the Left, seeking tax reform -- in particular, wanting a progressive income tax, even though SCOTUS had effectively made in unconstitutional -- and also pushing for worker's rights. He found the going tougher in his second term, making less progress. His second administration was also marked by the "Financial Panic of 1907", in which the nation's banking system came perilously close to collapse. The worst was only evaded by the intervention of private individuals, most prominently financier J.P. Morgan, with the US Treasury Department proving ineffective in dealing with the crisis. The panic was transient, but it set off a wave of rethinking the government's role in the financial system that would see results in the next decade.
Another problem for TR was that SCOTUS was out of tune with the Progressive Era. In 1895, New York State had passed a law regulating the maximum number of hours the employees of bakeries had to work, limiting it to 10 hours a day, 60 hours a week maximum. One Joseph Lochner, owner of a bakery in Utica, was fined under the law, and took the case to court.
Lochner's appeal was based on the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, which stated that no state could "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The court decided in favor of Lochner, with Justice Rufus Peckham writing for the majority:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The question whether this act is valid as a labor law, pure and simple, may be dismissed in a few words. There is no reasonable ground for interfering with the liberty of person or the right of free contract by determining the hours of labor in the occupation of a baker.
END QUOTE
What the court "dismissed in a few words" was the rights of the working people, who were judged to be free agents: they didn't like the rules of employment, they were free to quit and not have a job. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a dissent that would strongly resonate a century later:
BEGIN QUOTE:
This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain. If it were a question whether I agreed with that theory, I should desire to study it further and long before making up my mind. But I do not conceive that to be my duty, because I strongly believe that my agreement or disagreement has nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law. It is settled by various decisions of this court that state constitutions and state laws may regulate life in many ways which we, as legislators, might think as injudicious, or, if you like, as tyrannical, as this, and which, equally with this, interfere with the liberty to contract.
Sunday laws and usury laws are ancient examples. A more modern one is the prohibition of lotteries. The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not. The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social [Darwinism].
... a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.
... I think that the word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law. ... A reasonable man might think it a proper measure on the score of health. Men whom I certainly could not pronounce unreasonable would uphold it as a first instalment of a general regulation of the hours of work.
END QUOTE
The LOCHNER decision is generally, if not universally, recognized as the third worst decision made by SCOTUS, following DRED SCOTT V. SANFORD and PLESSY V. FERGUSON. The court would not reconsider the decision for a quarter of a century, that period becoming known as the "Lochner" era. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("This Origami-Like Strip Of Paper Helped Diagnose Malaria In Uganda" by Angela Chen, 19 February 2019), paper biomedical sensors are nothing new -- the most prominent example being certain home pregnancy tests. The technology continues to be extended, with a new paper sensor accurately detecting malaria in 98% of cases in a test group of schoolchildren in Uganda.
Malaria is one of the most widespread infectious diseases in the world, and though progress had been made against it, the number of cases is rising again, according to the World Health Organization (WHO): there were 217 million cases in 2016, 219 million cases in 2017. Malaria can be misdiagnosed, with patients then undergoing troublesome and useless treatments.
There are existing rapid-diagnosis test that use a drop of blood, but they are inaccurate; more accurate methods require labs and trained technicians. To address the problem, bio-engineer Jonathan Cooper of the University of Glasgow created a paper sensor that is cheap, easy to use, and accurate. It works as follows:
Cooper tested the device on 67 kids, with neither the researchers nor the kids knowing who was infected with malaria. The test correctly identified malaria in 98% of the kids who had it. The tests available to local healthcare teams, in contrast, could only detect malaria in about 86% of cases. The Ugandan Ministry of Health is now interested in deploying the device.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Germany's Wolves Are On The Rise Thanks To A Surprising Ally: The Military" by Erik Stokstad, 15 February 2019), the wolves of central Europe were headed for extinction in the 20th century -- but they've bounced back, to a population of several thousand today. In Germany, military reservations have played a significant part in their rehabilitation.
Wolves traditionally attacked livestock, and sometimes humans, and so humans hunted them down; they disappeared from Germany in the 29th century. From the 1980s, European countries passed laws to protect wildlife and habitats. In Eastern and southern Europe, farmlands were also given up and allowed to return to the wild. From the late 1990s, wolves began to range into Germany from the forests of Poland. The first litter of pups in Germany was reported in 2001 in Saxony-Brandenburg. They've since spread westward into six more of Germany's 16 federal states, and their numbers are steadily increasing.
Ilka Reinhardt -- a biologist with Lupus, the German Institute for Wolf Monitoring and Research in Spreewitz, who has been tracking the rise of German wolves -- the population growth "is quite impressive." The latest data suggest that Germany is now home to 47 packs and 21 pairs of wolves. They have been doing well, even though Germany has many humans and few large wild areas: "It shows how adaptable wolves are."
The researchers found wolves were doing particularly well in military reservations: "This was surprising to us." The first pair to arrive in a new state always settled in military training ground, as did the second, and usually the third. After that, other breeding pairs would be found in protected nature reserves or other habitats.
Why the military training grounds? They didn't seem more attractive from nature reserves, as measured by the concentrations of forest and roads. Examination of deaths, however, showed that wolf mortality rates were higher in nature reserves, it appears because of poaching. Wolves are traditionally villains, they also compete with hunters for deer, so hunters are inclined to shoot wolves. Military reserves are restricted areas, and the authorities take a dim view of trespassers; they also may have live-fire ranges, and sensible humans stay away from them. Wolf populations have, fortunately, reached the level where occasional poachings don't cause them much damage.
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("GM Plants And Pollution", 19 January 2019), the air in modern homes and offices is pretty clean -- but not perfectly, containing small amounts of volatile, toxic organic compounds such benzene, formaldehyde, butadiene, carbon tetrachloride, naphthalene, and chloroform. They're not a lethal threat by any means, but we'd prefer not to breathe them.
Stuart Strand, Long Zhang, and Ryan Routsong -- of the University of Washington, in Seattle -- have come up with a scheme to clean up indoor air. Their approach is to splice a gene from a rabbit into a popular indoor plant named "Devil's vine", which is a species of ivy that got its name by being very hard to kill off.
Using plants to clean up indoor air is not a new idea, it's been around for decades, but it hasn't produced results. One experiment involving unmodified spider plants, for example, showed that they could scrub formaldehyde out of the air -- but a building would have to be full of plants to make a notable difference. Tobacco plants equipped with a bacterial gene for a formaldehyde-destroying enzyme were three times more effective at formaldehyde scrubbing than those without it -- but tobacco plants flower indoors, and so their pollen can spread genetically engineered material through a building, which makes people nervous.
The UW research team wanted a plant they could modify, but did not flower indoors. They picked Devil's vine, which was particularly attractive because it was so robust. They spliced in a gene for cytochrome P450 2E1, a mammalian enzyme that oxidizes a wide range of volatile organic compounds, including benzene, chloroform, trichloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride. The researchers used a bacterium to ferry a rabbit version of the gene into the plant's chromosomes, with the plant then synthesizing the enzyme.
Tests inside closed spaces showed the modified plant to be much more efficient at cleaning up toxic compounds like benzene and chloroform than unmodified Devil's vine. Commercialization of the scheme remains a future.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* PEROVSKITE LEDS: The relatively cheap and easy to produce materials known as "perovskites" are a hot topic of investigation, particularly for photovoltaic cells. As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("LEDs Created From Wonder Material Could Revolutionize Lighting And Displays" by Robert F. Service, 4 June 2019), researchers are also investigating the use of pervoskites to build light-emitting diodes (LED). They have fabricated perovskite LEDs (PLED) that can convert electricity to light with efficiencies comparable to the commercial organic LEDs (OLED) commonly used in smartphones and flat-screen TVs.
The attraction of perovskites for electronic devices is that the materials are cheap, and they are much easier to process than the semiconductors used in current LEDs. The first PLED was demonstrated in 2014 by Richard Friend, a physicist at the University of Cambridge in the UK. In a typical PLED, electrodes sandwiching the light-emitting material deliver charges -- negatively-charged electrons and positively-charged electron vacancies, or "holes" -- into the material. When an electron falls into a hole, it releases energy as a photon of light. The color of the photon depends on the perovskite's chemical constituents, meaning the color can be tuned by tweaking perovskite composition.
The Cambridge group started out with PLEDs that glowed in the near-infrared, red, or green. Since then, the team and other groups have been able to produce LEDs with colors across the rainbow. The first PLEDs had conversion efficiencies of less than a percent -- due to the fact that the boundaries between the "crystallites" making up the perovskite layer impeded the flow of charges. Since that time, conversion efficiencies have dramatically improved. In 2018, Friend's group reported that they had achieved efficiencies of 20.1% with red PLEDs, by adding a light-emitting polymer layer that reduces the impedance of the perovskite layer.
A team led by chemist Edward Sargent at the University of Toronto in Canada came up with a different scheme, which was announced in 2018. The Toronto researchers tweaked their perovskite composition so that it forms crystallize shells around the crystallites, also reducing impedance. The result was a green PLED with 20.3% efficiency -- unimpressive by commercial standards, but workable for some applications.
Researchers led by Gao Feng -- a physicist at Linkoeping University in Sweden -- reported in 2019 that they had come up with yet another trick to improve PLED efficiency. Finding that lead ions at the edges of perovskite crystallites were inclined to trap passing electron, they added a material that bound to the lead ions, making them less able to trap electrons. The result was a near-infrared PLED with an efficiency of 21.6%.
Friend says the rate of improvement is "quite exceptional", but warns that PLEDs are not close to commercialization. For one thing, no PLED built to date has lasted more than 50 hours; commercial devices will last more than 10,000 hours. Gao says nobody has quite figured out why PLEDs have such short lifetimes, but adds that the same problem afflicted OLEDs early on -- and now they're a hot technology.
Perovskite solar cells also were noted for short lifetimes, but researchers have made great headway in longevity by sealing the devices from air and humidity. There's general confidence in the field that PLEDs are a coming thing, with researchers even working on 3D-printing PLED displays.
ED: One of the challenges in design of digital cameras is the fabrication of imaging arrays. The challenge is not so much fabricating the millions of light sensors in the array, as it is to make each sensor large enough to pick up enough light, and suffer from noise that results in a "speckled" image. The larger the array, the more expensive it is. It would be nice to have a large and sensitive, but cheap array. If perovskites can be used to fabricate solar cells and LEDs, might they also be used to fabricate imaging arrays? We'll see.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI & PROTEIN FOLDING: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("AI Protein-Folding Algorithms Solve Structures Faster Than Ever" by Matthew Hutson, 22 July 2019), it is straightforward to determine the sequence of animo acids that make up a protein chain. What is much harder is to determine how the protein folds up against itself. Clues about 3D protein structure can be obtained from X-ray crystallography, but nailing down the structure tends to require a lot of computer power.
Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are now being used to tackle the protein-folding problem. At the end of 2018, Alphabet's AI firm DeepMind introduced an algorithm named "AlphaFold", which leveraged off two techniques emerging in the field, to beat established contenders in a competition on protein-structure prediction by a strong margin. Following that, in April 2019, a US researcher unveiled an algorithm using a totally different approach, with the researcher claiming his AI is up to a million times faster than the Deepmind scheme -- though probably not as accurate in all circumstances.
Biologists are wondering how else deep learning -- the AI technique used by both approaches -- might be used to determine protein structure, and by implication protein function. The basic concept is straightforward: a deep-learning system to obtain protein structures uses a neural net that's trained by being given the sequences and structures of proteins that have already been determined. The system can then determine structures for proteins whose sequences are known, but the structures aren't. The specific implementations of the systems vary considerably.
Deep learning promises to be much cheaper and faster than traditional means working out 3D protein structures; a better understanding of such structures would be useful for a better understanding of diseases, and how to design drugs. John Moult, a biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, has set up a biennial competition, named the "Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP)", in which teams exercise software to predict protein structures.
AlphaFold competed at CASP13, to clearly outperform the other contenders. AlphaFold works in two steps:
Mohammed Al-Quraishi -- a biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts -- also competed in CASP13, presenting an innovative system, which he calls a "recurrent geometric network", that generates a structure in one step. Al-Quraishi's network takes months to train, but once trained, it can transform a sequence to a structure almost immediately, much faster than other systems. Al-Quraishi's system did not perform well at CASP13 in 2018; it wasn't mature enough.
Participants in CASP13 were impressed by AlphaFold, and are now leveraging off its approach to improve their own systems. Al-Quraishi's system is not being ignored, however, since the iterative process used by AlphaFold is time-consuming. If he can't get his software to work very well, his concepts are proving inspirational to other researchers.
While prediction of protein structures by AI isn't really ready for operational use yet, it's getting there, and the deep-learning approach has wide promise -- for example, to help understand how a mutated protein contributes to disease, or figure out which part of a protein to turn into a vaccine for immunotherapy. John Moult says: "There's a lot of excitement about where things might go now."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: As reported by an article from CNN.com ("Teqball: What Ronaldinho Did Next" by Matias Grez & Tom Collins, 5 August 2019, sports are always evolving. One of the latest examples of this phenomenon is "teqball" -- a hybrid of football (soccer to Americans) and ping-pong.
The game was invented by Hungarian footballer Gabor Borsanyi, working with businessman Gyuri Gattyan and computer scientist Viktor Huszar. It is played using what looks like a ping-pong table curved up in the middle, with a small transparent fence. It can be played singles or doubles; each player makes contact with the ball, then returns it. Arms are never used, with contact typically with head or chest, return with a kick.
World-class footballers have become "Teqers", as they are called, one of the latest being two-time FIFA World Player of the Year Ronaldinho. He plays for hours on end, and is now planning to collaborate with his brother to set up an official Teqball Federation in Brazil. Ronaldhino says: "When I am at home, I play it everyday. Once I discovered it, I started playing regularly with my friends. Today in Brazil, nearly everybody plays it, on the beach or wherever."
The third annual Teqball world cup will take place later in 2019. The 2017 and 2018 editions were hosted in Budapest, Hungary and Reims, France, and the gold medal winners last year in singles and doubles won $10,000 USD each. Ronaldinho won't be representing Brazil in 2019: "No, no, I'm not at that level yet," he laughs. "I like to play but there are others who are very, very good."
* Regarding the "Storm Area 51" meme discussed here last month, the fellow who started it all, Matty Roberts, is now planning an "Alienstock" festival in the Nevada desert. Roberts wasn't serious about storming Area 51, he was just clowning around, and it went viral. Since actually storming into Area 51, a heavily guarded military reservation, would be a bad idea, Roberts thought it would be better just to throw a big party.
It will take place on September 20 to 22, near the town of Rachel NV. Admission is not being charged, but donations are being accepted. The people of Rachel -- population 98 -- are not happy about the prospect of a horde of possibly rowdy alien enthusiasts descending on their town. How it goes? We'll see. [ED: It was more or less a dud, but at least not a disaster.]
* In the Real Fake News for August, it's all starting to fall into a dull pained blur. Following another spate of mass shootings, there was the usual talk of gun-control measures, with President Donald Trump making noises about background checks -- which nobody imagines will amount to anything. His trade war with China continues unabated, with the Chinese seeming to push back harder the more he pushes them. It's making markets nervous. Nobody thinks that a fall is imminent, but the economy is showing signs of instability.
In the meantime, the usual nonsense is coming out of the White House. The suicide of Jeffrey Epstein -- one of the mega-rich, arrested on charges of running a sex-trafficking ring focused on juveniles -- in jail on 10 August did not change the tune being played over and over again. Epstein had many associations with the rich and powerful; Donald Trump, possibly to cover up his own links to Epstein, started spreading a ridiculous conspiracy theory that Bill Clinton had him murdered.
One David Frum -- once a staffer with the George W. Bush Administration, writing in THE ATLANTIC -- asked what the response would have been had Richard Nixon publicly played up the creaky conspiracy theory that Lyndon Johnson had John F. Kennedy assassinated. The result would have been public shock. The reaction to Trump? A shrug: "Like we'd expect anything else?" As Frum put it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
By now, Trump's party in Congress, the members of his Cabinet, and even his White House entourage all tacitly agree that Trump's occupancy of the office held by Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Eisenhower must be a bizarre cosmic joke, not to be taken seriously. CNN's Jake Tapper on August 2 quoted a "senior national security official" as saying: "Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that."
Everybody at this point ignores what the president says.
END QUOTE
There was, after Trump's 2016 upset electoral victory, smug proclamations from Trump's supporters that liberals had "taken Trump literally, but not seriously." To the extent that was true then, it isn't now: he can't be taken either literally or seriously, and no serious person on either side of the aisle does either. Frum adds:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Neither the practical impediments to impeachment and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process, nor the foibles and failings of the candidates running to replace him, efface the fact that this presidency shames and disgraces the office every minute of every hour of every day. And even when it ends, however it ends, the shame will stain it still.
END QUOTE
Frum is over-generalizing; Trump is a passing affliction. Trump hasn't had the power to overturn the system he inherited from Barack Obama; Trump has instead relied very heavily on executive actions, many of them no more than whimsical theatrics, that will be rolled back by the next administration in a hundred days after he leaves office. As far as those who voted for him go, they will find the backlash against him ferocious, and the Republicans will find themselves in the wilderness. As a conservative, Frum sees the prospect only too clearly.
One Joe Walsh, who runs a conservative radio talk show and did a term in the House of Representatives, seems to be looking beyond the Era of Trump, having announced he will challenge Trump in the primary election for Republican candidate for president. While ramping up attacks on Trump, he has retracted some of the extreme statements he made in the past, for example saying it was untrue to say Barack Obama is a Muslim. His radio show was promptly dropped by the Salem Radio Network, a conservative Christian operation.
It is of course absurd to think that Walsh will prevent Donald Trump from becoming the Republican nominee in 2020, and Walsh certainly knows it. What he may well be doing is positioning himself for a leadership position on the Right in the era after Trump. As the saying goes: "By being in the rear of the advance, you can be in the forefront of the retreat."
In any case, Walsh knows that taking on Donald Trump from the Right will be solid gold in terms of self-promotion. Trump would be wisest to simply ignore Walsh, but Trump doesn't do wisdom; anything Walsh says about him will get a loud and angry response. Where this goes, nobody knows; it might be a complete fizzle, but it might take off in some unknown direction.
* The lunacy of the Trump White House, of course, is on a global stage. Late in the month, Trump went to the G7 Summit in Biarritz, France -- where reports indicate he got into a heated argument with the other G7 leaders for refusing to re-admit Russia to their ranks. Trump's fascination with Putin has always been difficult to understand, particularly since it has drawn so much suspicion down on Trump. More generally, it suggests the incoherence of Trump's foreign policy -- which was highly by an essay by one Daniel Larison in THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE in April, with the title of: "There Is No Trump Doctrine".
To the extent that the Trump Administration has articulated a foreign policy, it is, as Trump himself has said: "Don't be a chump." In this vision, Trump is a hard-nosed nationalist who, unlike his predecessors, doesn't put up with nonsense from other countries. Larison suggests there is nothing in Trump's conduct to suggest he is anything of the sort:
BEGIN QUOTE:
If the "core" of Trump's foreign policy is not to be a chump, that can't account for why he has repeatedly given US clients in the Middle East whatever they want in exchange for nothing. It doesn't explain why he walked away from a nonproliferation agreement [with Iran] that was working exactly as intended, and proceeded to wage economic war on the country that was faithfully adhering to the agreement. It definitely doesn't explain why he has gone out of his way to insert the US into [Venezuela's] internal political crisis in a push for regime change that has nothing to do with American interests. The list could go on, but the point is that Trump has opted for policies that impose costs on the US without having anything to show for it.
END QUOTE
Trump fancies himself cleverer than his predecessors, when he is simply juvenile. No other president ever met with one of the Kims? That's because the other presidents knew it wasn't in American interests to do so:
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[Trump] makes decisions that his predecessors chose not to make because they understood the implications and costs better than he does, and then he prides himself on having done something "nobody ever did before." There is no "Trump Doctrine" as such. There is a hodgepodge of competing influences and factions in the Trump administration, and depending on which ones happen to be ascendant on certain issues, the capricious president will go this way or that without any pretense of consistency or overall strategy.
END QUOTE
Trump is noted for his practice of "ruling by chaos", playing his people off against each other, so he can ensure they are weak and he is calling the shots -- if not exactly in control. One Michael Anton, previously a Trump Administration staffer, did try to articulate a Trump Doctrine:
BEGIN QUOTE:
It can be stated like this: Let's all put our own countries first, and be candid about it, and recognize that it's nothing to be ashamed of. Putting our interests first will make us all safer and more prosperous. If there is a Trump Doctrine, that's it.
END QUOTE
Larison calls this a "banality". CNN's Fareed Zakaria went farther, effectively labeling it a fraud: "What country has not put its own interests first? What president has argued to give preference to global interests over American ones?" Donald Trump simply does not understand what America's interests really are -- and as a result, all we end up with is a reality-TV show, broadcast to the world.
As parting comment on the Era of Trump, an innovation has been catching on in the USA: bullet-proof knapsacks for schoolkids. This is beyond any dark humor; it is simply appalling.
* Thanks to two readers for donations this last month. They are much appreciated.
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