DayVectors

* 23 entries including: 5th information revolution (series), bioelectronic medicine (series), Szostak on the origin of life (series), ancient meteor impacts, anti-helium conundrum, Biden's speech in Warsaw & Putin's war & no stagflation, Biden's electric grid, pathetic Russian military & the fall of America First, Ukraine drone strikes, bad planning of Ukraine invasion & bad Russian morale, Meta conundrum, Russia under sanctions & Fox News on Putin, and Tonga eruption.

[THU 31 MAR 22] ANCIENT IMPACTS

* ANCIENT IMPACTS: As discussed in an article from BUSINESSINSIDER.com ("A Meteor That Incinerated The Residents Of An Ancient City Inspired The Biblical Story Of Sodom, Research Suggests" by Aylin Woodward, 19 October 2021), an archaeological study of the ancient town of Tall el-Hammam, in what is now Jordan, revealed that it came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end some 3,600 years ago. Buildings were smashed, the inhabitants were blasted apart, and intense heat scorched the area.

Excavations at Tall el-Hammam began in 2005, with archaeologists quickly realizing that something disastrous had happened to the town. Closer examination was that the damage indicated a blast of intense heat, with melted rocks and metal artifacts -- which wouldn't have happened if the town had simply burned down. Could it have been a meteor strike? In 2014, the excavators got in contact with the Comet Research Group (CRG), an international collaboration that investigates "space strikes".

Over the next seven years, a CRG team under Malcolm LeCompte -- of Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina -- visited the site three times to collect samples. In a layer of sediment dating back to the time of the strike, they found "shocked quartz", or fractured sand grains, which only form at high pressures. The heat and pressure had also converted wood and plants into tiny diamonds. In addition, the researchers found dusty particles called "spherules", made up of vaporized iron and sand -- as well as platinum, iridium, and osmium, which are rare on Earth but common in meteorites.

The pattern of damage suggests the blast was to the southeast of the town, with LeCompte estimating that it was in the range of 5 to 30 megatons, far more powerful than the blast that destroyed Hiroshima. Sediments from the time of the blast have a high level of salt, possibly due to depositions from the nearby Dead Sea caused by the blast, which made growing crops in the area impractical for centuries afterward. LeCompte suggests the disaster was the basis for the Sodom & Gomorrah story. That's impossible to say for certain -- but if so, it demonstrates the tendency of humans to say about the misfortunes of others: They had it coming to them.

* In other tales of destruction from space, a report from the University of Cincinnati (UC) discussed traces of a comet impact over North America 1,500 years ago, found at 11 sites related to the Hopewell tribal culture of the era, which was found over a large area of what is now the US Northeast. The 11 sites were in three US states along the Ohio River Valley.

UC archaeologists found an unusually high concentration and diversity of meteorites at Hopewell sites compared to other time periods. The meteorite fragments were identified from the telltale concentrations of iridium and platinum they contained. The researchers also found a charcoal layer that suggests the area was exposed to fire and extreme heat. UC anthropology professor Kenneth Tankersley says:

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The surviving Hopewells collected the meteorites and used the metal in jewelry and other artifacts. The airburst affected an area bigger than New Jersey, setting fires across 9,200 square miles (23,850 square kilometers) sometime between the years 252 and 383 CE. This coincides with a period when 69 near-Earth comets were observed and documented by Chinese astronomers, and witnessed by Native Americans as told through their oral histories. According to Hopewell, who has tribal roots, Algonquin and Iroquoian tribes, descendants of the Hopewell, spoke of a calamity that befell the Earth. Similar stories are found among the Miami, Shawnee, Ottawa, and Wyandot.

The impact itself was disastrous to the Hopewell, with its longer-term ecological effects being ruinous as well. Researchers are now studying pollen trapped in layers of sediment to see how the comet airburst might have changed the botanical landscape of the Ohio River Valley.

[WED 30 MAR 22] BIOELECTRONIC MEDICINE (2)

* BIOELECTRONIC MEDICINE (2): Advocates of bioelectronic medicine envision using nerves in the body that regulate specific organs -- or rather, subsystems of those organs -- to orchestrate a precision response to a malady. Robert Kirsch -- chair of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University and executive director of the Cleveland FES Center -- says that the nervous system and its patterns of electrical impulses amount to a "language" that the human body uses to communicate with itself, and concludes: "We need to learn how to speak that language."

Researchers are beginning that decoding project with well-defined nerve systems. For example, the biotech company Neuros Medical, based in Cleveland, is targeting the nerve trunk that runs along a person's legs as a way to potentially treat phantom pain in amputees. These neural pathways extend the entire length of the limb. After an amputation, the nerve continues to grow, sending out new extensions that, with nowhere to target, begin to clump into a mass of tangled, and painful, nerve endings called a "neuroma".

Fang Zi-Ping, chief scientific officer at Neuros, developed a potential solution for treating such pain. The device includes a surgically implanted electrode that wraps around one or two nerves in the leg. The electrode is connected to a waveform generator implanted in the abdomen that produces a high–frequency current whenever a patient presses a button on a remote control, before shutting off automatically after 30 minutes. The signal blocks the pain signals sent by nerves to the brain.

At first, Fang thought the relief would be temporary, lasting only as long as the device was activated -- but to his surprise, patients in the first pilot study reported feeling pain-free for hours, even days, after a treatment session. Nobody quite sure why that happens; Fang suggests that directly blocking the pain, the electrical therapy may also help to desensitize the nervous system to the pain sensation. Fang says: "If we give the patients 30 minutes of pain-free time, clinically, some doctors call that a 'pain vacation.' It's not a cure for pain, but for many people in our pilot study they were able to significantly reduce or quit their use of narcotics and improve their quality of life."

The company is now expanding its study beyond the first 10 patients with amputation-related pain to include 180 people in order to further test the device for safety and efficacy. Other companies, like SetPoint Medical -- which conducted Kelly Owens' trial -- are focusing on the vagus nerve. Named after the Latin word for "wandering", the vagus is rooted in the brain stem and branches into the neck, chest and abdomen. It controls everything from sensory functions to swallowing, digestion, respiration, and heart rate. Researchers see the vagus as something like a "volume control" for the nervous system; since it's the longest and most extensive nerve in the body, it's an obvious target for BioEM.

However, the very extensiveness of the vagus nerve presents a challenge, in that it's not easy to trace its connections out to a particular body function. While it starts out as a discrete trunk, the vagus, like many of the other large neural networks in the body, eventually disperses into brushlike bundles of nerve endings that tap into different organs, different tissues within those organs, and finally different cells within those tissues. Robert Kirsch says: "It's like trying to make a telephone call by putting the call over every single line that is available. It goes to the right line, but it goes to all the other places too."

To make matters more complicated, the connections are piled on top of one another in the tissues, making them hard to sort out. What happens is that in trying to trace out one connection, doctors may end up disturbing others, triggering unwanted side effects.

The challenge is to construct a detailed road map of the major nerve networks in the body. That is the goal of the US National Institutes of Health's (NIH) "Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC)" project, which has the ambitious goal of mapping out every nerve of the human nervous system outside the brain. Researchers at universities across the USA have been assigned different major organ systems. Their findings will be aggregated, with the resulting nerve map available to any researcher interested in finding ways to tap into those neural networks to develop new BioEM treatments. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 29 MAR 22] THE ANTI-HELIUM CONUNDRUM

* THE ANTI-HELIUM CONUNDRUM: As discussed in an article from SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.com ("Stars Made of Antimatter Might Be Lurking in the Universe" by Leto Sapunar, 7 June 2021), it has long puzzled cosmologists as to why our Universe appears to be mostly matter, and very little anti-matter. They look the same except for reversed electric charges; shouldn't one be as common as the other?

It is generally thought that, in the time of creation after the Big Bang, matter and anti-matter were almost -- but not quite -- equal. Most of the anti-matter met up with matter and was turned into energy, with the slight excess of matter surviving to make up the matter Universe today. In our time, anti-matter is usually only seen as a by-product of intense particle collisions, quickly disappearing in the aftermath.

In 2018, however, physicists were puzzled when the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment mounted on the exterior of the International Space Station reported the detection of two anti-helium nuclei, along with six that may have been detected earlier. It began to seem as if anti-matter was more common than thought. Finding anti-protons was expected, but anti-helium was a surprise. An anti-proton is relatively easy to form, but anything heavier, such as anti-deuterium -- an antiproton plus an antineutron -- or anti-helium -- two anti-protons plus typically one or two antineutrons -- gets progressively harder to make as it gets more massive.

One suggestion was that it was synthesized in the cores of anti-matter stars, or "anti-stars" -- an idea that seemed just crazy enough to be worth investigating. Vivian Poulin, a cosmologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Montpelier, France, published a paper in 2019 that gave an estimate of the number of anti-stars needed to account for the anti-helium nuclei found by the AMS.

Following up Poulin's work, a group of French researchers decided to see if they could get a better lead on anti-stars, using data from the NASA Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, specifically its Large-Area Telescope (LAT). The study leaders were Simon Dupourque -- an astrophysics grad student at the University of Toulouse -- and Paul Sabatier of CNRS.

It would not be straightforward to spot an anti-star, because it would emit light in exactly the same way as a normal star. The give-away would be flashes of gamma-ray emission when normal matter fell onto its surface and was annihilated. The research team examined ten years of LAT data for gamma rays of the appropriate energy, sifting through traces from 6,000 sources, to come up with 14 seemingly anomalous samples. That data was far from conclusive, Duporque saying that the gamma-ray flashes might instead be coming from pulsars, or the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. They might just be detector noise.

The push is then to examine the 14 objects in more detail. Floyd Stecker -- an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who was not involved in the research -- says:

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The puzzle of the situation is: if there are no antimatter stars, then where did the anti-helium nuclei come from? Pierre Salati -- a particle astrophysicist at the Annecy-le-Vieux Particle Physics Laboratory, who worked on Poulin's 2019 study -- suggested that a process called "spallation", in which high-energy cosmic rays from exploding stars ram into interstellar gas particles might be a mechanism. However, formation of anti-helium-3 nuclei, with one neutron each, would be freakishly rare, while formation of anti-helium-4 nuclei, with two neutrons each, would be statistically impossible.

As for dark matter, certain models predict that dark matter particles can annihilate one another, a process that could also create antiparticles. Dark matter is temptingly convenient for the purposes of creating anti-helium-4 -- for the dubious reason that we've never detected dark matter, so we really don't know what it can do. However, no models of plausible dark matter strongly support the idea that it can generate anti-helium-4.

The possibility remains that the AMS observations are bogus; no other instrument has spotted evidence of anti-helium-4. Samuel Ting -- a Nobel laureate physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and head of the AMS team -- is being cautious about the observations, saying: "We are not yet ready to publish any heavy antimatter results. We are collecting more data before any [further] announcement is made."

In the meantime, researchers continue to hunt for antimatter. The "General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS)" experiment, which will be flown above Antarctica on a balloon, will collect data on antiparticles. If it doesn't confirm AMS results, it is likely they will be discounted; if it does, it could lead to a revolution in physics.

[MON 28 MAR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 13

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: On the 26th of March, US President Joe Biden delivered a forceful speech in Warsaw on the war in Ukraine that went over very well, with excerpts listed here:

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The comment that Putin "cannot remain in power" raised some controversy, sounding only too much like the discredited notion of "regime change" -- but though it could be interpreted in such a fashion, it was clear the USA and NATO have no intention of trying to force the issue. A broader interpretation reads it as something that is just going to happen. In any case, it cost him nothing.

* As discussed in an essay from BLOOMBERG.com ("Ukraine Is Changing the World Order, Just Not How Putin Hoped" by Marc Champion, 22 March 2022), two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his armed forces into Ukraine, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published an article proclaiming imminent victory, celebrating "a new era" -- marked by the end of Western domination, the severing of the connection between the US and continental Europe, and the return of Russia to its rightful "space and place" in the world. RIA Novosti soon took the article down, but it was correct: Putin's decision to invade Ukraine is changing the international order, just not in the way he planned.

Existing ideas of defending Europe have been discarded. Nobody ever seriously thought Russia would resort to old-school aggression in the 21st century. That assumption having proven wrong, European nations are reconsidering what they spend, what they buy, and how they would need to fight. Instead of being split from the USA, they have grown closer to it, while asserting NATO power. General Richard Barrons, a former commander of the UK's Joint Forces Command, says:

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Fiona Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs on the US National Security Council, commented that Putin's invasion of Ukraine "is a post-imperial, post-colonial land grab. If we let this happen, we're setting a precedent for the future." Putin is demonstrating no inclination to acknowledge his mistakes, and knows that defeat would call his political survival into question.

Germany has stepped up with a commitment to spend an additional 100 billion euros ($110 billion USD) -- that being a particularly significant action from a country long noted for its anti-militarism. Other countries are also raising their defense budgets, with the Baltic States asking NATO for permanent bases and long-range anti-aircraft systems.

Exactly how that will work out remains, of course, to be seen. Over the short run, the Russian military has been badly chewed up and its stockpiles of munitions depleted. It is of course possible that Russia will suffer a social breakdown -- but given Russia's nuclear stockpile, even that poses threats. Putin's regime may survive, remaining a threat to Europe; certainly there is no possibility of reconciliation as long as he's in office.

China's role in this is ambiguous. The Chinese government officially is on Moscow's side, but how deeply does that go? Putin's war in Ukraine is a loser, and Beijing can't see any advantage in supporting it. The disastrous path of the campaign also must be giving Chinese leadership second thoughts about military action against Taiwan.

In any case, it is Europe that is in the front lines, and the war has proven a shock to complacency. Barrons says: "It's a 90-minute journey, and there are cruise missiles over London."

* Not incidentally, Putin's miscalculations may well prove even more wrong in the long run. The war will come to an end, and Ukraine will prevail. Given the devastation of the conflict, Western powers will have to help with reconstruction -- with the USA likely being the biggest player. The end result will be a Ukraine closely allied to the USA on Russia's southwest flank -- with Ukraine possibly having expanded influence in the Central Asian "Stans" to the east, which the Kremlin regards as their assets.

For another small note, as brutal and ghastly as the war in Ukraine has been, it has its flashes of humor -- as of late, in videos of Ukrainian farmers towing off Russian tanks and other combat gear. There was a photoshop of a Lego kit, the cover showing a Lego tractor pulling a "FREE TANK INCLUDED!". More amusing was the Ukrainian special operations patch:

* The war in Ukraine has aggravated the global economic difficulties left in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As discussed in an essay from TIME.com ("Why You Probably Don't Need to Worry About 1970s-Style Stagflation" by Zachary Karabell, 24 March 2022), there are worries about the "stagflation" of the 1970s, when inflation was roaring while the economy was stagnant.

The 1970s stagflation confounded traditional economic wisdom, which saw inflation as a product of an overheated economy and loose monetary policy. Stagflation was due to the OPEC oil embargo of the West, imposed in response to Western support for Israel after the 1973 October War, along with a US Federal Reserve that was too slow to react. Many suggest that things are not so different now:

• Economic growth (GDP) for the first months of this year looks to be anemic in the US and Western Europe, following a strong 2021.
  
  
• Rising gas and fuel prices will put a dent in consumer budgets and crimp the profits of companies.
  
  
• The Fed is necessarily moving towards higher interest rates, which has thrown instability into stock markets.

Add on top of this the dramatic sanctions imposed by the West on Russia. However, although Russia is faced with economic depression, it is not a key player in world markets. Its GDP is the 11th largest in the world, but that makes it economically about the size of Texas, with about five times the population. Its economy is dependent on oil exports, the only other sectors of importance being wheat production plus a few specialty minerals, such as nickel.

Russia controls only 10% of the world's oil supply. In the 1970s, in contrast, OPEC controlled nearly 60% of the world oil supply, and the 1973 embargo saw the price of oil quadruple in a few weeks, compared to the 25% increase now in the weeks since the Ukraine invasion. The energy shock in 1973:1974, followed by later supply shocks, was by orders of magnitude greater than Russia today represents. To be sure, markets have been thrown into confusion by current events, attempting to compensate for the loss of Russian exports, but so far the disruption has been less than feared, though volatility persists.

Yes, inflation has been and continues to be troublesome, but it's not in a league with the 1970s. Inflation from the mid-1970s through 1980 were in the double-digits, reaching 14.5% in the summer of 1980. The annual rate of inflation of the US was 4.7% for all of 2021. Inflation's picked up in 2022, but it's still not near that of the stagflation years. Unemployment was worse then than now; interest rates also reached double digits, with a 30-year home mortgage reaching 11.2% by the end of 1979.

Could things get worse? They could, but the relative strength of not just the US economies but also the major European ones argues against that. The trillions of dollars injected by governments because of COIVD-19 has led to consumers having less debt and more income, even with inflation starting to erode those gains. As a result of COVID spending, governments today have more debt than ever, but rates remain historically low, extremely low in fact, which means that interest to service that debt is less than it was in the 1980s when government debt was much lower. We have further trouble to endure, but have cause to think it can be endured.

[FRI 25 MAR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (21)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (21): Atari's Pong game began a digital arcade gaming craze. Established coin-operated game makers -- including Williams, Chicago Coin, and the Midway subsidiary of Bally Manufacturing -- jumped in, along with newcomers such as Ramtek and Allied Leisure. They focused on simple games similar to Pong, with competition forcing them to seek new ideas, and also resulting in a shake-out in mid-decade. Magnavox was also inclined to slap the newcomers with intellectual-property suits; Nolan Bushnell managed to settle with Magnavox, obtaining perpetual use rights for Atari, but Magnavox crushed many other players.

In Japan, the Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (NAMCO) partnered with Atari to release a Pong clone in Japan by late 1973, with Taito and Sega following. Taito developed GUN FIGHT, which was the first arcade game with a microprocessor; it was licensed to Midway, which released it in 1975. The microprocessor reduced the chip count and meant much the same hardware could be used for different games. To be sure, writing the games programs wasn't easy, but some programmers became artists at it.

In the meantime, games for mainframe computers were also being refined. Along with AI work on strategy games such as chess, there were also "text-based games", being adventure games in which a computer issued a series of descriptive texts describing a particular scenario in a game environment, with the user entering brief text commands to make decisions on what to do next. They were effectively interactive stories, with the branching progress of the story dependent on a random-number generator in the program and on user inputs.

One of the first was written by one William Crowther, being titled COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE. It was written in FORTRAN and reflected his experience exploring Kentucky caves; it became popular in the mid-1970s. Further text-based adventure games followed, such as STAR TREK and THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. Text-based games required ingenuity in creating the branching story lines, but they were generally not hard to implement and not necessarily very big -- so they were soon ported to the emerging personal computer world. They persist today, mostly on a hobbyist basis, and many visually-oriented adventure games are simply illustrated text-based games.

In the meantime, pocket calculators were emerging. Electronic desktop calculators had been evolving through the 1960s, but they were expensive, bulky, and there was no mass market for them. The first pocket-sized calculators were introduced in 1971, with Bowmar of the USA shipping the 901B -- which was a four-function calculator with a red LED display and rechargeable batteries, using a Texas Instruments chip. Sharp and Casio of Japan also began to sell pocket calculators.

The big event, however, was the introduction of the Hewlett-Packard HP-35 calculator in 1972, which was the first true scientific calculator -- based on a stack-based "reverse Polish notation (RPN)" usage model, as opposed to the algebraic notation that would become much more standard for pocket calculators. According to HP company legend, when the revered Bill Hewlett was asked: "Who'll buy it?" -- he replied: "I'll buy it. Build it." It cost $395 USD, but it was a hit.

Texas Instruments replied with a series of calculators, including four-function and scientific calculators -- catching up to the HP-35 with the SR-50 in 1974, and by 1977 had introduced the much cheaper TI-30 -- with that line still in production today, in functionally comparable but much refined and cheaper versions. HP had not been idle, however, introducing the first programmable calculator, the HP-65, in 1974. It had a capacity of 100 instructions, and had a built-in mag-card reader. Five years later, it led to the HP-41C programmable calculator, which was a modular system, capable of handling plug-in memory modules, or peripherals such as a micro-cassette drive, thermal printer, or barcode reader. A programming community grew up around the HP-41C. In any case, programmable calculators, sometimes with graphing capabilities, became commonplace.

In the meantime, the price of calculators dropped abruptly, notably thanks to offerings from Sharp and Casio. By late in the decade, power-hungry LED displays had given way to LCD displays, and solar power calculators were also increasingly common. Calculators were ubiquitous, and rendered the slide rule ridiculously obsolete in a decade. Branching out from calculators, cheap handheld game units were introduced, such as THE LITTLE PROFESSOR from TI, which was a game to teach children math, and Mattel's AUTO RACE, both introduced in 1976, with handheld games also enjoying an explosion in popularity.

Along another parallel track, digital watches became commonplace in the 1970s, starting out with the Hamilton Pulsar P1, introduced in 1972 with a pricetag of $2,100 USD. It was, of course, a luxury item; it featured an LED display. By mid-decade, however, digital wristwatches had gone to LCD displays, and their price plummeted as well. Japanese manufacturers, notably Casio, dominated the market, offering on the margins gimmicky watches featuring games or a calculator emerging by the end of the decade. The gimmicks wouldn't seriously catch on. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 24 MAR 22] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Navy Tests Autonomous Aerial Supply Drone From Its Newest Supercarrier" by Joseph Trevithick, 23 February 2021), the US military has a strong interest in obtaining supply drones. The US Navy is experimenting with a "Blue Water Maritime Logistics Unmanned Aerial System" -- with a Blue Water drone carrying a lightweight payload to the carrier USNS GERALD FORD in February 2021.

The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), based at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, first acquired the Blue Water drone in order to conduct various logistics experiments in October 2020. The Blue Water drone was a variant of a hybrid-electric design from Texas-based firm Skyways, known only as the "V2.5". It is a winged, twin-boom drone with an inverted vee tail and a pusher prop, with twin vertical-lift props on each boom. It has an autonomous flight system, a maximum range of 800 kilometers (500 miles), and can carry payloads of up to 14 kilograms (30 pounds). It can release its payload while in a hover above a ship in motion.

The small payload is an issue, but not too much of one. The Navy says that this is more than enough to potentially make the drone a valuable addition to its at-sea resupply options. Navy Captain Paul Lanzilotta, skipper of the FORD, says:

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If, for example, a carrier-based aircraft is not mission-capable due to a component failure, the component is usually small. While larger loads can be carried by Seahawk helicopters or Osprey tilt-rotors, they aren't cost-effective for small loads. Once a network of Blue Water drones is up and running, it could include drones with a larger payload capacity.

* The Gatling multi-barrel machine gun was invented in 1861 by Dr. Richard Gatling, and it served around the world to the end of the 19th century. After World War II, the design was revived, initially as a rapid-fire aircraft cannon. As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("China's Massive 11-Barrel Naval Gatling Gun Has Been Adapted For Close-In Defense On Land" by Thomas Newdick, 27 September 2021), the Chinese have proven very enthusiastic about the Gatling gun -- having developed 7-barrel and 11-barrel versions for shipboard use, and both of them adapted for ground use.

The shipboard 7-barrel 30-millimeter Gatling is known as the "Type 730", while the shipboard 11-barrel weapon is the "Type 1130". They are built by Chinese arms manufacturer NORINCO. The Type 730 weapon has a reported rate of fire of around 4,000 rounds per minute and a maximum range of about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles). The Type 1130 has a reported rate of fire of 10,000 rounds a minute. The Chinese 30-millimeter round is 30 x 165 millimeters; in contrast, the US round for the GAU-8/A Gatling on the A-10 Warthog is 30 x 177 millimeters, and the US round for the chain gun on the AH-64 Apache gunship is 30 x 113 millimeters. The shipboard weapons are intended for close-in defense against antiship missiles and the like. A 20-barrel weapon is apparently in the works.

The Type 730 has been adapted to truck mount, the resulting system being designated the "LD-2000"; some versions of the system also add six TY-90 infrared-guided missiles to provide another defense against aerial targets. A fire-control radar and electro-optical sensor are included on the truck. The 11-barrel weapon has now been fielded on a trailer mount. The primary mission of these weapons is point defense of field installations against cruise missiles and guided bombs. The US has comparable systems using the classic Vulcan 6-barrel 20-millimeter Gatling gun, with the naval system known as the "Phalanx Close In Weapons System (CIWS)" and the ground-based system known as the "Centurion".

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Piasecki Announces World-First Hydrogen-Electric Compound Helicopter" by Loz Blain, 25 August 2021) the Piasecki company -- which has roots going back to the foundation of the helicopter industry -- is now working with HyPoint, a startup focused on hydrogen fuel cells, to develop a hydrogen-powered hybrid helicopter, based on a hydrogen power system that could be used in other hybrid aircraft.

HyPoint says its "turbo air-cooled" fuel cell system will achieve up to 2,000 watts per kilogram (2.2 lb) of specific power, which is more than triple the power-to-weight ratio of traditional hydrogen fuel cell systems. It will also have up to 1,500 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, enabling longer-distance journeys. For comparison, a contemporary lithium battery pack has a capacity of about 300 Wh/kg. HyPoint says the system has already been validated in bench tests.

HyPoint will supply five 650-kW hydrogen fuel cell systems for each Piasecki PA-890 hybrid compound helicopter. The PA-890 is envisioned as a slowed-rotor five-seater with wide wings for efficient cruise, and a tail rotor that tilts backward in forward flight to become a pusher prop. The wings tilt 90 degrees upward to get out of the main rotor's way on take-off and landing. John Piasecki, president and CEO of Piasecki Aircraft, says: "Our objective is to develop full-scale systems within two years to support on-aircraft certification testing in 2024 and fulfill existing customer orders for up to 325 units starting in 2025."

[WED 23 MAR 22] BIOELECTRONIC MEDICINE (1)

* BIOELECTRONIC MEDICINE (1): As discussed in an article from TIME.com ("Why It's Time to Take Electrified Medicine Seriously" by Alice Park, 24 October 2019), Crohn's disease is a digestive malady that has far-reaching effects -- not just diarrhea and cramps, but even widespread arthritis.

Kelly Owens was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at age 13. By the time she was 25, she was all but crippled with pain from the disease. She took a suite of drugs, but they had limited effects and serious side effects, including nausea, fatigue, and increasingly brittle bones. She increasingly acquired resistance to the drugs. In 2017, her doctors told her: "We are out of [treatments] to try; there is nothing left because you have been on them all."

There was, however, a new option, thanks to the emerging field of "electroceutical medicine" -- AKA "bioelectronic medicine", or "BioEM" for short. The idea is to treat chronic diseases by identifying specific nerves, then implant devices that either stimulate or dial down those nerves to influence the body's regulatory systems. Although quack electrotherapy devices have a long and bad history, BioEM is already being successfully used for conditions such as headaches and certain forms of depression, as well as chronic and sinus pain. Companies like Abbott already have neuromodulation devices on the market designed to stimulate nerves, approved by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), for treating chronic pain. Advocates believe BioEM could do much more, dealing with chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes, some forms of blindness and even dementia.

Owens is certainly a believer. After getting an electrical regulator implanted in her chest, she is now living pain-free for the first time in decades. Two weeks after she received the implant, doctors turned it to stimulate a specific nerve at just the right level to keep her immune system under control. That evening, she forgot to take her pain medication because she wasn't in pain.

There's considerable interest in BioEM from startups and major drug companies. Although current use of the medtech, for example to treat headaches and chronic pain, is limited, the market is still expected to read $7 billion USD by 2025. The pharmaceutical industry, confronted with diminishing returns in drug development, sees opportunities in BioEM, one major benefit being that it is precisely targeted. Drugs taken by mouth end up distributed through the body -- which not only dilutes their effectiveness, but can promote bad reactions.

The pharma industry and patients want smarter treatments. Drug developers are capitalizing on genetic information that can help them better match the right therapies to the right patients -- especially for cancer treatments, where specially designed drugs are chosen to home in on particular mutations in tumor cells. Isolating certain nerves to stimulate or inhibit represents another promising avenue of investigation. Kris Famm -- president of Galvani Bioelectronics, a biotech collaboration between Glaxo-Smith-Kline and Google's Verily, focused on developing electricity-based therapies -- believes that BioEM will produce "the next wave of new treatments we will have to treat disease."

BioEM, in the broad sense, goes back centuries. In the late 1700s, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani figured out he could make dismembered frog's legs twitch with an electrical shock. He was just stimulating nerves, but his work led to the idea that electricity was some sort of "life force". That led to Mary Shelley's classic book FRANKENSTEIN, with a patchwork monster resurrected via lightning bolts.

Electrical stimulation mostly remained in the realm of quack medicine until the decades after World War II, when pacemakers and other electrical-stimulation implants were refined, and gradually became accepted practice. Implants were crude in the early days, but now they are much more sophisticated and reliable -- adding smarts, as well the ability to record data and communicate wirelessly with the outside world.

We may be only scratching the surface with what BioEM can do. Kelly Owens has used it to beat Crohn's disease; researchers think it could also deal with rheumatoid arthritis, through an implant that would turn down the body's immune response that attacks their joints. Someone with high blood pressure could get an implant electrical device that would control how well the kidneys filter fluids, alleviating the need to pop pills. A diabetic could avoid the constant cycle of blood checks and pills or insulin shots, with an electroceutical device at the pancreas that protects their insulin-producing cells. Researchers at Johns Hopkins believe that manipulating electrical signals in the brain could deal with conditions from depression to dementia. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 22 MAR 22] BIDEN'S GRID

* BIDEN'S GRID: As discussed in an article from THEVERGE.com ("Biden Administration Announces Major New Initiatives To Clean Up The Electric Grid" by Justine Calma, 12 January 2022), the Biden Administration has been working to move the USA to renewable energy.

The Department of Energy is rolling out a "Building a Better Grid" initiative, using funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law, which allocated $65 billion US for grid improvements. In particular, there's $2.5 billion USD earmarked for new transmission lines that will be crucial for distributing renewable energy cross-country. Another $3 billion USD will be invested in smart grid technologies to make homes more efficient and balance loads on the grid.

In addition, there's more than $10 billion USD in grants to states, tribes, and utilities for efforts to harden the grid and help prevent power outages. As the grid ages and extreme weather events are worsened by climate change, blackouts have grown longer in the US, with the average American going more than eight hours without power in 2020 -- twice as long as was typical when the Federal government started keeping track in 2013.

The administration is also commissioning new studies to guide its deployment of thousands of miles of additional transmission lines, and plans to work with tribes, states, and local governments to ensure agreement with such enhancements to the power grid.

Plans to auction off vast swaths of federal waters for offshore wind farms also moved forward. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) posted the final sale notice for six commercial lease areas in the New York Bight off the coasts of New York and New Jersey. Once developed, wind farms there could generate up to 7GW of clean energy -- enough to power 2 million homes. The lease deal is seen as a foundation stone in the administration's plan to install 30GW of offshore wind capacity across the United States by 2030. BOEM is continuing to float proposals to bring wind farms to areas off the Gulf Coast, California, Oregon, and central Atlantic.

There is some resistance from the fishing industry over the deployment of new offshore wind farms, on the basis that they could harm marine ecosystems and coastal economies. The Interior Department is working with state governments to address such concerns, while the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and BOEM also said they are entering a new interagency agreement focused on "protecting biodiversity and promoting cooperative ocean use."

In addition, the Biden administration wants to "fast-track" the permitting process for wind, solar, and geothermal projects onshore. To speed up reviews, five agencies -- including the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency -- issued a memorandum of understanding to prioritize renewable energy proposals on public lands. The aim is to permit 25GW of renewable energy projects on public lands by 2025.

ED: In related news, the Biden Administration decided to retain tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration on solar panels, but raised the limit from 2.5GW to 5GW, and exempted two-sided -- "bifacial" -- solar panels that are often used in utility-scale installations.

[MON 21 MAR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 12

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The war in Ukraine thunders on, and it doesn't seem to be working out well for Vladimir Putin. As discussed in an article from VOX.com ("Is Russia Losing?" by Zack Beauchamp, 18 March 2022), the Russian Army expected to overrun Ukraine in a few days. That not happening, the Russians settled for pounding Ukrainian cities with artillery, air, and missile strikes. That led to some incremental gains, but even those are fading away -- the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying that Russia's offensive "has largely stalled on all fronts" -- with the Ukrainians now conducting counter-offensives.

Estimates of Russian casualties are not reliable, but the Pentagon estimates that at least 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed. Overall losses of effective strength are estimated at 10%; more than 25% would mean collapse of the offensive. Robert Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies air power, says: "We're seeing a country militarily implode." On paper, Russia's military might is far greater than Ukraine's, and many expected the Russians to indeed walk over Ukraine.

A decade ago, Ukraine's army was anything but professional; it is now, while the Russian Army remains decrepit. Morale of Russian troops is very low, and their logistical support is totally inadequate. Not only have combat vehicles been abandoned for lack of fuel, Russian troops appear to be starving, reduced to begging or stealing food from Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian Army, knowing they were outgunned, didn't seriously try to halt the multiple Russian drives into Ukraine, performing fighting withdrawals instead of standing their ground. The Ukrainians have fought in towns and smaller cities, where intruders are easily ambushed and house-to-house fighting favors the defense. In the meantime, well-armed and mobile Ukrainian combat teams attack isolated Russian units on the open roads, in particular attempting to cut Russian supply lines. A WASHINGTON POST article described a battle near the Kyiv suburb of Brovary, based on Ukrainian military videos and interviews with witnesses:

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The Russians appear to be having the most success in the south, where they are besieging the port city of Mariupol. They have been trying to do the same to Kyiv in the north, but their attempts to encircle the city have failed.

By all evidence, the initial invasion plan was put together in secret by a handful of Putin's top military and intelligence advisers. It reflected the Russian dictator's sincere belief that Ukraine was a fake country, and they could achieve regime change with limited resistance through a "special military operation". It would be no more troublesome than the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Over the longer run, poor logistics have proven a critical failure. A big part of that problem is corruption in the Russian procurement system. Corruption in Russia is less a bug in its political system than a feature; one way that the Kremlin maintains the loyalty of its elite is by allowing them to profit off of government activity. Putin's regime is a kleptocracy, a government of thieves, and the military is continuously looted for personal gain, with food and housing being substandard even in normal times. There was really no serious logistical plan to support the invasion. The Russian Air Force has also proven notably reluctant to commit aircraft to the battle. Farley says:

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Possibly the biggest factor in the conflict is the great imbalance between the morale of Ukrainian and Russian forces, being very high and rock-bottom respectively. According to Dartmouth political scientist Jason Lyall, whose recent book DIVIDED ARMIES examines the role of morale on battlefield performance:

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Putin kept the Russian invasion plan a secret from everyone but his inner circle; before the invasion, Russian diplomats and propaganda outlets were mocking the West for suggesting it might happen. Putin, it appears, simply thought soldiers were mere automatons, who would go fight if ordered to do so, when the troops were in no way prepared to fight. As for the Ukrainians, Lyall says:

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Lyall warns that significant Russian gains could upset this imbalance, and even dispirited troops can win wars, through the indiscriminate use of firepower. However, even if Russia begins to perform better on the battlefield, its initial objective, a subservient Ukraine, is completely out of reach. Russia doesn't have the forces to control the country, and no puppet regime would survive once occupation forces are withdrawn.

At this point, Putin's only card is brutality, to inflict as much damage on Ukraine as possible in order to extract significant political concessions from Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. Even that is problematic, Zelenskyy showing no signs of begging for mercy, recently announcing in a public video:

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Incidentally, videos do suggest that morale of Ukrainian troops is sky-high. A video from THE SUN UK showed Ukrainian artillery pounding a vehicle park, to the tune of AC/DC's rock classic HIGHWAY TO HELL. Another showed a Ukrainian soldier with a Javelin anti-armor missile launcher in front of a Russian armored vehicle with its turret blown off. He grinned, pointed to the wrecked vehicle, patted the launcher, and blew a kiss into the air. It appears the US-made Javelin is highly regarded, possibly because it's common, with references to "Saint Javelin".

* The war has underlined America's rejection of Donald Trump's dubious notions of foreign policy. In an editorial titled "Trump's America First Policy Is Dead (18 March 2022)" CNN's Julian Zelizer commented, with some editing here:

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[FRI 18 MAR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (20)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (20): Although the Commodore PET was the first true personal computer to be announced, it wasn't the first to be delivered -- that honor going to the Tandy / Radio Shack "TRS-80". It was based on the Zilog Z-80 processor, the Z-80 being a cleaned-up and souped-up derivative of the Intel 8080, and featured a monochrome display plus a notably clicky keyboard. At the outset, it had a mere 4 kilobytes of RAM, plus a cassette tape drive for mass storage. Later models would several times more RAM, floppy drives, and even external hard disk drives.

The TRS-80 was effectively a BASIC machine. Radio Shack did offer some other software for it, but never really focused on software development. The "Trash-80", as it was known, was never much more than a toy for people who wanted to tinker with computers, and most of them would quickly outgrow it.

The third personal computer entry in 1977 was the "Apple II", created by a team-up of two California techies, Steve "Woz" Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They were only similar in liking to tinker with computers: Woz was an easy-going computer geek who spent most of his time tinkering, while Jobs was sharp-edged, while being inclined to counterculture thinking. They formed "Apple Computers" in 1976, producing and selling a 6502-based PC named the "Apple I".

Not many Apple Is were sold, but Jobs got close enough to the burgeoning PC industry to set his sights higher, bringing in professional business help and seeing what could be done to turn the PC into a mass-market product. Woz was technically clever, while Jobs -- along with his business sense -- had a knack for understanding customer needs. The result was the "Apple II", the last of the three PC offerings in 1977. It ran on the 6502 CPU; had a baseline of 4 kB of RAM, ultimately expandable to 64 kB; used an audio cassette player for mass storage; and included two joysticks for playing games. It had an expansion bus for plug-in cards. Most notably, it offered low-resolution color graphics.

The Apple II started out pretty much as a BASIC machine, just like the TRS-80, although an Apple Disk Operating System (DOS) was introduced, with a floppy-disk drive becoming normal and the cassette drive being discarded, along with the joysticks. It was still a hobbyist machine, but it was the most popular of the lot, gradually leaving the competition in the dust. They attempted to stay relevant, leveraging off the "Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M)" DOS developed for 8080-based computers. In any case, by the end of the decade, an applications software base was emerging for personal computers, of which more is said later.

* The Apple II and other early PCs had been preceded and influenced by the emerging videogame market. It had actually started out in the mid-1960s with gimmicky "electro-mechanical (EM)" games, associated with a Japanese company named SEGA that had its roots in slot machines. They mostly sold slots to US military bases, since the Japanese have a low regard for gamblers -- in samurai stories, the villains are often gangs of gamblers instead of cattle rustlers. SEGA left that business behind, to focus on vending machines, of which the Japanese are very fond, and the EM games. They were technologically on the level of pinball machines, with lights and moving fixtures, rotating backgrounds, SEGA's 1966 submarine game UP PERISCOPE being stereotypical.

In the late 1960s, a college student named Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job in a game arcade, where he dealt with EM games. He hooked up with a like-minded partner named Ted Dabney, with the duo deciding to turn the popular -- among computer geeks -- Spacewar! game into an arcade game, developing "Computer Space" with Nutting Associates in 1971.

In the meantime, one Ralph Baer came up with an idea for a low-cost digital electronic game machine that could be hooked up to a TV set. Working with colleagues, he developed a prototype, with Magnavox deciding to run with it -- the result being the Magnavox "Odyssey", the very first game console, introduced in 1972. It played a simple table-tennis game; it didn't even have a CPU, instead being put together from a set of simple DTL chips. It could be reprogrammed to play alternate games by plugging in a programming module, which simply rewired the chipset.

Bushnell and Dabney had set up a company named Atari to develop digital electronic arcade games, and hired one Allan Alcorn to develop an arcade version of the Odyssey table-tennis game. The result, Pong, also based on a set of simple chips, hit the market later in 1972. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 17 MAR 22] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for February included:

-- 02 FEB 22 / NROL 87 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 2027 UTC (local time + 8) to put a classified payload, designated "NROL 87", into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office.

-- 03 FEB 22 / STARLINK 4-7 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1313 UTC (local time + 5) to put 49 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. Most were lost due to solar activity that raised the upper atmosphere. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds).

-- 07 FEB 22 / COSMOS 2553 -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0700 UTC (local time - 3) to put the secret "Cosmos 2553" satellite into MEO. It was suspected to be a surveillance satellite.

-- 10 FEB 22 / ONEWEB 13 -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Vostochny at 1809 UTC (local time - 8) to put 36 "OneWeb" low-orbit comsats into space.

-- 10 FEB 22 / VCLS D2 (FAILURE) A commercial small satellite launch vehicle developed by Astra made its third orbital launch attempt at 2000 UTC (local time - 5) from Cape Canaveral. It carried four CubeSats developed by NASA and US universities, including:

• BAMA 1: From the University of Alabama, intended to test a dragsail de-orbiting scheme.
  
  
• Ionospheric Neutron Content Analyzer (INCA): From New Mexico State University, intended to measure particle flux in low orbit.
  
  
• QubeSat: From the University of California at Berkeley, intended to demonstrate a miniature gyroscope scheme.
  
  
• R5-S1: From NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, being a demonstrator for rapid CubeSat development, designed for in-space inspection.

The CubeSats were selected for launch by NASA through the agency's Venture Class Launch Services program. The booster did not make orbit. It was the fourth failure in five Astra launches.

-- 14 FEB 22 / EOS 4 -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 0029 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the "EOS 4" (earlier "RISAT 1A") radar remote sensing satellite into low Earth orbit. It carried a C-band SAR payload. The launch also included two secondary payloads:

• INS 2tD: A demonstrator satellite with a thermal imager, for a future satellite India is developing in cooperation with Bhutan.
  
  
• INSPIRESat 1: A joint project between the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, with contributions from institutions in Singapore and Taiwan. It investigated the dynamics of the Earth's ionosphere, and also carried an x-ray spectrometer to observe solar flares.

India has launched 54 PSLV missions since 1993.

-- 15 FEB 22 / PROGRESS 80P (MS 19 / ISS) -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Baikonur at 0425 UTC (local time - 6) to put a Progress tanker-freighter spacecraft into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) supply mission. It docked with the station two days later. It was the 80th Progress mission to the ISS.

-- 19 FEB 22 / CYGNUS 17 (NG 17) -- An Orbital Sciences Antares booster was launched from Wallops Island off the coast of Virginia at 1740 UTC (local time + 5) to put the 17th operational "Cygnus" supply capsule, designated "NG 18", into space on an International Space Station support mission, carrying 3,810 kilograms (8,400 pounds) of cargo. It docked with the ISS two days later. The booster was in the "Antares 230+" configuration, with two RD-181 first stage engines and a Castor 30XL second stage.

-- 21 FEB 22 / STARLINK 4-8 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1444 UTC (local time + 5) to put 46 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The first stage of the booster performed a soft landing on the SpaceX drone barge; it was its 11th flight. The fairing halves were also recovered, this being their fifth flight.

-- 25 FEB 22 / STARLINK 4-11 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1712 UTC (local time + 8) to put 50 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds).

-- 28 FEB 22 / STRIX BETA -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 2037 UTC (next day local time - 13) to put the "Strix Beta" SAR satellite into orbit for Synspective, a Japanese Earth-imaging company. It had a launch weight of 100 kilograms (220 pounds) and carried an X-band SAR. Synspective is developing spacecraft for a planned constellation of more than 30 small radar observation satellites to collate data of metropolitan centers across Asia on a daily basis that can be used for urban development planning, construction and infrastructure monitoring, and disaster response. There was no attempt to recover the booster.

[WED 16 MAR 22] SZOSTAK ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (3)

* SZOSTAK ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (3): Szostak is a strong believer in the "RNA World" hypothesis; in fact, he believes it's so compelling as to hardly be a hypothesis any more.

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So if RNA came first, where did RNA come from?

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So where is his research headed?

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Beyond the specifics of the research, are big questions like: was the origin of life on Earth a cosmic fluke? Szostak doubts it:

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If it is inevitable, then given vast numbers of planets in our Galaxy, then there's little doubt it has happened and will happen elsewhere. As Szostak zeroes in on plausible mechanisms, it seems ever more apparent that life is common in the Universe:

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It will take time, but Szostak believes he's on track to solve the mystery of the origin of life. If it doesn't happen in his lifetime, another generation will solve it. It will be solved. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 15 MAR 22] UKRAINE DOES DRONE STRIKES

* UKRAINE DOES DRONE STRIKES: As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("Turkey Airlifts Additional TB2 UCAVs To Ukraine" by Gareth Jennings, 02 March 2022), at the beginning of March, Ukrainian defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov announced that the country had just received an additional batch of Baykar Defense Bayraktar TB2 "unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs)" -- attack drones. Apparently about two dozen of these drones are in service in Ukraine, with their numbers expected to more than double.

The TB2 is a fairly conventional medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drone, with a pusher two-bladed prop -- originally driven by a four-cylinder liquid-cooled Rotax 914 piston engine with 78 kW (105 HP) -- plus a twin-boom inverted-vee tail, retractable tricycle landing gear, a belly turret fitted with day-night electro-optic imagers along with a laser target designator, and four stores pylons.

It can carry a synthetic-aperture radar instead of the imaging turret. Payload capacity is 150 kilograms (330 pounds); it is unclear if that includes the imaging turret. It has automated navigation, take-off, and landing capabilities. It is operated by a 3-person ground station on a truck -- the drone can't get more than a few hundred kilometers away from the ground station. Due to export restrictions, the engine and electronic subsystems are now built in Turkey. The TB2 is about half the size of a US General Atomics Reaper drone.

   BAYRACTAR TB2:
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________
 
   spec                    metric              english
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________

   wingspan                12 meters           39 feet 4 inches
   length                  6.5 meters          21 feet 4 inches
   height                  2.2 meters          7 feet 2 inches

   empty weight            875 kilograms       1,930 pounds
   MTO weight              700 kilograms       2,850 pounds

   max speed               130 KPH             80 MPH / 70 KT
   cruise speed            220 KPH             140 MPH / 120 KT
   operational altitude    5,500 meters        18,000 feet
   max endurance           27 hours
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________

Munitions normally carried by the TB2 include the Rocketsan MAM-C and MAM-L small guided munitions, the MAM-C weighing about 6.5 kilograms (14 pounds) and the MAM-L about 22 kilograms (48 pounds). They are both laser-guided glide bombs, with a variety of warhead options. Other small guided munitions are also possible stores. It doesn't appear that there are multiple stores racks for lighter munitions, but that's certainly a possibility.

The TB2 was introduced in 2014. Along with Turkey and Ukraine, current users include Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, and Turkmenistan. Iraq and Niger have TB2s on order. The Ukrainian TB2s had seen action even before the invasion, destroying a howitzer in the separatist Donbas region in October 2021.

The Ukrainians are enthusiastic about the TB2. From altitude, it is very hard to notice, with nobody on the ground knowing anything's wrong until it's too late. Ukrainians have played up videos, clearly not faked, of MAM attacks on Russian vehicle columns. The Russian military is much more powerful, on paper, than Ukraine's, but the Ukrainians have the advantage of being on the defense, and also of engaging in "asymmetric warfare" -- that is, using relatively cheap and simple weapons to neutralize the Russian advantage.

Drones are clearly a major part of Ukraine's asymmetric warfare strategy, and more is certain to be made of them. Baykar Defense has introduced a "TB2S", the major change being fit of a satellite communications receiver system that allows the drone to fly beyond line of sight. That presents the possibility of performing precision attacks deep into Russia -- taking out Putin's VIP jetliner, for example? [ED: Later, it became apparent NATO countries are not enthusiastic about Ukraine taking the war back to Russia itself, presumably fearing escalation.] In any case, the Ukrainians are still going up the learning curve, and can be expected to come up with unpleasant surprises for the Russians.

[MON 14 MAR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 11

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: One Igor Sushko released a commentary on Twitter, supposedly written by a Russian FSB security officer. There's no verifying it, but if it's propaganda, it's very well written. A severely-edited version follows:

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It seems Putin has had a number of senior FSB officials arrested, probably both as scapegoats for failure, and to head off a potential coup.

A Professor James Goodwin -- Director of Science & Research Impact at Brain Health Network in the UK -- spent twelve years as infantry in the Queen's Army in the 1970s and 1980s, confronting the Soviets in Germany. He published his comments on the Russian offensive into Ukraine in THE TELEGRAPH:

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Morale of Ukrainian troops is by all evidence very high. A video from THE SUN of the UK started with a camera drone surveying the wreckage of a Russian mechanized column, with the view switching to the ground and Ukrainian soldiers picking up salvage. A cheerful soldier explained to the newspeople:

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An older soldier, possibly an NCO, said: "There was a column. We were waiting for them, and finished them. Here's the result. Slava Ukraini!"

* The war continues to go viral online. A pretty little blonde six-year-old girl made a hit, singing the Disney tune LET IT GO in Ukrainian in a bomb shelter. A few days later, it was announced she was safe in Poland. Kremlin trolls infest reply threads on Twitter, blaming the conflict on everyone but Putin, and saying the Ukrainians should surrender to end the war. I reply with a GIF: NOT GONNA HAPPEN.

The trolls are laughable, accomplishing nothing -- eh, maybe they don't care, as long as they get paid. Elizabeth de la Vega, an ex-prosecutor with a following on Twitter, commented on Putin's intent to nationalize assets of foreign companies that are pulling out of Russia:

Michael Dresser @michaeltdresser: That would throw an Allen wrench into his economy.

* I finally got my COVID vaccine booster shot this last week. I was holding off because I didn't feel at much risk, living a solitary existence, and was thinking a Omicron-optimized vaccine would arrive. It didn't, it appears that Omicron punched through supposedly optimized trial vaccines about as easily as non-optimized vaccines. I decided to stop stalling.

The shot didn't go badly. I was playing a puzzle game on my smartphone when I got the shot as a distraction; that works, to my surprise I didn't notice the shot. My shoulder got a little swollen; then, after I went to bed, I got the chills, even though I was under four layers of comforters. I turned on an electric heating pad and managed to warm up. I woke up in the middle of the night and was too warm, so I turned the heating pad off.

The next day I was sluggish. I did a light morning workout, and even that was a struggle. I ended up taking a nap, sitting upright in my chair, for 40 minutes -- I almost never take naps. The day after that, I was fine, other than my digestion being plugged up for a few days. I'll stop masking up in April, since diseases don't circulate so much in good weather; get another booster shot in the fall, before I go on a road trip; then mask up from November through March again. The N95 masks are comfortable, so why not? I don't get around much in the winter anyway.

I'll need to make sure I have access to antiviral drugs. I just ordered four free government COVID testing kits; I still don't know about getting my hands on the drugs, but that should become clear. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, the pandemic's over, now I live with COVID. I feel much the same way about America's seemingly endless Trump-driven political crisis. That will pass too, I don't know when, I live with it as well. I'm reassured, knowing MAGA is going to lose. I'm thinking they've already lost.

[FRI 11 MAR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (19)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (19): During the 1970s, there was a push towards improved integrated circuit technology that would, in time, upend the computer industry. It more or less began in 1968, when Robert Noyce and a few colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor set up a new company in Palo Alto, California, named "Intel". To that time, computers had been driven by BJT technology, with ICs being relatively simple building blocks.

Early in the 1960s, RCA Corporation had devised an alternative to the BJT, the "metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS)" transistor. The idea was to take a silicon wafer and deposit dopants into it to create a current "source" and a "drain", then deposit dopants to create a "channel" between them. A layer of oxide insulator was deposited over the channel, with a metallic "gate" laid over that, along with contacts to the source and drain. Controlling the voltage on the gate controlled current through the channel. Unlike a BJT, a MOS transistor wasn't very useful for analog electronics, but it worked fine as a switch. It was also relatively simple and easy to fabricate. MOS transistors could be built as n-type ("nMOS") or p-type ("pMOS").

In 1970, Intel introduced a 1-kilobit memory chip, much bigger than any released before, far cheaper and much more compact than an equivalent core memory module. Going a big step further, in 1971 Intel introduced the "4004", the very first microprocessor chip. It was actually the core of a processor, with 2,300 transistors, having a word size of 4 bits, requiring support chips to make it fully operational. It led to the improved "Intel 4040", then the 8-bit "8008" -- and, in 1974, the 8-bit "8080", which was the company's first really satisfactory "microprocessor" chip. It used nMOS technology -- which would gradually supplant pMOS technology -- with 6-micrometer design rulings; a device count of 4,500; clock speeds of 2 to 3.125 MHz; and a 16-bit (64-kilobyte) address space. By that time, other companies were getting into the "microprocessor" business, most notably Motorola, with its 8-bit "6800" chip, with similar specifications to the 8080.

A little company named "Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems (MITS)" -- led by an ex-Air Force officer and electronics engineer named Ed Roberts, out of Albuquerque, New Mexico -- had been scraping by, selling electronics kits to hobbyists. Sales were good, but profits were not. Roberts decided to take a big leap, promoting a $400 USD kit for the very first personal computer, the MITS "Altair 8800", in the January 1975 issue of POPULAR ELECTRONICS magazine. It was based on the Intel 8080 processor and had no particular practical use, being targeted at hobbyists who wanted to play with a computer. It had no display and no keyboard, being programmed with front-panel switches, with LED indicator lamps for output. One thing it did have going for it was a plug-in bus, with 100 lines, that allowed users to homebrew their own extension cards. It was known at the outset as the "Altair-100" bus.

MITS sold thousands of Altair 8800s, with hobbyists working to see what could be done with it. It caught on, with MITS strained to keep up with the demand. Users quickly added the ability to use a keyboard and a display, as well as use a "floppy disk" -- a recent invention, being a disk magnetic storage medium in a jacket that could be removed from a mass-storage drive. The original floppy disks were 20 centimeters (8 inches) in diameter, but soon gave way to the 13.3-centimeter (5.25-inch) floppy drive, with a storage capacity of 360 kilobytes per disk. More cheaply, ordinary portable compact-cassette drives were used to store bits as audio tones -- with very slow access times and very low storage capacity. Floppy drives would put audio-cassette storage out of business in a few years.

One of the most significant improvements was a collaboration between an aspiring programmer out of the Boston area named Paul Allen, who teamed up with a Harvard student named Bill Gates to come up with a version of BASIC that ran on the Altair 8800. Roberts hired Allen to work for MITS.

The excitement over the Altair 8800 led to the rise of dozens of competitors, with names such as "Itty Bitty Machines" -- "IBM", get it? -- Kentucky Fried Computers, or Loving Grace Cybernetics. The Altair-100 backplane bus became a standard, being enshrined as the "S-100" bus. The enthusiasm was supported by magazines serving the community, prominently BYTE and DR. DOBB'S JOURNAL. It was still largely a hobbyist thing; a company named Information Management Science Associates INC (IMSAI) got the idea of selling personal computers to businesses, but found the early personal computers really weren't up to practical use.

The market began to shifted dramatically in 1977, with the introduction of the first personal computers that looked like commercial products and weren't targeted to dirty-fingernails hobbyists. The first to be announced was the Commodore Personal Electronic Transactor (PET), Commodore being led by Jack Tramiel, a concentration-camp survivor who had come to the USA after World War II. The PET had a MOSTek 6502 processor chip -- a derivative of the Motorola 6800 chip -- the baseline PC having 4 kilobytes of RAM and cassette storage. More capable versions could have up to 96 kilobytes of RAM and floppy drives. The PET had a built-in CRT display -- text only -- and a proper keyboard; it was mostly a BASIC machine that could run BASIC games and other programs. It cost about five times as much as a low-end modern desktop PC while being less than a 50th as capable, but proved popular. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 10 MAR 22] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As reported in an article from REUTERS.com ("Biden Administration Sets New Requirements For US Secure Networks", 19 January 2022), in January 2022, the Biden Administration issued a new set of requirements for America's secure networks, stipulating the use of government-approved encryption and ordering officials to report breaches to the National Security Agency (NSA).

The order requires agencies including the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Energy to implement baseline security measures for "national security systems". The requirements include multi-factor authentication; NSA-approved encryption; and "zero-trust" architecture, an industry term for the ongoing validation of user or devices identities. The order follows previous ones from the Biden Administration for less-critical Federal civilian networks.

ED: The interesting thing here is that the measures stipulated are simply common sense, not that hard to implement, and should be universal. The recent fiasco over the ID.me identification system was a setback, but only a glitch on the road to more secure systems.

* A research team at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST) under Assistant Professor Jonathan Eugene Halpert has announced a hybrid solar-power / battery device, using a perovskite-halide solar cell integrated with a lithium-ion rechargeable battery. This seems like a straightforward idea, but other attempts to get a battery and solar cell to work hand in hand have resulted in devices that are less efficient than using a solar cell to charge a conventional battery. It appears that tweaking the perovskite electrode got the device to work properly.

HKUST are thinking of the hybrid device as useful for portable applications, but it is tempting to think that, if costs can be kept down and capability enhanced, it would work for large-scale solar power plants as well. Instead of having a solar array charging up a giant battery, the solar array is the battery as well. However, that may be too optimistic.

* As discussed by an article from INSIDESCIENCE.org ("From LEGOs To Ziploc: The Science Of The Snap Fit" by Katharine Gammon, 1 December 2020), the "snap fit" is as pervasive a technology as the screw -- examples being pen caps, IKEA furniture, ziplock bags, and of course Legos. Oddly, however, the physics of snap fits has not been articulated.

Wada Hirofumi -- a physicist at Ritsumeikan University in Kusatsu, Japan -- noticed all the petty tech around his house using snap fit, and decided to conduct a study on the subject. Working with one of his students, Yoshida Keisuke, came up with an experimental scheme, in which they used a cylinder and a thin plastic sheet that had been treated with hot water to bend to the shape of the cylinder, then measured the forces at work as the sheet bent over the cylinder and eventually snugged into place. They identified at least four different processes as the snap happened, the strongest force being when the sheet bent wildly.

Dominic Vella -- an applied mathematician at Oxford University in the UK, who was not associated with the study -- says that the key thing in any snap system is that it should be easy to push on and hard to pull off, a characteristic embodied in the "locking ratio". He adds that the study shows how getting a good snap fit depends on the interaction between the geometry of the object, along with its ability to deform, then return to its original shape.

The study doesn't really affect snap-fit technology in any fundamental way, but it points the way towards expanding use of snap-fit, suggesting it could be used to eliminate adhesives, which tend to be environmentally troubles. Another extended application would be for robots, which could use snap-fit to handle packages, instead of the robot using a complicated gripper.

Wada is continuing his work, investigating what he calls the "Type II snap" -- which works the reverse of the Type I snap, being easier to pull apart than push together. He's also interested in rigorously investigating how a plastic ball joint works. Wada says: "In any structure, form and function are always intimately coupled and much needs to be studied from the viewpoint of physics."

[WED 09 MAR 22] SZOSTAK ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (2)

* SZOSTAK ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (2): Jack Szostak has performed research in modern locales that have some resemblance to conditions of the primordial Earth -- volcanically-active places like Norway, Iceland, and Yellowstone Park in the USA. He sees that life got started in pools of mineral-laden waters, with volcanism driving chemical reactions, though he believes it volcanism was not the driving force:

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The vesicles come about by combining fatty acids with water. That's straightforward, but what about genetic material?

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[TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 08 MAR 22] THE META CONUNDRUM

* THE META CONUNDRUM: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Here's How US Lawmakers Could Finally Rein In Facebook" by Clare Duffy, 17 January 2022), social media giant Meta -- previously known as Facebook -- has been drawing intense fire from politicians, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta officials being regularly grilled by Members of Congress. It's gone well beyond mere questioning now:

• Congress is currently working on about a dozen bills targeting Big Tech, some of which would change how Meta handles algorithmic recommendations and collecting user data, and also limit its acquisitions.
  
  
• A bipartisan group of 10 state attorneys general launched an investigation late in 2021 into Meta, focused on the potential harms of its Instagram platform on young users.
  
  
• In early January 2022, a Federal judge said the Federal Trade Commission could go forward with a lawsuit to break up Meta, after the company had argued the complaint should be dismissed. This litigation could drag on for years, of course.
  
  
• The FTC and a number of state attorneys general are also reportedly investigating Meta's Oculus virtual reality unit over antitrust concerns.

The Biden Administration has proven willing to take on businesses that don't appear to be playing nice, notably giving Lina Khan, a vocal tech industry critic, the chair of the FTC. The hint is that the government is serious. Katie Paul -- director at the tech advocacy group Tech Transparency Project -- says that she sees this mindset at work in Congress:

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The days when Members of Congress asked Mark Zuckerberg appallingly naive questions appear to be mostly over. Nonetheless, no major actions have taken place yet, and the looming midterm elections may sideline them for now.

Of course, Congress has a major problem in that Democrats and Republicans agree they don't like Meta, but have opposed motives for doing so. Democrats want Meta to clamp down on trolls, while Republicans regard suppressing even the most toxic trolls as a violation of the Constitution.

One of the focuses of the controversy is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in the 1990s. Section 230 prevents tech companies from being held liable for the content that users post on their platforms, while implicitly giving them discretion in making their rules. There's talk of scrapping or updating -- but there is the serious problem that, if Meta was made legally liable, trolls would immediately start pressing nuisance lawsuits.

Furthermore, Meta would probably win in court, thanks to the 1st Amendment, which protects free speech. Jeff Kosseff -- cybersecurity law professor at the US Naval Academy and author of a book about Section 230 titled THE TWENTY-SIX WORDS THAT CREATED THE INTERNET -- says:

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Kosseff also worries that trying to hold tech platforms responsible for certain types of speech, such as vaccine disinformation, could backfire, giving the government too much control. Kosseff says: "There have been some countries that have passed fake news laws, and they've misused them just as you would expect that you would."

One option -- proposed by Frances Haugen, previously a Meta engineer and a prominent whistleblower against the company -- is to reformed Section 230 to hold platforms accountable for how their algorithms promote content. In that scenario, Meta and other tech companies still would not be responsible for user-generated content, but could be held liable for the way their algorithms promote and cause that content to go viral. Section 230 arose out of the legal tradition that booksellers could not be held liable for the contents of books being sold, but what if booksellers were actively promoting those contents? Other options are being considered.

Lawmakers have also used recent hearings about Meta to push for updated privacy laws. Progress appears to be taking place along this front. California's Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect in 2021, gives consumers the right to demand that large companies disclose what data they have collected on them. Under the law, consumers could also ask companies to delete their data and, in some cases, sue companies for data breaches. Other states are passing privacy laws.

Industry doesn't seem to be too worried about privacy laws, simply wanting them to be consistent, coherent, and not too difficult to implement. They would prefer that the Federal government establish a national law, instead of having to fuss with diverse state laws.

In his testimony before a Senate subcommittee in early 2022, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri proposed the creation of an industry body that would set standards for "how to verify age, how to build age-appropriate experiences, how to build parental controls," and other social media best practices.

Lawmakers were not enthusiastic; Meta already has an oversight board, whose members are appointed and paid by the company, and it has accomplished nothing of substance. Senator Dick Blumenthal (D-CT) shot back: "Self-policing depends on trust, and the trust is gone." Instead, lawmakers and advocates are pushing for the creation of a new Federal regulatory body responsible for overseeing Big Tech.

The FTC will play a major role in enforcing any laws passed to regulate Big Tech. The FTC is already at loggerheads with Meta, attempting to reverse the company's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, with the agency also considering new rules about how industry can use data and algorithms. Meta is pushing back, expressing confidence that "the evidence will reveal the fundamental weakness of the [FTC's] claims." Meta officials even at one time wrote a letter to the FTC demanding that Lina Khan recuse herself from all matters related to the company. The letter was ignored.

[MON 07 MAR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 10

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The war in Ukraine thunders on; the Russian Army is bogged down -- literally, it's the muddy season there -- but continues to pound Ukrainian cities. Western sanctions against Russia are being extended, with American public opinion strongly tilting towards even halting the purchase of Russian oil. America only gets 10% of its oil from Russia, so it's do-able, likely without too much trouble, but will the public accept the trouble?

There's also American public support for a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine, but that won't happen -- it's effectively going to war with Russia. The Ukraine misadventure has demonstrated how hollow Putin's war machine is, meaning it's likely it would be beaten, but that would drive Putin towards going nuclear. Considering how rash it was of him to attack Ukraine, it is by no means out of the question that he would be willing to use the Bomb. Even if not, he could easily throw NATO on the defensive by throwing missiles into Poland the Baltic States, and then dare NATO to do something about it. In addition, Putin would be able to use NATO intervention to sell the war to the Russian people, saying he was right about Western aggression all along.

For the time being, NATO can only help with sanctions and arms. The sanctions are drastic and unprecedented, a journalist named Julia Ioffe commented on Twitter:

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Russians are leaving the country in numbers, one American journalist saying a Russian contact walked across the border into Estonia with his dog. Things are going to get much worse in Russia. Ioffe ran a commentary in Russian by one Maxim Mironov, with an edited translation below:

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The war has no real support; the government never tried to sell it to the Russian public, saying Russian forces were engaged in exercises, and even told that to the troops -- who found it a rude awakening when they ran into bitter Ukrainian resistance. Ukrainian forces have been circulating videos of drone strikes on Russian vehicles, with the light bombs carried by the drones sometimes resulting in staggering secondary explosions -- one vehicle, apparently a fuel truck, went up in a huge fireball.

The drones are silent, as are the laser-guided small glide bombs they drop, and the first thing Russian troops know about an attack is the blast. Such attacks are terrifying and demoralizing to troops who don't want the war in the first place. The videos show the dead and wounded lying around -- but when a video showed a glide bomb hitting a surface-to-air missile launcher with a satisfying explosion, the soundtrack had the operators cheering, and it felt like the right thing to do. It is sad to kill young men, but too bad for them.

Nobody knows what will happen to Putin, but it is clear that his trajectory is downward. Army General Mark Hertling, cited here last week, replied to attempts by pundits to figure out Putin's strategy in Ukraine:

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* Fox News and the other Right-wingnut outlets started out siding with Putin in the war against Ukraine, but quickly reversed that position when it became obvious the great majority of Americans detest Putin. Of course, Fox and company are doing all they can to place the blame on Joe Biden -- though that only suggests that Fox has "jumped the shark", and is also in slow decline.

In any case Desi Lydic -- THE DAILY SHOW's literal Fox-watcher -- ran through the scene at Fox:

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[FRI 04 MAR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (18)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (18): IBM followed the System / 370 in 1977 with the "Model 3033". It was about 60% faster than its predecessor, and well more compact, with innovations including "instruction pipelining". A traditional processor would fetch instructions from memory and execute them one at a time in sequence; in pipelining, multiple instructions were executed in an assembly-line fashion, with execution beginning when an instruction arrived in the pipeline, to be completed as it moved through the pipeline. The 3033 had an eight-stage pipeline, as well as features such as "branch prediction" -- in which program jumps were anticipated so as not to disrupt the pipelining -- and "speculative execution" -- in which anticipated commands were executed, and simply discarded if not needed.

Supercomputers advanced in parallel with mainframes and minicomputers in the 1970s, but the progress was by fits and starts. CDC introduced the "Star-100" supercomputer in 1974, featuring a 64-bit architecture, pipelining, and "vector processing" -- a "vector" just being a list or one-dimensional array of numbers, with the Star-100 calculating on vectors instead of "scalars", meaning single values. It could calculate on vectors at 100 MFlops in principle, an order of magnitude faster than the earlier CDC-7600, and could access a maximum of 8 megabytes of memory. That was a lot for the time, still puny compared to a modern smartphone.

The Star-100 did not meet expectations, the main problem being that it didn't perform scalar calculations with any remarkable speed, and programming it to efficiently perform vector calculations was troublesome. Only three were sold. Texas Instruments built a comparable vector processor, the "Advanced Scientific Computer (ASC)", and only sold three as well. A more interesting effort was the Burroughs ILIAC IV, which had 64 processors, working in parallel to perform simulations of phenomena like weather. The idea was that a block of atmosphere could be sliced into "boxes", with an individual processor assigned to a box or set of boxes. Each box would be updated by data from its neighbors; the multiprocessor system would update all the boxes, then use the data generated from the boxes to update them all again, step by step.

Such a multiprocessor simulation worked better with more and smaller boxes, but that meant increasing processor load. ILIAC IV was a pioneer in multiprocessor simulations, the result suggesting the saying that it's easy to recognized pioneers from the arrows in their backs. It was buggy, and putting together multiprocessor simulations to work efficiently was very difficult. NASA's Ames Research Center obtained one for use on aerodynamic problems, but it was abandoned in a few years. It was simply too far ahead of its time.

It was Seymour Cray who had the biggest impact in supercomputing in the 1970s. He left CDC in 1972, after the company had decided not to pursue leading-edge supercomputer research. He formed his own company, Cray Research, and in 1976 introduced the ground-breaking Cray-1 supercomputer. It was a vector processor and looked like a movie prop, a cylindrical tower about chest-high, with a circular seat around it. Cray said, it seems not exactly joking, that an engineer could sit on it in winter to keep warm. Its high performance meant it generated a lot of heat, and it had to have a freon cooling system to keep its temperature down.

The Cray-1 was able to perform both scalar and vector calculations at very high speed, up to about 100 Mflops, more under certain circumstances. The secret of its success was that Seymour Cray, while determined to build the most powerful computers ever, was surprisingly conservative in the technology he used to do it -- never adopting anything new if proven tech could do the job. Architecturally, it wasn't much different from a CDC 7600, it was just a lot faster. The Cray-1 proved popular, with dozens sold, that being big sales in the research supercomputer world. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 03 MAR 22] SCIENCE NEWS

* SCIENCE NEWS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("World's Fastest Growing Plant Offers Genomic Clues For Next-Gen Crops" by Nick Lavars, 02 February 2021), researchers working on the Salk Institute's "Harnessing Plants Initiative" intend to deal with climate change and other grand problems by determining the genomic architecture behind various plant species. One of their recent targets was the tiny aquatic plant known as "duckweed".

Duckweed, formally known as Wolffia, grows in freshwater environments around the world, and is eaten in parts of Southeast Asia. It has no roots, consists of a single stem-leaf structure, and reproduces by budding. Each duckweed plant is around the size of a pinhead; duckweed grows very fast, being capable of doubling in size each day. Such a fast-growing plant suggests applications in the production of foods or biofuels.

As a consequence, researchers have been very interested in finding out exactly why Wolffia grows so fast. Salk researchers accordingly grew duckweed in the lab under light-dark cycles, monitoring which genes were active during different parts of a cycle. Todd Michael, lead of the study, says: "Surprisingly, Wolffia only has half the number of genes that are regulated by light/dark cycles compared to other plants. "We think this is why it grows so fast. It doesn't have the regulations that limit when it can grow."

The researchers also found that Wolffia lacks some of the key attributes other plants rely on for survival -- such as the genes needed to develop elaborate root systems, or defenses against pests such as spines or bristles. By living in water, it doesn't need roots, and it grows fast enough to thrive in the face of attrition from pests. Michael says: "This plant has shed most of the genes that it doesn't need. It seems to have evolved to focus only on uncontrolled, fast growth."

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Event Horizon Telescope Captures 'Beautiful' Images Of Second Black Hole's Jet" by Daniel Clery, 19 July 2021), radio telescopes can be used as "inteferometers", in which widely-separated instruments can be hooked up into a network, all observing the same object at the same time, with the timing of the radio signals being received being linked to atomic clocks and precisely recorded. Using computing power, the recorded signals can be summed, taking into account slight phase differences, with the result being a highly detailed image. A radio interferometer will have a best resolution proportional to the maximum distance between radio telescopes in the network, though the gathering power will still only be proportional to the sum of the areas of all the instruments in the network.

The "Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)" is an interferometer array, hooking up a number of widely dispersed radio dishes, from Hawaii to France and from Greenland to the South Pole. It only operates for a few weeks out of the year, the radio telescopes performing individual observations the rest of the time. In 2019, the EHT got a close-up of a giant black hole, lurking at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), which got a lot of press. It has now obtained an image of a second, somewhat smaller giant in the nearby active galaxy Centaurus A. Astronomer Philip Best of the University of Edinburgh says of the new image: "This is really nice. The angular resolution is astonishing compared to previous images of these jets."

The EHT took a shot of Centaurus A during the same 2017 observing campaign that produced the image of the supermassive black hole in M87. Centaurus A, about 13 million light-years away, is one of the closest galaxies to Earth that is bright at radio wavelengths. It also has obvious jets spewing matter above and below the galactic disk, an indicator of an active giant black hole. The EHT images have more detail of the jets than any obtained before, showing a dark center flanked by two bright stripes. It is suspected the jet appears bright around its edge because its outer regions rub against surrounding gas and dust, causing them to glow.

Astrophysicists are still trying to understand how galactic nuclei drive the powerful jets. One theory holds that an accretion disk, the swirling whirlpool of matter spiraling into the black hole, generates a magnetic field that funnels some of the matter into a jet. Others suggest this magnetic field taps into the rotational energy of the black hole to achieve such colossal power.

* As discussed in an article from LIVESCIENCE.com ("Mysterious Object Called 'The Accident' Has Been Careening Through The Milky Way For 10 billion Years" by Brandon Specktor, 2 September 2021), a brown dwarf is a very big planet that was still not big enough to initiate nuclear fusion at its core and become a star. They typically are about 80 times the mass of Jupiter, but that's still only a negligible fraction of the mass of our Sun.

Astronomers have spotted about 2,000 brown dwarfs in the Milky Way using infrared telescopes, like NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE). One peculiar brown dwarf was spotted in the NEOWISE survey imagery; it was faint in some infrared wavelengths, suggesting it was a very cold and old brown dwarf, but it appeared bright in other wavelengths, indicating that it was a warm, young brown dwarf. It had been found by chance, and was accordingly named "The Accident".

Astronomers took a closer look at The Accident using the NASA Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, as well as the infrared telescope at the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii. They found out it was even more peculiar than it first seemed:

• It's moving fast. Located about 50 light-years from Earth, The Accident speeds through our Galaxy at about 800,000 MPH (500,000 KPH), which is much faster than a typical brown dwarf. That suggests The Accident is very old and has been tossed around by gravitational encounters with bigger objects for billions of years.
  
  
• The elemental traces in The Accident's atmosphere are puzzling as well. Its infrared spectrum shows that it is low in methane, which is a common molecule in cool brown dwarfs. That suggests The Accident is very old, formed 10 to 13 billion years ago, when the Milky Way was filled almost entirely with hydrogen and helium but little carbon.

Federico Marocco -- an astrophysicist at Caltech and one of the research leads -- says:

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Finding more ultra-old, ultra-cold brown dwarfs could be challenging, the researchers said, since they're so dim. However, it's only a matter of time before others are found.

[WED 02 MAR 22] SZOSTAK ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (1)

* SZOSTAK ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (1): The BIG BRAINS podcast out of the University of Chicago interviewed Jack Szostak (Episode 61, released 28 January 2021) -- a Harvard geneticist who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for medicine, from studies of the dynamics of chromosomes. He has since gone on to a "moonshot", researching the origins of life.

He got into that field because he wanted to ask "big questions", the three that he thought the most interesting being the origin of the Universe, the origin of life, and the origin of the mind or consciousness. He chose the origin of life, since it seemed the easiest to answer. It was still challenging, Szostak saying:

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There has long been a belief, which persists today, that the question of the origin of life is not just challenging, but is so impossible to answer that the only possibility is that it happened by supernatural means. Szostak does not agree:

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The Earth-Moon system was formed in a giant impact about 4.5 billion years ago. At the start, the Earth was lifeless, with evidence for life not showing up in the fossil record until about 3.7 billion years ago.

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[TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 01 MAR 22] TONGA ERUPTION

* TONGA ERUPTION: As discussed in a NASA press release ("Island Obliterated" by Adam Voiland, NASA Earth Observatory, 15 January 2022), a volcano in the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga began erupting in late December 2021, to finally blow its top in mid-January 2022. The explosion was expected; an international team of researchers had been monitoring the island since 2015, when new land rose from the water and joined two existing islands. The researchers used surface and satellite observations to keep track of events there.

The double island, named Hunga Tonga / Hunga Ha'apai, is the top of a large underwater volcano. It rises 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) from the seafloor, spans 20 kilometers (12 miles) across, and is capped by a submarine caldera 5 kilometers in diameter. The two islands are elements of the rim of the Hunga Caldera. The explosion destroyed the new land bridging the two islands, and also tore large chunks out of them. NASA scientist Jim Garvin of the Goddard Space Flight Center, a member of the research team, said:

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The blast was hundreds of times bigger than that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. For comparison, scientists estimate Mount Saint Helens exploded in 1980 with 24 megatons and Krakatoa burst in 1883 with 200 megatons of energy.

Garvin, working with other researchers, develop detailed maps of Hunga Tonga / Hunga Ha'apai above and below the water line. They used high-resolution radar imagery from the Canadian Space Agency's RADARSAT Constellation Mission; optical observations from the commercial satellite company Maxar, and altimetry from NASA's ICESat 2 mission. They also used sonar-based bathymetry data collected by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, in partnership with NASA and Columbia University.

As the new land emerged from the sea, researchers from NASA, Columbia, the Tongan Geological Service, and the Sea Education Association collaborated to watch the young terrain was eroding due to waves and the occasional cyclone. They also observed shrubs, grasses, insects, and birds moving from the two islands onto the new land. For the first few weeks of 2022, the volcanic activity seemed typical, with intermittent, small explosions of tephra, ash, steam, and other volcanic gases as magma and seawater interacted at a vent near the middle of the island. These ongoing "Surtseyan" eruptions -- named for the island of Surtsey, off the south coast of Iceland, which emerged from the sea from 1963 to 1967 -- and added new land to Hunga Tonga / Hunga Ha'apai. Garvin says:

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On 13 January, however, a powerful set of blasts sent ash into the stratosphere, with the blasts continuing to 15 January, when the island was wracked by explosions that sent material as high as 40 kilometers (25 miles) in altitude and possibly as high as 50 kilometers, carpeting nearby islands with ash and triggering destructive tsunami waves. This was not expected behavior; it appears that large quantities of seawater flooded into the subsurface magma chamber led to the massive explosions. Garvin says:

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The geology team appreciates the disastrous impact of the eruption on nearby inhabited islands, but nonetheless finds the event fascinating. Aside from Surtsey, which still exists, most new Surtseyan islands get eroded away within a few months or years. Hunga Tonga / Hunga Ha'apai represents a case study that will yield valuable data.