DayVectors

* 21 entries including: US Constitution (series), exploring neutron stars (series), spider genomes (series), COVID-19 menace (series), digital yuan, searching for dark energy, COVID-19 vaccine distribution, & OpenRAN for 5G.

[FRI 29 JAN 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (135)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (135): As far as detente with the Soviet Union went, from early on in his administration, Jimmy Carter pushed for a nuclear test ban and arms limitation. The result was the signing of the "Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) II" treaty by Carter and Leonid Brezhnev in 1979.

However, relations between the two superpowers were about to go south. In the spring of 1978, a Communist government under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki took over Afghanistan, and signed a treaty of friendship with the USSR. Taraki's government proved radical and repressive, leading to an insurgency by "mujahedin" rebels. The instability led to the overthrow of Taraki by Hafizullah Amin, who proved even more extreme. The insurgency grew in strength, with Amin's government headed for extinction. In December 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, arrested and executed Amin, and set up Babrak Karmal as the president of the country.

The invasion took the US by surprise and meant the collapse of detente. The move seemed to threaten the Persian Gulf countries, with worries that the USSR had designs on Iran and Pakistan. The worries were greatly exaggerated, British intelligence concluding that "the CIA was being too alarmist about the Soviet threat to Pakistan."

In response to the invasion, the US sought a better relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but the Iranians remained hostile to the Americans. The Carter Administration had been at odds with the Pakistani government, one big reason being Pakistan's nuclear-weapons development program, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan meant that relations were hurriedly patched up.

One of the consequences of the rapprochement with Pakistan was a collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It had actually begun during the turmoil before the invasion, but was of limited scope, focused on delivering non-lethal aid to the "mujahedin", the "holy warrior" insurgents. It was scaled up to lethal aid, with the Saudis enlisted to help fund the operation. The massive support for the mujahedin routed through Pakistan would prove effective -- but it would be plagued by corruption, while the Pakistani government favored mujahedin groups rooted in Islamic extremism.

Carter chose to take a strong public stance to what he judged a serious provocation. He went onto TV to declare sanctions on the USSR; asked for a 5% increase in the defense budget; disowned SALT II, which would never be ratified; turned on registration for the Selective Service; and, under the "Carter Doctrine", committed the US to the defense of the Persian Gulf. He also slapped an embargo on grain shipments to the Soviet Union, and announced that the USA would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow -- a move that particularly stung the Soviets.

The biggest scandal in the Carter Administration involved Carter's Director of the Office of Management & Budget, Bert Lance, who was forced to resign in September 1977, after accusations of improper banking activities. Carter ended up testifying under oath -- the first sitting president to do -- in connection with the Bert Lance scandal; Carter was cleared of all improprieties. Otherwise, Carter had little involvement with the judiciary, there being no major court cases during his administration, and he didn't even have the opportunity to appoint a SCOTUS justice.

When the election of 1980 came around, Carter defeated Senator Ted Kennedy in the primary, but he had alienated the Left wing of the Democratic Party. That was only part of Carter's problems, since inflation continued to run high, with the economy hobbled -- in early 1980, he signed into law a bailout for auto-maker Chrysler, which wasn't all that popular with the public. Worst of all, he couldn't get out from under the Iran hostage crisis. Carter gave too much of an impression of being ineffective and overwhelmed; he lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, previously governor of California, who radiated a sunny optimism.

Carter focused on public and humanitarian service after leaving office; indeed, he has been judged a better ex-president than president. In 1982, he founded the Carter Center, a non-governmental and organization focused on advancing human rights and welfare around the world; he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for the center and his work in it.

Carter often conducted informal diplomatic visits to other countries, including to Israel in 1981, Egypt in 1983, and Syria in 2008. In 1994, at the request of President Bill Clinton, he negotiated with North Korea on a possible peace treaty -- which went nowhere, but Carter managed to obtain the release of an American in North Korean custody. He toured Cuba in 2002 and 2011, as a step towards normalization of relations between the US and Cuba. Carter held summits in Egypt and Tunisia in 1995:1996 to consider turmoil in the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Carter often criticized presidential administrations following his, from a distinctly Left perspective. While the US Navy is inclined to name aircraft carriers after modern presidents, the service broke the custom for Carter, a submariner, and gave his name to the fast attack submarine USS JIMMY CARTER. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 28 JAN 21] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("JMU Unveils Preliminary LHD Design" by Gabriel Dominguez, 20 November 2019) Japan, confronted with a growling Chinese dragon to the east, has been raising its defense posture. Accordingly, the Japan Marine United (JMU) has floated the design of a landing helicopter dock (LHD) amphibious assault ship, that the company plans to propose to the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF).

Japan already fields helicopter carriers, the latest being the IZUMO-class, mentioned here in 2013. However, these carriers are not designed as amphibious assault ships. In contrast, JMU's "Future Landing Helicopter Dock (FLHD)" will be a roll-on/roll-off ship capable of supporting armored amphibious assault vehicles and air-cushioned landing craft (LCAC), in addition to having a full-length flight deck to support helicopter operations. The ship, which will have a crew of about 500, with space for up to five helicopters on its flight deck, with and space for five more in the two hangars below deck.

The FLHD will have three more hangars for flexible use. The vessel will be capable of embarking up to two LCACs in its well deck and more than 20 amphibious assault vehicles, in its forward storage section. It is not clear how many troops the vessel will carry. The vessel will be 220 meters (720 feet) long, have a beam of 38 meters (125 feet), a draught of 7 meters (23 feet), and a standard displacement of 19,000 tonnes (20,900 tons). The Japanese Ministry of Defense has yet to issue a requirement for the vessel, but JMU is offering it in expectation that the interest is there.

* There's been a lot of interest in hypersonic weapons as of late. According to an article from JANES.com ("Sea Shrike Submarine Payload Plan Suggests Hypersonic Missile Link" by Richard Scott, 13 March 2020), the US Navy appears to be working towards a submarine-launched hypersonic missile -- the service having awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman for the development of a payload module in support of an undefined weapon system on VIRGINIA-class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs).

The "Sea Shrike Advanced Payload Module (APM)" is most likely linked to work towards a new hypersonic "Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS)" for VIRGINIA-class SSNs. According to the Navy, CPS will provide a hypersonic conventional offensive strike capability, using a depressed boost-glide trajectory to hit deep-inland, time-critical, soft- and medium-hard targets in defended environments.

* As discussed by an article from NEWATLAS.com ("UPS partners With Wingcopter For Next-generation Delivery Drones" by Paul Ridden, 24 March 2020), parcel-delivery giant UPS is getting into the drone-delivery business -- discussed here in 2018 -- by partnering with German drone maker Wingcopter, which makes vertical take-off / landing drones.

UPS has been working on a "Flight Forward" program for drone delivery, having received authorization for flights under the effort from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2019. The partnership with Wingcopter represents a closer step towards fielding the scheme. According to Bala Ganesh of the UPS Advanced Technology group:

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The Wingcopter drone is of twin-boom configuration, with an inverted-vee tail and an inverted-gull wing. It has a rod on each with, with an electric-drive rotor front and back on each rod, the front rotor tilting up and the rear rotor tilting down for vertical take-off / landing. It has tall skid landing gear, with payloads carried between the skids. They can fly at up to 240 KPH (150 MPH) over a range of 120 kilometers (75 miles), and can and handle winds of up to 70 KPH (44 MPH). It can carry a typical payload of 3.5 kilograms (7.7 pounds).

They have been used in "beyond visual line of sight" operations, including the delivery of insulin to an island in the North Sea, and flying vaccines to health centers in the South Sea island of Vanuatu. Courier giant DHL has also made use of Wingcopter drones for a project in Tanzania.

[WED 27 JAN 21] DIGITAL YUAN?

* DIGITAL YUAN? As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("China Wants To Weaponize Its Currency -- A Digital Version Could Help" by Laura He, 4 December 2020), China would greatly like to break the chokehold the American dollar has over the global financial system. The Chinese government believes a digital currency could give it a lever to that end, and more importantly, extend its control over Chinese citizens.

After years of work, China began rolling out an ambitious test of a digital version of the yuan in 2020. Pilots exist now in four Chinese cities, where transactions totaling more than 2 billion yuan ($300 million USD) have already taken place. If the program is expanded nationwide, China would become the most powerful economy to date to offer a national digital currency, ahead of a digital version of the euro from the European Central Bank.

Publicly, the Chinese government declares that a digital yuan will make buying things more convenient and secure, and that it could help who don't have access to bank accounts and other mainstream financial services. Both those statements may well be true, but they aren't the entire story. The reality is that China is almost cashless already, with most transactions performed digitally. The problem, from the government's point of view, is that it's not inside the loop of those transactions. Along with providing tighter control over the money supply, an official digital yuan would give Beijing floods of detailed information about how and where people are, and what they're purchasing.

This is not what the creators of digital currencies like Bitcoin and its imitators had in mind. Bitcoin is based on a decentralized blockchain system that, in principle, prevents any one person or organization from having control. Frank Xie, a professor in business at University of South Carolina Aiken, says: "In essence, the digital yuan can help strengthen the state's surveillance and control over the economy and society. It enhances the centralization of authority. That may be the fundamental reason why it has been strongly pushed and rushed by the state."

It's an ambitious goal, one not close to being an accomplished fact yet. In addition, the push for government control over the currency means that it's unlikely that a digital yuan will replace the US dollar as the global currency. Internationally, the yuan has little clout; it accounts for slightly over 4% of international transactions, while the US dollar accounts for 88%. It is difficult to see any reason that a digital yuan would have more clout. Donald Trump used the predominance of the dollar to bully other nations -- but Trump is gone now, reforms are likely, and few think that giving China the same lever is a good idea.

The effort to develop a digital currency began in 2014, according to the People's Bank of China. Authorities spent six years researching the project before launching pilot programs this year in Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Xiong'an. The digital yuan incorporates some elements of blockchain technology: Every transaction is recorded and traceable in a digital ledger. It would replace some of the cash that is already in circulation.

One of the big motivations in the effort is government anxiety over being sidelined by the private sector. Anthony Chan, chief Asia investment strategist for Swiss bank UBP, wrote: "Beijing has long been concerned about the digital currency monopoly by tech giants, and their impact on the financial system beyond central bank supervision."

Online payment services run by Ant Group's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay have been growing rapidly over the last decade, and the government hasn't been happy about it. In 2013, for example, Alipay launched a money market fund called "Yu'e Bao (Leftover Treasure)" that became so popular that Chinese regulators stepped in and forced the program to reduce its size. They were concerned about systemic risk: if the massive fund failed for some reason, it could send shockwaves through China's economy. More recently, Beijing has signaled its displeasure with Ant Group by derailing its highly anticipated initial public offering, only days before its shares were to start trading in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

James Gillingham -- CEO and co-founder of Finxflo, a Singapore-based crypto brokerage firm -- says that decision confirmed that "no one entity will be allowed too much power or control over one market without express approval or collaboration with the government." Gillingham adds that the government in Beijing is also concerned about money flowing out of the country. Money left China at a record clip in 2020 via unauthorized channels, as the country wrestled with economic troubles and its trade war with the United States. He says: "The introduction of the digital yuan would allow them to implement better levels of capital control."

Frank Xie of USC calls the digital yuan the "last piece" of the surveillance state. China already uses a wide array of technology, including facial recognition and cameras, to collect vast amounts of information on its citizens.

The People's Bank of China says its digital yuan features "controllable anonymity" -- which means that transactions are publicly anonymous, just not anonymous to the central bank. That is not reassuring. Andrew Tilton, chief Asia economist for Goldman Sachs, has written that central bank digital currencies "are unlikely to have the same degree of anonymity as cash," pointing out that the central banks can "directly monitor their usage."

The European Central Bank, in its work towards a digital euro, acknowledges that it would be "ultimately controlled" by the institution, with one option being that "all transactions" are "recorded in the central bank's ledger." ECB President Christine Lagarde is aware that this works against user privacy, which she regards as a "key issue" in the exercise, doesn't want Europe to move "too fast" on the digital euro. It will be important to make sure everything is laid out in plain sight before moving ahead.

It's not clear that Chinese consumers will be enthusiastic about the digital yuan, since they are likely to see it as a fix for something that isn't broken. More than 800 million people in China, 86% of mobile internet users, already use mobile payment services like Alipay and WeChat Pay. They're not the same as a digital currency, which would be fully guaranteed by the central bank, but they're not all that different from one in practice. Frank Xie says that Chinese people will be skeptical of the digital yuan: "They risk losing more privacy while not gaining additional convenience."

[TUE 26 JAN 21] EXPLORING NEUTRON STARS (3)

* EXPLORING NEUTRON STARS (3): NICER is continuing observations of J0030 to refine its radius measurements. At the same time, the team is beginning to analyze data from a second target -- a slightly heavier pulsar with a white-dwarf companion. Other astronomers have used observations of this pair's mutual orbit to determine the pulsar's mass, which means NICER researchers have an independent measurement that they can use to validate their findings.

Among NICER's other targets, the team plans to include at least a couple of high-mass pulsars, including the current record-holder for most massive neutron star, with a mass 2.14 times that of the Sun. That should allow the researchers to probe an upper limit: the point at which a neutron star collapses into a black hole. Even the 2.14-solar-mass object is challenging for theorists to explain.

Several researchers have also suggested that NICER might spot two neutron stars with the same mass, but different radii. That would suggest that neutron stars have a transition point, at which slight differences create two distinct cores. One might contain mostly neutrons, for example, while the other might be composed of more-exotic material.

NICER is not the only instrument probing neutron stars. In 2017, the US "Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)", along with the Virgo detector in Italy, picked up the signal from two neutron stars smashing and merging together. Just before the final collision, the two objects spun up to distort each other into teardrop shapes through their gravitational pull, generating gravity waves in the process. The gravity waves gave clues about the configuration of the neutron stars and the malleability of the material inside them.

LIGO's facility in Livingston, Louisiana, picked up a second neutron-star collision in April 2019, with more events likely to be spotted. Gravity-wave observations so far suggest that neutron stars aren't particularly deformable; gravitational-wave observatories need to be improved to get a better read on the crucial final moments before impact, when the warping is greatest and would display internal conditions most clearly.

Refinements of LIGO and Virgo are ongoing, while new observatories are coming online. The "Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector" in Hida, Japan, will enter service in 2020, while the "Indian Initiative in Gravitational-wave Observations" near Aundha Naganath, Marathwada, in 2024. Working in collaboration with LIGO and Virgo, they will improve sensitivity, maybe even capturing the details of the moments leading up to a crash.

There are a number of projects farther down the road that could enhance neutron-star astronomy A Chinese–European satellite called the "enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry mission (eXTP)" is scheduled for launch in 2027; it will study both isolated and binary neutron stars to help determine their equation of state. Researchers have also proposed a space-based mission that could fly in the 2030s called the "Spectroscopic Time-Resolving Observatory for Broadband Energy X-rays (STROBE-X)". It would use NICER's hotspot technique, pinning down the masses and radii of at least 20 more neutron stars with increased precision.

The hearts of neutron stars will probably always retain some secrets. But physicists now seem well placed to begin peeling back the layers. Read, who is a member of the LIGO team, says that she has collaborated on a project to imagine what scientific questions gravitational-wave detectors would be able to tackle in the 2030s and 2040s. In the process, she realized that the landscape for neutron-star research — in particular, the question of the equation of state — should look very different by then.

Jocelyn Read -- an astrophysicist at California State University, Fullerton, and a member of the LIGO team -- is excited about the progress in the field: "It's been this long-standing puzzle that you figure will always be there, Now we're at a point where I can see the scientific community figuring out the neutron-star-structure puzzle within this decade." [END OF SERIES]

[MON 25 JAN 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 3

* THE WEEK THAT WAS 210117: This last month, the USA acquired another day "that will live in infamy", 6 January 2021 -- joining 7 December 1941 and 11 September 2001. Ever since the US election in early November, Trump had been flogging claims of massive voter fraud that cheated him of the win, though he had only the flimsiest pretense of evidence in support. He pressed dozens of cases into the courts, which were uniformly rejected; the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. He personally leaned on state election officials to bend the votes in his favor.

It was all very nerve-wracking, all the more so because Republican members of Congress backed Trump up well more often than not. However, it was also ridiculous, there being no real prospect that he could really overturn the election. It did suggest to Democratic Members of Congress that an election-reform bill needed to be a high priority once Congress came back into session in the new year.

California was the last state to certify its votes, on 11 December 2020. On 6 January 2021, Vice President Mike Pence was to announce the votes to Congress. Trump immediately began a campaign to have Congress overturn the vote. That was all but hopeless; while Members of Congress could protest the voting results from a state, it would require a majority vote from both houses of Congress to overturn it. The Democrats obviously wouldn't go along.

On the morning of 6 January, at the encouragement of Trump from his tweets, a rowdy crowd assembled in Washington DC, with Trump pumping them up with his grievances for an hour. When he was done, the crowd went over to the Capitol Building, broke through security with appalling ease, then trashed the place. Security was good enough to allow Congress to escape, and an aide had the presence of mind to secure the votes that Pence was to read. It is suspected the rioters were after the votes; they could be replaced, but the process of doing so would have been subject to political interference.

The rioters were finally driven out, with five people dead in the end -- one rioter shot by the Capitol police; a policeman beaten up, to later die of a stroke; three others that had unspecified "medical emergencies". The FBI began a manhunt to track down the ringleaders of the end; many of them conveniently put videos of themselves in the Capitol Building up on social media, as if it were some sort of holiday affair. Trump was not remorseful; indeed, reports said he watched the riot on TV with obvious pleasure. He issued stilted official calls for peace, and then started to agitate again on Twitter -- which promptly killed his account, reportedly sending him into a towering rage. He was quickly banned from all social media.

The Democrats in the House of Representatives quickly put together a second impeachment effort. It was easy to do, the only basis for it was the attack on Congress, and no real investigation was required. The vote in the House took place on 13 January. Only ten Republicans voted for it. Apparently there were some others who wanted to vote for it, but they were getting death threats against themselves and their families. One suspects they will decide to go into another line of work.

It seemed unlikely that the impeachment would get through the Senate immediately, with less than a week left before Joe Biden's inauguration. The decision was made that it should be put on the shelf for the moment, lest it confound the administration's urgent work, particularly with regards to the pandemic. The media made much of how troublesome a Trump impeachment would be to Biden, but that seemed overstated. Yes, Trump is a problem for the Biden Administration, but one that they're stuck with. All they have to do is pretend they never heard of Donald Trump, while letting Congress and the states work him over.

There was some puzzlement as to what sense it made to pursue impeachment of Trump after he left office, but on examination it made sense. There is nothing in the Constitution to prevent it, and some precedent of impeachments of lesser officials after they left office. There is also the simple logic that, if impeachment couldn't take place after an official left office, that official could simply resign and escape punitive measures. Should Trump be convicted by the Senate, he will presumably lose his presidential perks, and more important be barred against running for office again.

In any case, the Democrats in Congress had to act; the assault on the Capitol was too outrageous to be tolerated. The Democrats also know that pushing impeachment through Congress forces the Republicans to take a stand, to say if they are for Trump, or for America. The House Republicans have, except for ten, already chosen Trump and disgrace; what the Senate Republicans do remains to be seen. The GOP is in a slow-motion crash.

Right now, the Federal government is not pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his klan. It's not needed. Along with the various fraud charges looming in New York state, Washington DC is considering "incitement to riot" charges, and Georgia is considering election fraud charges -- on the basis of the hour-long phone call from Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where Trump tried to bully 12,000+ votes out of him. Raffensperger had the sense to record the conversation. Incidentally, evidence is popping up that the rioters on 6 January were getting help from Members of Congress. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

* Antagonism between the US and China grew considerably during Donald Trump's time in the White House -- and, while Trump's xenophobia had a lot to do with it, there are real and substantial difficulties between the two countries. However, as discussed by an essay by Ian Bremmer in TIME.com ("No, The US And China Are Not Heading Towards a New Cold War", 28 December 2020), both countries have good cause to avoid a new "Cold War", with Bremmer ticking off four reasons why:

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Second, the Cold War was between two sides in an effectively zero-sum game: American influence grew at the expense of Soviet influence, which is not how things are today:

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Third, China is, at present and into the mid-term, not a military threat to the USA, as the Soviet Union was; China is expanding its armed forces at a rapid rate, with advanced technology, but from a modest base. It is, at present and to the mid-term future, a regional power, with little force-projection capability. On the other hand, the USSR was never remotely an economic competitor to the USA, while China is working aggressively to catch up to American economic might. The economic threat to the USA is real, but it's not remotely the same thing as a military threat -- and the USA can't damage China economically without hurting its own economy. Instead of a Cold War, America and China have to come to terms with each other, and even cooperate on issues of mutual importance.

It is not in the interests of either side to pursue a Cold War. They are better off coming to some sort of accommodation, on mutually agreeable terms. The US fear of China is exaggerated, the country being burdened by serious problems: significant corporate debt, a labor base that is getting more expensive, massive investment in economically weak countries -- and above all, a rigid and authoritarian government with a weak concept of civil rights.

America has real concerns with China, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and treatment of Uighurs. There are likely to be flareups between the two countries, even possibly limited military confrontations. However:

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ED: I had long been trying to figure out some way of streamlining my blog writing -- I felt like five entries a week was one entry too much to keep up with. Then I got to thinking that my endmonth / startmonth entries were easy to write -- and decided to do a news survey of the past week every Monday instead. This particular survey goes back to the beginning of the month, but I won't go beyond a week again, unless I have to catch up after a week or two on vacation.

Incidentally, the title of this section reflects a weekly satirical TV show from the 1960s, THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS. It was run in the UK in 1962 and 1963, with a US version following in 1964 and 1965. It was presented by David Frost, with the US version notably featuring the work of legendary musical satirist Tom Lehrer.

Anyway, another aspect of this exercise is to collect amusing comments from Twitter. With regards to the Republican disinclination to vote against Trump in impeachment, the tweet made the rounds: "It's like half of the teachers in a school justifying the actions of a school shooter." Worse, as was added in reply, the shooter is the school principal.

As far as Trump himself goes, another tweet made the rounds: "Teddy Roosevelt on line 1, sir. He would like a word." Still another tweet suggested that Trump's Mar-A-Lago resort be renamed "MAGAstan" -- and in response to the incoming Biden Administration's intent to decontaminate the White House at a cost of a half-million dollars, it was added that it should be exorcised as well.

Another good one, in response to social media's dramatic shutdown of Trump: "When you try to ban TikTok, but then Tiktok bans YOU!" A somewhat related comment had Trump holding up a placard that read: "Welcome to the Karma Cafe. There is no menu -- you get what you deserve." Yet another cited Trump as saying: "I want to see Biden in prison!"

With Joe answering: "What makes him think I'll visit him in prison?"

And then Rick Wilson -- one of the prime movers behind the Lincoln Project, the conservative anti-Trump shock troops -- said he got an email from an ex-friend in the GOP: "Just admit it; you're trying to cancel Trump and anyone who backed him."

Wilson replied: "No shit. You figured that out all by yourself?" His Lincoln Project colleague George Conway is also assertive, but much more sophisticated in his approach: unlike Wilson, he doesn't call them "motherfuckers". Wilson is not always profane: when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a lunatic Right-wing troglodyte, proudly announced on video that she had just files articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, Wilson replied: "Day-drinking already. Sad."

The bottom line of it all was suggested by horror author Stephen King, who has a popular Twitter feed: "The inmates are no longer running the asylum. What a relief!" Incidentally, when a troll called King one of the "Hollywood elite", he shot back: "I live in Maine, dumbass."

Somebody else tweeted that Joe Biden should start out his inaugural address with: "Well, THAT was weird!" Sure was, four years of weird. I kept thinking back to 9 November 2016, when I assessed Trump's win, and concluded the Republicans were in a lot of trouble. I had NO idea. Geez, four years -- where does the time go? That particular time, I'm glad is gone.

[FRI 22 JAN 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (134)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (134): Jimmy Carter had campaigned as a Washington DC outsider, and remained out as president. This was not to his benefit; he did little to cultivate a relationship with Congress, and as a result, Congress wasn't very agreeable to his initiatives. He got the most pushback from Democrats to the Left of him. However, economic stimulus legislation was passed -- most notably the Public Works Employment Act of 1977 -- with economic recovery following.

The energy crisis of 1979 put the brakes on the recovery. It was due to the doubling of oil prices by OPEC, with the consequence that US inflation jumped to double-digit levels. In the summer of 1979, instabilities in the US oil markets led to shortages of fuel at the pumps, and undermined public confidence in the Carter Administration.

One of the planks of the Carter Administration was deregulation, with the president signing the "Airline Deregulation Act" into law in 1978. The act phased out government control over routes and fares, which were then to be determined by market forces. The Federal Aviation Administration retained its regulatory powers over flight safety. The next year, 1979, Carter legalized home brewing of beer, which had been suppressed since the implementation of Prohibition. The deregulation of beer production led to a steady growth in "microbreweries" that could compete in local markets against big brewers.

Carter did not do so well in pushing a national healthcare system, his proposals coming to ruin in Congress. That underlined Carter's poor relationship with Congress, since much of the opposition to him came from Democrats -- most notably Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy. Carter did collaborate effectively with Congress to set up the Department of Education in 1979, following up a campaign promise. He expanded LBJ's Head Start program, with Federal funding for education increasing in general.

In foreign policy, Carter generally followed the trajectory of previous administrations. In the Middle East, he backed Israel, while working on a peace deal with Egypt -- part of the longer-term effort to reduce Soviet influence in the region. Extended diplomacy led in 1978 to the signing of an agreement by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin that normalized relations between the two countries, leading to a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979.

Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 -- though in response, Islamists assassinated Sadat in a hail of gunfire in 1981. The "Camp David Accords" were Carter's greatest diplomatic coup; however, they did not result in a deep rapprochement between Egypt and Israel, and did not address the Palestinian question, which would continue to be a running sore.

Carter continued to back Indonesia, though reports of Indonesian human-rights violations in East Timor were beginning to leak out. Carter did take an expanded interest in Africa, working against apartheid in South Africa, and becoming the first US president to visit Nigeria.

The overthrow of the regime of the Shah of Iran in 1979, leading to the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was a foreign-policy debacle for the USA. The Shah had been a staunch US ally, with the Americans turning a blind eye to his erratic and tyrannical ways of doing things; the Islamic Republic was anti-American. On 4 November 1979, a group of Iranian students took over the US Embassy in Tehran, taking the embassy staff hostage, and initiating a crisis for the Carter Administration.

There followed extended and largely futile negotiations to free the hostages. On 7 April 1980, Carter issued Executive Order 12205, imposing sanctions on Iran, including the freezing of extensive Iranian assets. With no response to the sanctions, on 24 April 1980, Carter ordered a special-operations mission codenamed EAGLE CLAW to free the hostages. The operation was poorly planned and resulted in disaster: there was a collision between aircraft at a desert rendezvous point that killed eight American servicepeople. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned on his own initiative; he had been opposed to it. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 21 JAN 21] SPACE NEWS

* As usual, December was a busy month for space launches:

-- 02 DEC 20 / FALCON EYE 2 -- A Soyuz ST-A booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0133 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put the "Falcon Eye 2" high-resolution Earth-imaging satellite for the United Arab Emirates. The satellite had a launch mass of 1,190 kilograms (2,625 pounds), and had a design life of 10 years. It was built by Airbus Defense & Space and carried an optical imaging payload from Thales Alenia Space. The imaging payload was believed to have a best resolution of 70 centimeters (28 inches). Falcon Eye 2 was the second of two surveillance satellites ordered by the UAE military.

-- 03 DEC 20 / GONETS M x 3 -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome in Russia at 0114 UTC (local time - 3) to put three "Gonets (Messenger) M" store-&-forward civil communications satellites into orbit. Each of the 280-kilogram (617-pound) Gonets M satellites was built by ISS Reshetnev, and had a five-year design life; the payloads were designated Gonets M satellites Number 30 through 32. The flight also included a small demonstrator satellite, designated "ERA 1" AKA "Cosmos 2548".

-- 06 DEC 20 / GAOFEN 14 -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 0358 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen 14" stereo Earth-imaging satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit. This was the first launch of the enhanced Long March 3B/G5 booster, the main change being an extended 4.2-meter (13.8-foot) diameter payload fairing, being about 90 centimeters (3 feet) taller than fairings on past Long March 3B launches. Other changes included updates to the launcher's flight software, enabling the rocket to perform an "omni-directional take-off roll" to take trajectories into alternative orbits.

-- 06 DEC 20 / SPACEX CARGO DRAGON CRS 21 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1617 UTC (local time + 4), carrying the 21st operational "Cargo Dragon" capsule to the International Space Station (ISS). This was the first flight of an upgraded Cargo Dragon, with improvements derived from its Crew Dragon sibling. The capsule returned to Earth on 13 January 2021.

-- 09 DEC 20 / GECAM -- A Chinese Long March 11 booster was launched from Xichang at 2014 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Gravitational Wave High-energy Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor (GECAM)" satellite into low Earth orbit. The GECAM mission consisted of two small satellites to spot the flashes of gravitational waves and other energetic cosmic events, picked up by gravitational-wave detectors.

Also designated "KX 08A" and "KX 08B", each satellite had a launch mass of 150 kilograms (330 pounds). They carried a dome-shaped array of 25 gamma-ray detectors (GRD) and 8 charged-particle detectors (CPD). The detectors covered the energy band from 6 keV to 5 MeV. Together the satellites were able to keep an eye on the entire sky, and locate targets to about a degree. They gave real-time alerts, providing data on an event's trigger time, localization, duration, spectrum, and so, with a reporting lag of from 2 to 10 minutes. The mission was to detect gamma-ray emission from gravitational-wave sources, gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts, and other energetic events.

-- 11 DEC 20 / NROL 44 (USA 311) -- A Delta 4 Heavy booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 0109 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put a secret military payload into geostationary orbit for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The payload was designated "NROL 44", and was suspected to be a signals intelligence satellite. The largest of the Delta 4 family, the Heavy version features three Common Booster Cores mounted together to form a triple-body rocket.

-- 13 DEC 20 / SXM 7 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1730 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "SXM 7" geostationary satellite into orbit for SiriusXM. It replaced the "XM 3" satellite in SiriusXM's fleet, to provide satellite radio to listeners across North America. SXM 7 was built by Maxar Technologies; it had a launch mass of about 7,000 kilograms (15,000 pounds), and featured a large unfurlable S-band reflector broadcast antenna. It replaced the XM3 satellite, launched in 2005, in the geostationary slot at 85 degrees west longitude.

-- 15 DEC 20 / TEST FLIGHT -- An Angara A5 booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0550 UTC (local time - 3) on its second test flight. It carried a dummy payload.

-- 15 DEC 20 / STRIX ALPHA -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's North Island at 1009 UTC (local time - 11) to put the "StriX Alpha" synthetic aperture radar satellite into orbit for Synspective, a Japanese Earth-imaging company. The StriX a satellite was the first of a series of spacecraft for Synspective's planned constellation of more than 30 small radar observation satellites to collate data of metropolitan centers across Asia on a daily basis that can be used for urban development planning, construction and infrastructure monitoring, and disaster response. The Electron booster was fitted with a new payload fairing, 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) in diameter, versus the 1.2-meter (3.9-foot) fairing used on earlier flights. There was no attempt to recover the first stage. The flight was nicknamed "Owl's Night Begins".

-- 17 DEC 20 / CMS 1 -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 1011 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the "CMS 1" (previously "GSAT 12R" geostationary comsat into orbit. It had a launch mass of about 1,400 kilograms (3,100 pounds), a design life of 7 years, and carried an "Extended C-band" payload. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 83 degrees east longitude to provide communication services over the Indian subcontinent and surrounding areas. It replaced GSAT 12, which had been launched in 2011. The booster was in the "PSLV-XL" configuration, with six strap-on solid rocket boosters. It was the 52nd flight of the PSLV and the 22nd of the PSLV-XL.

-- 18 DEC 20 / ONEWEB 4 -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Vostochny at 1226 UTC (local time - 3) to put 36 "OneWeb" low-orbit comsats into space. OneWeb plans to put a constellation of hundreds of comsats into near-polar low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles).

-- 19 DEC 20 / NROL 108 (USA 312) -- A Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1400 UTC (local time + 4) to put a secret military payload into space for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The payload was designated "NROL 108". There were actually two components, designated "USA 312" and "USA 313". The first stage soft-landed in Florida; it was its fifth trip to space.

-- 21 DEC 20 / XJY 7 -- A Long March 8 booster was launched at 0437 UTC (previous day local time - 9) from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island to put the "XJY 7" secret payload into orbit. The primary payload was a secret demonstrator satellite, designated "XJY 7". There was also a set of smallsat payloads:

• Haisi 1, a 400-pound (180-kilogram) radar Earth-imaging satellite for the Chinese company Spacety
  
  
• Yuanguang: A demonstrator 12-unit (12U) CubeSat.
  
  
• Tianqi 8: A data relay satellite for an "Internet of Things constellation, being flown by Guodian Gaoke, a Beijing-based company.
  
  
• ET-SMART RSS: A 6U CubeSat for Earth observation, jointly developed by the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute and Beijing Smart Satellite Space Technology CO LTD.

The Long March 8 can put a payload of about 4,500 kilograms (9,900 pounds) into Sun-synchronous orbit, placing its lift capacity between that of the smaller Long March 6 and the more powerful Long March 7.

The LM8 is 50.3 meters (165 feet) tall and has a launch mass of about 356 tonnes (392 tons). The first stage has a diameter of 3.35 meters (11 feet) and is powered by two YF-100 engines, burning kerosene and LOX, instead of the storables used on the previous generation of LM boosters. The Long March 8's cryogenic second stage uses two YF-75 engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The YF-75 engine is also flown on the upper stages of China's LM3 booster.

Chinese officials approved development of the modular Long March 8 booster in 2017. The three-year development cycle was expedited by the launcher's use of engine and booster designs from the LM7 and LM3. Chinese engineers also introduced thrust control technology on the LM8, paving the way for recovery and re-use of boosters. Future LM8 boosters will be fitted with control fins and legs for vertical landings on an offshore platform. Both the LM8's core stage and two side boosters will be landed as a unit.

The adjustable thrust level in the LM8 engines also allows the rocket to throttle down as it passes through the phase of maximum aerodynamic pressure, when it is flying through the dense lower atmosphere at high school. The adjustment, which is common in US launch vehicles, reduces structural loads on the launcher.

-- 27 DEC 20 / YAOGAN 33 -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 1544 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the secret "Yaogan 33" payload into orbit. It was apparently a radar surveillance satellite. The launch also included an undescribed smallsat named "Weina 2".

-- 29 DEC 20 / CSO 2 -- A Soyuz ST-B booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1642 UTC (local time + 3) to put the second "Composante Spatiale Optique (CSO 2)" military reconnaissance satellite into Sun-synchronous polar orbit for CNES and DGA, the French space and defense procurement agencies respectively. The CSO 2 satellite was the second of three new-generation high-resolution optical imaging satellites for the French military, replacing the Helios 2 spy satellite series. The satellites were built by Airbus, with an imaging payload from Thales Alenia Space. CSO 1 was launched in 2018, into a higher orbit, meaning its imaging resolution was poorer.

* OTHER SPACE NEWS: As discussed by NASA press release ("NASA Selects Heliophysics Missions of Opportunity for Space Science Research and Technology Demonstration", 3 December 2020) has now chosen two new science proposals for nine-month concept studies. They were selected as "Solar Terrestrial Probes (STP)" Missions of Opportunity, to study the solar wind.

The two missions include the "Global Lyman-alpha Imagers of the Dynamic Exosphere (GLIDE)" and "Solar Cruiser". GLIDE will help researchers understand the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, the "exosphere", where it encounters space, while Solar Cruiser demonstrate the use of a "solar sail" for spaceflight propulsion.

One proposal will ultimately be chosen to launch along with NASA's upcoming "Interstellar Mapping & Acceleration Probe (IMAP)" in 2024. IMAP will be launched in 2025 to the L1 Lagrangian position, about 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from the Earth towards the Sun. It will be a smallsat, a pathfinder for NASA's new "RideShare" policy, which will launch satellites using excess launch capacity. IMAP will investigate the interstellar boundary region, where the solar wind and the solar magnetic field it transfers to the edge of the solar system collide with galactic material and the galactic magnetic field.

As the selected science mission, GLIDE will study variability in Earth's exosphere by tracking far ultraviolet light emitted from hydrogen. The exosphere is the outer region of Earth's atmosphere that touches space. Observing the global structure of the exosphere requires a telescope that is outside the outer reaches of the atmosphere, which extend almost to the Moon. The IMAP launch trajectory to the inner Lagrangian point, the point of the Earth-Sun system that provides an uninterrupted view of the Sun, will provide a suitable vantage point for observations.

Solar Cruiser was selected as the technology demonstration mission. Consisting of a 1,700 square meter (18,000 square foot) solar sail, it will demonstrate the use of solar propulsion. Solar Cruiser will maintain position along the Earth-Sun line at a point closer to the Sun than L1, a useful location for solar storm warning.

Another STP science Mission of Opportunity, the "Spatial/Spectral Imaging of Heliospheric Lyman Alpha (SIHLA)", has also been funded for investigation, with a development decision being put off, based on budget and RideShare opportunities. SIHLA would map the sky to determine the shape and underlying mechanisms of the boundary between the heliosphere, the area of our Sun's magnetic influence, and the interstellar medium AKA "heliopause".

From the start of IMAP mission formulation, SMD planned to include secondary spacecraft on the launch under the agency's SMD Rideshare Initiative, which cuts costs by sending multiple missions on a single launch. This launch will also include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Follow-On mission, which will expand that agency's space weather forecasting.

* As discussed by an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Ariel Mission To Study Exoplanet Atmospheres Enters Implementation Phase" by David Szondy, 13 November 2020), the European Space Agency (ESA) has now approved the "Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel)" mission for development, with a contractor to be selected in 2021 to build the observatory.

Thousands of extrasolar planets, "exoplanets", have been found, but few details are known of any of them. Ariel will be the first of a new generation of satellites that will be able to inspect them in more detail. It will be launched in 2029 by an Ariane 6 booster from Kourou, French Guiana, to be placed in the Earth-Sun Lagrange point -- the gravitational balance point between the two bodies, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth. From there, it will observe about 1,000 exoplanets as they transit across their parent stars, obtaining spectroscopic data in the visible and infrared to determine the thermal profiles and composition of exoplanet atmospheres.

A contractor hasn't yet been selected for building the observatory, but work is underway on developing the payload. Ariel will feature a 1-meter telescope; it will feed a spectroscopic analysis system that will inspect analyze target planet atmospheres as they pass in front of or move behind their host star. The instruments will be able to measure changes in the light curve by up to 1 parts in 10,000 relative to the star. The payload will be developed by the Ariel Mission Consortium, made up of over 50 institutes from 17 European countries.

ED: Britain launched six Ariel science satellites in the 1960s and 1970s, so it would be logical to name this upcoming mission as "Ariel 7" -- if simply as a tribute to a pioneering space research effort.

[WED 20 JAN 21] SPIDER GENOMES (3)

* SPIDER GENOMES (3): Cheryl Hayashi and her team at AMNH are now working from the genetic studies to learn how spiders make their silk. The typical orb weaving spider has many silk glands divided into seven types; each type of gland produces a specific mixture of proteins, which forms a distinctive type of silk when it is extruded through one of the spider's spinnerets. Hayashi and her colleagues have now identified which silk genes are active in each of the golden orb-weaver's seven types of glands. They have also searched the activity of similar genes in the silk glands and other tissues of cobweb-weaving spiders -- a subset of orb weavers that build 3D webs instead of flat ones -- and discovered over 200 potential silk and glue components. Hayashi calls it "mind boggling".

These newly discovered genes help explain the molecular basis of spider silk properties. The silk genes contain short stretches of DNA called "motifs" that vary between species in number and in their exact sequence. By comparing the genetic differences with differences in silk properties, Hayashi's team has found that those motifs seem to influence strength, elasticity, and other properties. Sorting out how the silks are put together may help bio-engineers better understand and, ultimately, harness silk's remarkable strength and flexibility.

Hayashi says: "In these sequences, there are answers to questions such as: 'How do spiders keep the silk liquid at extremely high concentrations in the body?' "It's hard for biochemists to do this." For example, she and others found that the silk glands contain nonsilk proteins that may serve as molecular guides to help with production of the fiber.

There have been similar advances in the understanding of spider venoms. The door has also flown open for the similarly complex world of spider venoms, which may offer compounds useful for controlling insects or relieving pain. Greta Binford is an evolutionary biologist at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, who studies the unusual tissue-destroying properties of the venom of the brown recluse spider; people bitten by a brown recluse can develop gangrene so serious they can lose a limb. Binford says: "Venom cocktails are really rich; they can have up to 1,000 different chemicals and the mix varies a lot." The latest genomes and follow-up studies, she adds, "give us more confidence that we're capturing a comprehensive set of venoms."

In earlier work, researchers had characterized some of the components of black widow venom, identifying two seemingly unique families of proteins: "latrotoxins", which act on neurons; and "latrodectins", whose function in venom remains unclear. (Both are named for the black widow genus, Latrodectus.) The black widow genome likely contains genes for many more toxins, but it has proven very hard to sift out. As a result, Binford and her colleagues have instead looked for venom genes in the genome of a close Latrodectus relative, the common house spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum.

Although a house spider's bite is not as painful as the black widow's, Jessica Garb of UMass and her colleagues were surprised to find that its venom is loaded up with latrotoxins, 47 in total, all differing from those known in black widow venom. Garb says that "suggests [that spider family] is evolving in a very dynamic way." For example, black widows make "a-latrotoxin", which specifically attacks vertebrate nerve cells, but the house spider does not. Garb suggests that this toxin may have evolved in black widows because they are big enough to build webs capable of catching small lizards and other prey with backbones.

The analysis also hints at the fascinating idea that members of Latrodectus got their neurotoxins when a bacterium invaded their ancestor's cells and left behind some of its DNA. Sifting through a genome database revealed that the closest known matches to the house spider's latrotoxin genes are bacterial genes.

Silk and venom are the most visible examples of spider biochemistry, but spiders are a diverse group, and have plenty of other tricks. Peacock spiders and other jumping spiders use internal hydraulic pumps, not leg muscles, to leap 30 times their body length. Spitting spiders spew silky glue from their venom glands to pin down other, larger spiders for a killing bite to the leg. African sand spiders can survive a year with no food or water.

The size and complexity of spider genomes makes them tough targets, and all revelations extracted from them will take time and effort. Spider researchers are patient, believing they will get the rewards in time. Auburn's Jason Bond says: "Spider systematics, spider evolution and ecology, even spider behavior, have lagged for many years because [of ] the genomic complexities. That's changed. Arachnology is starting to reach a level of maturity." [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 19 JAN 21] DARK ENERGY HUNTER

* DARK ENERGY HUNTER: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Robot Detector To Map Cosmos For Clues To Dark Energy" by Daniel Clery, 11 September 2019), in 1998 astronomers discovered that the expansion of the Universe was speeding up. Nobody knew what was driving the acceleration, with an unknown "dark energy" postulated as the cause.

Nobody has yet nailed down what dark energy really is. All indications so far suggest it has the same accelerating effect everywhere, across all time, implying it is a constant pressure associated with the fabric of space itself -- a "cosmological constant". However, if it varies over time, that would make things more troublesome, demanding elaborations such as an additional force, sometimes called "quintessence". It might even require a fundamental rewrite of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Astronomers originally came across cosmic acceleration by measuring the distance to supernovas in remote galaxies. They found that these distant "standard candles", assumed to be uniformly bright, became dimmer than expected with distance, suggesting that the expansion rate of the Universe was greater than believed. However, some have wondered if supernovas are all that valid as standard candles, and astronomers have been investigating alternative measurements. In one instance, astronomers working on the Dark Energy Survey, recently completed using a telescope in Chile, searched for tiny distortions in the shapes of galaxies caused by intervening matter, which would give clues about the cosmic distribution of matter and the stretching of space.

Now a telescope in Arizona has been refitted with a robot sky survey system to map an unprecedented 35 million galaxies and how they clump across space and time. The "Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)" will search for clumping patterns that might provide hints to the nature of dark energy. It will look for "baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO)" in the clumping of galaxies. These ripples began as sound waves that blasted through the Universe in the 400,000 years after the Big Bang, when it was a swirling mass of particles and energy.

Once the primordial soup cooled and became transparent, the ripples -- which drew matter to them, to seed galaxy clusters -- were locked in, leaving a spherical imprint in space around which galaxies clustered. The distribution of galaxies is highest in the center of the imprint, a region called a "supercluster", and around its edges, with giant voids between these areas. Superclusters formed in regions where dark matter -- invisible mass that drives the formation of such large-scale structures -- had concentrated under its own gravitational pull.

This primordial pattern of galaxy clustering has remained unchanged since about one million years after the Big Bang. As the Universe grew, BAOs have tracked its expansion; they are now about 1 billion light years wide. By tracking the size of the BAOs across time, astronomers can reconstruct how the Universe itself expanded.

A project named the "Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)" pioneered the technique, as a part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which used a 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico. It mapped about two million galaxies, but it was very laborious to use. To get distances to galaxies, the astronomers took the spectra of the galaxies and examined their redshifts -- the lengthening of their light emissions due to the expansion of the Universe, with the redshift increasing with distance. The problem was that the observations required a "mask" in the telescope's focal plane -- the mask being a plate with holes drilled in it, corresponding to the positions of galaxies in the field of view. Optical fibers fed the light from the galaxies to a spectrograph. A different mask had to be fabricated for each field of view.

DESI improves on BOSS by using a larger telescope -- the 4-meter (13.1-foot) Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona -- and by automating the masking system. There is a bundle of 5,000 optical fibers at the focal plane, with each fiber tip adjustable by a tiny actuator. The optical fibers snake down the back of the telescope to a temperature-controlled room containing 10 spectrographs, each analyzing the light of 500 galaxies simultaneously. Reconfiguring the system for a new field of view only takes a few minutes. A few other astronomy experiments -- including the "Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope" at the Xinglong Station in China, have used robotic positioners before. However, DESI is the most ambitious.

The mapping project, which will cover 35 million galaxies, began in 2020, and is expected to be complete by 2025. It should not only shed light on dark energy, but on other exotic questions in cosmology, such as the nature of the Universe's invisible "dark matter"; and whether the Universe was born in an exponential burst of expansion lasting just a fraction of a second, known as "inflation". About three-quarters of DESI's $75 million USD budget comes from the US Department of Energy, with major contributions from the United Kingdom and France.

[MON 18 JAN 21] EXPLORING NEUTRON STARS (2)

* EXPLORING NEUTRON STARS (2): The key to determining which models of the interiors of neutron stars are the most likely is getting good estimates of mass and size. Astronomers traditionally estimate mass by observing neutron stars in binary pairs, with the mutual orbit of the two neutron stars revealing their mass. Roughly 35 stars have had their masses measured in this way, although the figures can contain error bars of up to one solar mass. Before NICER, it was difficult to determine radii, with estimates being off by as much as a fifth of the size of a neutron star.

NICER's hotspot method has been used by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, which launched in 1999 and is still in operation. NICER is four times more sensitive, and has hundreds of times better time resolution than the XMM-Newton. Over the next few years, the NICER team of another half-dozen neutron stars, determining their radii to within 500 meters. Given that data, the group will be able to begin plotting out what is known as the "neutron-star equation of state", which relates mass to radius or, equivalently, internal pressure to density.

Few expect that the NICER data will conclusively unveil the structure of neutron stars. Most physicists believe that, on its own, the observatory will narrow down and not completely rule out models of what happens in a neutron star core. That's good, of course, Watts saying: "This would still be a huge advance on where we are now."

NICER's first target was J0030+0451, an isolated pulsar that spins at about 200 times per second and is 1,100 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pisces. Two groups -- one based primarily at the University of Amsterdam, and another led by researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park -- separately sifted through 850 hours of observations, crosschecking on each other. The hotspot curves are very complex, so the teams had to use supercomputers to model various configurations and work out which ones best fit the data.

However, the both came up with similar results, finding that J0030 has a mass that is 1.3 or 1.4 times that of the Sun, and a radius of about 13 kilometers (8.1 miles). Those results aren't tight to nail down what's inside a neutron star. Andrew Steiner -- a nuclear astrophysicist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville -- says: "There's no requirement for anything funky or crazy or exotic yet."

Researchers got a bigger surprise with findings about the shape and position of the hotspots. The traditional view of neutron stars has their magnetic field lines looking like those surrounding a bar magnet, with north and south poles emerging from circular spots at opposing ends of the star. By contrast, the Dutch supercomputer simulations implied that both of J0030's hotspots are in its southern hemisphere, and that one of them is long and crescent-shaped. The Maryland team also came up with the possibility of a three-hotspot solution: two southerly oval-shaped ones and a third circle near the rotational south pole.

The results would reinforce previous observations and theories suggesting that neutron stars' magnetic fields, which are a trillion times stronger than the Sun's, can be more complex than generally assumed. After they first form, pulsars are thought to slow their rotation over millions of years -- but if they have a companion star orbiting around them, they might drain material and angular momentum from this partner, boosting their spinning to superfast speeds. As the matter is deposited on the star's exterior, some theorists suggest it could affect a fluid-like layer of subsurface neutrons, generating gigantic vortices that twist the neutron star's magnetic field into bizarre arrangements. The companion star might ultimately be consumed, or lose so much mass that it is thrown off into space, resulting in a solitary neutron star like J0030. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 15 JAN 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (133)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (133): After being sworn in as governor of Georgia on 12 January 1971, Jimmy Carter dropped his implied bigotries and showed his true colors, saying in his inaugural address that "the time of racial discrimination is over. ... No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job or simple justice." Ironically, Carter's lieutenant governor was Lester Maddox, Georgia having no requirement that the candidate governor and lieutenant-governor be on the same ticket. The two men did not have a good working relationship.

Carter also did not have a warm relationship with the state legislature. He accordingly focused on expanding the authority of the governor's office, while streamlining the state bureaucracy. It was a sign of his energy and aggressiveness that he managed to push that agenda through the legislature. As governor, Carter pushed for budget deficit reduction while supporting education, prison reform, and particularly civil rights. He vetoed a plan to build a dam on Georgia's Flint River, saying it would cost more and have more impact than estimated. He also restructured Georgia's death penalty to address SCOTUS concerns, and supported the war in Vietnam.

In 1972, Carter began planning for a 1976 presidential bid, publicly announcing his candidacy in December 1974. At the outset, he was an obscure figure, little known to the public, not seen as likely to win the Democratic primary election. However, the public was still restless from the Watergate scandal; Carter positioned himself as a Washington DC outsider, to exploit dissatisfaction with the status quo. The fact that he was seen as decent and honest didn't hurt. The news media was inclined to be favorable to him, and he campaigned energetically. He came up from behind to win the Democratic nomination, to choose Minnesota Senator Walter F. Mondale as his running mate.

Carter's platform included campaign finance reform; creating a Federal consumer protection agency; pursuing nuclear disarmament and defense cuts; raising taxes on the wealthy; and a balanced budget. He made no attempt to disguise his Born Again beliefs, though they were clearly tilted to the liberal. He beat Gerry Ford by a narrow margin in the general election.

* Carter went into office hobbled by the 1973:1975 recession, with unemployment at 9%. He tried to start out on a good foot by issuing an executive order, on the basis of the pardoning power, declaring unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War-era draft evaders. He also initiated national energy-conservation measures, calling the energy crisis "the moral equivalent of war". The energy-conservation measures would not amount to much, the energy crisis proving temporary. The most enduring result was the formation of the Department of Energy (DOE) in 1977, with the DOE consolidating a number of earlier US government energy-related offices.

Of course, he inherited foreign-relations issues from the Ford Administration, notably the Middle East and detente with Russia and China. Of course, Henry Kissinger was no longer in the White House, with Carter relying most heavily instead on Zbigniew "Zbig" Brzezinski -- a Polish-American scholar who had served in LBJ's White House, and a rival to Henry Kissinger.

Carter's environmental efforts were marked by a scandal from 1977 over Love Canal, in the city of Niagara Falls, New York. The Love Canal area had been built on top of a toxic waste dump; more than 800 families were relocated, with the Federal government then remediating the area. The incident led to the creation of the "Superfund" to deal with the toxic waste dump problem.

The Love Canal environmental fiasco was followed in 1979 by the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on 28 March of that year. There was a radiation leak, but no evidence of harm to citizens. Carter -- who was by background a nuclear engineer -- set up a commission to investigate and report on the accident. The TMI accident was a profound blow to nuclear power generation in the USA. The excitement of the 1950s over nuclear power, already fading, transitioned to widespread skepticism about the safety and economic sensibility of atomic power. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 14 JAN 21] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Making Commodity Chemicals Requires Fossil Fuels. New devices Could Do It With Renewables" by Robert F. Service, 4 May 2020), two research groups have developed new chemical synthesis schemes that could be driven by renewable energy, instead of fossil fuels. One group uses carbon dioxide (CO2) as its starting material to make ethanol -- grain alcohol, useful as a fuel -- and ethylene, a plastics feedstock. The other turns nitrogen (N2) into ammonia (NH3), a key component in fertilizer. Both owe their progress to advances in the catalyst-coated electrodes that drive chemical reactions between gases and liquids.

In theory, turning CO2 into hydrocarbons such as ethanol and ethylene is simple: just energize CO2 so it can take hydrogen atoms from water, releasing oxygen in the process. However, the reactions are tricky. They take place in electrolyzers, which consist of two electrodes separated by a liquid electrolyte. At one electrode, the anode, water splits into oxygen, electrons, and hydrogen ions (protons). The protons then migrate through the electrolyte to the cathode, where they react with CO2, which is fed in separately, to make the hydrocarbons.

In current electrolyzers, the cathode usually consists of a 3D carbon mesh dotted with tiny copper catalyst particles. In this "gas diffusion" design, CO2 gas infiltrates the mesh to interact with all the catalyst particles simultaneously. One side of the mesh is also in contact with the liquid electrolyte, which helps transfer protons -- ionized hydrogen, in effect -- from the anode. Unfortunately, water in the electrolyte can infiltrate the pores, blocking CO2 gas from reaching the catalyst particles.

Coating the electrode with a water-repellent, fluorine-rich polymer can help. That and other improvements have resulted in electrolyzers that efficiently convert a small input of electricity into hydrocarbons. Unfortunately, only about 40% of the product compounds have two carbon atoms, as ethylene and ethanol do -- while much of the rest is methane (CH4), which is less useful.

Now, a research team led by Wang Ye, a chemist at Xiamen University in China, has found that adding fluorine to the standard copper catalyst on their gas diffusion electrode changes the pathway of the reactions, yielding more production of two-carbon compounds -- up to 85% of the output. Their setup can also handle 1.6 amps of current per square centimeter of catalyst, twice the throughput of the previous record holder.

Karthish Manthiram -- a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- has similarly come up with an improved electrochemical process for synthesizing NH3 using N2 from air and hydrogen (H2). The H2, split from water in another electrolyzer cell, where it is split into protons and electrons at the anode. The protons pass through a liquid electrolyte made of an organic solvent spiced with lithium to speed transfer of hydrogen to nitrogen. At the cathode, a three-step chemical process takes place:

• Piped-in N2 splits into individual nitrogen atoms.
  
  
• The nitrogen atoms react with the lithium to make lithium nitride (Li3N).
  
  
• The lithium nitride reacts with protons and electrons coming from the anode to make NH3, regenerating the lithium.

Manthiram's team couldn't use a porous carbon cathode because the liquid electrolyte would flood the electrode, blocking N2 gas from catalyst particles. The researchers accordingly researchers replaced the carbon cathode with a stainless steel mesh, which repels the organic electrolyte and allows N2 in. The scheme produced ammonia nearly five times as fast as the previous record. Its efficiency for converting the energy in electrons to chemical bonds in NH3 is 40%, the highest ever achieved with an electrolyzer.

The efficiency is still much lower than obtained using processes based on fossil fuels, and these efforts are not likely to lead to commercialization in the near future. However, they do provide a basis for further improvements.

* As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Choking On Diesel Costs, Somali Firm Turns To Solar For Cheaper Power" by Abdi Sheikh & Abdirahman Hussein, 2 June 2020), traditionally African nations have relied on diesel generators for local and back-up power. The diesels are both polluting and expensive to operate; the decline in the cost of solar power then gives it an opening in such sunny lands.

According to the owners of a new solar power plant in Mogadishu, Somalia, the facility is expected to quadruple the city's generation capacity and cut bills. Chief engineer Mohamud Farah of the BECO firm says: "It is a risky business -- but we are happy to be the first company to install solar energy to supply cheaper electricity."

The panels now supply power for four hours a day to its 300,000 customers, with generators providing electricity for the rest of the time. BECO intends to retain the generators even once the solar power's installed capacity reaches 100 MW, to ensure power is available at night. Farah says "Unless we get battery storage, we cannot stop using fossil fuel, and the cost per kilowatt-hour when we get the 100MW will still depend on storage batteries."

Mogadishu's total installed capacity is 35 MW, against a demand of 200 MW. At present 85% of Somalia's population has no access to electricity, with 60% of them living in remote villages. Mogadishu's residents and businesses have a great need for cheaper power. Shukri Mohamed, a mother of four, says: "I was selling drinks in a refrigerator just outside my house. I canceled the business after two months. My profit was $20 a month, but the electricity bill was $40 to $50 a month. I will restart my business if electricity becomes cheaper."

* In bogus tech news, GIZMODO.com reported on the "5G Bioshield USB Key" from the UK, which is claimed to neutralize the dangerous emissions from 5G phone towers using "wearable holographic bio-catalyst technology". It costs 300 GBP, or about $350 USD; Pen Test Partners, a UK data-security firm, got one and tore it down, to find to no surprise that it was a conventional 128 GB flash drive, with a sci-fi-flavored sticker.

OK, ridiculous, right? However, it's been recommended by the Glastonbury (UK) Town Council's 5G Advisory Committee, which is either unaware of or indifferent to the fact that the vendor, previously sold dietary supplements that performed "relativistic time dilation and biological quantum entanglement at the DNA level."

The Bioshield USB key is not alone, with a number of other anti-5G products out there: hats of course, pills, phone cases, crystal bracelets, and underpants. It is not a surprise that people swallow such things, but there's the question: "How many of them do?" GIZMODO listed the article as filed under: DO WE REALLY HAVE TO DISCUSS THAT HOLOGRAPHIC SHIELDS ARE SCIENCE FICTION?

[WED 13 JAN 21] SPIDER GENOMES (2)

* SPIDER GENOMES (2): The two groundbreaking studies in spider evolution were not based on analysis of complete genomes. Full-genome analysis is obviously the next step -- but Jessica Garb, an evolutionary biologist and geneticist at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell -- says that spider genomes have been a "hard nut to crack". There's three problems:

• Spider genomes are big, some bigger than the human genome, and full of repetitive DNA that tends to confuse analysis.
  
  
• Spiders are not closely related to most of the other animals whose genomes have already been sequenced, reducing leverage.
  
  
• Most significantly, spider research is not generously funded. While for some animal groups, such as birds, hundreds of genomes have been sequenced, only four spider genomes have been even partially deciphered.

Evolutionary biologist Trine Bilde at Aarhus University in Denmark led the first spider genome project as part of her research into the lives of the African social velvet spider, Stegodyphus mimosarum. This species lives in nests, with up to a thousand members, mostly females, spinning dense, meter-sized webs capable of snaring 15-centimeter (6-inch) long grasshoppers. The spiders are homebodies, and so tend to breed only within their colony. That custom -- plus evidence that colonies sometimes die out very quickly -- suggested that they might be highly inbred, lacking the genetic variation that shields other organisms against such die-offs. However, the species also thrives in a wide range of temperatures and humidity.

Bilde thought the velvet spider's genome would hold clues to the animal's social behavior, along with its odd mix of resilience and fragility, so her team and the Chinese sequencing giant BGI set out to sequence its DNA and, for comparison, that of a tarantula. The researchers expected that inbreeding -- which reduces genetic variation in populations -- would make the social velvet spider's genome easier to complete.

They were surprised and unhappy to find that the genome contains long stretches of noncoding and repetitive DNA, making it hard to piece together the short reads turned out by the sequencing machine. The tarantula genome was even worse: twice as big, and even richer in duplicated regions. The researchers used serious computing power to stitch together the social velvet spider's genome, though they could not assemble a satisfactory read of the tarantula's.

These genomes are now being probed for insights into the velvet spider's social behavior and its adaptability. Bilde's team also plans to investigate populations of velvet spiders living in different environments to see whether changes in their microbiome or "epigenetic changes" -- chemical modifications of DNA -- help the animals cope with varied and changing conditions.

These initial genomes, along with less ambitious molecular studies, are also doing much to boost silk and venom research. Cheryl Hayashi, a spider silk geneticist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is among the researchers excited about what she is learning about the molecular diversity of these substances. She says: "I feel like I am so fortunate to be working at this time."

Silk genes, which code for extremely large proteins with stretches of amino acids that repeat many times, are themselves long and full of repetitive DNA that's hard to decipher. Fortunately, the velvet spider genome, together with that of the orb weaver and the house spider, has revealed an unexpected variety of silk genes, many more than expected. Researchers had already identified two genes for the class of silk known as "major ampullate", which forms the superstrong dragline threads that anchor webs and are the inspiration for efforts to make spider silk commercially. The social velvet spider's genome, however, turned up 10 genes just for that one kind of silk and nine other genes for additional silk proteins.

In search of more spider silk genes, Cheryl Hayashi began another spider genome effort. Early in her career, she had cloned the Flag gene, which codes for flagelliform silk -- the elastic filament that orb weavers use in the insect-capturing spirals of their webs. The task was protracted and difficult; she then joined up with Benjamin Voight from the University of Pennsylvania, Ingi Agnarsson from the University of Vermont in Burlington, and others to decipher and characterize the genome of the golden orb-weaver (Nephila clavipes).

The genome, they discovered, included 28 silk genes, eight of them previously unknown. Hayashi says: "In the past, we thought we could define all the silk genes in one species, that there would be a handful, and we could say, 'This is the gene for a particular kind of silk.'" But it turns out that it's not that simple." Not only is there no one-to-one correlation between genes and silk types, but some silk genes seem to have acquired entirely different functions. One of the orb weaver's silk genes is even expressed in the spider's venom gland. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 12 JAN 21] DISTRIBUTING VACCINES

* DISTRIBUTING VACCINES: The COVID-19 pandemic, while not pleasant, has also been an education. As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("COVID Vaccine Is Bonanza For Digital Supply Chain Tracking Industry" by Rajesh Kumar Singh 17 December 2020), the imminent distribution of COVID-19 is shining a light on the logistics system that will do the job.

Distributing vaccines is a challenge; than half of them go to waste globally every year because of temperature control, logistics, and shipment-related issues. That also represents an opportunity for companies like California-based Cloudleaf, Germany's SAP SE, and others that sell technology for monitoring shipments from factory freezer to shot in the arm.

Cloudleaf, backed by Intel Capital, the venture arm of chipmaker Intel Corp, uses sensors attached to material containers to track location, temperature, humidity, vibration, and acceleration. The sensors send data to the computing cloud, where an artificial intelligence (AI) system can determine if action is requires to prevent a product from becoming exposed to "excursions" of temperatures outside the specified range.

Cloudleaf Chief Executive Mahesh Veerina said orders have jumped fivefold in 2020. To keep up, the company had to expand its workforce and increase capital spending by as much as 80%. He expects a similar growth in capital spending in 2021, saying: "I have CEOs calling and saying: 'Hey, can we get this up in the next 4:5 weeks?'" To fund operations, Cloudleaf raised millions of dollars in 2020 and, according to Veerina, has plans to raise "very significant" amounts of capital in 2021 as well.

Pfizer INC and German partner BioNTech's vaccine must be shipped and stored at -80 degrees Celsius (-112 degrees Fahrenheit), using dry ice or deep-cold freezers; it can only last at standard refrigerator temperatures for up to five days. In contrast, Moderna INC's vaccine can be stored at 20C (-4F) Friday, can be kept in a regular refrigerator for up to a month.

These different requirements have increased the risks of logistical bungles. A quarter of all vaccines are degraded by the time they arrive at their destination due to inept shipping procedures, according to the International Air Transport Association. Losses associated with temperature excursions in the healthcare industry are estimated at about $35 billion USD annually. That could mean a lot more pain with COVID-19 vaccine distribution.

Blockchain and sensor-enabled cold chain monitoring tools can help reduce the losses, as well as limit the risks of theft or counterfeiting of the vaccines. Moderna is using SAP's digital solutions to help serialize and distribute its vaccine, in order to sideline counterfeit medicines and enable collaboration with contract manufacturers and wholesalers.

Similarly, Israeli startup Varcode, which makes smart tags that measure time and temperature, and can track and trace products throughout the supply chain, has seen a big jump in orders. Before the pandemic, the orders for Varcode's tags would range between 100,000 to 1 million units. Since the middle of 2020, CEO Joe Battoe said some of the companies involved in the vaccine distribution have been asking for billions of tags. This, in turn, has led to a 200% increase in Varcode's capital spending.

Varcode's low-cost cloud-based, blockchain-enabled technology sends out alerts when a product goes outside its prescribed temperature range, and keeps track of the cumulative time that the product has been outside the temperature range. Its smart tags are serialized, and can be scanned with a smartphone. Every scan leaves a digital trail, reducing the risks of theft or counterfeiting. The tags can track individual vials, making them a better fit for the vaccine distribution in small and rural areas which may involve small shipments of doses.

Varcode's tags are produced in Israel -- but zooming demand has forced Varcode to invest in a printer and an applicator that would generate the tags on site where the vaccines are being manufactured, and send them on to the manufacturing line in real time.

Underlying shipments of the COVID-19 vaccines in the US, the Federal government, under Operation Warp Speed (OWS), has put together a new software system named "Tiberius" that allows states and Federal agencies to track their vaccine orders. The program covers 50 states, eight territories, the Veterans Health Administration, the Bureau of Prisons, the Indian Health Service, and the departments of Defense and State.

Every Thursday, vaccine producers tell OWS how much vaccine is available for the upcoming week. On Friday, Tiberius runs an algorithm that draws on a range of factors, including adult population and vaccine uptake, and allocates the maximum number of doses available to every state. On Saturday, every state finalizes their orders, which can go up to whatever cap Tiberius has set. Deliveries arrive on Monday.

To monitor side effects in people who have been vaccinated, the CDC is launching a new smartphone-based texting system, named "V-Safe", that will allow those who have received their shots to directly report any unusual health effects they experience. Anyone who gets the vaccine and enrolls in the system will get daily texts the first week after both their first and second doses, asking about any side effects they might be experiencing and whether they interfered with their daily activities or prevented them from going to work.

After the first week, the reminders come once a week for six weeks. The responses are logged and evaluated, and if they are deemed serious, or if experts at the CDC determine a pattern in the types of symptoms reported, they trigger an alert to the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System -- an established vaccine side effect tracking system that doctors and hospitals normally report to -- and then followed up on to determine if the side effect was related to the vaccine.

Given limited shipments, the vaccine doses are currently going to health care workers and older Americans living in skilled nursing or long-term care facilities. Little has been said about tracking who has got the vaccine; obviously, people need to have some way to validate that they have been vaccinated, but privacy concerns make that a tricky issue.

[MON 11 JAN 21] EXPLORING NEUTRON STARS (1)

* EXPLORING NEUTRON STARS (1): As reported by an article from NATURE.com ("The Golden Age Of Neutron-Star Physics Has Arrived" by Adam Mann, 4 March 2020), a giant star lives a bright but short life that ends in a supernova. Most of the star's matter is scattered into space, but the core remains -- crushed under its own weight into a sphere with a mass of up to two Suns but mere kilometers across, with the electrons and protons merging into neutrons.

How neutron stars are born has been known since the 1960s, but what happens inside them remains mysterious. Some researchers think that they are filled with neutrons down to the center; others wonder if the staggering pressures could contort the material into more exotic particles or states. They amount to laboratories of extreme physics that can't be duplicated on Earth. Now researchers are obtaining insights into the interior of neutron stars, thanks to an instrument mounted on the International Space Station (ISS) called the "Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER)" -- previously discussed here in 2017.

In December 2020, NICER handed astronomers some of the most exacting measurements ever made of a neutron star's mass and radius, along as well as unexpected findings about its magnetic field. The NICER team has data on other neutron stars that hasn't been released yet. Astrophysicists are also obtaining data from gravitational-wave observatories that can observe neutron stars crashing together. With these two sources, researchers now can probe into what happens inside a neutron star. Juergen Schaffner-Bielich -- a theoretical physicist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany -- says: "This is beginning to be a golden age of neutron-star physics."

NICER was launched to the ISS on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster in 2017. The $62 million USD observatory was mounted outside the station to collect X rays from pulsars -- which are spinning neutron stars with "hot spots" on the surface that radiate energy, making pulsars like cosmic lighthouses. The hot spots are at temperatures of millions of degrees, where a powerful magnetic field tears up charged particles from the surface, to circulate them back around the neutron star and smash them into the opposite magnetic pole.

NICER detects these X-rays using 56 gold-coated telescopes, recording their time of arrival to within 100 nanoseconds. That allows astronomers to precisely track the hot spots on neutron stars spinning at up to 1,000 times a second. The hotspots are of course visible as they sweep across NICER's field of view; but a neutron star warps spacetime in its vicinity to the extent that NICER can also detect emissions from hotspots facing away from Earth. Einstein's theory of general relativity provides a means of calculating a star's mass-to-radius ratio through the amount of light-bending; astrophysicists can use that and the observations of a neutron star to pin down the mass and radius of a neutron star, which provides clues of what's happening the star's core.

Not too surprisingly, neutron stars get more complicated with depth. Beneath a thin atmosphere made mostly of hydrogen and helium, the stellar remnants are thought to boast an outer crust just a centimeter or two thick that contains atomic nuclei and free-roaming electrons. It seems the ionized elements become packed together in the next layer, creating a lattice in the inner crust. Below that, nearly all the protons combine with electrons to turn into neutrons. Nobody's very sure of what happens underneath that.

Physicists have some idea of what happens, thanks to particle accelerators here on Earth. At facilities such as Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, researchers have smashed together heavy ions, such as those of lead and gold, to create brief collections of extraordinarily dense material. These collisions generate billion- or even trillion-degree flashes, in which protons and neutrons dissolve into a soup of their constituent quarks and gluons.

Neutron stars don't remotely reach such temperatures, and so the insights obtained in particle accelerators may or may not be applicable to neutron stars. There are various ideas for what actually may happen in a neutron star:

• Quarks and gluons could roam freely.
  
  
• Alternatively, the extreme energies could lead to the creation of particles known as "hyperons". Like neutrons, these particles contain three quarks -- but while neutrons contain the most basic and lowest-energy quarks, known as "up" and "down" quarks, a hyperon has at least one of those replaced with an exotic "strange" quark.
  
  
• A third possibility is that the center of a neutron star is a "Bose–Einstein condensate", a state of matter in which all subatomic particles act as a single quantum-mechanical entity. Theorists have come up with even wilder schemes as well.

These different configurations could be distinguished, since they would generate different internal pressures, and so a larger or smaller radius for a given mass. A neutron star with a Bose–Einstein condensate center, for instance, should have a smaller radius than one made from ordinary matter such as neutrons; one with a core made of hyperon matter could have a smaller radius still. Anna Watts -- a NICER team member at the University of Amsterdam -- says: "The types of particles and the forces between them affect how soft or squashy the material is." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 08 JAN 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (132)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (132): James Earl Carter JR was born on 1 October 1924, in Plains, Georgia, a small farming town. He was the eldest son, out of four children, of Lillian and James Earl Carter SR, a World War I veteran who ran a general store and invested in farmland; he gradually focused on raising peanuts.

In 1941, Jimmy Carter JR began engineering studies at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus; the next year, 1942, he transferred to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His real goal was to go to the US Naval Academy, where he gained admission in 1943. He graduated 60th out of 820 midshipmen in the class of 1946 with a Bachelor of Science degree, being commissioned as an ensign. Soon after graduation, he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister Ruth. They would have four children, including Jack, Jeff, Chip, and Amy, in that order.

Carter remained in the service from 1946 to 1953, serving on submarines. During that time, the Navy was moving towards nuclear propulsion for submarines, with Carter acquiring expertise on nuclear reactors. However, he never had a chance to command a nuclear submarine, since his father died in 1953; Carter left active service to take over the family peanut farm, though he remained in the Navy Reserve to 1961, finally leaving as a lieutenant.

From the mid-1950s, the issue of school integration began to make itself felt in Plains. Carter was in favor of desegregation -- but early on, he tended to keep a low profile on the subject. By 1961, he was a prominent citizen of the community and the Baptist Church, and had become chairman of the Sumter County school board; he started to speak out in favor of school integration. In 1962, he ran for a Georgia state Senate seat, with his wife Rosalynn helping manage the campaign. He lost the vote, but successfully challenged it on the basis of fraud, to win on the re-vote.

In the Georgia Senate, Carter still tended to keep a low profile, though he did speak up for voting rights, and pushed back on a change to the Georgia Constitution that he perceived as reinforcing the political authority of religion. He was an enthusiastic supporter of President Kennedy, and found JFK's assassination a major personal blow.

Carter advanced through the state Senate through hard work and persistence. He became a member of the state Democratic Executive Committee, and chairman of the West Central Georgia Planning & Development Commission, which oversaw the handling of Federal and state grants for projects such as historic site restoration. He won a second term in 1964, to then advance to chair the state Senate's Education Committee, and sat on the Appropriations Committee.

In 1966 Bo Callaway -- a member of the US House of Representatives from Alabama -- decided not to run for another term in the House, instead dropping out to seek to become governor of Georgia. The governor's office had been long held by Democrats, but desegregation had done much to undermine the Democrats' hold on power in Georgia; Callaway had switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1964. Carter and Callaway were political adversaries, and so Carter decided to run for governor on the Democratic ticket. Carter failed in the primary, with notorious arch-segregationist Lester Maddox winning instead, and going on to defeat Callaway.

That wasn't an outcome that Carter liked -- and worse, his campaigning had left him deeply in debt. He left the Georgia Senate, and applied himself to his agribusiness to restore his fortunes, biding his time with his political ambitions, while becoming a born-again Christian. He ran again for governor in 1970, positioning his campaign in an awkward balance between appealing to blacks and appealing to conservative whites. It worked; the won the election handily. A black state senator named Leroy Johnson sympathized with Carter, saying: "I don't believe you can win this state without being a racist." -- or at least, pretending to be one. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 07 JAN 21] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Urban Foxes May Be Self-Domesticating In Our Midst" by Virginia Morell, 2 June 2020), foxes have proven adaptable to urban environments on both sides of the Atlantic. A study in the UK suggests that, by moving into human-dominated environments, foxes have been in effect domesticating themselves, evolving doglike traits.

A Soviet biologist named Dmitri Belyaev performed a famous breeding experiment with foxes to study the domestication of animals. Over the generations, not only did the foxes become more accustomed to, indeed happy with, the company of humans, but they also acquired different traits: floppy ears, short or curly tails, extended reproductive seasons, changes in fur coloration, and changes in the shape of their skulls, jaws, and teeth. They also lost their "musky fox smell."

Kevin Parsons -- a Canadian evolutionary biologist, working at the University of Glasgow in Scotland -- remembered Belyaev's experiment when he heard about a large collection of red fox skulls at National Museums Scotland. Parsons had already noticed how many foxes he saw on Glasgow's streets, particularly in the early morning. He says: "They'd walk by me and stare, as if asking, 'Why are you looking at me?'. They were fearless."

Parsons got to wondering how foxes had adapted to an urban environment. To investigate, he examined National Museums Scotland's fox skull collection. About 1500 skulls had been collected from 1971 to 1973 in London and the adjacent countryside, when a fox culling campaign was underway. All were labeled as rural or urban. Urban areas were defined as having buildings, streetlights, and no wooded areas, while rural sites were wooded and lacked human development.

Parsons took photographs of 57 female and 54 male skulls and characterized them by their features. He and his team found a fox's habitat substantially affected the shape of its skull. Most significantly, the urban foxes had noticeably shorter and wider muzzles and smaller brains, than their rural fellows -- both of which had been noted in Belyaev's experiments. Males and females had very similar skull shapes. These changes are characteristic of what Charles Darwin called "domestication syndrome".

Urban foxes' skulls seemed to be optimized for a stronger bite than were those of rural foxes, which are shaped for speed. Parsons suggests that there is less need for speed in an urban environment, which is less characterized by open spaces than the wild -- while urban foxes need a stronger bite to consume human garbage, which often includes bones.

Parsons emphasizes that urban foxes are not domesticated. However, Melinda Zeder -- an emeritus archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History -- suggests that the study does show how exposure to human activity can set an animal down the path towards domestication. Like early dogs, urban foxes would need to overcome their fear of humans to get close enough to eat human trash.

Zeder points out that foxes have moved towards domestication before; for example, their bones show up in early farming communities. Unlike wildcats, however, which eventually became housecats through association with humans, foxes didn't become fully domesticated. She says: "They never move any farther down the path to domestication. We don't know why."

* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("No Star, No Problem" by Katherine Kornei, 1 April 2020), educated speculation about life on other worlds has long postulated a "Goldilocks zone" where planets can be habitable -- not so far from the parent star to be frozen, not so close where all the water evaporates. Now, a study suggests that a planet might still be able to support life even if it's outside the Goldilocks zone -- through warming from the decay of radioactive elements.

Radioactive isotopes such as uranium-238, thorium-232, and potassium-40 are found scattered through the Earth's mantle. As they decay, they release a small amount of power, about a 30,000th of that received from the Sun. Researchers suggest that some planets, particularly those that were formed near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, might have enough of these radioactive isotopes to generate sufficient heat to keep their surfaces from freezing entirely solid. Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, who co-author a study on the issue, says: "That gives you the freedom to be anywhere. You don't need to be close to a star."

Loeb and Manasvi Lingam -- an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology -- evaluated at three sources of heat for a sunless planet:

• Heat left over from its formation.
  
  
• Radioactive decay of long-lived isotopes over billions of years.
  
  
• Radioactive decay of short-lived isotopes over hundreds of thousands of years.

Working from there, they modeled the surface temperatures of planets with different masses and radionuclide abundances to determine whether water, ammonia, and ethane -- three solvents found in the Solar System -- could exist as liquids. They found that warming a planet enough to liquefy water requires about a thousand times greater abundance of both classes of radioactive isotopes than found on Earth.

According to Lingman and Loeb, warming a planet enough to liquefy water would demand about a thousand times Earth's abundance of both types of radioactive isotopes. They found that planets with the same mass as Earth, but with about 100 times the abundance of radionuclides, would generate enough heat to keep ethane liquid over hundreds of millions of years. The radiation levels on such worlds would be hundreds of times higher than the time-averaged doses Chernobyl residents experienced after the Ukrainian nuclear disaster in 1986.

Lingam says that no multicellular life found on Earth could stand up to that level of irradiation -- but some of Earth's most extreme microbes might tolerate it. For instance, Deinococcus radiodurans, a highly radiation-resistant bacterium, would do just fine, Lingam saying: "Deinococcus radiodurans is a really crazy organism."

Could a planet accumulate such a high level of radionuclides? Loeb believes that any such world in our Milky Way Galaxy would have to have been born near the galactic center. That's because heavy elements such as uranium and thorium are thought to be produced in collisions between neutron stars, and such collisions are more likely to happen in the densely crowded center of the Galaxy.

Could such a planet be spotted? In principle, yes, since it would be much warmer than it would seem it should be, emitting strongly in the infrared. Finding such a needle in the galactic haystack would be very difficult, but it's worth looking out for in sky surveys, with computer imagery analysis systems designed to notice such anomalies.

[WED 06 JAN 21] SPIDER GENOMES (1)

* SPIDER GENOMES (1): As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Spider Genes Put A New Spin On Arachnids' Potent Venoms, Stunning Silks, And Surprising History" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 19 October 2017), humans are inclined to dislike spiders, but they are an ancient and diverse group of organisms, with a wide range of adaptations. An estimated 90,000 species thrive over every continent, except Antarctica. One of the keys to their success is their silk, which is used for capturing prey, rappelling from high places, and building egg cases and dwellings. It is highly diverse as well, its make-up varying from species to species. The same can be said of spider venom, with each species producing a different concoction of up to 1,000 different compounds.

Arachnologists have now been able to probe into the history of spiders through pioneering genomic studies, having sequenced the genomes of three spiders: the golden orb-weaver, the African social velvet spider, and the common house spider. They have done more limited genetic and protein studies on many others. The studies have helped the paths of spider evolution, including the evolution of spider silk and venom, and suggest molecular-based ways to study these animals' behaviors.

From fossil evidence and specimens preserved in amber, biologists concluded long ago that spiders descended from a many-legged, scorpionlike ancestor that by 380 million years ago had a long tail, but looked very spiderlike, and may even have had silk glands. By 300 million years ago, fossils show, eight-legged creatures with spiderlike mouth parts, primitive silk glands, and stumpy abdomens had emerged. Their abdomens were still segmented, not fused as in today's spiders. What happened to spiders between then and now, however, remained mysterious.

Today, taxonomists recognize three spider groups:

• The Mygalomorphae, which are ground-dwelling creatures characterized by fangs that point straight down. There's about 2,500 species, including tarantulas, plus trapdoor and funnel-web spiders.
  
  
• The Liphistiidae, consisting of 97 species, many of which also build trapdoors to capture prey.
  
  
• The Araneomorphae, which includes 5,500 jumping spiders, 4,500 dwarf spiders, 2,400 wolf spiders, and thousands of web spinners.

Within each group, researchers have tried to classify species by the orientation of their fangs, the shape of their sexual parts, and other aspects of their appearance or behavior. From the early 1990s, they began to make use of molecular methods, when arachnologists identified a half-dozen short, conserved spider DNA sequences that still had enough variation between species to derive relationships.

However, little real progress was made until 2014, when two studies were published that "turned spider evolution upside down," according to Gustavo Hormiga -- a spider systematist at The George Washington University in Washington DC, who co-led one of the studies. Instead of using a small set of DNA markers, both teams compared hundreds of genes from up to 40 spider species to build a family tree that included all the web builders.

The results were surprising, with the analyses dividing orb weavers -- the many spider species that make the classic spiral webs and cobwebs -- into two groupings, and putting them on distant branches of the spider tree; they had previously been seen as a unified group. Orb weavers that produce fuzzy, sticky fibers called "cribellate silk" ended up in a branch of the tree along with many spiders that don't make webs at all, while orb weavers that make a woolly silk are on a different branch.

There are two possible explanations for these surprising conclusions: either the behaviors, body structures, and materials used in weaving webs evolved twice -- or web capabilities evolved much earlier in a common ancestor of both branches, and were lost in many species on the cribellate web weavers' branch.

Jason Bond, who studies spiders at Auburn University in Alabama and led the second study, thinks it is more likely that orb weaving evolved only once, in a common ancestor. In a later study that compared almost 3400 active genes in 70 spider species, Bond's team found that mostly webless, ground-dwelling arachnids such as wolf spiders and jumping spiders diversified much more quickly than web weavers -- possibly because they were able to exploit a range of new opportunities once they no longer had to build and tend webs. Bond says: "Once we get rid of the orb web, that's where we see some of the biggest bursts of speciation."

The study concluded that this diversification occurred about 100 million years ago -- around the same time as an explosion of nonflying insects that could serve as prey for ground-based spiders. Such genetic comparisons, Bond says, "are transforming our understanding of spider evolution." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 05 JAN 21] OPENRAN

* OPENRAN: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("5G Technology: Is There An Alternative To Huawei?", 7 November 2020), mobile telecom technology has evolved through a series of generations, and is now headed towards "Fifth Generation (5G)" technology. The transition to new technologies is often troublesome; the transition to 5G is proving particularly so, in large part because of politics.

5G has become controversial because China, through tech vendor Huawei, is pushing 5G technology, leading to fears that the Chinese will dominate 5G, and also use it to gather secrets. The USA has led the charge against Huawei; Australia, Canada, and Japan have already in effect banned Huawei from their 5G networks, while Britain and Sweden are moving towards doing so as well. However, the only current alternative to Huawei for 5G are two big Nordic firms, Nokia and Ericsson, and nobody's entirely comfortably with relying entirely on them, either. Nokia is having business troubles, and few like the idea of being dependent on tech from a company that's folded.

There is another alternative, named "OpenRAN" -- "Open" for "open source", and "RAN" for "radio access network". Mobile operator Vodafone has already announced that it intends to get rid of some Huawei gear and replace it with OpenRAN gear. To understand what OpenRAN is about, first know that there are two primary subsystems in the mobile telephony network:

• Radio Access Network (RAN): The link between the network and the phone, consisting of the antenna modules seen on cell towers, plus a base station.
  
  
• Core Network (Core): The "interior" of the network. It provides access control for users; routes telephone calls over the general telephone network; allows operators to charge for calls and data use; and hooks users up to the internet. It also takes care of handovers, as a user moves from coverage provided by one RAN tower to the next.

While it was always possible for operators to have one vendor for their Core network and another vendor for the RAN, traditionally there was no great concern among vendors for standards and compatibility between RAN equipment from different vendors; the push was to provide better functionality at lower cost. That means any one cellphone network has typically been built by one vendor, or a linked group of them. OpenRAN aims to change this, and allow operators to mix and match components from different vendors. In an Open RAN environment, the RAN is "disaggregated" into three main building blocks:

• Radio Unit (RU)
  
  
• Distributed Unit (DU)
  
  
• Centralized Unit (CU)

The RU is where the radio signals are transmitted, received, amplified, and digitized. The RU is located near, or integrated into, the antenna. The DU and CU are the control parts of the base station. The DU is physically located at or near the RU, while the CU can be located nearer the Core.

The key concept of OpenRAN is "opening" the protocols and interfaces between the building blocks in the RAN. The OpenRAN Alliance has defined sets of interfaces within the RAN, and also defined a "RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC)" which adds programmability to the RAN. OpenRAN hooks up with "virtualization" of the RAN, in which what was once done in hardware is now done in software; that means standardized hardware, available from multiple vendors, can be used, as long as it can run the software.

Conventional mobile networks are made out of specialized equipment, while new OpenRAN networks use mostly off-the-shelf hardware, with lots of code defining what the hardware does. Since all the gear connects up using standard interfaces, carriers can mix and match products from different suppliers. Operators end up knowing more about their networks, and have a choice of vendors; not only do the operators end up having more confidence in their networks, they are also likely to save money.

OpenRAN is building up steam. Rakuten Mobile of Japan recently launched the world's first 5G network based on OpenRAN, with substantial savings in cost. Telefonica, which has 260 million mobile subscribers in Europe and Latin America, has teamed up with Rakuten to deploy OpenRAN more widely in its networks by 2025. In America, Dish has started to build a 5G network based on OpenRAN. Vendors, except for Huawei, are becoming enthusiastic, Ericsson having announced its first OpenRAN-related product.

OpenRAN is, of course, not a mature technology. As a result, supply of subsystems is uncertain, and it is not clear how well it will work in big cities with lots of phone traffic. The "plug-&-play" nature of OpenRAN also presents a challenge -- since at first, elements from different vendors may not actually play so well together. Governments, along with encouraging OpenRAN, can also support it by subsidizing R&D, helping establish standards, and implementing regulations. However troublesome that might be, it's less troublesome than relying on China to get 5G working.

[MON 04 JAN 21] THE COVID-19 MENACE (25)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (25): SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely equipped for forcing entry into cells. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 bind with ACE2, but the receptor-binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 is a particularly tight fit. It is 10 to 20 times more likely to bind ACE2 than is SARS-CoV9. Clemens-Mars Wendtner says that SARS-CoV-2 is so good at infecting the upper respiratory tract that there may be a second receptor that the virus could use to launch its attack.

Even more troubling is the fact that SARS-COV-2 seems to make use of the enzyme furin from the host to cleave the viral spike protein. This is worrying, researchers say, because furin is abundant in the respiratory tract and found throughout the body. It is used by other formidable viruses, including HIV, influenza, dengue, and Ebola to enter cells. By contrast, the cleavage molecules used by SARS-CoV are much less common and not as effective.

Scientists think that the involvement of furin could explain why SARS-CoV-2 is so good at jumping from cell to cell, person to person, and possibly animal to human. Robert Garry -- a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana -- estimates that it gives SARS-CoV-2 a 100 to 1,000 times greater chance than SARS-CoV of getting deep into the lungs. He says: "When I saw SARS-CoV-2 had that cleavage site, I did not sleep very well that night."

This cleavage site is unique to SARS-CoV-2 among coronaviruses. Pinning down its origin might be the last piece in the puzzle that will determine which animal was the stepping stone that allowed the virus to reach humans.

* Some researchers think that SARS-CoV-2 will weaken over time through mutations that make its residence in the human body less troublesome to the host. That would allow the virus to spread more readily to other hosts. However, nobody has found any convincing evidence of weakening, likely because the virus has such an effective genetic repair mechanism. Guo Deyin -- who researches coronaviruses at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou -- says: "The genome of COVID-19 virus is very stable, and I don't see any change of pathogenicity that is caused by virus mutation."

The University of Edinburgh's Andrew Rambaut agrees: "It doesn't work that way." He points out that as long as it can successfully infect new cells, reproduce and transmit to new ones, it doesn't matter whether it harms the host.

Klaus Stoehr -- who headed the World Health Organization's SARS research & epidemiology division -- is more optimistic, believing that the spread of COVID-19 will at least give people antibodies that will offer partial protection. He adds that immunity will not be perfect; people who are reinfected will still develop minor symptoms, the way they do now from the common cold, and there will be rare examples of severe disease. However, the virus's proofreading mechanism still means it will not mutate quickly, and people who were infected will retain robust protection.

Stoehr says: "By far the most likely scenario is that the virus will continue to spread and infect most of the world population in a relatively short period of time [1 or 2 years]. Afterwards, the virus will continue to spread in the human population, likely forever." Like the four generally mild human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 would then circulate constantly and cause mainly mild upper respiratory tract infections. He believes, controversially, that vaccines won't be necessary.

Some studies do lend support to his argument. One showed that when people were inoculated with the common-cold coronavirus 229E, their antibody levels peaked two weeks later and were only slightly raised after a year. That did not prevent infections a year later, but subsequent infections led to few, if any, symptoms and a shorter period of viral shedding.

The OC43 coronavirus, another common variant, offers a model for where this pandemic might go. That virus also gives humans common colds, but genetic research from the University of Leuven in Belgium suggests that OC43 might have been a killer in the past. That study indicates that OC43 spilled over to humans in around 1890 from cows, which got it from mice. The scientists suggest that OC43 was responsible for a pandemic that killed more than one million people worldwide in 1889:90 -- an outbreak previously blamed on influenza. Today, OC43 continues to circulate widely, and it might be that continual exposure to the virus keeps the great majority of people immune to it.

Skeptics still point out that there's no necessity that SARS-CoV-2 will become benign. There's still doubts about long-term immunity to the virus; cats, cows, dogs and chickens do not seem to become immune to the sometimes deadly coronaviruses that infect them, leaving veterinarians over the years scrambling for vaccines. Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa, who studies coronaviruses, says that people like to think that "the other coronaviruses were terrible and became mild. That's an optimistic way to think about what's going on now, but we don't have evidence." [END OF SERIES]

[FRI 01 JAN 21] ANOTHER MONTH

* ANOTHER MONTH: The buzz this last month was, of course, Donald Trump's increasingly frantic attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The MAGAbots, his loyal fans, continue to insist on Twitter that there was massive election fraud, citing "extensive evidence" -- none of which, of course, impressed any judges in court, with Trump's lawyers fearing to make many claims for it. Honestly, no matter what setback the MAGAbots suffered, they were undeterred: they would promptly forget the setback, and then declare certain victory for the next checkpoint. They thought they could successfully challenge state certification of votes; that didn't work. They then thought that the Supreme Court would come to the rescue; that didn't work, either, with SCOTUS simply declining to consider the case.

Trump's last hope, it seems, is the presentation of the vote to Congress by Vice-President Pence on 6 January. That is no hope at all, since all in effect that will happen is that Pence will open the envelopes of state vote tallies, and announce the winner. That's it, nothing can happen to change the outcome -- though there is likely a fair amount of posturing and some ruckus in the background.

One amusing item on Twitter during December was a set of postings by Mohammaed Hussain in Ottawa, commenting on his Christmas season experiences:

BEGIN QUOTE:

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* I've been looking forward to getting a nice camera phone. I've got the money for a high-end phone, but I haven't found one that was exactly what I wanted. As an interim measure, I decided to buy a relatively cheap unlocked Chinese Xiaomi (pronounced "shao-mi") Redmi Note 9 Pro camera phone for about $250 USD, including an armor case. It has a quad-camera array in the back, with a 64 megapixel main camera, 8MP wide-angle camera, 5MP close-up macro camera, and a depth-sensor camera; there is also a 16MP selfie camera. The main camera "pixel-bins" to a 16MP image.

The Redmi Note 9 Pro It has a Snapdragon 720G chip with eight ARM cores, maximum clock speed for the faster cores being 2.3 gigahertz. It has a generous 6 gigabytes of RAM, and a not-so-generous 64GB of flash memory. No problem, the first thing I did was put in a 128GB flash chip -- which presented my first obstacle: how do I add flash memory? After a little refresh of my personal wetware memory, I realize that I needed to stick a tool that came with the smartphone into a little hole that would pop out a tray for flash and SIM cards. Actually, I didn't really need the tool, a bent paperclip works fine.

That done, I fired the phone up, and ran into my second obstacle: it came up in Arabic script. I was flummoxed for a while, until I figured there had to be a way to factory-reset the phone. I checked around online, and it turned out all had to do was hold down the power and volume-up buttons simultaneously for a while. I booted up in a clean mode, then went through phone configuration.

After I got comfortable with the phone, I started taking shots of Christmas lights. They were very blurry; further investigation demonstrated that the phone did not have optical image stabilization (OIS), making handheld night shots troublesome. I shrugged and ordered a mini-tripod from Amazon.com. Once I got the tripod, I was able to take good night shots, using a bluetooth remote shutter for hands-off operation.

The Redmi Note Pro 9 will work for now; it can take excellent daylight shots, and I can use the tripod for night shots -- it's small enough to fit into my kit bag. Again, it's just an interim solution, Xiaomi phones being said to not be all that robust, and inclined to cook up. They also have a reputation for throwing a lot of adware at users, but I didn't notice that.

My real solution, I believe, is the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, which will come out in January. It has a top-of-the-line camera array, built around a 108MP main camera -- pixel-binning to 12MP -- and has OIS, though reviews say a tripod is still needed for dark night shots. Price is not clear yet, but it stands to be expensive. No worries, I won't buy it until later in 2021, when I can get it renewed for a good markdown. Since I'm not going anywhere for a while, I can easily wait, and play with the Redmi Note Pro 9 in the meantime.

* Thanks to two readers this last month for donations to the website. They are much appreciated.