DayVectors

* America's Constitution (series), synthetic biology (series), SETI revival (series), self-teaching AI systems, bats versus viruses, AI systems predict protein-folding, uncertainties in Hubble constant, & why cats like catnip.

[FRI 30 JUL 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (161)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (161): The US-led invasion of Iraq had unforeseen consequences. In particular, it helped recruiting for Muslim extremists, the "jihadists (holy warriors)", with young Muslims in Western countries attracted to the cause. The end result was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had put out one fire, to start many others.

For the time being, however, such problems seemed more or less manageable. In 2003, Bush signed a new "Medicare Act", which enhanced the abilities of beneficiaries to buy prescription drugs, while increasing reliance on private insurance to deliver benefits. The push towards more privatization did not make critics of the Bush Administration happy, but the retired persons lobby group AARP endorsed it.

George W. Bush did not make any SCOTUS appointments in his first term, but there was a major SCOTUS decision in 2003, in LAWRENCE V. TEXAS. In 1998, John Geddes Lawrence JR, an older white man who lived in the Houston area, had been arrested along with Tyron Garner, a younger black man, when police raided Lawrence's apartment, to catch them in a "consensual homosexual act". A former boyfriend of Garner's had called the police, saying there was an illegal firearm in the apartment. They were fined under Texas sodomy laws, but decided to challenge the conviction.

The previous SCOTUS case on such a matter, BOWERS V. HARDWICK in 1986, had decided in favor of Georgia's sodomy law. This time around, SCOTUS judged 6:3 to strike down the Texas sodomy law, automatically taking out sodomy laws in 13 other states that had them on the books. It was a big leap forward for gay rights.

* Bush's approval ratings remained good, and his hold over the Republican Party was strong. The GOP retained control of Congress in the 2002 mid-terms; When elections came up in 2004, Bush had no primary challengers. He ran on a thoroughly conservative platform: continued support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the USA PATRIOT Act; modifying Social Security to create private investment accounts; and opposition to mandatory controls on greenhouse-gas emissions -- climate change having become an increasingly active issue. The platform also pushed, much less convincingly, for constitutional bans on abortion and same-sex marriage. They had no chance of happening, but they appealed to the voters.

Bush's opponent in the election was Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Kerry attacked Bush on getting America bogged down in Iraq, and on the sluggish economy. The Bush campaign fired back, playing the Reagan card and calling Kerry a "tax & spend" liberal, who had waffled in his support for the war in Iraq. Bush ended up winning by a comfortable but not generous margin, taking the popular vote with 50.7% to Kerry's 48.3%, and winning 31 of 50 states, 286 electoral votes in all. The Republicans retained control of both arms of Congress.

Bush's first major domestic effort of his second term was a drive to reform Social Security, which was facing potential bankruptcy down the road. He pushed for a partial privatization of the system, with Americans having personal Social Security accounts, and the ability to partially divert a part of their FICA Social Security tax into government-secured investments. The Democrats were not buying it, and it didn't happen. Bush did sign into law a Medicare drug benefit program that, by some accountings, would cost trillions over the longer run -- but with no credible funding mechanism.

In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, inflicting severe damage and many casualties on the city. The Federal response to the disaster was seen as tardy and inept. In the meantime, the conflict in Iraq dragged on, with no end in sight, and the economy remained sluggish. As a result, Bush's once-high approval ratings began to decline, with the Republicans losing control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 mid-terms.

[THU 29 JUL 21] TEACHER TEACHER

* TEACHER TEACHER: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Who Needs A Teacher? Artificial Intelligence Designs Lesson Plans For Itself" by Matthew Hutson, 19 January 2021), almost by definition, artificial intelligence (AI) systems can learn -- but the teaching scheme has to be very carefully designed, Now, researchers have devised an AI that can generate plans to teach itself what it needs to know, a capability that has wide-ranging applications.

The AI research team -- led by University of California (UC) Berkeley graduate student Michael Dennis and Natasha Jaques, a research scientist at Google -- started with an AI that tries to quickly reach a destination by navigating a 2D grid populated with solid blocks. The "agent" improves its abilities through a process called "reinforcement learning", which is a sort of trial & error process.

Of course, navigation gets more difficult as the "worlds" becomes increasingly complicated. The researchers experimented with two schemes to create more elaborate grids to challenge the AI:

• One approach randomly distributed blocks, which tended to frustrate the AI.
  
  
• The other approach leveraged off what had caused the AI trouble in the past, and used that to make a more difficult grid -- with the result that sometimes the grids were impossible to traverse.

Since the goal was to come up with a smarter AI, these two approaches were nonstarters. In consequence, the design team came up with a new approach that they call PAIRED:

• First, they coupled their AI with a nearly identical one, if with a slightly different set of strengths, which they called the "antagonist".
  
  
• Second, they had a third AI design worlds that were suited to the antagonist and easy for it, but hard for the original "protagonist". That kept the tasks just at the edge of the protagonist's ability to solve. The designer, like the two agents, used a neural network to learn its task over many trials.

The protagonist was challenged with a set of difficult mazes. Without PAIRED, it couldn't solve any of them; but with PAIRED, it could solve one in five. In another study, Jaques and colleagues at Google used a version of PAIRED to teach an AI agent to fill out web forms and book a flight. While a simpler teaching method led it to fail nearly every time, an AI trained with the PAIRED method succeeded about 50% of the time.

Bart Selman -- a computer scientist at Cornell University, and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence -- and his team have developed an alternative approach for development of such "autocurricula". Their task was a game named "Sokoban", in which an AI agent must push blocks to target locations. Since blocks can get stuck in dead ends, success often requires planning hundreds of steps ahead. It's along the lines of rearranging large furniture in a small apartment.

Their system created a collection of simpler puzzles to train on, with fewer blocks and targets. Then, based on the performance of their AI, it selects puzzles that the agent has trouble solving, effectively ratcheting the lesson plan. Selman says it's not always easy to figure out the right puzzles: "The notion of what is a simpler task is not always obvious."

The researchers tested their trained agent on 225 problems that no computer had ever solved. It cracked 80% of them, with about one-third of its success coming strictly from the novel training method. Selman says: "That was just fun to see."

* As discussed in Rohit Prasad -- a senior researcher at Amazon's Alexa Artificial Intelligence lab -- in WIRED.com ("The Three Ways Alexa Is Going To Get Smarter In The Next Decade", 28 January 2021), Amazon sees its artificial intelligence technology as getting smarter in a number of specific ways over the next decade.

At present, as Prasad notes, machine learning is based on handing an AI system a set of data inputs, along with outputs that are linked by labels to the inputs. In principle, once the learning is sufficient, the AI system will then be able to take any new input and link it to a known output. This is laborious and time-consuming, with a push in AI system design to allow them to learn from much smaller datasets, one way being self-teaching via interaction with users.

Prasad's top concern is, of course, Amazon's Alexa AI assistant. Right now, Alexa can competently interpret user commands, such as: "Turn on the lights." -- and questions such as: "What is the route to the supermarket?" However, users want more than the mere ability to understand simple commands, thinking in terms of broader commands, such as: "Find the best smartphone cameras." -- and questions: "Any ideas for the weekend?"

The first approach towards a smarter Alexa is "semi-supervised learning". This is a form of "boostrapping", where a small amount of labeled data is combined with large amounts of unlabeled data, and used to teach an AI system. For example, in an Alexa effort for improving automatic speech recognition, a large "teacher" model was first trained on thousands of hours of labeled speech data. The teacher was then used to train a "student" model on millions of hours of unlabeled data.

The second approach is "self-supervised learning", where the AI learns by predicting one part of the input from what it knows about another. "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)" for natural-language processing, created by Google, for example, uses large unlabeled data sets to "pre-train" a general language model, which can then be optimized for a specific task using a small amount of labeled data.

The third, and arguably the most significant, approach will be AI self-learning from user feedback. If an AI assistant does something wrong, users may ask again, or rephrase their inquiry. The AI will apply the lesson in the future. In any case, AI assistants promise to become much smarter in the future.

[ED: The idea of AI "bootstrapping" has similarities to curve fitting: given a set of data points, an equation defining a curve can be obtained, with new data points falling around that curve. A bootstrapping AI similarly uses a relatively small data set to establish a framework that should correctly determine the outputs for new data, with the new data resulting in a more robust AI.

The problem with curve fitting is that it falls down for data points that don't really fit on the derived curve. A bootstrapping AI has much the same problem, having no way to match data points that are outside of its experience. It would be good for an AI to be able to notice data points that seem anomalous, and pass them up to a human for inspection.]

[WED 28 JUL 21] BATS VERSUS VIRUSES

BATS VERSUS VIRUSES: As discussed in an article from INSIDESCIENCE.org ("This Is How Bats Survive Deadly Viruses Better Than Humans" by Charles Q. Choi, 31 October 2020), bats are one of the "prime suspects" of the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. They may beat the rap on that charge -- but if so, they are still fascinating for their ability to resist pathogens.

Bats can host many viruses that are potentially deadly to humans, including those behind SARS, Ebola, and possibly SARS-CoV-2. Researchers have now discovered key ways in which bats can live with these pathogens, while suffering few bad effects from them. That may reveal ways to deal with these contagions in humans.

According to the EcoHealth Alliance -- an environmental health nonprofit group in New York -- roughly 75% of emerging infectious diseases humans face are "zoonotic", or come from animals. In the past two decades, researchers have discovered that bats host some of the most lethal emerging infectious diseases, such as those behind maladies such as Nipah, Hendra, Marburg, and MERS -- while the animals only rarely display clinical symptoms from such contagions. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, says:

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In 2016, virologist Wang Lin-Fa -- at Duke / National University of Singapore Medical School and his colleagues discovered that all known bat genomes have lost the genes encoding molecules known as "AIM2-like receptors". In humans, these immune proteins detect the DNA of hostile germs within cells, and can trigger a cascade of events leading to inflammation and cell death.

In a new study, Wang and his colleagues introduced the genes for human AIM2-like receptors into bat kidney and immune cells grown in lab dishes. This resulted in a clustering of proteins in the cells that usually mark the onset of inflammation. However, installing AIM2-like receptors in bat cells did not restore other known inflammatory responses, such as activation of the enzyme "caspase-1", which plays a key role in mobilizing immune defenses. In black fruit bats (Pteropus alecto), the scientists found that caspase-1 featured changes that likely blunted its activity.

The researchers also discovered that in black fruit bats, the cave nectar bat (Eonycteris spelaea), and the vesper bat David's myotis (Myotis davidii), a protein known as "interleukin 1 beta" that is activated by caspase-1 in humans featured modifications that made it less active in response to greater caspase-1 activity.

These new findings suggest bats evolved strategies to dial down their inflammatory responses at multiple levels, some of which might have evolved independently several times -- and could help bats tolerate potentially lethal viruses. Although the loss of AIM2-like receptors might prove a liability in some way to bats, from an evolutionary standpoint, as Wang notes, such a risk should be more than offset by avoiding the harm from an overactive immune response to pathogens.

Bats are unusually prone to picking up infectious diseases, since they are mobile and tend to live in dense colonies. That much is obvious, the interesting question being what advantage would they get from suppressing inflammation? As Wang points out, since bats are flying creatures, they are under high metabolic stress. Peter Daszak, who was not involved in Wang's research, elaborates:

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Daszak adds that suppressing inflammation may give bats their long lifespans:

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As Wang points out, over-inflammation plays an important role in many human diseases, "especially those associated with aged patients. If we can learn the lessons from bats and apply some of them to human clinical interventions, it will be definitely novel, and they will hopefully have less side effects." That may be particularly applicable to COVID-19.

Wang emphasizes that these findings should not imply that bats are pests to be eradicated, saying: "Culling bats will have a devastating effect on our ecosystem, which can actually lead to more disease outbreaks. Bats play a key role in controlling mosquitos and other insects, which are vectors of many important pathogens."

Daszak adds that, with regards to the threat of zoonotic diseases acquired from bats, "there are very simple low-tech solutions we could adopt, like reducing the wildlife trade, and reducing contact with bat colonies by not cutting down forests."

[TUE 27 JUL 21] SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (2)

* SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (2): The third element that led to the creation of synthetic biology was less philosophical than the other two, the interest being in "metabolic engineering". Life processes, metabolic processes, operate in cycles, using sets of "enzymes" -- catalytic proteins -- to generate an end product. There's a wide range of metabolic processes in nature, some of which generated end products useful to humans. Researchers wonder if, using the new genetic tools, they could build metabolic processes from the ground up that would generate useful end products much more efficiently than natural products.

One of the most significant of the early efforts along his line was a project led by Jay Keasling -- a professor at the University of California, Berkeley -- to create a metabolic pathway which created a precursor to artemisinin, a molecule made by a plant called Chinese sweet wormwood, and not available from any other source, that had been discovered to be an excellent malaria drug.

By the turn of the century, synthetic biology was coming together. By 2002, engineering undergraduates at MIT were using genes bought online to alter bacteria. In 2003, Keasling and colleagues founded a company, Amyris, focused on making artemisinin and other useful products. The first international conference on synthetic biology took place at MIT in 2004, with the first iGEM Jamboree following soon after.

The media picked up on the excitement -- not just because of the open-ended potential of synthetic biology, but because it's always good copy to write about scientists charging forward into "things that humanity was not meant to know." Drew Endy, a charismatic young leader in the MIT group, talked of "re-implementing life in a manner of our choosing" and shaking off the constraints of evolution. George Church of Harvard talked of synthesizing not just genes but whole genomes, including, possibly, those of creatures now extinct.

More practically, emerging companies in the field decided to jump into biofuels. With climate change becoming increasingly obvious and decarbonization looming on the horizon, biofuels seemed like a grand opportunity. Governments were intrigued, and pumped in subsidies. The exercise went nowhere in any hurry; scaling up tinkerings in the lab to huge industrial processes proved much harder and more expensive than expected. To make matters worse, oil prices then went on one of their downward excursions. The projects failed.

Investors became leery of synthetic biology, but some governments, including those of Britain and Singapore, still thought the idea had potential. In the USA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's "blue sky" research office -- created an office of biology in 2013. In 2015, DARPA launched a program that awarded contracts to labs working on synthetic biology to create pathways that would generate 1,000 different molecules never synthesized by a biosystem before. That goal was met in 2019, and represented a significant milestone in the evolution of synthetic biology.

Synthetic biology, it seems, has gone through the traditional "hype cycle": exaggerated expectations at the outset, leading to disappointment and crash -- following by slow improvement that gradually reaches critical mass. Academia and startups alike feel they have a better grasp of what they're doing, and have much more self-confidence. That is in part because better tools have become available.

Over the past twenty years, gene-editing tools have become much more effective and diverse. The most prominent is based on a scheme named CRISPR that is both easy to use and precise; it plays a big role in iGEM competitions, and is enabling practical efforts in synthetic biology across the board. Improved methods of DNA synthesis have also been a big boost, with costs of synthesizing a gene falling by a factor of a thousand over the last two decades. Investors are interested in the field again. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[MON 26 JUL 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 29

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Some weeks back, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up a committee under Member of House Benny Thompson of Mississippi to investigate the 6 January Capitol riot. She appointed six other Democrats to the committee, plus fiery Republican House Member Liz Cheney of Wyoming, and invited GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to appoint five more Republicans.

After some weeks, McCarthy came up with his appointments -- the most noticeable being Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan has worked hard to obtain a reputation as loudmouthed, belligerent, ignorant, dishonest, and generally obnoxious; all he would do on the committee is try to subvert it. Another appointment was Jim Banks of Indiana, who is not as notorious as Jordan, but made it clear he was cut from the same cloth with an announcement in response to the appointment:

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Pelosi, who had veto power on the appointments, rejected both of them, announcing:

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One witness in Pelosi's office described the relevant conversation between Pelosi and McCarthy as a "wall of screaming". Another witness said more mildly that there were "raised voices". McCarthy publicly shot back:

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Pelosi did not change her mind, with McCarthy yanking his nominations, and then adding that "we will run our own investigation," focusing on the Capitol's lack of preparedness for the riot -- to be blamed on Pelosi, of course -- and prevention of a future attack.

It was all very predictable. McCarthy could have had no doubt that Jim Jordan would be rejected; there was never any serious intent to support the investigation. Pelosi could have bet on the outcome, and she immediately moved on to an alternate play -- first reaching out to Republican House Member Adam Kinzinger to the committee and then, it appears, casting a net for retired GOP House Members. At a press conference, Pelosi brushed off questions about McCarthy, saying: "I'm not talking about him. Let's not waste each other's time." She then said:

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Liz Cheney, her demeanor like thunderclouds while speaking from the steps of the Capitol Building, also fired back at McCarthy:

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This is only the beginning: every time McCarthy spouts off, Cheney will immediately shove it right back down his throat. It will be interesting to see how long he will persist in this game.

It will also be interesting to see how McCarthy's "Junior Woodchuck Capitol Riot Whitewash Committee" will fare -- not well, I suspect probably comically. [ED: As of November 2021, not a peep about it.] Incidentally, one Republican Member of the House -- James Comer of Kentucky -- told a reporter, in response to the ruckus, just what needed to be done about the 1-06 investigation:

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Of course, that is precisely what Nancy Pelosi tried to set up, and the GOP refused to go along. Indeed, Comer voted against it. It is impossible to figure out if Comer had some reason to talk such trash, or if he was so dense that he didn't realize it was trash.

As part of this exasperating dark comedy, JD Vance -- who wrote the best-seller HILLBILLY ELEGY, and who is after a Senate seat under the MAGA banner -- claimed that the "culture wars", so enjoyed by the MAGAs, were actually created by the "childless Left". With the tweet in reply:

The INS home office / @INSHomeService: Um, [Pelosi's] grandkids outnumber most states' congressional delegations.

This with the photo of Pelosi being sworn in as Speaker, surrounded by her grandkids and the kids of friendly House members. I replied: "OK, that makes my blog posting for Monday." Joe Biden has made it clear that he regards Trump as a distraction, and is leaving that concern up to Pelosi. She seems more than agreeable, even enthusiastic. Trump is no match for the Dragon Queen.

* On another front, the Biden Administration is becoming increasingly frustrated with the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic because people are failing or refusing to get vaccinated. The White House has put pressure on social media to clamp down on trolls spreading vaccine misinformation, and put enough pressure on Fox News to get them to back up a bit.

Alas, it's hard to see that much will change. The Right, thanks to Trump, has decided, somehow, that it serves their interests to undermine efforts to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control. As evidence, GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky attacked the Bush Administration's pandemic guru, Dr. Anthony Fauci, while Fauci was speaking with Congress. The trolls have made much of the fact that the US provided some funds to the biomedical research lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic broke out -- in particular claiming that the US funded "gain of function" research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus to make it more dangerous. There was a hot exchange between Paul and Fauci:

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Fauci goes Full Brooklyn when angry, and he was visibly angry. It appears the government and other responsible entities are going to take more severe measures to get people vaccinated, and soon.

As for myself, I'm feeling relaxed about the pandemic, since it's now at a very low level in Colorado. However, I've been thinking of taking a road trip to Seattle in September, but if things remain unsettled -- maybe not. Instead of ending on a discouraged note ... THE DAILY SHOW's Desi Lydic offered a "GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCEMENT" to reassure vaccine skeptics that there are, despite their fears, no microchips in the vaccines:

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* Incidentally, I was originally going to try to transcribe this video by ear, which is time-consuming. I got to thinking there had to be an app to transcribe text out of videos, and a little searching showed me there were a number of them out there.

However, I then got to wondering if there was a plugin for the Firefox web browser that would do the job. I found one immediately, titled simply TRANSCRIPT DOWNLOADER for YouTube videos, by one Raj Shekhar Dev. It works very simply, with a scrolling text window popping up to the right of the YouTube video. The text goes into the system Clipboard, and can be pasted into any editor.

Of course, the text needed formatting and spell checking, but I expected that much. This is yet another one of those little things that I wish I had thought of doing ten years ago.

[FRI 23 JUL 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (160)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (160): The "9-11" attacks on the USA spawned a conspiracy industry, in which the Bush Administration was accused of having foreknowledge of the attack, or even being complicit in it, with the conspiracy theories having many variations. While there had been a few missed signals, there was never any substance to the accusations, though they took over a decade to fade out.

In parallel, concerns over the signals missed before the 9-11 attack led to a very quick reappraisal of American's internal security system. The first consequence was the PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, which enhanced the government's surveillance capabilities, allowed indefinite detention of immigrants, and expanded the domain of warrantless search and seizure. It would be gradually whittled down over the next two decades by court decisions and modifications of the act, to finally die out.

More enduringly, the "Department of Homeland Security (DHS)" established in November 2002 under the "Homeland Security Act". It placed 22 agencies under one roof, including US Customs, Immigration & Naturalization, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service, and the Coast Guard.

Another consequence was the incarceration of terrorist suspects captured in Afghanistan at the US Navy base at Guantanamo, Cuba. This was done to avoid restraints on the legal status and treatment of prisoners, had they been kept in Stateside facilities. "Gitmo", as the military called it, quickly became controversial, in particular because of the use of harsh interrogation techniques there.

At the time, however, Bush's public approval ratings were very high. The apparent success of US forces in Afghanistan led to overreach. In his State of the Union Address in January 2002, Bush spoke of an "axis of evil", consisting of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq -- with a particular focus on Iraq. Saddam Hussein's attempts to thwart sanctions and frustrate UN inspectors had long rankled conservatives, and they wanted to settle scores with Saddam Hussein. Later on in 2002, the CIA provided reports of his efforts to reconstitute a biological and chemical weapons capability, and to seek nuclear weapons.

On the basis of Saddam Hussein's alleged efforts to obtain "weapons of mass destruction (WMD)", the Bush Administration pushed for military intervention. There was opposition in the UN and no approval for such an action from that direction, but the US was able to assemble a "coalition of the willing" -- consisting of more than 20 countries, notably the UK -- to invade Iraq. Much to the anger of the Bush Administration, the French refused to go along, saying the Americans would be buying themselves a great deal of trouble if they overthrew Saddam Hussein. The Bush Administration didn't listen; the assault began on 20 March 2003, and quickly overran the country. Bush declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED on 1 May 2003.

He would regret those words. The US occupation forces soon found themselves involved in a wasting insurgency. The ruling class under Saddam Hussein had been effectively Sunni Muslim, dominating a larger population of Shiite Muslims; overthrowing Saddam Hussein upset the social order. Worse for the Bush Administration, Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, the basis for intervention, turned out to be an illusion. He had been pursuing "dual-use" facilities that could be used to produce biological and chemical weapons once sanctions had been subverted. However, Iraq never really had a nuclear program. The Bush Administration had been seeing what they wanted to see -- though admittedly, the games Saddam Hussein had been playing with UN inspection teams did provoke suspicion of his intent.

[THU 22 JUL 21] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article in AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Will US Army Missile Buys Mean Fewer US Air Force Bombers?" by Steve Trimble, 05 February 2021), there's been a push by the US Army to enhance its surface-to-surface missile (SSM) arsenal, under the "Long-Range Precision Fires (LRPF)" effort.

Since the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, the service's missile inventory had been limited to the 300-kilometer (185-mile) range of the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, and 70-kilometer (45-mile) range of the M-270 Multiple Launch Rocket System. However, the US and Russia dumped the treat in 2019, freeing the Army to acquire ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with conventional warheads and ranges up to 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles).

The baseline version of the Lockheed Martin Precision Strike Missile (PSM) will enter service in 2023 with a range of just about 500 kilometers (310 miles), but a follow-on version to be introduced in 2025 will have a range of up to 800 kilometers (500 miles). The Army has also selected the Raytheon SM-6 multirole missile and UGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile for new ground-launched roles, with prototypes to go into test in 2023. At that time, Lockheed will field the first "Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW)", a rocket-boosted glider with a conventional warhead. Once these weapons are in service, the Army will no longer need the Air Force's bombers and fighter-bombers to hunt and destroy targets deep inside enemy territory. The Army is also working on a "Multi-Domain Sensor System" to provide intelligence for, among other things, targeting such long-range weapons.

Does that mean diminished influence for the Air Force, and cutbacks on its strike assets? General Frank Murray, in charge of the Army's Futures Command and the architect of LRPF, said that the effort was an outgrowth of observing recent military operations, particularly in Ukraine, in light of Russian and Chinese evaluation of US doctrines of the last few decades.

The key to the modern mindset is "anti-access / area-denial (AA-AD)", or in short having weapons that prevent an adversary from getting into operational areas. In itself, AA-AD is defensive, but it has offensive implications, since an adversary has to overcome those defenses. Murray believes that both Army LRPF and USAF strike assets will be needed to overcome AA-AD, and that these are assets "are actually complementary, not contradictory. I think we've got to have both."

[ED: It appears that some senior USAF brass are very unhappy with the LRPF concept, clearly feeling it is an intrusion on Air Force turf. However, it also appears that nobody cares what they think about it.]

* As discussed in an article from MILITARY.com ("Army Wants To Replace The Cold War-Era TOW Missile With A New Longer-Range Tank Killer" by Matthew Cox, 8 April 2021), the US fielded the "Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided (TOW)" anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) in 1970. It proved highly effective -- a gunner simply kept a sight on a target, with commands sent to the missile over trailing wires to direct to a kill -- and has served faithfully in America's wars from that time. The US Army is now working to obtain a replacement under the "Close Combat Missile System / Heavy (CCMS-H)" program.

The Army fielded the first TOW missile system in 1970. Range was about 3,750 meters (2.3 miles). It proved capable, but soldiers had to remain stationary and vulnerable to enemy fire as the missile tracked to the target. The service wants the future ATGM to have the same general form-factor as the TOW, for compatibility with launchers, but with a range of at least 10,000 meters (6.2 miles), and greater speed. The Army wants troops to be able to lock the new missile on target before and, if needed, after launching, he said. It should also be maneuverable so it can go after enemy vehicles hiding behind cover, suggesting a "non-line of sight (NLOS)" capability.

Mark Andrews, chief of the Combat Capabilities Branch at the Maneuver Requirements Division, says that the CCMS-H should be able to share targeting information with other combat vehicles: "So, an adjacent vehicle could take your targeting data and you could pass it to them, and they could fire the missile because they are best postured to fire that missile."

* As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("British Troops Get Small Swarming Drones They Can Fire From 40mm Grenade Launchers" by Joseph Trevithick, 3 February 2021, the classic 40-millimeter grenade launcher has been around for about 60 years, and it has acquired a range of different types of ammunition. Now British troops have obtained a quadcopter drone that can be fired from a 40-millimeter grenade launcher.

It is reported that members of the UK Task Group in Mali had received "several hundred" Drone40 quadcopters from Australian firm DefendTex. British forces are in Mali as part of Operation NEWCOMBE, which provides British support to Operation BARKHANE -- a French-led regional counter-terrorism effort -- and the United Nation's "Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA in its French acronym)".

The Drone40s have a modular payload scheme that allows them to carry cameras or warheads, including high-explosive, anti-armor, flash-bang, or smoke; they can potentially carry radio jammers or even laser target markers. The length varies with payload -- they're too long for some older grenade launchers, like the classic American M203. They can also be hand-launched, if with some loss of range, and fly as a swarm after launch, under the control of a GPS-enabled navigation system and radio link. It appears British troops in Mali are only using the video payload, which sends its imagery back to a tablet. Flight endurance is from a half-hour to an hour, depending on payload.

The US Army has evaluated another drone that can be shot from a 40-millimeter grenade launcher, the Cerberus GL, from Skyborne Technologies, also of Australia, and researchers from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) have patented a "Grenade Launched Unmanned Aerial System (GLUAS)".

[WED 21 JUL 21] AI & PROTEIN-FOLDING

* AI & PROTEIN-FOLDING: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("The Game Has Changed: AI Triumphs At Solving Protein Structures" by Robert F. Service, 30 November 2020), proteins are long-chain molecules, made up of 20 "amino acid" subunits. It is, with modern technology, straightforward to determine the sequence of amino acids in a protein chain; what is not straightforward is figuring out how the chain folds up on itself, its 3D structure determining its function. There's just too many ways it can fold, and of course, the problem gets worse with longer chains. It's too much of a challenge for raw computing power.

Now, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to solve the protein-folding problem. A biennial protein-folding competition was aced by researchers at DeepMind, a UK-based AI company. The Deepmind work is likely to have far-reaching consequences. Knowing the 3D structure of a protein could help researchers come up with drugs that can target in proteins' pockets and crevices, while being able to synthesize proteins with a desired structure could accelerate the development of enzymes that make biofuels and degrade waste plastic. Janet Thornton, director emeritus of the European Bioinformatics Institute, says: "What the DeepMind team has managed to achieve is fantastic and will change the future of structural biology and protein research."

The traditional approach towards determining 3D protein structure was observational techniques such as x-ray crystallography or cryo–electron microscopy ("cryo-EM"). However, that's a laborious approach, and doesn't always work out. Structures have been solved for only about 170,000 of the more than 200 million known proteins. From the 1960s, researchers investigated the use of computing power to determine protein structures -- but "brute-force" computing was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task.

In 1994 John Moult -- a structural biologist at the University of Maryland, Shady Grove -- and colleagues set up a competition, named the "Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP)" -- to be conducted every two years. Entrants get amino acid sequences for about 100 proteins whose structures are not known; some groups compute a structure for each sequence, while other groups determine it experimentally. The organizers then compare the computational predictions with the lab results and give the predictions a "global distance test (GDT)" score. Moult says that scores above 90 on the zero to 100 scale are considered equivalent to experimental methods.

Early on in CASP, computers could only determine the 3D structures of small, simple proteins: large proteins resulted in worthless GDT scores of about 20. By 2016, computers were getting scores of about 40 -- much better, but still not close enough. They managed to do that well by obtaining clues from known protein structures.

DeepMind first competed in CASP in 2018, as discussed here in 2019. Its algorithm, called "AlphaFold", relied on this comparative strategy -- but it took it a big step further. AlphaFold used an AI scheme known as "deep learning", in which it was fed a large set of descriptions of protein chains and their 3D structures. Having learned from the set, AlphaFold could then be fed a protein chain that didn't have a known structure, and come up with a highly educated guess about what the structure really ways. It blew past the competition, coming up with GDT scores of about 60 for the hardest targets.

That was an impressive leap in capability, but according to John Jumper -- who heads AlphaFold's development at DeepMind -- it wasn't good enough to be useful: "We knew how far we were from biological relevance." The development team realized that deep learning wasn't enough, and added an "attention algorithm" that allowed AlphaFold to break down the problem into smaller pieces. The attention algorithm mimics the way a person solves a jigsaw puzzle: first putting together pieces in small clusters, the "pieces" in this case being amino acids, and then moving from these "local" determinations to a "global" determination of how all the clusters fit together. Working with a computer network built around 128 machine learning processors, they trained the algorithm on all 170,000 or so known protein structures.

The results were spectacular. At the 2020 CASP, AlphaFold obtained a median GDT score of 92.4, obtaining a score of 87 with the toughest targets. It even excelled at solving structures of proteins that sit wedged in cell membranes, which are central to many human diseases but notoriously difficult to solve with x-ray crystallography. All the teams in the 2020 CASP showed big improvements, but none were close to AlphaFold, leading to suspicions that DeepMind was cheating.

CASP organizers accordingly set up a special challenge: to determine the structure of a membrane protein from a species of archaea, a sibling group to bacteria. That protein had long resisted analysis with x-ray crystallography. AlphaFold had no problems with it, returning a detailed image of a three-part protein with two long helical arms in the middle. Suddenly, the x-ray crystallography images made perfect sense.

As a condition of the competition, none of the entrants were allowed to keep their schemes secret. That will be a big benefit to experimentalists, who will be able to use accurate structure predictions to make sense of baffling x-ray and cryo-EM data. Moult says it could also enable drug designers to quickly work out the structure of every protein in emerging dangerous pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, a key step in the hunt for molecules to block them.

AlphaFold is still not perfect. In the contest, it stumbled one protein, an amalgam of 52 small repeating segments, which distort each other's positions as they assemble. Jumper says the team now wants to train AlphaFold to solve such structures, as well as those of complexes of proteins that hook together to carry out key functions in the cell. Nonetheless, computational solution of 3D protein structures has finally come of age -- and, as AI systems accelerate the determination of protein structures, they will have more to learn from, and become ever more powerful. Moult says: "I never thought I'd see this in my lifetime."

[ED: In late-breaking news, DeepMind has "open-sourced" AlphaFold, giving access to its source code to anyone who wants it. It's not clear what the strategy behind that move is, but it doesn't sound like a bad move.]

[TUE 20 JUL 21] SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (1)

* SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (1): ECONOMIST.com ran a survey on "Synthetic Biology" (4 April 2019, by Oliver Morton), which started out at the 2018 "International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM)" competition in Boston, Massachusetts. More than 300 teams from 42 nations took part, with entries including an effort to give bacteria a sense of smell, and fungi that could be used to build bases on Mars. A group of Chinese high-school students won an award for synthesizing the active ingredient of catnip in yeast and bacteria; they think it may help programs which round up stray cats.

One of the big lessons of the competition was that rethinking organisms -- "synthetic biology" -- is hard, and many efforts are disappointments. Nonetheless, there are dozens of synthetic-biology startups around the world that started life as iGEM teams. Ginkgo Bioworks, a firm that emerged from teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that competed in 2004 and 2006, designs organisms for clients in agriculture and the chemicals industry in its Boston labs. Ginkgo's business is booming, the firm having attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.

However, most participants in the iGEM Grand Jamboree are not thinking first and foremost about getting rich, being instead fascinated by the technology and its potential. There's nothing new about humans leveraging biology for their own purposes; we've been selectively breeding crops and domestic animals for thousands of years, as well as reshaping environments -- not always for the better -- by introducing foreign organisms. The discovery of the genetic code of DNA in the 1950s and 1960s was a game-changer, allowing humans to tinker with the "blueprints" of organisms, instead of simply exploiting natural variation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, machines became available that could synthesize DNA to order, one letter or "base" of the DNA code at a time. That presented the option of, instead of merely tweaking organisms, humans could rearrange them from the ground up. That led in turn, around the end of the century, to three academic trends that would come together to create synthetic biology.

The first trend was centered on computer engineers at MIT. Having helped establish the computer revolution, they saw the new DNA technologies as supporting the "programming" of cells, allowing them to be engineered somewhat like computers and software. The normal operation of cells is very complicated, following convoluted rules -- cells hadn't been designed, they had evolved. However, what if humans took what they knew, and made up their own rules? Life processes would then be transformed into something more amenable to engineering, using well-defined standardized parts.

Tom Knight, one of the pioneers at MIT, and his colleagues saw this sort of biological engineering as not fundamentally different from their work on the early internet and pre-PC computer workstations. They excited their students, many of which immediately had visions of the re-engineered dinosaurs of the movie JURASSIC PARK.

The second trend that led to synthetic biology came from academics who were thinking in a different direction: instead of trying to end-run around the cell's natural mechanisms, they wanted to duplicate them. They were particularly interested in the systems by which cells turn genes on and off. Only when a gene is on, or "expressed", will a cell make the protein described by that gene's sequence. When the gene is turned off, or "repressed", the protein's production stops. The expression of genes is fundamental to the structure and operation of cells; it is why a brain cell, for example, differs from a muscle cell, or a cancer cell from a healthy one.

In 2000, two teams published designs for new genetic "circuits", with which they could control the expression of one gene with a protein made by another. In one of the gene circuits, the genetic switches flicked each other on and off over time. Genetic circuitry like this "repressilator" was trivial compared with the co-ordinated gene expression that cells do all their lives. Howvever, as one of the designers of the repressilator noted, "at this stage one can learn more by putting together a simple if inaccurate pendulum clock, than one can by disassembling the finest Swiss timepiece." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[MON 19 JUL 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 28

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Donald Trump remains at the center of US public attention, as demonstrated by new books on the last year of his presidency. CNN's Stephen Collinson examined them ("New Trump Revelations Underscore His Undimmed Danger", 15 July 2021), and found the picture they painted frightening. The book I ALONE CAN FIX IT -- by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker -- focused in part on Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, who was so appalled by Trump's refusal to concede defeat that Milley feared Trump might attempt a coup.

Milley told his deputies: "They may try, but they're not going to fucking succeed. ... You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns."

Trump did try, inciting a mob to overrun the Capitol Building, though it accomplished nothing but to discredit him. However, since then, the Republican Party has been taking Trump's cue, and is trying to subvert state electoral systems. There is the question of whether Milley is on the level, or just trying to cover his historical tracks. Since the Joint Chiefs reacted angrily to Trump's attempts to get the military to take on urban unrest, it seems likely he is sincere and accurate.

Of course, much of what the books write about is no surprise:

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The books highlight that there were parts of the government, particularly the military, that Trump had failed to place under his control. Leonnig and Rucker found out that the Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one-by-one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they judged to be illegal, dangerous, or foolish. Milley feared that Trump would fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel in order to strengthen his control over the intelligence services. That didn't happen, but there was a precedent -- when Trump fired (former) FBI Director James Comey, Trump actually publicly announced Comey was fired because of the Russia investigation. It was most fortunate that Trump wasn't re-elected, since he would have installed his stooges all through the government, and then would be able to do anything he wanted.

In parallel news, the British GUARDIAN newspaper reported on documents supposedly leaked from the Russian government that outlined the Kremlin's plans to install Trump as US president in 2016 -- the documents saying that Trump was an "impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex". The documents referred to compromising materials or "kompromat" that the Russians had on Trump.

The GUARDIAN article was interesting, but it wasn't credible. Nothing gets leaked from the Kremlin unless the Russians want it leaked, and then they deny it -- meaning there's no way to know if it was really leaked or not. The most that could be said about it was that it was not a revelation, simply saying things that anyone with sense effectively already knew. The same could be said about the new books on Trump. It was good to know specifics, and also to get a reminder: the USA is not out of the woods yet. Trump and the Republicans are in a weak position that's continuing to degrade, but they can still raise a lot of hell.

* I got to playing games on my Amazon Fire TV Cube, using a bluetooth game controller. The Cube is an Android computer, and it can run Android games -- but it's dodgy trying to download games to the Cube from anywhere but Amazon.com, and their game app selection is limited. I then got to wondering if I could just run a web browser in the Cube and play HTML 5 games instead. They're usually simple games that don't take a long time to play, which is what I want, not having a lot of time to spare for games. There's literally thousands of HTML 5 games out there.

The Cube has a Silk web browser, but trying to run HTML 5 games with it just didn't work. That failing, I thought I could a browser on my old XBOX 360 / Kinect, hooked up to the alternate HDMI port on my TV set. It's a Windows PC, and I could in principle download Internet Explorer to run on it. However, in practice I got a cryptic error message when I tried. I looked it up, and found out it meant: GAMEBOX IS TOO OLD NO LONGER SUPPORTED! Well, why didn't you just tell me that?

I wondered if I should get a new gamebox instead, but figured that was expensive and didn't really meet my needs. Why would I need a zippy game machine to run HTML 5 games? I finally concluded that I should get a little cheap "brick" PC, hook it up to my TV HDMI, and run a web browser on that. I accordingly bought a really cheap BMAX PC from Amazon for about $145 USD. It had a dual-core processor, base clock speed of 1.6 GHz. I figured there wasn't a PC I could buy these days that couldn't keep up with HTML 5 games.

I got the BMAX PC, and set it up. The first hangup was that, when I initially booted, I tried to use a wireless keyboard; that doesn't work, Windows didn't recognize the wireless USB dongle, so I plugged in a USB keyboard instead. Second problem was some confusion over logins, a clash between my desktop and my new little game PC.

That done, I struggled to run games on it. Struggle was the right word, since to my surprise, the PC was too sluggish to do the job. Fortunately, it died on me just before the return window closed, so I sent it back and got a refund. I bought a CHUWI brick PC that had a dual CPU running at 3.2 GHz, and an Intel Iris graphics coprocessor. I got it, and it was much more satisfactory -- indeed, the CHUWI PC was defined as a game machine. The end result was that I spent about as much as I would had I bought a Nintendo or such, but it was still better tuned to my needs.

In the meantime, I had been considering other issues in getting the game PC. I'd only wanted to run HTML 5 games, but then I remembered: "Duh, of course there are plenty of games that run on Windows." I got into the Windows store online, to find that the pickings were sparse. Further poking around, however, revealed that I was missing something obvious: the PC gaming site named "Steam" that supports gaming on Windows and Mac PCs.

Duh again, I hadn't realized the -- obvious in hindsight -- fact that there's still plenty of gaming on desktop PCs, with Steam set up to serve that market. Steam meshed with another issue: I had assumed that my bluetooth game controller would normally work like a mouse under Windows, since it does on the Fire TV Cube. No, by default, Windows doesn't know about it. Games on a PC will only work with a controller if they've been designed to do so, otherwise only working with a mouse.

Fortunately, Steam includes a downloadable environment to control the gaming experience and access to a user game library, and it allows configuration of a bluetooth controller to act like a mouse. That led to the next problem, in that the controller joystick was too hysterically sensitive to be useful. Steam didn't seem to have any way to slow down the joystick -- but then I realized that, since the controller was emulating a mouse, I needed to configure the mouse settings via Windows. I set the speed to minimum, which was a bit too slow, but the next setting up was too fast.

Having got the CHUWI PC and the game controller working, I was flying on HTML 5 games, the performance being perfectly adequate. I decided to buy a Windows game to try that out, and selected DISNEYLAND ADVENTURES -- one reason being that it was cheap, only $20 USD. I also had liked playing it on my XBOX 360. It has an environment which involves running around a virtual Disneyland, which is only really fun for kids, but also has sets of "mini-games" standing in for rides. I got particularly fond of the SPACE MOUNTAIN, BUZZ LIGHTYEAR, and MATTERHORN BOBSLED mini-games.

It was slow downloading the game over a wi-fi connection, but no worries, I could let it download and go do other things for an hour or two. When I ran the game, after some initial fumblings, it ran just fine, no performance problems at all. I had played the game with the Kinect interactive scanner on my XBOX 360; I found playing it with the bluetooth controller to be more controllable and fun, though figuring out the control mappings was a bit of a chore. I'd discovered that I could use the Kinect scanner with the game PC if I bought an adapter, so I did -- but I decided not to bother. I stuck the scanner and adapter in a box and put it away, in case I decided to play with it later.

The big problem now for me is sorting through the thousands of games available to find ones I want to play. I can do that on my desktop. I vaguely recalled that it was possible to send a link over email from Firefox; I'd never done that, but a little investigation showed it was simple. I could send a link to my Gmail account, and read it using Firefox on the game PC. Windows 11 is coming out in the not-too-distant future, and it will support Android apps, so I think I will have all the access to games I could ever want.

Incidentally, a "Steam Deck" handheld game box has just been introduced, along the lines of a Nintendo Switch, but for running PC games. I've no interest in it right now -- but if I get more into gaming, maybe one of these years. PC gaming is not dead, not by a long shot.

[FRI 16 JUL 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (159)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (159): George Bush campaigned for the presidency as a "compassionate conservative", implying a center-right policy, with planks including building up the military, cutting taxes, improving education, and aiding minorities. His opponent in the primary race was Arizona Senator John McCain, with the contest becoming heated. Bush won, to select Dick Cheney -- who had been a chief of staff in the Ford Administration, and a secretary of defense in George Bush SR's administration -- as his running mate.

In the presidential campaign that followed, Bush faced off against Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, with Bush hammering on Gore over gun control and taxes. The election was very close, with Gore actually obtaining a small margin, of about 550,000, in the popular vote, but narrowly losing the electoral vote. The contest was particularly close in Florida, leading to recounts of the vote, and litigation that went up to the Supreme Court, which judged in favor of Bush. Bush was the first president to lose the popular vote but still be elected since Benjamin Harrison in 1888.

* George Bush took office in the wake of a mild recession, caused by the collapse of excessive enthusiasm over "dot-com" high tech companies. Since the government was enjoying large budget surpluses, a tax cut was easily justified, and one was accordingly passed in 2001, with a follow-up cut in 2003. They were, however, very deep tax cuts, with critics later saying they primarily benefited the rich, and did little to stimulate the economy, which remained sluggish. Bush, in line with his "compassionate conservative" approach to governance, ramped up spending on social programs and the military.

He was particularly focused on education and science, increasing funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, as well as pushing "Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM)" education. One of the Bush Administration's early major initiatives was the "No Child Left Behind Act", signed into law in 2002, which focused on narrowing the gap between education for the wealthy and the poor. Critics on the Left called it under-funded; critics on the Right objected to the entire principle of "compassionate conservativism" -- saying that it might be compassionate, but it wasn't conservatism.

Nonetheless, it certainly echoed the era of Progressive Republicanism, which had been on the fade in the Reagan Era. However, all such initiatives were reduced to the shadows on 11 September 2001, when Islamic terrorists -- of the Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda group, led by a Saudi named Osama bin Laden (OBL) -- hijacked four jetliners, flying two of them into the double World Trade Towers in New York City, leveling them, and a third into the Pentagon, causing severe damage. The fourth was to fly into the White House, but the passengers took on the terrorists, with the jetliner crashing in Pennsylvania.

That evening, Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising a strong response to the attacks, and asking Americans to come together. Three days later, Bush visited "Ground Zero", the ruins of the World Trade Center, meeting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firefighters, police officers, and volunteers.

In the wake of the attack, Bush declared a "Global War On Terror". On 20 September, Bush condemned OBL and al-Qaeda, to issue an ultimatum to the Afghan Taliban regime, demanding that they "hand over the terrorists, or ... share in their fate." The Taliban did not hand them over, so on 7 October 2001, US and British forces initiated bombing campaigns against Afghanistan, kicking off Operation ENDURING FREEDOM.

An international force, led by the Americans and the British, backed up a "Northern Alliance" of anti-Taliban Afghans, with the Taliban evicted from Kabul in November, and a provisional government set up in December. OBL escaped the country, with the US conducting an indefinite manhunt to track him down.

[THU 15 JUL 21] SPACE NEWS

* June was a busy month for space launches:

-- [02 JUN 21] FENGYUN 4B -- A Long March 3A booster was launched from Xichang at 1617 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Fengyun 4B" geostationary weather satellite into orbit for the China Meteorological Administration. It was the second in the fourth series of Fengyun satellites.

The Fengyun 4B satellite had a launch mass of 5,300 kilograms (11,700 pounds). It joined Fengyun 4A, launched in 2016, to form a two-satellite network collecting real-time data on the atmosphere and clouds, ice and snow cover, sea surface temperature, aerosol and ozone, and vegetation, according to the China Meteorological Administration.

Fengyun 4A was as a pathfinder satellite; Fengyun 4B introduces several new upgrades. Fengyun 4B added new water vapor detection channels in its radiation imager, improved spectrum detection capabilities, and was capable of providing more accurate atmospheric radiation and temperature and humidity profiles. Fengyun 4B also has a "newly equipped fast imager" with a resolution of about 250 meters (820 feet), to better monitor typhoons, rainstorms, and other extreme weather events. Fengyun 4B also has an improved data download system using Ka-band communications.

The Fengyun 4 satellite series replaced China's earlier family of Fengyun 2 geostationary weather satellites. Unlike the Fengyun 2 series, the Fengyun 4 satellites were three-axis stabilized, meaning they control their orientations without having to maintain a spin rate. The Fengyun 4 satellites were also designed for lifetimes of seven years, compared to four years for the Fengyun 2 satellites, the last of which launched in 2018. China also operates a fleet of low polar orbit "Fengyun 1" and "Fengyun 3" weather satellites.

-- [03 JUN 21] SPACEX DRAGON CRS 22 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1729 UTC (local time + 4), carrying the 22nd operational "Dragon" cargo capsule to the International Space Station (ISS). One of the main payloads was two roll-out solar-power arrays. The capsule docked with the ISS two days after launch. The flight carried four CubeSats:

• G-Satellite from One Team, an advertising gimmick.
  
  
• MIRSat, a demonstrator from the Mauritius Research & Innovation Council (MRIC).
  
  
• RAMSat, an edusat from Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge TN USA.
  
  
• SOAR, a demonstrator from the University of Manchester in the UK.

-- [06 JUN 21] SXM 8 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0426 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "SXM 8" geostationary comsat into orbit for SiriusXM. The satellite replenish SiriusXM's constellation providing satellite radio programming to consumers across North America. SXM 8 was built by Maxar Technologies and was based on the Maxar 1300 platform; it featured a large unfurlable S-band antenna.

SXM 8 was the second spacecraft in a two-satellite order placed by SiriusXM in 2016. The first satellite, SXM 7, successfully launched in December 20201 on a Falcon 9 booster but suffered a payload failure before entering service, and was written off. It was not clear how SXM 8 was to be deployed in orbit It was not clear how SXM 8 was to be deployed in orbit, given shifting plans.

-- [11 JUN 21] BEIJING 3 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0303 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Beijing 3" commercial remote sensing satellite into orbit for Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology and DFH Satellite Company. It was a follow-on from the earlier international "Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC)" satellites. There were three other payloads, including:

• Haisi 2: A marine remote sensing satellite jointly developed by DFH Satellite Company and Xiamen University.
  
  
• Wangwang 1: A commercial optical astronomy satellite developed by DFH Satellite Company, primarily for asteroid surveys.
  
  
• Tianjian Space Test-1: A demonstrator to perform testing and verification of satellite health management technology. The satellite was developed in part by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, an arm of the China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation, which operates the Chang Zheng (Long March) family of launch vehicles and is the primary contractor for the Chinese space program.

-- [12 JUN 21] SIMORGH (FAILURE) -- An Iranian Semnan LP2 booster attempted to put a "Simorgh" surveillance satellite into orbit. The payload did not make orbit.

-- [13 JUN 21] TACRL 2 -- A Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL booster was launched at 0811 UTC (local time - 5) by a Tristar jetliner flying out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California to put the "TacRL 2" AKA "Odyssey" payload into orbit for the US Space Force's Tactically Responsive Launch program. It was described as a "space domain awareness technology demonstration satellite" -- involving the detection, tracking, and characterization of satellites and debris in orbit.

-- [15 JUN 21] NROL 111 -- An US Air Force and Northrop Grumman Minotaur 1 rocket launched from Wallops Island at 1335 UTC (local time + 4) to put three classified satellite payloads into orbit for the US National Reconnaissance Office. They were designated "USA 316" through "USA 318".

-- [17 JUN 21] SHENZHOU 12 -- A Long March 2F booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0122 GMT (local time - 8) to put the "Shenzhou 12" crewed space capsule into orbit, carrying three "taikonauts" to The crew included Commander Nie Haisheng (commander), Liu Boming, and Tang Hongbo. This was China's seventh crewed space mission -- the last being in 2016 -- and the first to the Tianhe 1 space station.

-- [17 JUN 21] GPS 3-05 (USA 320) -- A Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1609 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "GPS 3-05" AKA "USA 320" navigation satellite, named "Neil Armstrong", into orbit. It was the fifth third-generation GPS satellite. The Falcon 9 first stage soft-landed on the SpaceX recovery barge; it had flown once before.

-- [18 JUN 21] YAOGAN 30-09 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Xichang at 0630 UTC (local time - 8) to put three secret "Yaogan 30-09" payloads into orbit. They were possibly a "flying triangle" signals intelligence satellite constellation. The launch also included the "Tianqi 14" internet of things satellite.

-- [25 JUN 21] PION-NKS 1 (COSMOS 2550) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1950 UTC (local time - 3) to put the first "Pion-NKS" naval SIGINT satellite into orbit for the Russian military.

-- [29 JUN 21] PROGRESS 78P (ISS) -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Baikonur at 2327 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Progress MS-17" AKA "ISS 78P" tanker-freighter spacecraft into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) supply mission. It docked with the ISS Poisk module two days later. It was the 78th Progress mission to the ISS.

-- [30 JUN 21] TUBULAR BELLS 1 -- A LauncherOne booster was dropped from a Boeing 747 carrier aircraft at 1447 UTC (local time + 7) to put seven CubeSat payloads into orbit under the "Transporter 2" mission. The flight was based out of California's Mojave Air & Space Port. This was LauncherOne flight 3, also known as "Tubular Bells Part One" in reference to the first track on the first album released by Richard Branson's record label, Virgin Records.

It was the first LauncherOne operational mission. LauncherOne's first flight test, carrying only dummy payloads, was in May 2020, but failed shortly into its first stage burn. The second flight, in January 2021, put ten small satellites into orbit for NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) program, certifying LauncherOne for operations. The seven payloads included:

• STP x 4: Four CubeSat payloads from the Space & Missile Systems Center (SMC) of the US Space Force, including "Gunsmoke-J 3", "HALO-Net Free Flyer", and two "CNCE Blk 1" satellites. They were sent to space as part of the "Rapid Agile Launch Initiative (RALI)". They demonstrated laser communications, localized space-based communication networks, radio frequency measurement technology, and autonomous maneuvering systems.
  
  
• Brik II: A 6U CubeSat from the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF). It was the first satellite launched by the RNLAF, and was developed through an agreement between the Government of the Netherlands, the Delft University of Technology, and ISISpace, a Dutch company that develops and operates CubeSats. While details were not announced, Brik II was a testbed for various communications technology experiments, as well as a demonstrator for how CubeSats may aid military operations.
  
  
• STORK 4,5: Two Earth observation satellites in 3U CubeSat format, being the first two (of 14) satellites to be launched as part of SatRevolution's STORK Earth observation constellation. They carried an imager with a ground resolution of 5 meters (16 feet 5 inches).

SatRevolution is a Polish company providing Earth observation services through CubeSats. The third and fifth STORK spacecraft, STORK-1 and STORK-2, are scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 dedicated small satellite rideshare flight sometime in 2021. SatRevolution hopes that the remaining 10 STORK spacecraft needed to build the constellation will be launched over the course of the next few years.

-- [30 JUN 21] TRANSPORTER 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1931 UTC (local time + 4), on the "Transporter 2" mission, a rideshare flight to low-Earth orbit, carrying 88 payloads. The dedicated Transporter rideshare missions feature a payload stack of several rings that each contain circular attachment points, or ports, with a defined volume around them that can be filled with one or many satellites depending on customer needs. Launch service providers such as Spaceflight INC, Exolaunch, D-Orbit, ISILaunch, Nanoracks, and others purchased one or more ports which could then be fitted with minisatellites, deployer racks, and free-flying deployers.

The free-flying deployers included two "orbital transfer vehicles (OTV)", which had propulsion systems. SpaceFlight INC flew the "Sherpa LTE1", their first OTV, with an electric propulsion system to allow orbit changes. D-Orbit, an Italian launch service provider, flew their third OTV, "Dauntless David".

Individual payloads included:

• Three SpaceX Starlink "Internet In The Sky" comsats.
  
  
• Tenzing: A microsat from Orbit Fab, with a launch mass of about 35 kilograms (75 pounds). It provided an on-orbit refueling capability for Benchmark Space Systems hydrogen peroxide-fueled propulsions systems, using a fueling interface called RAFTI that Orbit Fab developed.
  
  
• Yet Another Mission (YAM) 2,3: Demonstration satellites from Loft Orbital with a launch mass of about 80 kilograms (175 pounds), carrying a variety of imaging sensors for several customers, "internet of things (IoT)" payloads for Eutelsat, and an on-orbit computing payload for the Space Development Agency.
  
  
• Faraday Phoenix: A 6U CubeSat from InSpace, with six payloads for various customers.
  
  
• D2/AtlaCom 1: A 6U CubeSat from NanoAvionics, carrying a hyperspectral imager, as well as an X-band communications system.
  
  
• Shared Platform for Applied Research & Technology Affirmation (SPARTAN): A 6U demonstrator CubeSat from EnduroSat, with seven payloads.
  
  
• NuSat x 4: Four remote sensing satellites from Satellogic of Argentina, with both high resolution and hyperspectral imagers, for the Satellogic Aleph 1 constellation. They had a launch mass of 38.5 kilograms (85 pounds).
  
  
• Aurora: A hyperspectral imaging satellite from Orbital Sidekick, a precursor to a future GHOSt constellation.
  
  
• TUBIN: A CubeSat from TU Berlin, with a thermal infrared imager.
  
  
• NAPA II: An optical imaging CubeSat with two cameras, for the Royal Thai Air Force.
  
  
• Arthur 1: A demonstrator from Aerospacelab for a future optical imaging constellation.
  
  
• PAINANI II: A demonstrator CubeSat from CICESE with an imaging payload.
  
  
• Umbra: A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite from Umbra.
  
  
• Capella x 4: SAR satellites from Capella.
  
  
• IceEye x 4: SAR satellites from ICEye.
  
  
• Kleos x 4: A set of formation-flying CubeSats from Kleos, to perform "signals intelligence (SIGINT)" observations of radio emitters.
  
  
• Hawk x 4: Four SIGINT satellites from Hawkeye 360.
  
  
• Neputuno: A SIGINT demonstration satellite from Deimos.
  
  
• Lemur x 6: 3U CubeSats for a Spire constellation, performing occultation measurements to aid weather forecasting, as well as having receivers for maritime AIS and aviation ADS-B signals to track ships and planes.
  
  
• GNOMES 2: A radio occultation satellite from PlanetIQ.
  
  
• EG 3 (Tyvak 0173): A CubeSat from Echostar, intended to nail down spectrum rights for an "internet of things (IoT)" constellation.
  
  
• Tiger 2: A CubeSat from OQTech for IoT.
  
  
• Centauri 4 (Tyvak-0211): An addition to the Fleet IoT constellation.
  
  
• Astrocast x 5: IoT CubeSats for the Astrocast constellation.
  
  
• SpaceBEE x N: A cluster of U/4 CubeSats from Swarm for their IoT constellation.
  
  
• Lynk 06 / Shannon: A demonstrator for a cellphone relay satellite constellation from Lynk
  
  
• W-Cube: Another cellphone relay demonstrator, from Reaktor Space, to test W-band communications.
  
  
• Mandrake 2A & 2B: Twin satellites from Astro Digital to test optical communications links.
  
  
• LINCS A & B: Another twin set of satellites from General Atomics EMS, also to test communications links.
  
  
• Ghalib: A CubeSat from the UAE to track falcon migrations.
  
  
• HERON II: A CubeSat from the University of Toronto's HERON II, carrying a biological experiment to study the effects of microgravity on a yeast found in human gut flora.
  
  
• QMR-KWT: A student CubeSat, and Kuwait's first CubeSat.
  
  
• TROPICS Pathfinder & PACE 1: Two NASA CubeSats.

This was the eighth flight of that Falcon 9's first stage.

[WED 14 JUL 21] HUBBLE CONSTANT TENSION

* HUBBLE CONSTANT TENSION: As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("Mystery Over Universe's Expansion Deepens With Fresh Data" by Davide Castelvecchi, 15 July 2020), it has been known for decades that the Universe is expanding from its origin in the Big Bang. Trying to figure out exactly how fast it is expanding is troublesome, however.

A new map of the "cosmic microwave background (CMB)" of the Universe has challenged earlier thinking on the rate of cosmic expansion. The map was obtained from 2013 to 2016 by the "Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT)", a microwave observatory sited in Chile's high Atacama Desert. The observations do back up previous estimates of the Universe's age, geometry and evolution, but they contradict measurements of how fast galaxies are flying apart from each other, and predict that the Universe should be expanding at a significantly slower pace than is currently observed.

CMB radiation matches the emission of a black-body radiator at a temperature of about 2.72 degrees Kelvin. It can be observed from all directions of space, but it is not perfectly uniform: its variations across the sky reveal that regions of the early Universe differed slightly in temperature, by less than 0.03K Over the past two decades, cosmologists have used those tiny variations -- together with an established theory they call the "standard model" -— to determine some of the key features of the Universe's structure and evolution, including its age and the density of matter. Cosmologists also use the variations to predict the rate at which the Universe is currently expanding, a measure known as the Hubble constant after the US astronomer Edwin Hubble.

The European Space Agency's Planck space telescope mapped the entire CMB sky from 2009 to 2013 with unprecedented precision, and its observations are considered the gold standard of CMB cosmology. The ACT data now confirm Planck's findings, and produce a very similar value for the Hubble constant. However, neither result matches direct measurements of the Hubble constant, a discrepancy that has become known as the "Hubble-constant tension". Astronomers who use the brightness of particular types of stars and supernova explosions, collectively called "standard candles", to calculate the expansion rate find that galaxies rush away from each other roughly 10% faster than the CMB maps predict. Researchers had hoped that as techniques became more accurate, the gap would narrow -- but refinements of measurements have only made the tension greater.

The ACT is the first ground-based CMB experiment that could have challenged Planck's results, according Erminia Calabrese, a cosmologist at Cardiff University in Wales, who led the analysis of the data. The telescope's design and location, just inside the tropics, allows it to map more of the CMB sky than other ground-based or balloon-borne telescopes.

Calabrese points out that mapping the sky on a large scale is fundamental to calculating the key parameters of cosmic expansion. The ACT data has a particular advantage, in that upgrade in 2013 allowed it to make precise measurements of the polarization of the CMB radiation. Polarization data reveal how galaxies in the foreground affect how the CMB travels, and help to make the cosmological measurements more precise.

Calabrese says: "For the first time, we have two data sets measured independently and with enough precision to make a comparison." Having also been a member of the Planck team, she says it was a relief to find that the two experiments' Hubble-constant predictions agreed to within 0.3%.

Those results suggest that the Planck data is right, and the tension is due to some error in the standard-candle measurements. Researchers working with standard candles are now trying to refine their techniques to see what might be wrong. Adam Riess -- an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has led much of the cutting-edge work on standard candles -- is not sure they'll find any error, instead suspecting there's an issue with cosmology's standard model: "My gut feeling is that there's something interesting going on."

[TUE 13 JUL 21] SETI PERSISTS (4)

* SETI PERSISTS (4): It should be possible, in principle, to spot signs of a technological civilization, or "technosignatures", on worlds around other stars. Ultrasensitive radio telescopes might be able to pick up the beams of a radar, like the ones used for air traffic control, from a distant exoplanet. Future optical telescopes might reveal the glow of a city's lights or its infrared warmth. Heavy industry or geo-engineering might leave fingerprints in a planet's atmosphere.

These efforts complement searches for biosignatures -- detectable marks that organic life might leave on an exoplanet. Sofia Sheikh says: "The line between technosignatures and biosignatures is blurring. It makes sense to observe both." In deciding to fund the 2018 workshop on technosignatures, NASA deputy administrator Michael News says the agency felt they could be discussed "on a firmer scientific foundation than before." After the workshop, NASA became less hesitant about funding SETI research.

Penn State's Jason Wright and his colleagues were accordingly a grant to model exoplanet atmospheres and construct a "library" of potential technosignatures, which astronomers can refer to when observing exoplanets. The team will first model chlorofluorocarbons -- a pollutant that doesn't occur naturally -- and giant solar power arrays, since because they would leave an obvious cutoff in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

However, even with the generous funding obtained by Breakthrough Listen, SETI remains a peripheral concern for most astronomers. In 2018, panels of researchers convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) drew up strategies for NASA on astrobiology and exoplanets. They barely mentioned SETI, much less proposed funding SETI research.

SETI enthusiasts say they are trying to make sure they are factored into a bigger NASEM effort: its decadal survey of astrophysics, a once-a-decade priority-setting exercise that is influential with funding agencies and legislators. The survey will be reported in early 2021. Jason Wright says: "We've made a big push to get the decadal survey ... to explicitly say that NASA and the NSF need to nurture this field." He and colleagues submitted nine white papers to the survey.

However, most astronomers think exobiology -- life on other worlds -- is more important than SETI. Mainstream astrobiologists hope the decadal survey will approve the "Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR)", a proposed NASA space telescope as much as six times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope. It would inspect habitable planets for biosignatures and estimate the fraction of them that support life, that being another term in the Drake equation. Of course, any observatory that can pick up biosignatures could also pick up technosignatures. Astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "The progress we've made as scientists follows the terms of the Drake equation in order. That progress could lead to a search for technosignatures. I could see LUVOIR being used to do that, even though it wasn't designed for such a search."

Jason Wright, however, feels that SETI should have higher priority. Recently, he and his colleagues reported the "discovery space" -- all the possible locations, frequencies, sensitivities, bandwidths, timings, polarizations, and modulations -- that SETI radio surveys have so far explored. The bottom line is that if the entire discovery space is represented by the world's oceans, SETI has so far searched the volume of a hot tub.

Yuri Milner seems inclined to support at least a few more SETI hot tubs. He wants Breakthrough Listen to continue past 2025, when his initial funding runs out. Milner says: "It's one of the most existential questions in our universe," he says. "Just knowing we are not alone ... is something that can bring us together here on Earth." [END OF SERIES]

[MON 12 JUL 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 27

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: I take my morning walks down to the local shopping mall, and go past a cow pasture to the southwest of it. The owner had a put a small billboard with TRUMP labeled in big bold letters on it. It used to annoy me a bit, but then I realized: "Sooner or later, it will come down. I'll wait for the day."

Much to my surprise, the sign came down last week. I wasn't expecting that to happen until next year. As it turned out, a few days later I realized it had blown down -- but it was still significant that there was no rush to put it back up. It'll probably go back up, but then it will blow down again ... and eventually, won't go back up.

Maybe I'm reading too much into the matter, but I've seen another neighborhood TRUMP sign come down recently. I'm beginning to suspect that the MAGAbots are starting to tire of Trump's bogus act. Hey, Trump's been talking about being (magically) restored to the presidency come next month, but that's not going to happen. How many times can he flop and still have people back him up?

Allen Weisselberg, CEO of the Trump Organization, is now facing charges of tax fraud. The rumor is that the Trump kids are next, which is very plausible. Trump's niece Mary thinks they will rat on Daddy. House Representative Bennie Thompson's select committee on the Capitol Riot is setting itself up and getting ready to roll. It's unlikely the Thompson Committee will report its findings until early next year -- but Trump sits like a fat spider in the center of a network of enablers, and the committee will take it all down.

In the meantime, Trump has been promoting a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, claiming they are engaged in unlawful censorship -- of him, of course. The case has zero merit and will go nowhere, but it is unlikely that Trump expects it to. He clearly plans to get his loyal fans to fund the exercise, and will spend as little as possible on the lawsuit. Indeed, he may stretch the case out, just to keep the scam going.

* I was noticing that little strange things were happening on my Windows PC, and were happening increasingly often. On Thursday afternoon, I got a particular error message, and hunted it down via Google -- to find, to no surprise, that I had done an update that had gone wrong. When and how, I didn't know, but the only thing I could do was reset Windows.

That was effectively a re-installation. My first problem with getting Windows working again after the re-installation was restoring my personal environment variables, since I've got a ton of batch files that are dependent on environment variable definitions to work. There was also a question of copying the GnuWin tools programs, plus some other utilities and batch files, to the Windows directory, so they would run when I invoked them -- but that was easily done.

The reset process assured me that I would keep my settings and apps, but not really. I had to re-install most of my apps:

• Firefox web browser: Firefox had actually survived the Windows reset, but wasn't working right, so I re-installed it. I'd saved my bookmarks to an HTML file, so I was able to recover them -- but otherwise, I had to do a lot of reconfiguring, such as changing colors and downloading plugins. I'd given up on logging in to my Firefox online account, since I didn't like sharing the same configuration on my other PCs, but that meant I didn't have a configuration backup. I figured out I could use the online account with my desktop PC, and not log into it with any of my other PCs. If I need to, I can set up a different Firefox account for another PC. Not exactly rocket science.
  
  
• Vim text editor: I'm very dependent on Vim. It has the problem that setting up a configuration file to get Vim to work just right is a pain, but after fumbling a bit, I recalled that I had saved the config file. Installing it to the Vim install directory did the trick. I had installed a newer version of Vim, however, and it kept creating files with a ".un~" suffix. After some confused poking around, I discovered that these were "undo" files, a new feature, that would persist through editing sessions of a particular document -- cute trick. I modified the config file to put the "undo" files in a directory along with other Vim backup files, and didn't see the files any more. Now I'm better off, next time I re-install Vim.
  
  
• Paint.net paint program: No problem installing it, except for the fact that I had a couple of add-on plugins. I had saved copies of some of the plugin files, but not all of them, and wasn't sure where they were supposed to be installed. I consolidated the plugin files, and set them in a directory with a link to where they are supposed to go. I'm set, the next time I re-install Paint.net.
  
  
• WinAero Tweaker: A handy little tool from a clever Russian named Sergey Tkachenko that does nice things such as allowing use of the old Windows photo viewer, make it easy to invoke a command-line shell, and so on. It's fun to go through the long command list to find useful things. The only problem with the re-installation was that I'd forgotten the name of the app. I also re-installed the nifty AstroGrep file search tool.
  
  
• Other apps included the LibreOffice and OpenOffice suites -- they're very similar, but OpenOffice does a few things better than LibreOffice -- plus the Amazon Kindle ebook reader; the Twitter app, to allow me to log into my business Twitter feed, while I access my casual Twitter feed via Firefox; the Lexis audio editor and Mp3tag utility; and the FileZilla FTP utility. I had got up to speed on FileZilla over the last month, and I had no problems configuring it again.

And then, after I was all set, I had to log in to all my online accounts again, set up file associations, re-install fonts, plus other nuisance housekeeping. I was certainly better off after getting my PC back to a stable state, but I wasn't happy about being put out of action for over a day. I'm writing it all down here, to make sure next time won't be as troublesome.

[FRI 09 JUL 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (158)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (158): George Walker Bush was born on 6 July 1946, at what is now Yale New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. He was the first child of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Bush, and the grandson of Senator Prescott Bush. At the time, George SR was at Yale. The family soon moved to Texas, where George W. grew up. Unlike George SR, George W would become truly Texan.

George W. went to public schools in Midland Texas, then spent two years at Kincaid School, a prep school in the Houston Area. After that, he spent two years at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. He went to Yale from 1964 to 1968. He was on the rugby team, became the president of his fraternity -- and like his father, became a member of the Skull & Bones society. His grades were middling; he graduated with a bachelor's degree in history. Bush had liked the fraternity life, and would always have a bit of a "frat boy" image. He liked the drinking, with the result that he would have bouts of alcohol abuse.

From Yale, Bush went back to Texas to join the Texas Air Guard, which committed him to two years of active duty and four years of part-time duty. The Vietnam War was at its peak, and Bush sensibly decided that he'd rather be a pilot than an infantryman. He became proficient in flying the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, became the only future president to fly a supersonic aircraft. He mustered out of the service in 1974 with an honorable discharge. There were, much later, concerns over irregularities in his service, but they never amounted to much. He was the last American president to have served in the military.

In 1973, while on part-time duty, Bush entered Harvard Business School, graduating in 1975 with an MBA, to later become the only US president with an MBA. He was still having occasional problems with alcohol, being busted for drunk driving in Maine; he had to pay a fine, and his driver's license was temporarily suspended.

In 1977, back in Texas, he met Laura Welch, a schoolteacher and librarian, and proposed to her; she accepted, and the two were married in November, settling in Midland. She was quiet, low-key, and had a strong influence on George W., in particular helping him steer clear of the bottle. He also began reading the Bible more, becoming a Born-Again Christian. George W. and Laura would have two children -- Barbara and Jenna, fraternal twins, born in 1981.

After getting married, Bush became involved in a complicated series of oil firms, becoming a prosperous business -- with enough financial and social clout to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball team, as well part of the team's management. He would eventually sell out, making a handsome profit.

In 1978, Bush ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives, but was defeated, but he didn't give up on politics. In 1988, he moved to Washington DC to campaign for his father's presidential election, and would also campaign for his father in 1992. That failing, in 1994 George W. Bush ran for governor of Texas, easily winning the primary, and then defeating popular incumbent Democratic governor Ann Richards.

As governor, Bush inherited a budget surplus, and accordingly passed an extraordinary tax cut of $2 billion USD. He supported efforts to deal with drug and alcohol abuse, as well as reduce domestic violence; he also raised the salaries of teachers, and worked to improve educational standards. He was not particularly focused on environmental issues, but he did sign a law that required utilities to buy a certain proportion of energy from renewable sources. Eventually, that would make Texas a national leader in wind power.

In 1998, Bush was re-elected by a landslide. During his second term, he promoted faith-based organizations, and to no surprise in conservative Texas, maintained high approval ratings. As governor of Texas, he had national attention, and was often seen as a presidential candidate. In 1999, he decided to seek the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 08 JUL 21] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from THEVERGE.com ("New Climate Goals Are Going To Need A Lot More Minerals" by Justine Calma, 5 May 2021) a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has concluded that the world isn't mining enough minerals -- such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel -- to support decarbonization of the planet.

Reaching the target of net-zero carbon production by 2050, according to the report, would demand six times more critical minerals than are produced today. For some minerals, the gap between supply and predicted future demand is much bigger. Demand for lithium, for example, is expected to grow 70 times over the next few decades; but given current expansion of mining capability, only about half the projected demand for this decade can be met.

Batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy storage are the critical path in the looming mineral shortage. Cobalt, nickel, graphite, and manganese are essential for batteries as well. Wind and solar power generation also have mineral demands that will be hard to meet. Wind turbines use rare earth minerals for magnets in generators, while solar panels are made using copper, silicon, and silver. In addition, the growth in renewable energy is being accompanied by a drive to modernize electrical grids, which demands more copper and aluminum.

The IEA adds that existing supply chains for critical minerals are vulnerable. Mining for certain minerals tends to be concentrated in a few locales, sometimes in just one country. In 2019, about 70% of the world's cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, while about 60% of rare earth minerals were mined in China. Anything that goes wrong in those places will disrupt supply. The IEA recommends government planning to address the shortfalls, seeking technologies that don't need critical minerals, enhancing recycling, and finding new sources of supply.

* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("US Approves Massive Solar Project In California Desert", 3 May 2021), the Biden Administration has now approved the construction of a major solar power facility in the California desert that will be able to power almost 90,000 homes. The project will include a battery storage system.

According to the US Interior Department, the $550 million Crimson Solar Project will be sited on 810 hectares (2,000 acres) of Federal land west of Blythe, California. It is being set up by Canadian Solar (CSIQ.O) unit Recurrent Energy, and will provide power to California utility Southern California Edison.

The Biden Administration is pushing to expand development of renewable energy projects on public lands, as part of his drive to fight climate change, create jobs, and reduce US dependence on fossil fuels. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said: "Projects like this can help to make America a global leader in the clean energy economy through the acceleration of responsible renewable energy development on public lands."

Crimson Solar will create 650 construction jobs, but just 10 permanent and 40 temporary jobs in operations and maintenance for the 30-year life of the project.

* Intelligent traffic lights have been discussed here in the past, last in 2019. As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("AI And Smart Traffic Lights Could Transform Your Commute" by Ana Moreno, 23 December 2020), work on smart traffic control systems is accelerating, with designers incorporating artificial intelligence technology in their systems.

Michael Ganser -- an engineer with Kapsch TrafficCom, an Austrian company that provides intelligent transportation systems -- says: "Building new roads or adding new lanes is not sustainable." Ganser believes the gridlock can be reduced by a combination of smart traffic lights, connected vehicles and congestion charges, all informed by AI.

In cities including Buenos Aires, Madrid, Mumbai, Kapsch TrafficCom has implemented a system where roadside sensors, traffic cameras, and vehicles collect data on things such as roadwork, accidents, and congestion. The information is fed into a central system, with a prediction model creating a comprehensive view of traffic conditions in real-time. The system then adjusts the timing of traffic light signals to optimize the flow of vehicles. In the future, drivers will be able to use an app to tell them the best routes to a destination, as well as the optimum driving speed.

Kapsch, along with other companies, has worked with cities such as Singapore to implement a variable congestion charge that makes it cheaper to travel outside peak times, encouraging drivers to avoid rush hour. Ganser says combining smart lights, connected vehicles, and congestion charges "leads to a traffic system that, under good conditions, allows almost jam-free roads." He estimates that combination could reduce congestion by around 75%, saving big cities billions of dollars every year.

Along with direct savings, there are also savings from improved productivity. American commuters waste about 99 hours a year on average, while British commuters similarly waste about 178 hours a year. Damon Wischik -- who researches traffic flow optimization using AI at Cambridge University in the UK -- is developing software to control traffic signals in Britain's cities. He likes to think of "queues of cars at traffic lights as blocks in Tetris," which can be re-routed using AI, adding: "If you treat cities like a computer game, it can learn to clear congestion."

Wischik believes that the solution involves more than technology, suggesting that drivers also need to alter their customs: "It all comes down to: can you change people's behavior, and can you make people willing to accept some slight change in behavior if it's imposed on them?" Of course, digital technologies are a big help as well, Ganser saying: "They are inexpensive and easy to scale. So if society wants a quick win that brings down carbon emissions and gets rid of congestion, this is the way to go."

[WED 07 JUL 21] HIGH ON CATNIP

* HIGH ON CATNIP: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Why Cats Are Crazy For Catnip" by Sofia Moutinho, 20 January 2021), all cat lovers know just how jolly their cats get when handed catnip-laced toys. Exactly why catnip -- and silver vine, which is sometimes used as a catnip substitute -- has that effect on cats has, however, long been somewhat mysterious. A study now suggests the key intoxicating chemicals in the plants activate cats' opioid systems, much like heroin and morphine do in humans. In addition, the study determined that rubbing the plants protects the felines against mosquito bites.

Catnip (Nepeta cataria) and silver vine (Actinidia polygama) both contain chemical compounds known as "iridoids" that protect the plants against aphids, and are known to be key to the euphoria the plants generate in cats. To determine the physiological effect of these compounds, Iwate University biologist Miyazaki Masao spent five years running different experiments using the plants and their chemicals.

First, his team extracted chemicals from in both catnip and silver vine leaves and identified the most potent component that produces the feline high: A minty silver vine chemical called "nepetalactol" -- which had previously not been shown to affect cats, though it is similar to "nepetalactone", the key iridoid in catnip.

Second, they put 10 leaves' worth of nepetalactol into paper pouches and gave them, together with pouches containing only a saline substance, to 25 domestic cats, to then watch the reactions. Most of the animals showed interest only in the pouches with nepetalactol. To make sure this was the object of the felines' attraction, they repeated the experiment with 30 feral cats -- plus one leopard, two lynxes, and two jaguars living in Japan's Tennoji and Oji zoos. All the felines liked it, rubbing their heads and bodies in the patches for an average of ten minutes. In contrast, dogs and mice that were tested ignored the compound.

Third, the researchers measured "beta-endorphins" -- one of the hormones that naturally relieves pain and induces pleasure by activating the body's opioid system -- in the bloodstreams of five cats five minutes before and after exposure. The researchers found that levels of this "happiness hormone" became significantly elevated after exposure to nepetalactol, compared with controls. Five cats that had their opioid systems suppressed did not rub on the nepetalactol-infused pouches.

That explained how cats got high on catnip, but the researchers wondered if there was more to it. One of them then found out about the insect-repelling properties of nepetalactone, which about two decades ago was shown to be as effective as the well-known mosquito-repellent DEET. It seemed that cats in the wild might rub on catnip or silver vine to apply insect repellant.

To test the idea, they conducted a live mosquito challenge with cats. They put the nepetalactol-treated heads of sedated cats into chambers full of mosquitoes, and counted how many landed on them. The number turned out to be about half of those that landed on feline heads treated with a neutral control substance. Miyazaki says: "Our findings suggest instead that rolling is rather a functional behavior."

It appears that ancestral cats that found catnip pleasant obtained a selective advantage from it, by reducing their vulnerability to insects. Miyazaki says: "Anyone who has ever sat in the field to observe animals ambushing prey knows just how difficult it is for them to keep still when there are many biting mosquitoes around. It does not seem unreasonable, therefore, to argue that there is a strong selection pressure" to keep away annoying bugs.

The researchers have already patented an insect repellent based on nepetalactol. They plan to identify the cat genes responsible for catnip sensitivity, and see how well the "repellant" works against other pests.

[TUE 06 JUL 21] SETI PERSISTS (3)

* SETI PERSISTS (3): The first task in SETI is to acquire data, lots of it, mapping the sky for revealing signals. Sifting through all that data is a big challenge. The first telltale of an alien signal should be an unusual amount of energy packed into a narrow frequency band. Human-produced signals have that characteristic, and so they have to be excluded. One test is to see if the signal varies in frequency over time: signals from a distant world should change due to the Doppler shift caused by the motion of that planet, while Earthly signals won't change. Another give-away is a signal remaining present, while the direction of a radio telescope is changed.

However, there's no saying that aliens might send more elaborate signals, and it's hard to know in what way. Hunting for signals that just look anomalous or weird is problematic. One approach to that task is to use artificial intelligence (AI), that approach being similar to the way an AI can pick out words in human speech -- think in terms of Amazon's Alexa -- after being trained on vast speech datasets. Unfortunately, with speech we know what we're looking for; with SETI, there's so much data that it's like looking for needles in haystacks, without knowing exactly what a needle looks like.

Converting the data stream into 2D diagrams that resemble images works better, at least in tests, in which machine vision algorithms picked out strange pictures from a torrent of similar ones. Steve Croft of UC Berkeley's SETI Research Center: "We have to guess what an anomaly might look like and train the algorithm to look for this, or look for things that look similar."

* Traditionally, SETI has focused on radio searches -- but more recently, there's been interest, under "optical SETI", to look for laser communications links.

The LaserSETI project, funded by the SETI Institute, is a collection of $30,000 USD mini-observatories, each made up of an off-the-shelf fisheye lens, two cameras, and electronics that would gather light from the entire sky. The first was installed in 2019 on an observatory roof north of San Francisco. Eventually, the institute wants to install 60 instruments around the world for 24/7 coverage.

LaserSETI's small telescopes would only pick up an especially bright flash from a nearby source. Shelley Wright of UC San Diego hopes to see much farther with the "Pulsed All-sky Near-infrared Optical SETI (PANOSETI)", an all-sky telescope able to detect ultrashort laser pulses across the optical spectrum.

PANOSETI's design includes photon counters sensitive to pulses less than one-billionth of a second long. Shelly Wright says: "It's hard for nature to make that." It uses a Fresnel lens -- a lens effectively compressed into a set of concentric rings -- to gather light from a patch of sky 10 degrees wide and focus it on the photon counters. The team is building two observatories, each an array of 80 telescopes with lenses 50 centimeters across, bunched together in a "fly's eye" arrangement. The plan is to site the pair a kilometer apart, to screen out false positives, at the Palomar Observatory in California. Funded by Qualcomm cofounder Franklin Antonio, the project has built five telescopes at last notice, but has been stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

What if intelligent aliens don't bother to try to communicate across the stars? They might still be detectable from their activities. In 1960, physicist Freeman Dyson imagined an advanced society might build a megastructure surrounding a star to capture its energy. In 2015, Penn State's Jason Wright led a search for the glow of such "Dyson spheres" in 100,000 nearby galaxies, using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite. No Dyson spheres were found. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[MON 05 JUL 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 26

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The other shoe dropped this week, with the House voting to establish a select committee to investigate the 6 January Capitol riot. Only two Republicans voted in favor: Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.

As defined, the committee has 13 members, including 8 Democrats and 5 Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named seven Democrats: Pete Aguilar, Zoe Lofgren, Elaine Luria, Stephanie Murphy, Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, and Bennie Thompson -- while reserving the right to appoint a Republican to the eighth seat.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced the committee as a sham, and warned that any House GOP who accepted Pelosi's appointment would lose seating on committee assignments. Kinzinger shot back: "Who gives a shit?" The GOP selection was, to no surprise, Liz Cheney -- giving the committee seven Democrats and six Republicans. McCarthy will, in principle, select the Republicans, though Pelosi holds veto power; clearly, she will not accept any GOP opposed to investigating the Capitol riot. What will happen if McCarthy won't make the appointments? I'm sure Pelosi already knows what to do in that case. Whatever it is, McCarthy won't like it.

If he doesn't like it, too bad for him. Pelosi invested a lot of effort trying to get an impartial independent commission set up, but it was shot down by the Senate GOP. Even before the vote, she was talking about setting up a select committee -- broadly hinting that if the GOP didn't want the commission, they'd get something they liked much less. It appears that Pelosi had little expectation of the commission getting through the Senate, since she was remarkably agreeable to concessions asked for by the GOP. Why not? It wasn't likely to happen anyway. Pelosi ending up just feeding them rope.

I was wondering who the chair would be, thinking Adam Schiff would be picked -- he prominently had led the charge on the first Trump impeachment trial, demonstrating a high level of skill as a prosecutor. It turned out that Bennie Thompson of Mississippi got the chair, since he was the primary architect of the ill-fated independent commission. I was thinking it might be fun to have Liz Cheney as the chair, but that didn't happen. We'll still have fun. Every time McCarthy spews out trash talk, Cheney will shove it right back down his throat. She'll enjoy it, and so will we. We'll also enjoy seeing who gets hit with subpoenas to testify to the committee, and how they'll react to it.

How long until the Thompson Committee reports? Pelosi says: "As long as it takes." That's the right answer; it's not drop-dead urgent, and they need to do the job right to make sure Trump and his enablers don't get away. Six months sounds reasonable, but it might take more. I suspect that the committee will make waves in the meantime.

* As the US economy sputters back to life, there's been anxiety over inflation and other economic challenges. An essay by Jordan Weissman of SLATE.com ("Seven Reasons To Be Extremely Optimistic About The Economy Right Now", 29 June 2021) suggested that there's no good cause to be too worried. True, there are problems:

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Weissman then outlined seven reasons for confidence:

ONE: The USA is beating the pandemic. True, it's not over by any means, and the obstinate reluctance of Red states to get vaccinated is slowing the recovery. However, overall the trendline is down, and more down in Blue states. Cases are down or flat in 21 states and the District of Columbia, while deaths and hospitalizations are both still headed down nationally. The pandemic is effectively over in a handful of states. We haven't been in such good shape since March 2020, just before the pandemic first wave took off.

TWO: Inflation may have peaked. The Fed's Jerome Powell has suggested the inflation that has afflicted the USA over the past few months is on the way out -- though former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers insists there's chronic trouble ahead. In reality, the inflation has been spotty, localized in particular industries, and due to temporary problems: fuel prices are high because tanker companies can't find drivers. The trendline for most prices is falling.

THREE: Consumer spending is up and staying up, higher than it was in February 2020, and close to its pre-pandemic trendline. There are concerns that the spending is being driven by the government aid supplied to the pandemic -- but on the other hand, households saved up record amounts of money while they were stuck at home, while total wages and salaries are way up.

FOUR: There's absolutely no shortage of job openings. Business owners are having trouble finding workers, some blaming the government's generous employment benefits for the hiring shortage. Maybe so, but with so many job openings, those hunting for work have more options, and they're opting not to take jobs that have miserable pay levels. Big corporations like Amazon.com have jumped on the $15 USD minimum wage bandwagon, and are hiring like mad; business that are offering less can't keep up.

FIVE: Accordingly, service industries are raising pay. In that sector, wage growth has shot up by about 5 percent since January, which notably is less than the increase in the consumer price index. America's waiters, cooks, bartenders, and hotel maids are getting a welcome pay bump. Will that mean inflation? Probably somewhat -- but again, the big corporations have already bitten the $15 USD an hour bullet. Eating out may get more expensive, but service industry workers will have more to spend. It's hard to complain about a marginally pricier hamburger if that means workers are getting a liveable wage, and have money to spend themselves. To be sure, many will still complain.

SIX: Even with the threat of inflation, service industries are getting back on track. The service industries of course took a hit during the pandemic, while sales of durable goods shot up. Can't travel? Work on home improvements instead. Spending on durable goods is now trending down, while spending on services is trending up. Overall, the service industries have a bright outlook -- though it is a good question whether movie theaters, which were in decline before the pandemic, will ever really recover in the age of Netflix.

SEVEN: Business productivity is booming. By the end of the first quarter of 2021, output per hour was up 4.1% compared with a year earlier, the biggest increase in a decade. Part of the jump was due to the fact that, a year ago, workers in service industries, which are noted for low productivity, were laid off. However, now that the service industries are coming back on line, we'd expect productivity to fall again, which is the opposite of what's happening. The reality is, as was discussed here earlier this year, that the pandemic drove a remarkable level of innovation -- not just among the trend-setters, but in the laggards as well.

Consider the revolution in Zoom videoconferencing and remote work. Not all businesses like that revolution, but many have found it efficient and entirely to their liking. Will this technology revolution end with the pandemic? Possibly, but don't bet on it -- and if it continues, it will provide a basis for an energetic economic run.

* The Pacific Northwest, where I grew up, got hit by an unprecedented heat wave this last week -- reaching temperatures of like 46 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit) in places, with road buckling and other heat damage. Climate change is here, and pounding at the door.

I ran across a Seattlite on Twitter who said he was "still on the fence" about climate change. Huh? I had to ask for clarification. He replied: "Well, maybe it's part of a natural cycle ..." Oh no, not this trash again. So where do you get your facts? Fox News? "Can't cure ignorance."

It hasn't been too hot in Colorado, but the pollen counts are up. One of the few good things about the pandemic is that it got me into wearing masks, which do a good job of stopping pollen. "You mean I could have spared myself decades of hacking and coughing just by wearing a mask?" The pandemic, though unfortunate, has had its useful lessons.

Oh, and one last thing -- concerning Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the DILBERT comic strip, who is completely bonkers. He was the subject of a Twitter exchange:

01 JUL 2020: Scott Adams / @ScottAdamsSays: If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year.

01 JUL 2021: Declan Garvey / @declanpgarvey: We made it.

Garvey, it seems, is fond of dry, understated humor, as am I. I suspect he pinned that tweet for a year, just waiting for the opportunity to reply. Things have indeed been on the uptrend over the past year, though everyone's nerves are frayed. Sometimes, when I do my morning calisthenics, I honestly feel good for a little bit of time -- but then it fades, and I'm back with the dreary burden of a time and place where things are just not working right. Fortunately, the uptrend is likely to continue. I'm looking forward to the Thompson Committee report.

[FRI 02 JUL 21] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (157)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (157): Operation ALLIED FORCE was marred by the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999. Nonetheless, it was a time of good relations between the US and China, with America permanently normalizing trade relations with China in 2000, and approving China's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) -- which had been established in Geneva in 1995 to facilitate and adjudicate international trade. Clinton said of trade normalization:

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This rosy optimism would not last. In addition, Clinton floundered in his attempts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace. Although he brought Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat together at Camp David for a two-week summit in July 2000, the talks broke down; Clinton later blamed Arafat for the failure of the summit. Further attempts to obtain peace were derailed by the Israeli-Palestinian violence. The most that could be said was that no other American president would have any better luck.

* Despite his running personal scandals, Bill Clinton left the presidency with a very high approval rating of 68%. There was a widespread perception that, though he was sleazy in his private life, he was competent and conscientious as the chief executive. ABC News characterized public consensus on Clinton as: "You can't trust him, he's got weak morals and ethics -- and he's done a heck of a good job." Nonetheless, the partisan fighting between Right and Left intensified during the Clinton Administration, with Right-wing media outlets -- most notably Fox News -- gaining traction.

Clinton left the White House in difficult financial circumstances, due to the lawsuits against him. That was a temporary problem that he put behind him in a few years, becoming wealthy from writing, paid speeches, and other work. He may have been in debt, but his status as an ex-president amounted to a value that more than made up for it. He set up the William J. Clinton Foundation to address global issues, notably HIV-AIDS, as well as other public health issues. He led a UN relief effort in response to the disastrous 2004 Asian Tsunami, and collaborated with George H.W. Bush in directing relief for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He has also conducted a series of special diplomatic missions.

[THU 01 JUL 21] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global calamity, and has presented an enormous challenge to the biomedical community. That challenge has led to an impressive response; as reported in an article from NATURE.com ("One Million Coronavirus Sequences" by Amy Maxmen, 23 April 2021), one aspect of this has been a global collaboration that has accumulated, as of July 2021, over two million SARS-CoV-2 genomes from over 170 countries, openly available to all. The sequence data has been very useful to researchers investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the epidemiology of COVID-19 outbreaks, and the spread of viral variants across the planet.

The data was produced by the "Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID)". A number of databases for genome sequences exist, but GISAID is by far the most popular for SARS-CoV-2. It was conceived in 2006 as a repository of genomic data from flu viruses. At that time, many countries withheld genomic information, for a range of reasons -- one being a fear that benefits of research would not be fairly distributed. Following two years of discussions to hammer out difficulties, GISAID was launched in 2008.

When COVID-19 began spreading in China, GISAID reached out to researchers and governments around the world, to understand what barriers might prevent them from sharing genomic data on SARS-CoV-2. For example, when researchers in West Africa said that they lacked bioinformatics training, a scientist affiliated with GISAID in Senegal began to hold workshops on sequencing, analytics, and how to use the tools on the platform. Some of GISAID's tools allow researchers to see how genomes they've uploaded relate to others, or to explore where new variants appear from day to day.

To search or download sequences from GISAID, or use the platform's genome-analysis tools, people must register with their name, and agree to terms that include not publishing studies based on the data without acknowledging the scientists who uploaded the sequences -- or inviting them to collaborate, if possible. Some researchers have been unhappy with the conditions, but there would be more unhappiness if the conditions weren't there. In any case, the site is popular because it makes it easy to share data, and has excellent tools for sequence display and analysis.

Wealthy countries like the USA and the UK have uploaded the lion's share of sequences. At the other end of the scale, Tanzania has contributed little or nothing, since the late president John Magufuli denied the existence of the pandemic for many months. Poor or troubled countries, like Lebanon, have also not contributed much. Even with the uneven contributions, GISAID has provided a powerful digital microscope into the pandemic.

* As discussed in an article from SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.com ("A Catalog Of Cas9 Proteins Could Provide Gene-Editing Variety", by Niko McCarty, February 2021), the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing scheme is based on an immune defense found in some bacteria, featuring:

• A genetic system marked by "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats", hence CRISPR, the repeats defining genetic markers for target viruses.
  
  
• A set of "CRISPR-associated (Cas)" proteins, encoded by and supporting the genetic system, with the Cas9 variant cleaving a DNA strand. There are other Cas proteins with different functions.

In genome editing, a protein complex includes an RNA strand that acts as a "guide", matching to a particular genetic sequence -- a "protospacer adjacent motif (PAM)" -- with a Cas9 protein cleaving the target DNA strand at that location. This imposes a limitation, in that there are invariably many sites that don't have an adjacent PAM, and so Cas9 can't cut them.

The CRISPR-Cas9 scheme was derived using the system from the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, and uses its Cas9 protein. However, not only are there other Cas proteins, but Cas9 varies among different lines of microbes. Researchers have now analyzed dozens of Cas9 variants, to find out just how diverse their actions are. A research team under Virginijus Siksnys -- a biochemist at Vilnius University in Lithuania -- sifted through "thousands of sequences of Cas9 proteins in databases", to settled on 79 candidates from different bacteria. They synthesized each Cas9 in a liquid that simulates the cellular interior, and then they added snippets of DNA with random PAM codes to each mixture.

As it turned out, they came up with Cas9 proteins associated with about 50 different PAMs, varying substantially in length and composition. Such a range of PAMs extends the number of targets for Cas9. In addition, some subjects develop an immune reaction to Cas9 that neutralizes it. Cas9 proteins from more innocuous bacteria might be less likely to trigger a bad reaction.

The researchers plan to test some of the proteins in living organisms. Beyond the practical applications, Siksnys appreciates the remarkable diversity of these DNA cutters: "It's like having multiple scissors instead of a single pair."

* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Astronomers Find Galaxy Similar To Milky Way More Than 12 Billion Light-Years Away" by Ashley Strickland, 12 August 2020), astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) microwave telescopes in to find a more than 12 billion light-years away that looks very much like our own. That would mean we see the distant galaxy only 1.4 billion years after the creation of the Universe in the Big Bang.

Traditionally, it was believed that orderly spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are a relatively recent innovation in the Universe. The galaxy, named "SPT0418-47", has two features of our Galaxy, including its rotating spiral disk structure and a central bulge. A central bulge has never been seen before in such early galaxies.

SPT0418-47 was found through "gravitational lensing", the bending of light around a nearer galaxy. It was imaged as a ring around another galaxy, with computer power used to reconstruct the true image. Simona Vegetti -- of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, one of the astronomers involved in the research -- says that the distant galaxy is very active, which is not consistent with its tidy structure:

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