* 20 entries including: US Constitution (series), global supply chains (series), MERMAID ocean floats, brains of dogs, mapping the body's cells, insect graveyards, wood-drill ants & symbiotic feather mites, California digital privacy bill, coronavirus threat, and convenience stores moving up.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR FEBRUARY 2020: The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump came to its expected end on 5 February, with the Republican Senate majority voting to acquit him. That was inevitably followed by an extended noisy Trump meltdown at the White House, with an audience of GOP that encouraged him on.
Of course, he had been also been goaded by other factors, one being that the vote to convict had been bipartisan. All Democrats in the Senate voted to convict -- including Doug Jones of Alabama and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who are from conservative states, and had to think twice about it -- plus Mitt Romney of Utah. Under obvious stress, Romney publicly announced that it was the "hardest decision I've ever made", and he understood that "the consequence will be enormous" for him politically. He added:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The consequence of violating my conscience and my oath of office to God would be even greater. Does anyone seriously believe that I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded of me?
I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice. I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor. Yes, he did ...
... what he did was not perfect. No, it was a flagrant assault of our electoral rights, our national scrutiny and our national values. The president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine.
END QUOTE
Republicans blasted Romney -- the 2012 Republican candidate for the presidency -- as a traitor, and Trump was particularly abusive towards him in his White House rant. However, one wonders if Romney didn't actually make the right decision from a practical point of view, as well as an ethical one. The GOP is on the road to the Devil; possibly Romney has picked a better road. CNN's Chris Cillizza, always amusing and worth listening to, commented:
BEGIN QUOTE:
What Romney's speech -- and vote -- did is say to his party and the country that an alternative version to Trumpism exists. It may not be popular now. It may be derided by those in power. But it exists. And it's based not on the politician of the moment or on any politician at all, but rather on the idea that there are principles that transcend any individual.
THE POINT: Romney may not have meant to start a movement. And he might not start one! But if there is ever going to be a post-Trump GOP, Romney's actions this week will stand at its core.
END QUOTE
Trump also blasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was sitting behind him during his State of the Union address on the evening of 4 February, and had to listen to a long list of dubious claims:
There were things that Trump did not say -- in particular, nothing about the massive budget deficits that the Trump Administration is building up, thanks to reckless tax cuts. At the end of the speech, as Trump left the podium, Pelosi took her copy of the speech and theatrically ripped it to shreds in full view of the cameras.
The Republicans inevitably howled, but Pelosi was not contrite, saying that Trump had "shredded the truth", and she made the only "courteous" response -- meaning it was more courteous than the unstated alternatives. Trump likes to proclaim that he is "New Presidential" as he talks endless trash; he can then have no credible complaint when Pelosi calls it out as trash. It really amounted to nothing much, one way or another, except for an amusing footnote in the history books. Those who respect Pelosi didn't mind, or liked it; those who didn't like it, hate her anyway.
Trump did get a boost in polls from the State of the Union Address and his acquittal, with his odds of being re-elected being rated up. The good economy works in his favor, but Trump runs his presidency by pandering to the extreme Right, which involves bad-mouthing everyone who isn't the extreme Right. His post-acquittal tantrum did not convince those who don't like him to reconsider their judgement of him. Nothing changes Trump's approval / disapproval rates, which are stuck at -- ignoring the indifferent few who don't care and don't vote -- about 45% / 55%.
* Whether the Dems can turn that into an electoral victory in November remains to be seen. The initial Iowa primary caucuses in this last month were a complete fiasco, due to a defective app, with Trump crowing loud as a result. Unfortunately, having got off to a fractious start, things didn't get better, with Bernie Sanders getting an early lead over the presumed favorite, Joe Biden. The prospect of Bernie getting the nomination created what was labeled a sense of "panic" among Democratic leadership, and for two very good reasons. First, Bernie is not really a Democrat, he's a socialist, and his candidacy would amount to a hostile take-over of the Democratic Party -- just as Donald Trump's candidacy amounted to a hostile take-over of the Republican Party.
Second, and more importantly, nobody with sense would bet that Bernie could beat Trump in the November election. Yes, he mobilizes the faithful, but the Woke Left only wins in safe districts, displacing moderate Democrats, not Republicans. The Big Blue Wave by which the Democrats retook the House of Representatives in 2018 was made of moderates from swing states, who did displace Republicans. The election will be won or lost in the swing states; and Bernie's Woke Left policy proposals have no traction there. The USA is centrist in general sentiment, and Bernie is well Left of center. With Bernie at the top of the bill, it is unlikely that the Democrats will tilt Senate seats in 2020, and may not retain control of the House.
In addition, although Bernie's fans idolize him, those not so infatuated with him see him as a ranting, crankish, annoying old man, strong on high-flown ideas and weak on realism. His Leftist past makes him only too vulnerable to the smear tactics the Trump campaign is sure to use against him. Not incidentally, Trump is saying nice things about Bernie for the moment, clearly liking the idea of Bernie becoming his opponent. Bernie's fans insist he can beat Trump -- but that's a delusion, being rightly compared to climate-change denial. Bernie versus Trump would be a noisy little chihuahua up against a fat, ugly, and nasty pit bull. There would be no doubt as to the outcome.
Everything is still in flux, and primaries are always fractious, if maybe not normally this much. A lot can happen in the next few months. Super Tuesday, when a cluster of states have their primaries, will be on 3 March, and will do much to clarify the race. It'll be settled out in July. If Bernie gets the nod, even his detractors among the Democrats, lacking any choice, will vote for him and not complain. They will, however, also resign themselves to four more years of Donald Trump.
* Trump believes the good economy will bring him a win in November in any case. CNN's Fareed Zakaria, in a video essay, acknowledged that the US economy has been doing well -- though not, as Trump would have it, better than it has ever been. Zakaria suggested that Trump, in his crowing about his economic successes, is most thoroughly off base in his central economic plank, the trade deficit.
During the 2016 election, Trump relentlessly hammered on the trade deficit, saying that foreigners were looting the USA. He promised to drive down trade deficits -- but instead, they've risen substantially on his watch. Zakaria points out that, when the US economy is booming, the trade deficit tends to rise; and in a recession, tends to fall. The biggest drop in America's trade deficit was in 2009, in the depths of the Great Recession.
Zakaria cited a paper by economist Roger Martin titled "Why The Trade Deficit Can Be A Sign Of A Healthy Economy". Martin postulates a country that has less than 5% of the world's population, but produces 20% of the world's GDP. America buys more than it sells to others, but sells more services -- banking, insurance, consulting -- than it buys. This country also has laws protecting private investment, plus a strong stable currency, which makes it a great place for foreign investment.
Of course, this is the USA. America buys more from other countries than it sells, resulting in a deficit, but other countries like to invest in America, and the USA has a huge surplus in selling services to other countries. 80% of US jobs are in services; manufacturing employment as a percentage of US employment has been declining at a steady rate for 70 years. Martin says: "On this basis, the trade deficit should be something to brag about, rather than denounce."
Trump's war on trade deficits has been painfully costly, forcing Americans to pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes -- tariffs are not often paid by other countries -- and then using tens of billions of dollars to subsidize farmers who are being hurt by retaliatory tariffs. As Zakaria said: "All this to solve a problem, that isn't really a problem."
Zakaria said nothing about the other irony of Trump's obsession with trade deficits, in that he doesn't care about budget deficits at all. That, however, is another story.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Raytheon Unveils Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile Project" by Steve Trimble, 16 September 2019), US defense giant Raytheon has unveiled a company-funded program to develop a new air-to-air missile (AAM) named "Peregrine" -- with the munition to have the range of the medium-range AIM-120C AMRAAM and the maneuverability of the short-range AIM-9X Sidewinder, but in a compact form factor to increase the number of AAMs that can be carried by a combat aircraft.
The Peregrine, as shown by artwork and mockups, has a configuration along the lines of the Raytheon Standard naval surface-to-air missile, with cruciform tailfins and long strake-like wings. It is much smaller, of course, the idea being to double the AAM load compared to the AMRAAM for internal carriage, or triple it for external carriage. Raytheon says it will have a length of 1.8 meters (6 feet) and a launch mass of about 68 kilograms (150 pounds) -- or about half the length and mass of the AMRAAM.
The Peregrine will have a "multimode autonomous seeker", possibly with radar and infrared sensors, giving it "fire and forget" capability. It will have an unspecified "advanced propulsion system", and will have high end-game maneuverability.
The Peregrine fits into a new category of AAM, demonstrated by the 2013 unveiling of Lockheed Martin's Cuda concept, which offered the Air Force a missile with AIM-120-like range -- or somewhat better -- in a package half the size and weight. The Cuda received support from an Air Force Research Laboratory project named "Small Advanced Capabilities Missile". Although the Peregrine and Cuda are of similar size, they have distinct differences. Lockheed designed the Cuda as a hit-to-kill weapon, but the Peregrine carries a blast-fragmentation warhead.
Raytheon is seeking new opportunities in AAMs after losing the AIM-260 contract to Lockheed Martin in 2017. The AIM-260 will be an extended-range derivative of the AIM-120.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Dynamit Nobel Defence To Begin RGW 110 Firing Trials In 2020" by Robin Hughes, 30 August 2019) Dynamit Nobel Defense (DND) of Germany is moving towards preliminary firing trials for its 110-millimeter (4.3-inch) "Recoilless Grenade Weapon (RGW) 110" shoulder-fired disposable single-use weapon system in 2020.
The RGW is currently available in 60-millimeter (2.36-inch) and 90-millimeter (3.54-inch) warhead variants. The new RGW 110 variant will have high-explosive anti-tank / high-explosive squash head (HEAT-HESH) warhead as a baseline. The RGW 110 will weigh 10 kilograms (22 pounds), have a length of a meter (39.4 inches), and an effective range of 600 to 800 meters (1,970 to 2,625 feet).
The RGW 110 is effectively an evolution of and direct successor to the DND 110 Panzerfaust 3 family of single-shot shoulder-launched weapon systems. According to a DND official: "We've taken the 110 mm Panzerfaust HEAT/HESH warhead, shortened and upgraded it -- while maintaining its performance -- and put it inside an ergonomically enhanced 110-millimeter launch tube. So essentially you have a Panzerfaust in its newest version, which is more than 3 kilograms lighter [and] more balanced, with greater accuracy and longer range."
* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Russia Displays S-70 UCAV Model With Stealth Upgrade" by Steve Trimble, 26 August 2019), the Russian Sukhoi organization is in continuing development of their S-70 "Okhotnik (Hunter)" attack drone AKA "unpiloted combat air vehicle (UCAV)".
The S-70 first broke cover in early 2019, through a set of photos posted online, of the aircraft performing taxi tests outside the Kazan Aircraft Production Organization (KAPO) factory in Novosibirsk. The S-70 was shown to be a large, flying-wing, stealthy UCAV, apparently with ancestry from the earlier Mikoyan Skat UCAV demonstrator. The program apparently goes back to at least 2011, evolving from a government requirement for a stealthy strike / reconnaissance drone.
The S-70 is believed to have a wingspan of about 20 meters (65 feet), an empty weight of about 20 tonnes (22 tons), subsonic performance, and a range of possibly 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles / 3,200 NMI). It has two internal weapons bays, and is powered by a single Saturn AL-31F or AL-41F engine. At the time of the release of the images, the Russian Air Force transported the S-70 to the remote Chkalov Flight Test Center in Akhtubinsk in March for what appeared to be an imminent first flight. It didn't occur until 3 August, the test program having been delayed.
The S-70 is coated with radar-absorbing materials, though the demonstrator's stealth features are compromised by a round and unshrouded engine exhaust nozzle; however, a model recently displayed showed a flat exhaust nozzle. Officials say surveillance payloads are being developed for the drone. Details of program schedule are not clear, and at best, it won't reach operational service until late in the next decade. Apparently the S-70 is seen as a "loyal wingman" drone for the new Su-57 fighter, photos showing the two operating together.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MERMAIDS PROBE THE EARTH FROM THE SEA: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("These Ocean Floats Can Hear Earthquakes" by Erik Stokstad, 17 April 2019), by deploying hydrophones inside neutrally buoyant floats that drift through the deep ocean, seismologists are detecting earthquakes that occur below the sea floor, using the data to see into the Earth in places where data have been lacking.
Researchers report that nine of these floats -- named "Mobile Earthquake Recorders In Marine Areas By Independent Divers (MERMAID)" -- deployed near Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, had helped track a "mantle plume" -- a column of hot rock rising from deep below the islands. Now, 18 MERMAIDs searching for such plumes under Tahiti have also recorded earthquakes.
According to Frederick Simons -- a seismologist at Princeton University, who helped develop the floats -- the South Pacific fleet will continue to grow, while the numbers of floats increase elsewhere. Simons envisions a global flotilla of thousands of the floats, which could also be used to detect the sound of rain or whales, or be kitted up with other environmental or biological sensors. "The goal is to instrument all the oceans."
Seismometers have long monitored the Earth to track the movement of earthquake waves through the planet. Deep structures of different density, such as the slabs of ocean crust that sink into the mantle along subduction zones, can speed up or slow down seismic waves. By combining seismic data obtained from different locations, researchers can map those structures. Seismic stations have also got a boost because they can detect nuclear detonations.
Seismometer stations haven't revealed much about upwelling plumes and other giant structures under the oceans, because there are very few stations on the ocean floor. It's expensive to build, place, and support them. There's been work on using fiber-optic cables laid over the ocean floor to detect tremors, but the work is in its infancy.
The question eventually arose: do the seismometers actually have to be sited on the ocean floor? The answer was the MERMAIDs. They drift at a depth of about 1,500 meters (5,000 meters), deep enough to isolate them from surface noise, but reduces the energy the float requires to surface so it can report its findings. When a MERMAID's hydrophone picks up a strong sound pulse, the float's computer system screens it to see if it's noise. If it doesn't look like noise, the float surfaces within a few hours, to relay the seismogram via satellite.
The nine floats released near the Galapagos in 2014 obtained 719 seismograms in two years, before their batteries ran down. Some of the seismograms were corrupted by background noise, such as that generated by wind and rain at the ocean surface -- but the researchers report that 80% of the seismograms were helpful in imaging a mantle plume about 300 kilometers (185 miles) wide and 1,900 kilometers (1,180 miles) deep.
Following the Galapagos campaign, the MERMAID design was reworked by research engineer Yann Hello of Geoazur, a geoscience lab in Sophia Antipolis, France. Hello made them spherical and stronger, and also tripled battery life. The floats currently cost about $40,000 USD each, along with $50 USD a month to transmit data. That's cheap, as scientific instruments go.
Between June and September 2018, 18 of the new MERMAIDs were dispersed around Tahiti to explore the "Pacific Superswell", a region of oddly elevated ocean crust, likely raised by plumes. To date, these floats have picked up over 250 earthquakes -- with 90% of them validated by ground-based seismometers. In August 2019, 28 more MERMAIDS will be deployed in the South Pacific, two dozen of them bought by the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. Heiner Igel, a geophysicist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, is enthusiastic: "I would say drop them all over the oceans."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE BRAINS OF DOGS: Anyone familiar with dogs know they are, among animals, unusually fine-tuned for interactions with humans. As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Humans Haven't Just Changed What Dogs Look like -- We've Altered The Very Structure Of Their Brains" by Eva Frederick, 2 September 2019), a study of the brain scans of dogs reveals that domestication has altered the structure of their brains.
Erin Hecht, a Harvard University neuroscientist , a library of MRI brain scans from 62 purebred dogs from 33 different breeds. Hecht says that once she lined up the images so she could see them all: "You could just see the results staring at you."
The researchers identified six networks of brain regions that tended to be bigger or smaller from dog to dog, and that varied in tandem with each other. The patterns led Hecht to wonder if these regions were collaborating in different behaviors, and if the patterns correlated with dog behaviors. For example, beagles can sniff out cancerous tumors in humans and let doctors know, while a border collie can herd hundreds of sheep, or even turkeys, into an enclosure with great efficiency. All the dogs examined were pets, not working dogs, but there was no reason to think pets and working dogs of the same breed differed in brain structure.
The researchers looked for correlations between the six networks in different dogs and the behaviors those dogs were noted for, as defined by the American Kennel Club. The result was that each of the six brain networks correlated with at least one behavioral trait. For example, boxers and dobermans, which are sometimes used as police dogs, showed significant differences from other breeds in the network that was linked to sight and smell; while dogs bred for sport fighting showed changes in the network that represented fear, stress, and anxiety responses.
Hecht was particularly intrigued in the differences between dogs bred for sight hunting, and those that hunt by scent. Dogs that specialized in scent hunting showed differences not in the early regions of the brain that detect smells, but instead in the more sophisticated areas that help the dogs understand and communicate that information. She says that makes sense: "I've heard trainers that are working with scent hounds say you don't have to train a dog to be able to smell something. You just have to train them to report it."
* As discussed by another article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Dog Breeds Really Do Have Distinct Personalities" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 7 January 2019), a second study has established links between the behavior of dogs and their genetics.
The dog genome was first sequenced in 2005, researchers wanted to determine the genetic markers for the behavior of different breeds of dogs. As it turned out, there is a lot of genetic variation even within a breed, and finding the patterns meant studying a lot of dogs.
Evan MacLean -- a comparative psychologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson -- and colleagues finally took on the job, studying behavioral data for about 14,000 dogs from 101 breeds. The behavioral data was obtained from the "Canine Behavioral Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ)", a pet personality quiz developed by James Serpell, an ethologist at the University of Pennsylvania. C-BARQ asks questions like: "What does your dog do when a stranger comes to the door?" -- with the goal of objectively characterizing 14 aspects of their pet's personalities, including trainability, attachment, and aggression. Since the survey was developed in 2003, more than 50,000 owners have participated.
The researchers team matched up these behavioral data for each breed with genetic data about the breeds. They didn't perform genetic analyses of genomes of all the individual dogs, instead using typical / average genomes for each breed. The team identified 131 places in a dog's DNA that may help shape 14 key personality traits. These DNA regions explain about 15% of a dog breed's personality, with each exerting only a small effect. Trainability, chasing, and a tendency to be aggressive toward strangers were the most highly heritable traits.
Some of the dog genes for aggression are the same, or close to, genes tied to aggression in humans. Similarly, DNA associated with the dog's trainability is found in genes that in humans are associated with intelligence and information processing. Serpell believes that understanding the links between dog behavior and their genetics may improve our understanding of the links between human behavior and their genetics.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (11): The US has now replaced NAFTA with the new "United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)". While the leaders of American industry have not always been happy with the Trump Administration's erratic trade policies, they're pleased enough with the USMCA. In the first place, it's not all that different from NAFTA; in the second, to the extent it is different, it has its advantages. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, never a fan of Trump, praised USMCA, saying "there is no question of course that this trade agreement is much better than NAFTA."
An article from CNN.com ("5 Key Differences Between NAFTA And Trump's USMCA Deal" by Katie Lobosco, Brian Fung and Tami Luhby, 10 December 2019) outlined the advantages provided by the new treaty:
AUTO MANUFACTURING BOOST: The USMCA requires 75% of a vehicle's parts to be made in one or all of the three signatory countries, up from the current 62.5% rule, in order to stay free from tariffs when moving between the three signatory countries. In other words, simply assembling a car effectively built outside the North American trade block isn't on.
It also requires more vehicle parts to be made by workers earning at least $16 USD an hour, which negates much of the labor advantage for Mexico. An International Trade Commission report found that these changes would add 28,000 jobs in the industry over six years, while also leading to a small increase in the price of vehicles. However, the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents America's big automakers, say the ITC report underestimated long-term investments US automakers will make because of the USMCA. Of course, a Trump Administration report was well more positive, saying the USMCA would create 76,000 auto jobs over five years, a 7% increase in employment in the industry.
STRONGER LABOR LAWS: Manufacturing workers have long blamed NAFTA for sending jobs to Mexico, and the Democrats were determined to use USMCA to strengthen labor rules in order to create a more level playing field for American workers. The deal struck by Democrats establishes a set of benchmarks for Mexico to meet in implementing labor reforms, as well as an interagency committee that will monitor Mexico's labor reform implementation and compliance with labor obligations. The Mexicans raised some last-minute objections over the committee, seeing it as intrusive, but the problems were smoothed out.
DAIRY ACCESS TO CANADA: The original NAFTA eliminated tariffs on most agricultural products traded among the three countries. Canada and Mexico are already the two biggest export markets for US farmers and ranchers. The USMCA will keep those tariffs at zero, while further opening up the Canadian market to US dairy, poultry, and eggs. That was a bit of a feat, since the Canadian dairy lobby is notoriously strong. As a sweetener, the USA will allow more Canadian dairy, peanuts and peanut products, as well as a limited amount of sugar, to be exported into the USA from Canada.
UPDATES FOR THE DIGITAL ERA: When NAFTA was passed, the internet was a new thing, and so it wasn't a consideration then. It is now, and so USMCA includes a completely new chapter on digital trade. The provisions aren't expected to directly create jobs, but could provide a boost to US businesses in other ways.
For example, the USMCA prohibits Canada and Mexico from forcing US companies to store their data on in-country servers. It also ensures that US companies cannot be sued in Canada and Mexico for much of the content appearing on their platforms. The Democrats had pushed to exclude that provision, amid an ongoing debate in the US about whether tech companies were still entitled to that liability shield under domestic law.
BIOLOGIC DRUGS: Another issue in the USMCA that wasn't in NAFTA is biological drugs -- that is, drugs derived from biological sources. The USMCA, as offered, wanted protections for biologic drugs, allowing pharmaceutical companies to protect their intellectual properties. Currently, the US offers 12 years of protection, Canada 8 years, and Mexico 5 years; the USMCA suggested they all adopt a standard of 10 years.
The Democrats successfully lobbied for removal of this provision from the USMCA, arguing that it would have denied Congress the right to legislate on drug pricing. Of course, the pharmaceutical industry wasn't happy at that, a spokesman for an industry trade group saying: "The only winners today are foreign governments who want to steal American intellectual property and free ride on America's global leadership in biopharmaceutical research and development."
Possibly so, but the USMCA as implemented suggests the ambiguity of the term "free trade". It is absurd to think that any country embraces unrestricted trade; in reality, all the parties are paranoid of getting ripped off, and it takes a lot of troublesome negotiation to come to an agreement. Once the agreement is obtained, it is by no means easy to determine exactly who got the better deal -- or in some cases, if the new deal is better than the old arrangement. It can, however, be said that NAFTA was not, as Donald Trump would have it, a great disaster. It can also be honestly said that the USMCA is a clear improvement, if most visibly because it addresses issues that have arisen since NAFTA was passed. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (92): The confrontation with the Soviet Union continued in Truman's second term. In April 1949, America and its Western Allies established the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)", which was a mutual-defense pact, of course targeted at the USSR. NATO members pledged military cooperation, and to regard an attack on one member as an attack at all. The concept was popular, and the treaty easily got through Congress. NATO became the primary foundation stone of US relations with Europe.
Stalin lifted the blockade of Berlin in May, after the city had been under blockade for a year. However, that didn't end Truman's difficulties. At the time, civil war had been raging in China between the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communists of Mao Zedong. Nobody in power in the US wanted to intervene in the civil war, China having proven a demonstrable quagmire for the Japanese. George Marshall had attempted to negotiate a settlement between the two sides in 1946, but neither trusted the other; it was impossible. The Communists won in 1949, with Chiang's Nationalists retreating to the island of Formosa, now Taiwan. Republicans then blasted Truman for "losing" China. That was preposterous; no US administration would have had the capability to influence events in China.
Having fought the Axis powers, Americans broadly perceived that Communism presented a new threat to American principles and power. That insecurity was reinforced in August 1949, when the US detected fallout from the first Soviet atomic-bomb test. There were those in US leadership, including Truman, who had doubted the USSR could build the Bomb, and so the test was something of a shock. Examination of the fallout samples suggested the Soviet weapon, nicknamed "JOE-1" after Josef Stalin, was similar to the US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki -- and indeed, it was a copy of it, made using plans stolen by Red spies. The US accelerated its production of nuclear weapons and worked towards the more powerful H-bomb.
Paranoia over Communist subversion kicked into high gear. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the Red Scare hysteria to boost his political career, accusing the State Department of being riddled with Communists. Congress chimed in with the "McCarran Internal Security Act", which mandated the registration of Communists and authorized punitive measures against them. Truman vetoed the act, but Congress over-rode the veto, with the end result of Truman being labeled soft on Communism.
That was hardly the case, with Truman approving a policy paper designated "NSC 68" in 1950 that committed the government to tripling the defense budget; providing more military aid to US allies; and developing new weapon systems, notably the hydrogen bomb. The United States went to a partial war footing, the objective being to contain Communist expansion, and roll it back if possible. The USA had never before maintained military forces on a near-war footing in peacetime.
At that time, fighting broke out in the Far East, lending weight to the new policy. After World War II Korea, which had been a Japanese colony, was occupied by both the US and the Soviet Union, with the division line between the two occupations set by the 38th parallel. By 1950, Korea had evolved into two countries: Communist North Korea, under Kim Il-sung, and US-aligned South Korea, under Rhee Syngman. On 25 June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea.
Truman did not declare war, instead seeking authorization and support under the United Nations, with the conflict carried out under the UN flag, and with some UN nations committing troops to help American forces. Truman attempted to push a joint resolution in support of the war through Congress, but Senate Majority Leader Scott W. Lucas, a Democrat, said it was unnecessary. Truman wasn't comfortable with that, but didn't press the matter -- which would cause him trouble later, with the conflict being labeled "Mr. Truman's War". [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* After the typical December rush, space launch activity in January is typically slow, and this January was no exception:
-- 07 JAN 20 / STARLINK 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0219 UTC (previous day local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the third Starlink batch launch.
SpaceX planned to begin limited Internet service through the Starlink network later in 2020, to then expand to truly global operation. The initial constellation will have 1,584, which will require 27 launches. The full constellation may have 42,000 satellites. One of this batch was the first to feature an anti-reflective coating to prevent the satellite from confounding astronomical observations. The Falcon first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic. It had flown three times before.
-- 07 JAN 20 / TJSW 5 -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1520 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "TJSW 5" satellite into geostationary orbit. Few details were released, suggesting it was a military mission -- possibly a missile launch warning platform. The TJSW satellites were manufactured by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology.
-- 15 JAN 20 / JILIN 1, NUSAT 7 & 8, TIANQUI 1 -- A Chinese Long March 2D booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0253 UTC (local time - 8) to put a "Jilin 1" Earth observation satellite into orbit. The launch also included the "NuSat 7" and "NuSat 8" smallsats from Satellogic of Argentina, plus the "Tianqui 1" data relay satellite from Guodian Gaoke, a Beijing-based company.
The Jilin 1 satellite carried an optical imager with a wide field-of-view and high resolution, along with a high-speed downlink. It was the 16th satellite launched in the Jilin 1 fleet since 2015.
The NuSats were built in Montevideo, Uruguay, with each having a launch mass of about 45 kilograms (100 pounds), and carrying a hyperspectral imager. They joined eight earlier NuSat space platforms in orbit, these having been launched by Chinese boosters from 2016. Satellogic plans to launch a constellation of 90 NuSats.
-- 16 JAN 20 / YINHE 1 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0302 UTC (local time - 8) to put the experimental "Yinhe 1" -- AKA "Galaxy 1", or "GS-SparkSat 03" -- into near-polar orbit for the Chinese company GalaxySpace. Yinhe 1 had a launch mass of 225 kilograms (500 pounds). GalaxySpace plans to orbit up to 144 satellites to create a 5G mobile communications network in space.
-- 16 JAN 20 / EUTELSAT KONNECT & GSAT 30 -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2105 UTC (local time + 3) to put the Eutelsat "Konnect" and ISRO "GSAT 30" geostationary comsats into orbit. Eutelsat Konnect AKA "Eutelsat BB4A" was placed in the geostationary slot at 14 degrees east longitude to provide broadband internet services to Africa.
The Eutelsat Konnect satellite was built by Thales Alenia Space. It had a launch mass of 3,619 kilograms (7,978 pounds); a design life of 15 years; and a Ka-band communications payload, with a total bandwidth of 75 gigabits per second, and with channels operating at up to 100 megabits per second.
It was the first space platform based on the new Spacebus Neo satellite bus, which was developed by Thales with funding from the European Space Agency and the French government, including the French space agency, CNES, under the Neosat program. The Spacebus Neo platform features an all-electric propulsion system with xenon-fueled ion thrusters. Eleven satellites based on the Neosat-series designs program have been sold by Thales and Airbus to date. Following this first launch of the Spacebus Neo platform, the Airbus Eurostar Neo platform is slated to launch for the first time in 2021.
GSAT 30 was built by ISRO, had a launch mass of 3,360 kilograms (7,400 pounds), a payload of 12 C-band / 12 Ku-band transponders, and a design life of 15 years. It replaced the Insat 4A comsat, which launched in 2005 on a previous Ariane 5 mission. GSAT 30 was placed in the geostationary slot at 83 degrees east longitude to provide Ku-band communications over India, and C-band coverage of Gulf countries, a number of Asian countries, and Australia.
-- 29 JAN 20 / STARLINK 3 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1406 UTC (local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the fourth Starlink batch launch. The Falcon first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic. It had flown three times before. The payload fairing was also recovered, though half of it had to be fished from the ocean.
-- 31 JAN 19 / NROL 151 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's North Island at 0256 UTC (local time - 11) to put a secret payload into orbit for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The payload was designated "NROL 151".
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MAPPING THE BODY'S CELLS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("An Ambitious Effort To Map The Human Body's Individual Cells Gets Backing From NIH" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 11 October 2019), 21st-century science is dominated by "big data", with researchers now tackling issues that were simply too big to handle when paper was the dominant data-storage medium.
As an example, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is starting up the "Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP)", which will map out the locations and context of all the human body's trillions of cells, with a focus on describing the cellular architecture of organs. Julia Laskin -- an analytical chemist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and HuBMAP grantee -- says the goal is to "establish a baseline of what constitutes a healthy system." That will allow researchers to see what goes wrong in disease.
Until recently, biomedical scientists had only a broad-brush view of how organs functioned. In particular, they had succeeded in getting only a rough sense of gene activity -- that is, when genes turn on and off, which defines what a cell does -- in specific tissues. But organs consist of many kinds of cells, each with their own architecture and operation.
In 2016, drawing on technologies that allow researchers to readily inspect individual cells, a group of 90 scientists from around the world launched the "Human Cell Atlas (HCA)" effort, which aims to catalog how cells operate in different tissues. HCA now involves 1500 scientists from 65 countries -- obtaining support from many sources, including the Wellcome Trust and the European Union's Horizons 2020 program.
HuBMAP represents the US contribution to HCA, with NIH envisioning a total expenditure of $200 million USD over 8 years -- not really big money by Federal standards. At last report, NIH has awarded $54 million over the next 4 years to about 120 researchers, with activities in three categories:
The money is being obtained from the NIH's Common Fund, which builds on efforts straddling many NIH institutes to move a new field forward. For example, the Common Fund supported the Human Microbiome Project, which helped kick-start the current emphasis on the role of bacteria in and on the human body in health and disease.
Richard Conroy of NIH says that, for HuBMAP: "The biggest challenge will be getting everybody together at first." However, papers are already coming out. For example, dermatologist Muzlifah Haniffa from Newcastle University in the UK and her colleagues studied 140,000 cells from a developing liver, as well as 74,000 skin, kidney, and yolk sac cells, and described how the blood and immune systems form.
For a second example Prakash Ramachandran, a clinician scientist at the University of Edinburgh, and his colleagues used single-cell technology to describe all the cells involved in forming scar tissue in diseased livers. The cells consist of subtypes of three key cells: white blood cells known as "macrophages"; endothelial cells, which line blood vessels; and scar-forming cells known as "myofibroblasts".
Data from papers will be part of the developing atlas, which Conroy describes as a "Google map" for the body, where one can drill down to the molecular details of each cell. Meetings will establish how the system works, with participants saying the pieces are coming together.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INSECT GRAVEYARDS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Ancient Insect Graveyards Reveal An Explosion In Bug Diversity 237 Million Years Ago" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 5 September 2018), twin discoveries of huge fossil deposits in China have provided hints on the emergence of insects as the most diverse group in the animal kingdom. Insects, the fossils suggest, went through an explosion in diversity following a mass extinction event 252 million years ago, in parallel with a similar diversification of the plants that many insects feed on.
The "Permian-Triassic extinction" was the most calamitous in the Earth's history, with evidence of massive volcanic activity, global warming, and asteroid impacts that killed off more than 90% of marine life and 70% of vertebrate land animals. A wide variety of insects -- including primitive beetles; hemipterans or "true bugs", with plant-piercing mouthparts; as well as giant cockroaches and dragonflies -- flourished before the cataclysm, but researchers were not sure of how many survived. Insects don't fossilize well, since they don't have hard parts like bones, teeth, or shells.
Paleontologists Zheng Daran and Wang Bo of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy in Nanjing, China, and colleagues turned up five sites in northwestern China that were apparently the right age to provide clues. Two of them -- ancient lakebeds filled in with sandstone and other sedimentary rocks, 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles) apart -- were insect gold mines, with fossils of wings, larval cases, and other insect remains. 800 fossils were obtained from the two sites.
Examination of the sandstone nailed down the dates of the two sites, one being about 237 or 238 million years old, the other 230 million years old. The first, older site was more diverse, with insects from 28 insect families in 11 major insect groups -- including more evolved insects, such as flies and beetles, which all have a four-stage life cycle instead of the three-stage one of more primitive species such as cockroaches. The younger site had 10 insect families in six orders, including many of the same kinds as the older site.
The sites suggest that some types of insects, such as beetles and cockroaches -- survived the extinction event, while others evolved after. They also suggest that this burst of evolution took place much earlier than had been believed, particularly for water-loving insects. Such creatures were common in the fossils, which included remains of fossil dragonflies, caddisflies, water boatmen, and aquatic beetles. Paleontologists had thought they didn't emerge until 130 million years later.
This earlier date for the expansion of insect diversity aligns it with an explosion in plant diversity occurring at that time. As pollinators and pests, the insects helped drive further plant evolution and, by co-evolution, the evolution of insects as well. The result was a big step towards the flora and fauna of today.
* FOSSIL PARASITES: As discussed by an article from THE NEW YORK TIMES ("Before These Parasitic Wasps Finished Devouring Live Flies, They Became Fossils" by Nicholas St. Fleur, 28 August 2018), parasitoid wasps are common all over the world. Most are small and are generally not noticed by humans, but they are the bane of insects and other arthropods -- laying eggs on victims that hatch and eat them alive.
They've been at this business for a long time. German researchers have used synchrotron X-ray imaging to probe into the interior of ancient fossils, to find parasitoid wasp larvae lurking inside more than 50 fossils of developing flies, the fossils being dated as being from 30 to 40 million years old. Thomas van de Kamp -- an entomologist from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and lead author of a report on the wasps -- comments: "It's the first time we definitely have proof of a developing parasitoid wasp inside its host in the fossil record."
Van de Kamp and his colleagues found out about the ancient wasps while re-examining a collection of flies that fossilized during their pupal phase. The pupae fossils are only 3 or 4 millimeters long and resemble grains of rice. Most were found in the 1890s and early 1900s in southwestern France. In the 1940s, a Swiss entomologist named Eduard Handschin examined and described many of the fossils, after which they were generally neglected.
At first, van de Kamp examined 29 ancient fly pupae using the X-ray imager. The first nine were empty, just stones, but the tenth was interesting. Van de Camp says: "I was getting bored. It was like: Okay, stone; another stone; okay another stone ... and then it was: WOW! It was immediately clear there was a wasp inside."
The researchers to re-examine more museum samples. In the course of a week, they took images of more than 1,500 fossilized fly pupae, to find 55 with parasitoid wasps. What happened was obvious: flies laid eggs on rotting carcasses, which hatched into larvae, which were then parasitized by wasps -- with hosts and wasps fossilized before the wasps could depart. The researchers found four newly discovered wasp species. Two of the species, Xenomorphia resurrecta and Xenomorphia handschini, named after the parasitic "xenomorph" monster in the ALIENS sci-fi / horror movies.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (10): The notion of "free trade" has become controversial in recent years. An article from REUTERS.com ("Parts With Passports: How Free Trade Drives GM's Engines" by Nick Carey, 18 November 2019) shows that, like it or not, it's the reality.
Take, for example, the pistons for General Motors V-6 engines arriving at GM's plant in Romulus, Michigan. They took a circuituitous path to get there, with raw materials, and then parts built from them, traveling from the US to Canada, then to Mexico, and finally to Michigan; no tariffs were imposed on them as they crossed borders. Jim Bovenzi, GM's executive director of global supply chain, says: "They already have their passports. We look at North America as a borderless region. We have parts and components coming back and forth across the border all the time."
GM's Romulus Powertrain plant makes about 400,000 V-6 engines a year for high-margin Cadillac SUVs, light pickup trucks, and other GM vehicles. The Romulus-built V-6 uses 235 parts from 100 primary suppliers. 67 of them ship from factories in the United States, 13 from Mexico, 8 from Canada, and 12 from elsewhere in the world. Most of the electronics come from Asia.
The plant obtains engine blocks both from a GM casting operation in Saginaw, Michigan, and from a supplier in Mexico. The Mexican engine blocks are cheaper, but GM doesn't like being at the mercy of a single supplier for a critical component where substitutes are not easily obtained. James Rubenstein -- a professor of geography at Oxford, Ohio-based Miami University, who has studied the automobile industry -- says that more labor-intensive a part is to make, the more likely it's sourced from Mexico: "Final assembly costs don't affect the overall cost of a vehicle that much. Focusing on labor-intensive parts further down the chain is what really makes a difference."
The V-6 engines end up at the GM Spring Hill plant near Nashville, Tennessee, for installation in Cadillacs and Acadias. There, the engines are hooked up to about 200 parts from 88 different suppliers; 58 American, 12 Mexican, 5 Canadian, plus 13 from elsewhere. Spring Hill workers install an automatic transmission from a GM plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico; a starter and generator made in Tennessee by Japanese supplier Denso Corp; an air-conditioning compressor made by Denso in Michigan; a drive belt made by Gates Industrial Corp PLC in Mexico; tensioners and a pulley made by Gates in Canada; catalytic converters made in Tennessee by Tenneco Inc; and battery cables from China.
GM's V-6 engine is just one example of how GM, as well as rivals Ford Motor Co and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, have used the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to shift work to lower-cost facilities across the continent, cutting expenses and boosting returns from the region that represents the bulk of their global profits. Without NAFTA, their cross-border supply chains -- which include US companies employing American workers -- would shatter.
According to Kristin Dziczek -- vice president of industry, labor, and economics at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Michigan -- the use of lower-cost countries for more labor-intensive parts is now "part of the recipe to compete in the global market." US President Donald Trump's threats to slap tariffs on Mexico made the auto-makers very nervous,
Dziczek says such tariffs would force automakers to move sourcing of lower-cost parts from Mexico to other cheap markets like Vietnam. That would be bad for Mexican suppliers -- but would also hurt US suppliers, and defeat Trump's aim to boost US jobs, as shuttling parts back and forth between Asia and the United States would not be cost-effective. She comments: "If we weren't getting it from Mexico, we'd be getting it from somebody else's 'Mexico'. And the further away that 'Mexico' is, the less likely it is American suppliers would benefit from that business." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (91): Truman's support of the United Nations was less significant than his support of the trans-Atlantic alliance that had become firmly established in the war, with a focus on containing the perceived menace of Communist aggression. The end of the conflict led to the division of Europe, West from East, separated by what Winston Churchill called the "Iron Curtain". Germany was divided into West Germany and East Germany accordingly, with the divided city of Berlin embedded deep in East Germany. The division of Germany, and particularly Berlin, would be a source of great contention between the two sides.
He won support for his "Truman Doctrine" -- which established a policy of "containing" the Soviet Union -- and the Marshall Plan, named after Secretary of State George Marshall, which helped to economically rebuild Europe. To implement the America's Cold War strategy, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, which:
In 1947 Truman -- under pressure for alleged Communist infiltration of the government -- also signed "Executive Order 9835", known as the "Loyalty Order", which set in motion investigations of Federal government employees to check for connections to Communism. Over 3 million people were investigated, with 300 dismissed. The exercise also resulted in the "Attorney General's List Of Subversive Organizations". Truman would later express regret for issuing the Loyalty Order.
The Cold War went into higher gear in June 1948, when Josef Stalin decided to cut off Western access to Berlin. Although US military brass suggested to Truman that troops should shoot their way in, he didn't care for that idea -- instead following up a suggestion by British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin that West Berlin be resupplied by air. The result was the "Berlin Airlift", in which streams of transport aircraft from the US and its European allies kept the city alive.
It was one of Truman's finest moments, demonstrating strength of will to Stalin, and also that the Western Allies had resources the Soviets would struggle to match. In particularly significant decisions, in July 1948, Truman also issued Executive Order 9981, which racially integrated the US armed forces, and Executive Order 9980, to integrate Federal agencies. These were remarkable actions for a man from segregated Missouri whose private language on race wasn't politically correct, even by the weak standards of the time.
Of course, Truman's moves toward racial equality earned him hostility from Southern Democrats. In addition, agitation over Communist subversion continued to increase. In August 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a former Red spy and a senior editor at TIME magazine, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) -- which had been set up before the war to track down subversives working against the US government. Chambers said he had been a Red spy and implicated Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, in the spy network. That was never fully proven, but Hiss would do time behind bars for perjury. The hearings raised the public profile of a junior representative from California, Richard M. Nixon.
Truman, both because of events and his blunt style, wasn't favored to win re-election in 1948 -- but he did so, in an historic upset victory against Republican Tom Dewey. Truman's second inauguration was the first to be televised nationally, with the presidency then entering into the television age. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Google Is Collecting Health Data On Millions Of Americans" by Jordan Valinsky, 12 November 2019), in November 2019, Google announced a partnership with Ascension, one of the USA's biggest nonprofit health providers -- with 2,600 facilities in two dozen states -- to collect medical data on millions of Americans under Project Nightingale.
Few details were announced, Google simply declaring that it was a "business arrangement to help a provider with the latest technology, similar to the work we do with dozens of other healthcare providers." Google added that it is adhering to regulatory privacy standards, such as the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996. Ascension's data "cannot be used for any other purpose than for providing these services we're offering under the agreement, and patient data cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data."
Google is competing with Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon to stake out a claim in the health care industry. All three companies have come up initiatives to modernize the US health care system in the past few years. In 2018, Amazon announced a partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to develop the Haven medical service, the goal being to constrain rising health care costs. Earlier in 2019, Microsoft announced a partnership with Walgreens, while Apple has rolled out a series of health care initiatives.
ED: The entry of Google ETC into the health-care field may end up breaking the long-standing logjam in medical records, helping to impose standards so that medical records used by one provider can be transparently used by any other.
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Can Hack It", 8 May 2018), while electronic keys have become the norm for hotels, to no surprise, they're not very secure. Tomi Tuominen and Timo Hirvonen of F-Secure -- a Finnish a cyber-security firm -- came up with a hack that they say allows them to create a master key to get into any locks made by VingSecure, a manufacturer of hotel locks. According to F-Secure, these locks are in more than 40,000 hotel properties across 166 countries. Big hotel chains like Sheraton, Hyatt, and Radison use locks produced by VingSecure's parent company, Sweden's Assa Abloy.
Tuominen and Hirvonen did not discuss details of how they cracked the locks, since the Black Hats would promptly exploit that knowledge. In general terms, they used an RFID keycard to open an RFID lock, with an RFID reader snooping on the transaction -- allowing them to duplicate that keycard with another keycard. Staff keys, such as those carried by cleaners, are particularly valuable targets, since they can access all guest rooms.
The two hackers also say that hotel data systems, again to no surprise, are highly insecure. All they had to do to get into a hotel system was unplug a cable from a computer at a hotel's reception desk. F-Secure concluded that "a malicious actor could download guest data or create, delete, and modify guest entries." To be sure, any "hack" so straightforward is hardly worthy of the name; it could have been done long ago, but it's never been a real problem, there being nothing much to gain by doing so.
As far as the vulnerability of hotel locks go, a spokeswoman for Assa Abloy pointed out that the hack succeeded only after "12 years and thousands of hours of intensive work by two employees at F-Secure", and that "these old locks represent only a small fraction [of the those in use] and are being rapidly replaced with new technology." Of course, it's all for the good to plug up holes, and F-Secure has been working with Assa Abloy to make its locks harder to crack.
* An article from CNN.com ("This Self-Driving Hotel Room Could Revolutionize Travel" by Sarah Lazarus, 20th November 2018) discussed a design concept by one Steve Lee, of Aprilli Design Studio in Toronto, that he calls the "Autonomous Travel Suite (ATS)".
Suppose we're going on a road trip, driving from one place to the next and making overnight stays at hotels. OK, in the era of robocars, why do these activities need to be distinct? Why not build a robocar that's actually a rolling hotel room, with all the amenities, and then have it dock with a room at a hotel complex during the night? The travelers could then have access to more facilities while the ATS is being serviced.
Lee's ATS design features a sleeping space, a work space, a tiny kitchen, a toilet, a sitting shower, and an "entertainment zone" for watching movies and gaming. It features panoramic windows that dim at the touch of a button. It would be offered in a range of sizes, to handle solo travelers, couples, or families. It would be controlled by an app, Lee saying that travelers will "select the start and end points of their journeys, and can add stopping off points such as gyms and restaurants. The system will work out the best route."
Lee suggests that the ATS could replace air travel, at least for trips of moderate distance, the advantage being that it eliminates much of the logistics of travel -- no more standing in lines at the airport, handling luggage, and checking into hotel rooms. The ATS won the "Radical Design Award" for 2018. It is certainly radical -- but is it brilliant? Or daft? A bit of both? OK, that's how these design concepts are supposed to be -- pushing the boundaries to see what might be done, and if they're not practical in themselves, they may be fit into ideas that are.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANT AS DRILL: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Evolution Turned This Ant Into A Living Drill" by Jake Buehler, 24 August 2018), creatures that make a living by boring through wood have a challenging lifestyle. As example, consider wood-boring ants, which can be regarded as "living drills". A new study has provided insight into their extreme adaptations that make them very different from other ants.
The Melissotarsus ants are native to continental Africa and Madagascar. They're somewhat obscure because they are uncommon, small, and are rarely seen outside the galleries they carve into trees. Inside the galleries, they are thought to herd sedentary scale insects for food, eating their wax secretions or sometimes the scale insects themselves -- presumably when they've outlived their usefulness. Worker ants have two pairs of back legs that angle upward, presumably for getting around in the tunnels of the nest, and a bulbous head loaded with silk glands. No other ants have silk glands.
And then there's their ability to drill through wood. Christian Peeters -- a research biologist at Sorbonne University in Paris and senior author on the study -- says: "It was not obvious how they could derive the strength to chew live wood."
To investigate, Peeters and his team cut ant-inhabited branches from trees in Mozambique and South Africa, sending them back to the lab in Paris for examination. The lab used x-ray microtomography -- a 3D x-ray imaging scheme for tiny things -- and high-magnification microscopes to inspect the ants, focusing on the head, jaws, and legs. The researchers found that the bulbous head of the ant is loaded up with muscles that are connected to short, sharp mandibles that can chew through hard, living wood. Other ants with less powerful jaws live in rotten wood, or tunnels already created by boring beetles. The jaws of the Melissotarsus ant are also strong in opening, which Peeters suggests helps them push wood debris out of the way as they chew into a tree.
Not only were the mandibles geometrically optimized for maximum leverage, the tips of the mandibles had high concentrations of zinc. According to Robert Schofield -- a biophysicist at the University of Oregon in Eugene who wasn't involved in the study -- such zinc-reinforced "heavy element biomaterials". They're found in body parts that must endure tough use, such as spider fangs and marine worm jaws. Nanoscale clusters of zinc are bound into the chitin matrix of the exoskeleton, making the tips of the mandibles harder, but not brittler.
The legs of Melissotarsus ants, permanently bent close to the body, are very strong, for bracing against tunnel walls. The "basitarsus" of the ants' feet -- equivalent to a heel -- are also enlarged and equipped with peglike bristles, to allow the ants to brace themselves while chewing. These adaptations come at a cost, of course: the ants can't walk on a level surface. As Peeters says, the ants have an "irreversible commitment" to life inside trees, having gone down a different evolutionary road from other ant species.
* SYMBIOTIC FEATHER MITES: In more news of bugs, another article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("This Hair-Raising Feather Mite Is A Vacuum Cleaner For Birds" by Helen Santoro, 4 April 2019), more than 2500 species of feather mites live in and on the feathers of almost every type of bird. Some of them -- those that nest in the contour feathers that form the outer covering of a bird's body -- are thought to be parasitic, with pet owners, zookeepers, and veterinarians try to kill them with sprays or dusts.
A team of researchers inspected the diets of the mites, looking inside the guts of 1300 from 190 species of bird. They didn't find blood and skin; instead, they found bacteria and fungi, which grow on bird feathers and can cause problems such as feather loss. They also identified a little plant matter, and traces of the gland oil birds use for preening.
Just to make sure, they isolated the DNA from 1833 more mites and found they had the same diet. The mites, it turns out, are not parasites; instead, they are symbiotes who get lodging and incidental meals from birds, in exchange for cleaner feathers.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CALIFORNIA & DIGITAL PRIVACY: As discussed by an article from Associate Press ("California Vastly Expands Digital Privacy" by Rachel Lerman, 29 December 2019), as of the beginning of 2020, the people of California have the power to review their personal information collected by large companies around the world -- from purchase histories and location tracking, to compiled "profiles" that slot people into categories such as religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. They can also tell these companies -- including banks, retailers and, of course, tech companies -- to stop selling that information, or permanently delete it,
The law defines "data sales" so broadly that it covers almost any information sharing that provides a benefit to business, such as data transfers between corporate affiliates, and with third-party "data brokers" -— middlemen who trade in personal information.
It remains unclear how it will affect the business of targeted advertising, in which companies like Facebook amass piles of personal data and use it to direct ads to specific groups of people. Facebook doesn't actually share that personal information with advertisers; the company just says it reaches an audience of a given size for a particular product or service, then distributes the ads itself, and collects a payment.
Nonetheless, the California law is breaking new ground for the USA, and so may well set precedents. It is the biggest effort so far in the country to deal with "surveillance capitalism" -- the business of profiting from the data that most Americans give up, often unknowingly or indifferently, for access to free and often ad-supported services.
There are a lot of catches, however. The law -- formally known as the "California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)" -- is likely to provoke legal challenges, its broad scope making it vulnerable to charges of violating the US Constitution. It's also loaded with exceptions that could turn some seemingly strong protections into leaky sieves, and only focuses on information collected by business, not government.
For instance, users can ask Lyft to delete their personal data, and Lyft will be legally required to do so -- unless it claims some information meets one of the law's many exceptions, such as provisions that allow companies to continue holding information needed to finish a transaction, or in other circumstances in which there is a "reasonable expectation" that the company would retain the data. However, that vagueness isn't necessarily to the advantage of business either, since it makes legal challenges easier.
The law also assumes a level of consumer interest that isn't necessarily there. Margot Kaminski, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado who studies law and technology, asks: "If you aren't even reading privacy agreements that you are signing, are you really going to request your data? Will you understand it or sift through it when you do get it?"
The CCPA can be seen as a first pass on a comprehensive data-privacy law. With experience, it could be the basis for a series of improved laws. However, it might also reveal that most consumers don't worry very much about vendors collecting data on them, and won't bother to lift a finger to stop it.
* In related news, as discussed by an article from GIZMODO.com ("The UK Announces Regulations to Beef Up IoT Security" by Victoria Song, 28 January 2020), the UK is introducing regulations to protect consumers who buy connected devices from hackers and other of security risks. The law requires makers of "internet of things (IOT)" devices to conform to three security requirements:
In the announcement, the UK government says that an estimated 75 billion IOT devices will be found in homes around the world by the end of 2025. The three proposed security requirements were generated by consulting with businesses and the UK National Cyber Security Centre. According to UK Digital Minister Matt Warman:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Our new law will hold firms manufacturing and selling internet-connected devices to account, and stop hackers threatening people's privacy and safety. It will mean robust security standards are built-in from the design stage, and not bolted on as an afterthought.
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COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (9): Supply-chain management has evolved greatly over the past few decades, with a jumble of different and, to a degree, inconsistent processes emerging as a proper discipline. Decisions based on gut instincts and relationships are increasingly made using data instead. The result is supply chains that are shorter, faster, and smarter.
Unfortunately, they are not yet getting much safer. The world economy is becoming more hazardous for MNCs, global supply chains being faced with three short-term threats: the Huawei problem, cyber-security attacks, and tariff wars. Long-term threats, notably climate change, could be worse.
The Huawei problem requires firms to balance security concerns and the need to follow American law, against cost pressures and the desire to retain access to Chinese innovations and consumer markets. US President Donald Trump has made noises about relenting his crusade against Huawei, but nobody with sense believes much he says, and there is also hostility against the firm in the US Congress. Huawei's activities in America have been curtailed by executive order, while Congress has curbed its sales to defense contractors.
The Huawei blacklisting is unlikely to be dropped as long as Trump is in office, mostly because the Chinese don't have any interest in making a serious deal with him -- they rightfully don't trust him. Certainly, Trump's presidency is in a great deal of trouble, and the Chinese can bet there will be a more reasonable US administration in 2021 -- but the feud having gone out of control, it may not be easy to stop, and Trump may well be re-elected.
Even if the war is called off, it is likely to have an enduring effect on global supply chains. For one thing, it has served as China's "Sputnik moment". Up to now, Chinese leadership has seen their country's economic growth as symbiotic with the USA, America proving a source of investment, expertise, and of course providing a great market. The Hauwei war has told Chinese leadership that the future is not symbiosis with the America. Now they are investing heavily to accelerate "indigenous innovation", just as American leaders did following Russia's launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. They will push home-grown operating systems and technical standards, while directing vast resources and the country's best minds to developing advanced technologies. Some bets will fail, others will pay off; Chinese leadership thinks in the long term, and accepts the uncertainty.
Of course, the Huawei war also represents the deterioration of the Chinese model of global supply chains. While, as this series suggests, supply chains are being geographically redefined, Trump's inclination towards trade warfare works against extended supply chains. That means higher prices for consumers and lower profits for companies, which have macro-economic impact. By the OECD's estimations, the rise of hyper-efficient global value chains kept producer-price inflation and real-wage growth in check, and boosted productivity levels across advanced economies by nearly 0.6% per year.
The global push towards 5G wireless networks represents a bleeding edge of the Huawei wars. 5G promises to be a technological revolution, wiring the "internet of everything" -- including smart factories and digital supply chains -- with high-speed datalinks. The end result of the conflict may be to split the world into competing camps, each with their own 5G standard. While standards wars are nothing new, and over time standards tend to converge towards a single technology, with 5G the convergence may be slow and troublesome.
Consider the possibility that Sweden's Ericsson, Finland's Nokia, and South Korea's Samsung would supply a pricier network comprised of kit made outside China to serve customers allied with the United States. For example, Australia's government, which is close to American intelligence agencies, banned Chinese 5G kit in 2018. Huawei would build a cheaper network for those countries less worried about China.
Although the fears that Huawei gear includes "back doors" to allow the Chinese government to penetrate networks are clearly overblown, 5G still represents a major security challenge. Cyber-attacks on governments and businesses have been ramping up, inflicting severe damage in some cases. It's hard for organizations to harden their systems against attacks, since the attacks often come from the systems of suppliers or contractors. The rollout of 5G -- along with IOT -- represents an enhanced threat, because it means a lot of new, and presumably vulnerable, gear being introduced in a hurry, with inadequate emphasis on security.
* In conclusion, global supply chains are not dead; they are just in a troublesome process of being re-invented. It's getting harder to plan for the long term when the technical and political landscape is shifting unpredictably. It can be done, with the smartest firms already making use of shorter, faster and smarter supply chains as formidable tools. The toughest step will be to make them more secure. There will be no choice but to do so, since there is no safety in retreating to the past. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (90): Harry Truman maintained the internationalism established by Franklin Roosevelt, being a strong supporter of the United Nations. That did not endear him to conservatives, who feared that the UN's goal was to become a "world government" that overrode American sovereignty. The over-enthusiastic might have made noises to that effect, but the idea was nonsense. The United Nations did not honestly resemble a government of any sort, much less a world government. As it was set up, the UN consisted of six major components:
Only the General Assembly, the Security Council, and the Secretariat are of much interest in this context. The General Assembly could vote on resolutions of common interest, with voting by a simple majority, except for extraordinary questions that required a two-thirds vote. However, General Assembly resolutions were non-binding; UN members would go along with them if they felt like it.
The Security Council was where power actually resided. Security Council decisions were binding on UN members; decisions on procedural matters could be established by a majority of three-fifths of the Security Council members, or seven out of the eleven at the outset. The same voting ratio held for substantive matters, with one important qualification: the seven members voting for a decision had to include all five of the P5 members. In blunter terms, any one of the P5 members could effectively veto a decision. In addition, the charter did not clearly define the difference between procedural and substantive matters. There is a tale that when one ambassador not from a P5 country asked the Soviet representative what the difference was, the reply was: "We shall tell you."
The UN Charter proclaimed that member nations renounce war as the first option in resolving disputes, which were preferably settled by peaceful means. The UN did have the right to use force to resolve conflicts, as per Security Council directives; a "Military Staff Committee (MSC)" was set up to direct UN military operations. There had been an expectation in the creation of the UN that it would have permanent control over military forces and bases all over the world that would permit quick intervention in crisis spots.
That notion would prove entirely unrealistic, and the MSC would amount to nothing. The UN would never have any more military power than the P5 allowed it to have, and when the Great Powers felt the need to resort to force, they would be invariably inclined to exert it themselves, with the UN only providing endorsement and allies. The UN was never able to do more on the military front than throw together ad-hoc, lightly-armed peacekeeping forces to deal with crises that the Great Powers didn't want to bother with.
There was no way the UN could ever have more power than that; it could never do any more than its member states allowed it to do. It was hard to say it was would prove that much more effective than the League of Nations, and claiming that it was anything like a "world government" was absurd. However, it was clear that it did serve a valuable role, being an umbrella organization for international cooperation and coordination; for relief efforts; and also in allowing member states to make their complaints and initiatives known to the world. By that same coin, it would also provide a public theater for playing out the game of postwar superpower competition.
The UN would prove, one way or another, a source of ongoing controversy for presidential administrations. Less controversially, the Truman Administration pushed through the "Presidential Succession Act of 1947", which was driven by Truman himself. He was not comfortable with the idea that the presidency might fall to an unelected official, and so he suggested that the line of succession fall to the Speaker of the House, then the president pro tempore of the Senate, and through the cabinet if necessary. Constitutional scholars continue to argue over whether that was a good idea. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Cataclysmic Collision Could Explain Jupiter's Fuzzy Core" by Paul Voosen, 14 August 2019), one of the idiosyncrasies of the planet Jupiter is that it doesn't have a distinct core; instead, it has a fuzzy center, which extends to up to half the planet's radius.
Researchers now suggest that the fuzzy core may be due to a cataclysmic head-on collision about 4.5 billion years ago, between a young Jupiter and one of the large protoplanets that were likely common in the early Solar System. In that event, Jupiter would have absorbed the protoplanet -- which would have been 10 times Earth's mass -- causing their two dense cores to combine and diffuse after only 10 hours, as shown by a simulation. In time, cooling and currents could sweep some of the fuzzy core upward, explaining Jupiter's puzzling enrichment in elements like carbon and nitrogen close to its surface.
The researchers say there may be other explanations for the fuzzy core; it may have arisen from erosion, or the early composition of Jupiter could have been more gaseous than assumed. However, the collision hypothesis is plausible, since even today Jupiter collects large meteor strikes -- indeed, one such strike was observed on 7 August 2019 by an amateur astronomer. The impacts were obviously more common, and tending towards the more powerful, in the early days of the Solar System, when it was more cluttered.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Mystery Volcano That Cooled The Ancient World Traced To El Salvador" by Katherine Kornei, 16 August 2019), the 6th century CE was a troubled time, with lower than average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere leading to crop failure, famine, and possibly even plague. The cause of the temperature drop was known to be dual volcanic eruptions, one in 536 CE, the other around 540 CE. The first apparently happened in Iceland, but the location of the second wasn't known -- until now.
Researchers investigating ancient deposits from El Salvador's Ilopango volcano knew that a massive eruption had occurred there sometime from the third to sixth centuries. That event, named "Tierra Blanca Joven (White Young Earth / TBJ", sent a volcanic plume to the top of the stratosphere. To better determine when the eruption took place, the researchers obtained slices from three tree trunks buried in TBJ volcanic ash, 25 to 30 kilometers (15.5 to 18.6 miles) from the present-day lake sitting in the volcanic caldera.
Carbon-14 dating showed the three trees had all died sometime from 500 to 545 CE, suggesting that the TBJ event was the mystery 540 CE eruption. In fact, historical analysis of atmospheric circulation patterns say the eruption took place in the fall of 539 CE. That would not only help explain the global cooling and famine of the time, but might also help explain a temporary break in monument building by the Mayans.
* As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Space-Station Cameras Reveal How Thunderstorms Trigger Gamma-Ray Bursts" by Alexandra Witze, 17 July 2019), not so many years ago scientists discovered that clouds, along with producing lightning underneath them, also produced a bizarre array of other electrical discharges above them. Very surprisingly, in 1994 it was discovered that some of these discharges are associated with gamma-ray bursts -- even though it is very hard to understand how enough energy might be obtained to generate them.
An instrument mounted on the International Space Station (ISS) has observed hundreds of such "terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGF)" over the past year. The instrument, known as the "Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM)", is a box full of cameras and sensors, built by a group of European universities and companies, under the leadership of the Technical University of Denmark near Copenhagen, and launched to the ISS in April 2018. The researchers have found that the TGFs form when powerful electric fields propagate through the atmosphere, just before a lightning bolt travels along the same path. The charged electrical particles interact with the atmosphere to produce a super-fast flickering of gamma rays.
During its first 10 months of observations, ASIM spotted 94 events when TGFs and lightning happened very close to one another. More than half of them followed the same pattern. First, a weak pulse of light appeared, possibly after electrically charged particles started moving along a conductive channel in the thunderstorm. Next, the pulse was followed by the TGF burst, sending out gamma rays; a few hundred microseconds later, a huge pulse of electric current flowed along that same electrically charged path, producing lighting.
Nikolai Ostgaard -- a space physicist at the University of Bergen in Norway and ASIM research leader -- says the observations support the theory that a TGF arises when a conductive channel is available that has a small but strong electric field at the tip. Competing theories had suggested TGFs form when a thunderstorm builds up a strong, but much bigger, electric field in the clouds.
The ASIM researchers still need to factor in other data from the same storms, and see if the observed relationship is seen in the future. ASIM is expected to remain in operation to 2021 at least. Ostgaard and his team are also planning to fly aircraft with gamma-ray detectors and other instruments just above thunderclouds to get a closer look, with flights as early as 2021. Ostgaard believes he will obtain more dramatic observations of TGFs in the future: "It's like being out fishing, and you just have to wait for the big fish."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CORONAVIRUS THREAT: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST ("What Is The Wuhan Coronavirus?", 24 January 2020), the world is in a bit of a panic over a viral epidemic in China's Huebei Province, centered on Wuhan, the provincial capital. Over 10,000 cases of infection with the "Wuhan virus" have been detected, with hundreds of people dead from pneumonia or kidney failure. Cases have been found in all other Chinese provinces, with a growing number of cases abroad. Wuhan is on lockdown, and international travel to China is being curtailed.
The Wuhan virus, more formally "2019-nCoV", is a form of "coronavirus", a class that gets its name from the viruses' vague resemblance to monarchical crowns when examined as a two-dimensional "shadow" under an electron microscope. In three dimensions, they more resemble bristly spheroids. Viruses can have DNA or RNA genomes; RNA is less stable than DNA, and so RNA viruses tend to mutate faster, meaning new strains emerge faster. The Wuhan virus is an RNA virus.
Coronaviruses were discovered in the 1960s. They infect both mammals and birds; two variants that infected humans were known up to 2003, these being seen as mostly-harmless viruses that could have mild respiratory or gastro-intestinal symptoms. In 2003, however, the "severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)" appeared, also centered on China, which over the course of a half a year infected more than 8,000 people and killed about 800 of them. It caused losses of tens of billions of dollars from disrupted trade and tourism.
Two more mild coronaviruses that had been circulating in humans were found after SARS emerged -- and then, in 2012, a sixth exploded onto the scene, named the "Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)", which killed about a third of those infected. 2019-nCoV is the seventh coronavirus to be discovered. Nobody is exactly sure what kind of animal it came from. Very often, strains that jump from one species of animal to another species don't thrive in their new hosts; in other cases, they can be well more devastating.
Although the genome of the Wuhan virus is known, its behavior is not yet well understood. How easily is it transmitted from human to human? How long does it take to incubate? And what is the mortality rate? The pandemic is being closely monitored, so the virus is better understood all the time. At present, it seems to have a 3% mortality rate -- which is frightening, because that's in the range of the disastrous "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919. If a million people are infected, that's 30,000 deaths. We have wars that are less disastrous.
However, in many people, the Wuhan virus causes only mild symptoms -- and so many cases may not have been reported, meaning the mortality rate has been exaggerated, and may well fall with further monitoring by the health authorities. Unfortunately, some people who start out with mild symptoms eventually become seriously ill and die, so the mortality rate may be understated.
Doctors in Wuhan sounded the alarm about an unusual cluster of cases of pneumonia, following the standard protocol for spotting new viruses. Chinese scientists then isolated the pathogen and shared its genomic details with the world. For the present there is no cure, and no vaccine. Devising vaccines for RNA viruses is particularly tricky because of their rapid mutation rate, but a number of labs are working on a vaccine against the Wuhan virus -- under the overall direction of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, a public-private group set up after the emergence of the Ebola virus in West Africa, and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Inovio of San Diego, California, is working on a DNA vaccine, based on fragments of the viral genome that are injected into a host to encourage the host's own cells to generate parts of the virus, which then stimulate the immune system. The WHO is monitoring the different vaccine efforts being conducted over the world, and will coordinate human trials. However, nobody is expected to have a vaccine ready for trials before summer, by which time the pandemic may have run its course. If not, a vaccine will be desperately needed.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CONVENIENCE STORES ON A ROLL: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("America's New Favorite Restaurants Are Wawa, Sheetz, & 7-Eleven" by Nathaniel Meyersohn, 12 January 2020, much has been written about the decline of "brick & mortar" retailers in the age of Amazon.com -- but one sector is thriving: the humble 24-hour, average 300-square-meter (3,230-square-foot) convenience store.
That makes sense, since few are going to place an order with Amazon.com for something that's ordinary, cheap, and needed at the moment. However, there's more to the success of the convenience store than that: they've also reinvented themselves as quick and cheap restaurants for people in a hurry. Today, chains like Sheetz, Wawa, and Kwik Trip offer meal kits, salads, pizza, and espressos.
Convenience stores have adjusted to the changing ways Americans eat. Americans, particularly Millennials, are now more inclined to snacking, while they're cooking fewer of their dinners at home, often eating out or ordering from their couch. Instead of taking the time to go to a restaurant or even a fast-food joint, they'll pop into a convenience store. The average amount of time a consumer spends in a convenience store is less than four minutes. Carl Rick -- leadership development specialist at Kwik Trip, which is building around 40 stores a year, and recently opened its 700th -- says:
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People simply don't have the time to sit down a whole meal at night like they used to. The more places there are where people can duck in, be out in three minutes with milk, eggs, maybe a sandwich, something to drink -- those places are doing very well.
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According to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), an industry advocacy group, in the period from 2009 to 2018, food service sales in convenience stores grew at a higher rate than any other part in the store. Convenience-store chains are hiring executives from restaurants, while expanding their snack choices and prepared food in kitchens on site.
Chains like Wawa and Sheetz in the northeast; Casey's and Kwik Trip in the Midwest; Buc-ee's from Texas; Maverik, out of Utah; and others, are opening new stores and building devoted customer followings. A couple recently got married at a Wawa, and one die-hard Sheetz fan -- or "Sheetz Freakz" as they're known -- got tattooed with the company's logo.
Sheetz is a family-owned chain that has 600 outlets on the East Coast, and did $6 billion USD of business in 2019. According to Travis Sheetz, the chief operating officer: "Our bullseye is kind of that younger age group -- the late teens to the early thirties -- for food and beverage. They tend to be much more accepting of eating at a gas station."
Sheetz sells made-to-order sandwiches and salads, and has espresso bars. Everything is done on touch screens, which it introduced in the 1990s. The chain works to differentiate its offering from McDonald's, which it calls its biggest competitor, by offering more customizable sandwiches and a wider variety of choices. Travis Sheetz says: "We've always had breakfast at night. McDonald's did that recently."
Wawa, which has more than 800 convenience stores along the East Coast and is known for its hoagies, has added custom salads, sandwiches, and organic coffee in recent years. Casey, based in Iowa, has become the country's fifth biggest pizza chain.
In this last decade, according to NACS, convenience chains have increased sales by about 30%. Since 2000, the number of convenience stores in the United States has grown by 28%. The industry is highly fragmented and competitive, with many chains seeking influence in a quiltwork of regions.
The Southland Ice Company opened America's first convenience store in 1927 in Dallas, Texas; the company would become 7-Eleven. The idea in 1927 was to sell staples on Sundays and in the evenings, when grocery stores were closed. Convenience stores took off in the USA in the postwar era, thanks to the growth of car ownership, the creation of the interstate highway system, and migration to the suburbs.
In 1965, there were 5,000 convenience stores in the United States; now there are more than 153,000 -- more than all the grocery stores, drug stores, and dollar stores in this country combined. 7-Eleven is the giant of the industry, with more than 9,000 outlets. Almost 80% of convenience stores have fuel pumps.
Competition from convenience stores has pushed McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts to rethink their offerings. Big retailers are moving into the convenience-store domain as well; Dollar General is building smaller versions of its stores, named "DGX", while Kroger has partnered with Walgreens to test "Kroger Express" mini-sections inside some Walgreens locations. Amazon reportedly is thinking about opening up to 3,000 small, cashier-less Go stores by 2021. GoPuff, a "convenience store delivery app" that has expanded rapidly in dozens of cities, offers $1.95 delivery on more than 2,000 items from its own fulfillment centers.
Some convenience store executives say they are not overly worried about competition from Amazon and other big players, one important reason being that half of Casey's stores are in towns with fewer than 5,000 people. The company's CEO, Darren Rebelez, suspects Amazon will have a hard time reaching those rural customers: "I don't think that [Amazon Go] is something that's likely to show up in our footprint anytime soon. It's tough to really disrupt this industry in a meaningful way."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("As The US Ages, Older Americans Flock To Video Games" by Khristopher J. Brooks, 2 January 2020), a survey by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) says that in 2016, there were 40 million Americas age 50 or more who played video games. That number grew to about 51 million in 2019. Older women are more getting into video games than older men.
To be sure, people in their mid-30s still make up a majority of the gaming industry's customers, but companies like Electronic Arts and Nintendo are adjusting their product lineup and marketing to factor in geezer gamers. Older Americans have a number of reasons to be interested in games: they help to connect with grandkids, they help the oldsters stay sharp, and they're simply entertaining.
Besides, it's not like they never saw video games before: video games were well-established by the late 1970s, so some of the oldsters have 40 years of history with video games. Modern video games can offer online connectivity as well, to allow elderly Americans, who don't get around much any more, to hook up with others.
Barbara Evans, a 79-year-old Pennsylvanian, loves to play Nintendo Wii bowling with three of her friends in their retirement community. "It's a lot of fun when there's other people coming and going and they'll stop and watch and they'll cheer on this one or that one." She was once a nurse, and would bowl in a competitive league after she got off work. When she got married, she and her husband would bowl with a league as well.
Kansas City resident Michelle Kelley, a 73-year-old clinical psychologist, prefers the Xbox car race game FORZA HORIZON 4. Kelley says: "It's got cars that I currently own and cars that I owned as a teen ... I can drive my own car in the game."
It doesn't appear oldsters gravitate towards massive online RPG games, preferring instead interactive games and puzzle games. The intrusion of older Americans into the gaming market suggests new technology paths for the industry, for example adding voice and other controls to allow the elderly to keep up with games, even when they're not very nimble any more.
* As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Tag, You're It!" by Ben Morse, 24 January 2020), everyone remembers playing "tag" as children. As it turns out, there's a global competitive league for playing Tag as well.
"Chase Tag", as the game is called, was created by brothers Christian and Damien Devaux in 2011. It is only faintly like children's "tag", being played in a 12 x 12 meter (40 x 40 foot) "quad" filled with barriers. It's like cat & mouse with break-neck gymnastics, demanding a high level of stamina.
There are variations on gameplay, the most popular being "Chase Off". Two teams engage in a set number, 10 to 16, of 20-second chases between a "Chaser" and an "Evader". The Evader wins if the Chaser can't catch him, the Evader's team being given a point, otherwise the Chaser gets the point. The team with the most points at the end wins. The World Tag League has held four grand championships. Competition tag is only for the hard-core, but the playing quad can be detuned for any level of capability.
* I had long been thinking of buying a new car in 2020, and in December I got to thinking I should just go ahead and do it. I bought a Honda Fit -- better known as a "Jazz" outside the USA, I prefer that name -- on the last day of the year. I took delivery a week later, and spent January getting it kitted up and legal.
My old 2007 Toyota Yaris was an excellent machine -- it was in good shape, I sold it cash to a friend -- but it was bare-bones, no bells and whistles. Since this is likely to be my last car, since I'll be too old to drive by the time it needs replacing, so I splurged and got the high-end Jazz EX model.
The new car has turned out to be a bit of a learning experience. The Jazz EX has an automatic continuously-variable transmission (CVT); the other three cars I've owned were all manuals, so that took a little bit of getting used to. I've stopped pounding on the clutch that isn't there, but I still am inclined to try to shift gears I don't have.
More confusing was the keyless entry scheme, using a wireless fob; not having to stick a key into the ignition to turn the car on was something very new, and I found it hard to know if the car was honestly locked when I walked away from it. What really puzzled me was that the hatchback will always open if I have a fob on me. Eventually, I figured out that when I walk off with the key fob on me, the car locks automatically; I try to open it with the key fob on me, the car opens automatically -- or at least, after I pull on the handle twice. "Now I get it."
Some minor puzzle of the auto-locking scheme did puzzle me more. When I walked up to the car, I could see a red light flash on the dashboard; I finally figured out the car was acknowledging that it spotted the fob. Another trick was that if I walked off from the car in my garage, I would get a rapid set of chirps from the car. It turned out that meant the auto-locking system was confused, it appears by my proximity to the car. No problem, one just uses the fob to lock the car up manually.
A lot of the gadgetry is neither here nor there, for example pushbutton windows, including the pushbutton sun roof. It is nice to have many of the controls attached to the steering wheel -- audio system controls on my left hand, cruise control on my right, plus menu buttons to traverse through the dashboard display. I've taken to cycling through the menus when I'm waiting on a stop light, so I can embed the menu system in my brainware.
The audio system has plenty of features, such as satellite radio reception, but all I want is to listen to tunes off a USB drive. One weird feature is the paddle shifters on the steering wheel. I didn't know what they were for, so I poked around online; it turns out they allow the driver to adjust the CVT settings. Nobody can really figure out a good reason to do that, so the paddle shifters are just a silly gimmick.
The rear back-up camera is nice, as is the right-mirror camera, which is activated when I indicate a right turn to give me a view into the car's blind spot. The cruise control is very nice; I'd used cruise control on rental cars before, but I had thought it was really only useful for long-range driving. On the contrary, it's useful in driving around town: if I'm on an arterial, I use the accelerator to get up to speed, and set cruise control to the posted speed limit. No point in setting it to any other speed; now I maintain the speed limit with robotic precision, and never ride the accelerator pedal. Oddly, when using cruise control, I feel like I'm driving more slowly.
I have yet to much notice the more sophisticated driving aids: lane-keeping, automatic spacing, and collision avoidance. I did have the collision-avoidance system warn me when I was following a van a bit too close the other day. It does seem to be touchy when making a left turn against oncoming traffic.
One other nice little feature is the "eco" button, which conserves fuel by damping out the throttle response and other little tricks. I'm not very concerned with power; the car purrs along nicely with the eco button on, so I leave it on. The shifter has a "sport" setting for higher acceleration, but I suspect I will never use it.
The car has a well-thought-out seating scheme. I can lay down the rear seats for something like a flatbed in the rear, or I can keep them up, and tilt up the seat cushions to store things in front of them. I can tilt the front seats all the way back. I keep one rear seat down, using the space for a big plastic toolbox, with two wheels on one end and a pull-out handle on the other. I use it to store jumper cables, tire chains, and other emergency kit. I was thinking the lay-flat seats produced a nice flatbed, but not quite, there being obstructions; it wasn't so easy to roll out the toolbox, until I put a large doormat under it.
I had to get new chains -- they're cables, actually, with metal coil windings. The car manual told me true tire chains wouldn't fit; true enough, when I put on the new chains, the clearance between tire and fender was so tight that I had to take off my watch to fit my hand in. Incidentally, having obtained the chains, I soon tried them on, since the middle of a snowstorm is not the time to learn how to put them on, much less find they're broken or don't fit. I may never use them. I never used the chains for my Yaris.
The car is black; it's what they had, I'm good with it, but it's not perfectly my style. I named the car "Kurokoneko", Japanese for "Black Kitten". I won't take it out on the open road until May, when I go down from here in Loveland, Colorado, to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for my nephew's graduation. I only drive errands around town twice a week, so I may not even refuel it before then. I have yet to become really fond of the car, but I'm sure I will in time. By all appearances, it's the best car I've ever owned.
* Thanks to a reader for a donation this last month. It is much appreciated.
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