* 22 entries including: 5th information revolution (series), new trade order (series), INSAR scans the world (series), climate pause didn't happen, online moderation in Facebook and the UK, electric gyrodyne | drone drum magazine | CONSTELLATION frigates, control of methane emissions | super-emitter plants, Khodarenko critiques Ukraine war | the air war | Biden tax plan, drones in Ukraine war, Ukraine IDs Russian dead | M602 game mouse, solid-state batteries | China thorium reactor | renewables grow, Ukraine's IT Army, AI V protein complexes | 5K exoplanets | enzymes V plastics, 3D-printed & super glass, Disney V Desantis | White House press corps.
* CLIMATE PAUSE? As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("A Global Warming Pause That Didn't Happen Hampered Climate Science" by Alexandra Witze, 1 April 2022), the effort to deal with climate change has long been faced with politically-driven opposition. At the turn of the century, climate scientists believed they had a solid grasp on climate change, that the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" were leading to a slow but relentless increase in global temperature.
However, weather records seemed to show that global warming slowed between around 1998 and 2012 -- with climate-change naysayers claiming that it proved there wasn't really a problem after all. After careful study, researchers found the apparent pause to be an artifact in the data: the Earth had, in fact, continued to warm. The excitement over the false pause ended up serving as an example of the conflict between science and public perception.
Climate records -- established by weather stations, buoys, ships, and satellites -- have been maintained by several organizations around the globe. The records showed that the rate of warming was variable, but the trend was upward, with record-hot years becoming more common. What confounded the record was the powerful "El Nino" of 1997:1998 -- an El Nino being a weather pattern that transferred large amounts of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere. That led to a rapid increase in global temperatures, but then they appeared to stall. Between 1998 and 2012, the global average surface temperature rose at less than half the rate it did between 1951 and 1998.
The expectation was that temperature rise should be accelerating, not decelerating. Climate naysayers claimed that "global warming has stopped". Most professional climate scientists were not impressed, believing the apparent pause fell within the range of natural temperature variability, and paid it little mind. However, with public attention focused on the "pause", climate researchers were compelled to investigate the matter, even if just to refute it.
A number of ideas were floated to explain the "pause", such as the contribution of cooling sulfur particles emitted by coal-burning power plants, and heat being taken up by the Atlantic and Southern Oceans. The associated studies were highly focused on year-to-year climate variability, and ended up showing how much natural variability can be expected when factors such as a powerful El Nino are overlaid onto a long-term warming trend.
However, it turned out the "pause" was erroneous. In 2015, a team led by researchers at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a study that showed global temperatures had not flatlined; instead, incomplete data had led to the wrong conclusions. When more Arctic temperature records were included and biases in ocean temperature data were corrected, the NOAA dataset showed the heat-up continuing. Further studies showed the NOAA analysis was correct.
Of course, climate-change deniers continued to proclaim that climate change had paused. Congressman Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who chaired the House of Representatives' science committee in the mid-2010s, damned the 2015 NOAA study, insisting that NOAA had fudged the data. He insisted that the agency not only turn over the data underlying the study, but also communications between those working on it. NOAA pointed him to the publicly-available data underlying the study -- not that Smith could honestly do anything with it -- and refused to turn over internal communications -- knowing that they would simply be "quote-mined" and "cherry-picked" to support Smith's accusations.
What lessons might be learned from the fiasco? It's hard to see how things could have gone differently. Climate scientists had too much to do to spend effort trying to deal with flimsy accusations against them, but they had no choice but to respond. The fact that the responses made no impression on the denialists was inevitable, and there was nothing to be done about it. In the meantime, global temperature records are being broken on a near-yearly basis, while the denialists proclaim there's nothing to worry about.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: An essay by one Casey Newton, who runs a newsletter named Platformer that discusses the digital impact on democracy, probed the tricky issue of social-media moderation through a recent Facebook report on the subject.
There's a consensus that social media is unfair, with polls showing that three-quarters of Americans believe social-media firms censor political views they don't like. Republicans are the most earnest in this view, with 90% of them believing social-media firms do exercise censorship. That suggests one of the difficulties in coming to grips with social-media moderation: most people believe there's censorship, but both sides believe they are the ones being censored. The widespread insistence among Republicans that their views are being suppressed is particularly contrary, since the Right has found social media very useful in promoting their doctrines.
Another one of the difficulties is that social media actually does censor political views. Anyone promoting neo-Nazi views is likely to be booted off social media immediately, and that is clearly suppressing a political view. The trick is that there's no great disagreement that neo-Nazi views should be suppressed -- which suggests the real question being asked by the critics is: Are social-media firms aligned with our political views?
That brings us to Facebook's quarterly community standards enforcement report, which makes for interesting reading. First, it turns out that very little of the speech that Facebook removes is "political", at least in the sense of "commentary about current events and policies". What gets removed are posts related to drugs, guns, self-harm, sex and nudity, spam and fake accounts, along with bullying and harassment.
To be sure, these categories can be hard to sort out from politics; guns, of course, lead to discussion of gun control laws. However, Facebook is less worried about ideology than about driving users off, having noticed that the more obnoxious the online environment becomes, the more people drop out. Social-media companies proclaim they want to "keep the community safe" -- which is true, if in the sense that users will leave an unsafe community.
On the other hand, if Facebook moderates too heavily, users are driven off as well. The biggest complaint of Facebook users is having posts arbitrarily deleted. That is troublesome to Facebook not only in alienating users, but also in the labor required to correct such mistakes. What Facebook management wants is a fully automated moderation system, its judgements based on transparent rules that everyone can understand. It is very hard to see how that can happen -- and worse, it's hard to see exactly who wants it. Partisans inevitably cry "censorship" whenever content moderation goes against them. A reasonable balance is the last thing they want, and so the war goes on.
* A related article from ECONOMIST.com ("Britain's Online Safety Bill Could Change The Face of the Internet", 25 May 2022), Britain's government is now charging ahead with internet-regulation legislation, the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which will impose sweeping new obligations on new obligations on search engines, social-media sites, forums, video sites and the like. The OSB's defenders say it will make the UK "the safest place in the world in which to use the internet", with provisions including:
British civil libertarians are not happy, with critics pointing out the OSB is likely to collide with the free-speech provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Britain remains a signatory. David Davis, a Tory MP, has called the OSB a "censor's charter" that would "strangle free speech online".
The OSB does prioritize its targets, with the worst offenses actually covering things that are already illegal, such as encouraging suicide, making threats to kill, or assisting illegal immigration. Given the volume of postings to big social media sites, the only way to monitor the postings is with automated methods. There may come a time when AI monitoring systems are capable of doing a good job, but today they are notoriously crude, often making mistakes and flagging harmless postings.
The second level of priority concerns posts that aren't actually illegal, but which are judged to be "harmful". There isn't a lot of agreement on what "harmful" amounts to, with the government talking about everything from vaccine skepticism to bullying to glorifying anorexia or racist insults against England's football team. Children will have to be shielded from such things, while social media sites will have to make a judgement on how to display them to everyone else.
Ruth Smeeth, a former MP and the boss of Index on Censorship, calls them a "clusterfuck". The government has said tech firms merely have to use discretion, but Smeeth is dismissive: "Can you imagine the political pressure on any platform that says publicly they're OK with this stuff?" Again, supervision will be automated, with the same potential for blunders.
There is bipartisan support for the OSB, so it is likely to be implemented. Tech firms will then be faced with choices: they can make changes for Britain only, make the same changes everywhere -- or just stop doing business in the UK.
* I have to comment that a requirement for robust online identification is likely both necessary and, over the longer run, unavoidable. We need robust online ID to carry on legal transactions on the internet, and even potentially vote, while protecting us from online fraud. Governments could promote online ID systems, and make sure they aren't abusive. Mandating ID would be overbearing, but in time it would become so difficult to do business online as to make it impossible to avoid. It's the future, like it or not.
As far as content moderation goes, my own concern is with fraud. If people say they don't like vaccines, well okay; if they say that vaccines are demonstrably unsafe, they're lying. Trolls do not generally tell subtle lies: they tell outrageous lies that fly into the face of reality. We already have laws against fraud, and fraudsters often get busted online; why not extend the legal concept of fraud?
As for myself, this last week I took a step back from the online crazy race. From 2016, the USA has been in a continuous state of uproar, but:
I didn't decide to simply shrug it all off, instead simply choosing to back up a bit and distance myself from the frenzy; I was really never closely connected to it anyway. All I did was drop individuals from my Twitter FOLLOW list, to instead focus on news tweets, while promoting my ebooks. I will still post REPLIES at times that I know provoke the trolls, and if they answer to them, I mute them unread -- there's a trick to doing that, never mind the details. Trolls like to argue, but they don't like to be ignored. On Twitter, it's not as important to have the last word as it is to have the first word.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (30): By the beginning of the 1990s, the personal computer market was dominated by PC clones, IBM no longer being the biggest player in that market. Following up the 32-bit 80386 and 80486 processors, in 1993 Intel introduced the first "Pentium" CPU -- that name being seen as more distinctive than the alternative "80586". The original Pentium CPU chip featured a 32-bit address bus, a 64-bit data bus, built-in floating-point and memory-management units, and dual eight-kilobyte caches. It was available with clock speeds from 60 to 200 MHz. It was a huge advance over the 8086, but still far from a modern CPU, with an address space of only four megabytes.
PC hardware and software evolved in parallel. One big innovation was the CD-ROM compact disk, which provided much greater storage capacity than the floppy disk, which gradually faded away as CD-ROM drives became standard in PCs. Enhanced graphics capabilities arose as well, along with "graphics processing unit (GPU)" cards that supported capabilities such as solid animation; audio cards became popular as well. Driven by LCD displays that continually increased in size, improved in quality, and fell in cost, laptop and notebook PCs became more useful and less costly.
With more powerful PCs available, MS-DOS was no longer adequate, with Microsoft introducing the 32-bit, multitasking "Windows 95" operating system in 1995. It was a big step forward, but suffered from many bugs, which were largely addressed with the "Windows 98" follow-on. With Windows, Microsoft became the most powerful player in computing -- and attracted unwanted attention from the US government, which conducted a set of antitrust lawsuits against the company that proved inconclusive.
Apple continued to base its PCs on enhanced members of the Motorola 68000 family, but the architecture began to run out of steam. In consequence, Apple worked with IBM and Motorola to devise the "PowerPC" line of RISC CPUs, which led to a new generation of Apple Mac PCs. Apple also pursued a series of "MacBook" laptops, but the company suffered from a lack of focus, and was gradually losing ground to the Windows PC market. Steve Jobs, after leaving Apple in 1985, set up a new company named "NeXT"; to turn things around, Apple bought up NeXT in 1997, bringing Jobs back into the leadership.
* Although computing proved its worth in the 1980s, the field had an experimental aspect during that decade, with a lot of tinkering in hardware and software. From 1990, computing began to take off -- first and foremost with the introduction of the global internet, a "network of networks", based on TCP/IP. From 1991, the "World-Wide Web" became established on the internet; through a "web browser", a user could access and read documents from anywhere on the internet.
With the proliferation of resources on the web, finding what was available became a challenge. In 1996, Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- then students at Stanford University in California -- developed a "search engine", using it to establish a company named "Google". It would be so successful that the term "googling" became synonymous with internet search; Google would be a leader in establishing internet advertising, and dominate the industry.
Online commerce also began to grow from the mid-1990s. It was nothing entirely new, starting out as an online extension of traditional catalog sales, but it shifted into high gear with the creation of "Amazon.com" in 1995. Amazon started out as an online seller of books, but would gradually diversify its product offerings, and become the giant gorilla of "e-commerce".
Local networking became more commonplace in the 1990s, and by the end of the decade had expanded to include the wireless 802.11 "wi-fi" spec, which provided local networking without the hassle of cabling. Configuration could be tricky, but smarter configuration tools helped. Ongoing revisions of wi-fi would offer progressively increased speed and capability.
Another significant innovation, in the last half of the decade, was the "Universal Serial Bus (USB)", which was originally designed to connect PCs to input devices like keyboards and mice, using plug-&-socket cabling, with hubs becoming available to accommodate multiple connections. USB soon expanded its scope, particularly as later versions improved performance, to support external disk drives and a wide range of peripheral devices.
Before USB, expanding PC hardware capabilities meant installing a card in a PC, which could be a nightmarish configuration task; with USB, the surprised reaction of users was, at least after the initial bugs were worked out: "Plug it in, and it just works!" USB would gradually increase in performance and capability, until it could handle video rates of data transfer. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: The gyroplane is a classic rotary-wing technology, preceding and leading to the helicopter. However, although it has advantages and persists, it's always been a niche technology. As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("GEM Bets US$100 Million On Skyworks Aeronautics And Its eVTOL Gyrodynes" by Loz Blain, 8 February 2021), innovation still continues.
For a case in point, consider the latest proposal from Skyworks Aeronautics -- the latest name for what began in 1986 as Groen Brothers Aviation, later Groen Aeronautics Corporation and Skyworks Global. Skyworks has built a number of gyroplanes, notably the Hawk 4T four-seater, which flew some 67 missions doing perimeter patrols around Salt Lake City International Airport during the 2002 Winter Olympics; the Sparrowhawk kit gyro, which was spun off as a separate business in American Autogyro; and a "heliplane" project developed for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but not flown.
Now Skyworks is working on the "eGyro", a battery-electric "gyrodyne" -- a gyroplane that can spin up its rotor before taking off vertically -- that will be able to carry 2 to 4 passengers, along with a pilot, at speeds of up to 240 KPH (150 MPH), and a modest range of 50 to 160 kilometers (30 to 100 miles). The battery pack is being developed in collaboration with Mobius.energy.
Farther down the road, Skyworks wants to build a more formidable gyrodyne named the "Vertijet", derived from the company's unflown design for DARPA. It will use tipjets to spin up the rotor before liftoff. Earlier designs with such a scheme had high noise levels, but presumably Skyworks has a solution to that problem. Once in forward flight, the Vertijet will more or less idle the rotor, with lift provided by the wings, and twin turbofans mounted on the fuselage pushing the Vertijet to cruise speeds of about 640 KPH (400 MPH) -- over twice as fast as the fastest helicopters.
The Vertijet should have a range of 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) and a 450-kilogram (1,000-pound) payload capacity. Skyworks says the Vertijet will be much simpler than a helicopter, with no tilting rotors, rotor transmissions and gearboxes, or tail rotor. The company has bigger ideas in the wings, such as the GryoLiner, which would be a passenger liner in the size range of 20 to 100 seats, over a range of 560 kilometers (350 miles) at 380 KPH (240 MPH), useful for inter-city shuttle operations.
* Wars tend to lead to a good deal of invention. As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Now There's A Drum Magazine For Dropping Multiple Bombs From Commercial Drones" by Emma Helfrich, 17 May 2022), imagery has been circulating on social media of a drum magazine that can be carried by a commercial cargo-carrying quadcopter, with the magazine dispensing small mortar bombs and the like.
No specifics are known about the dispenser, but it is not hard to believe. The Ukrainians have adapted small commercial drones to drop grenades, and a particularly interesting video released by Ukrainian forces showed a video feed from a drone, hovering over a Russian armored vehicle, and dropping four small mortar rounds on it, pausing between drops to determine the effects. The Ukrainians may have already acquired such a dispenser system, possibly having built it themselves.
* The US Navy is now developing the CONSTELLATION-class guided-missile frigate. The Navy's frigates are relatively light warships, smaller than destroyers -- it used to be the other way around, but the US decided to conform to foreign practice. They are adequate to support humanitarian aid / disaster relief and anti-piracy operations, as well as escort or training / engagement missions with allied countries, and can operate as complement to larger warships in full combat situations.
The Navy is being cautious in developing the CONSTELLATION class after having been burned on the Littoral Combat Ship effort, and so is working from an existing design -- the FREMM multi-purpose frigate, from Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine. The CONSTELLATION class will be somewhat bigger than the FREMM, but it will have the same propulsion system, and retain much of the architecture.
Official documentation says that the CONSTELLATION-class will be "multi-mission small surface combatants capable of conducting anti-air warfare (AAW), anti-surface warfare (ASuW), antisubmarine warfare (ASW), and electromagnetic warfare (EMW) operations." -- and that the warships will be "capable of operating in both blue water (midocean) and littoral (near-shore) area, and capable of operating either independently (when that is appropriate for its assigned mission) or as part of larger Navy formations."
The Navy sees the CONSTELLATION-class frigates as carrying out traditional frigate roles, such as attacking over-the-horizon surface ships, helping escort surface ship groups in part by detecting enemy submarines, and defending convoys while networking with larger surface ships. The frigates would free up more powerful warships for tougher duties. The CONSTELLATION class should be in service by 2026.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NEW TRADE ORDER (2): The reason that Britain is enthusiastic about making trade deals is because the country has raised trade barriers against its closest neighbor, the European Union, with the UK government desperate to compensate. Overall, support for freer trade is not what it was. There hasn't been a big round of liberalization since the mid-1990s, with activity in general in decline.
One problem is the widespread perception that free trade hasn't delivered on its promises, in particular leaving workers behind. As president, Donald Trump loudly rejected the rules-based system. The Biden Administration seems suspicious about the idea -- though to an extent, that seems to be posing for domestic consumption, with active hostility not so much in evidence. However, nobody thinks America will never elect another trade warrior like Trump again.
In the meantime, the WTO is gridlocked. There is a widespread perception among its members that China took advantage of the benefits of the WTO, and gave back as little as possible in return. The system that was set up to prevent trade disputes from going out of control isn't working any more, while cleaning up the rules in a body with 164 members without a consensus is impossible.
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how nationalism and panic can derail global supply chains: over two-thirds of countries placing export controls on medical devices in 2020 still had restrictions in place in August 2021.
Political support for free trade has faded, jeopardizing growth. According to one study, the uncertainty associated with Trump's trade wars may have depressed global growth by 0.75 percentage points in 2019. As interest in freer trade has declined, other priorities have risen. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala -- director-general of the WTO -- says that at one time, trade was the only issue, "a negotiating thing, trade for trade itself." Now other issues are shoving their way in, such as human rights and the environment.
* As a case study in the state of international trade, by 2019 Australia had become China's biggest wine supplier. However, in late 2020 the Chinese government slapped tariffs on Australian wine of more than 200%, claiming the wines were being "dumped" on Chinese markets at artificially low prices. What actually provoked the tariffs was the Australian government's call for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
That wasn't the first time China had stepped on its trade partners -- but by that time, the USA was also dismissing the WTO and its rules, imposing tariffs on both adversaries and allies. America was long central to the multilateral trading system, as both an architect and an enforcer. Although the USA flirted with unilateralism in the 1970s and 1980s, the Americans accepted that a stable global trade system was in everyone's interest. After helping set up the WTO in the 1990s, the USA invited China into the club in 1990. It also worked to ensure the fairness of the system: from 1995 to early 2017 American governments, filed 114 complaints against other countries at the WTO, with over four-fifths of them for problems that affected other members too. In contrast, over half of the 434 disputes filed by other countries were purely bilateral.
There was a faction in the USA that didn't like the global trade order, saying it hurt American workers -- and in 2017, they came into power. Robert Lighthizer, a former United States Trade Representative (USTR), claims one of the Trump Administration's big contributions to trade politics was its interest in matters other than maximizing company profits. In hindsight, that seems perplexing, since Trump never made any secret of placing company profits at the top of the agenda, and played up jobs almost strictly as a campaigning issue.
In any case, the Trump Administration made it clear it wasn't bluffing from the start, quickly blocking appointments to the WTO's appellate body. If the government thought another country was undermining its interests, it would decide unilaterally on punishments. France received tariff threats after proposing to tax American tech giants, and China was hit with tariffs. It was hard to know what to make of the strategy, other than that it clearly reflected Trump's view of the world as a zero-sum game.
Lighthizer says the second contribution was to see that "China is an adversary and not a friend." Before Trump, the US had tended to downplay China's authoritarian system, but under the blatantly authoritarian and imperialistic Xi Jinping, it became impossible to ignore. China was no longer seen as a partner, but as a threat to US military, technological, and economic supremacy. The result was growing economic warfare with China. In this, there were fewer questions about the strategy of the Trump Administration, since suspicions of China had been growing throughout the US political system. In part thanks to Chinese aggression against Taiwan, today the Biden Administration does not regard China as a friend in any sense. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* METHANE CONTROL: As discussed in an editorial from NATURE.com ("Control Methane To Slow Global Warming -- Fast", 25 August 2021), the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes it clear that human emissions of "greenhouse gases" are leading to rapid and uncontrolled climate change. The core issue is to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels and halt the excess release of carbon dioxide -- but the IPCC report also pointed out that methane has been a significant contributor to climate change, contributing about a half a degree Celsius to the planet's warming since pre-industrial times.
Methane is the primary component of natural gas, which has become popular in the USA, being cheap thanks to extensive hydraulic fracking, and also much cleaner than the coal it has supplanted. However, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It does fade relatively quickly, with an atmospheric half-life of about nine years, but it has an outsize impact until it does. That means that curbing methane also has an outsize impact on climate change.
The first question in controlling methane emissions is to determine the sources of methane. Natural gas extraction and distribution is a significant contributor, but it's also emitted from landfills, coal mines, rice paddies and water-treatment plants. However, as reported by Ilissa Ocko at the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in New York City and her team, the biggest single contributor is livestock, which accounts for almost a third of methane emissions. Extraction runs second, at over a quarter of emissions.
Reducing methane from livestock is a big challenge. People like meat, and meat consumption is rising in developing countries. The push towards artificial meats should help, all the more so because plants are more energy-efficient to raise than livestock. However, it is difficult to make any plan based on the rise of vegan meats.
Ocko and her colleagues believe that global methane emissions could be cut by 57% by 2030 using existing technologies, with a quarter of global methane emissions eliminated at no net cost. The oil and gas industry can make the biggest difference here, having both the infrastructure and the incentive to minimize methane losses: they want to sell methane, not lose it into the atmosphere. In other sectors, the operators of landfills, coal mines, and wastewater-treatment plants could capture the gas and burn it to generate electricity; it would be useful to that end to manufacture low-cost generator systems. Along the same lines, rice producers could minimize emissions with better irrigation and soil-management practices. If these measures were implemented, global warming could be cut by 0.25C to 2050, and 0.5C by 2100.
The biggest problem is locating where methane emissions are taking place. Over a decade ago, infrared sensors that could detect methane in the atmosphere were trialed on aircraft, and now the detectors are carried on satellites. Even the limited space coverage at present has demonstrated that a relatively small number of "super-emitters", particularly in the oil and gas industry, are responsible for a major share of methane emissions.
In 2022, the EDF will launch a satellite designed to identify emissions across large swathes of land. Carbon Mapper, a non-profit partnership that includes NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the San Francisco-based company Planet, will follow up in 2023 with two prototype satellites designed to track methane and CO2 down to the scale of individual facilities.
In March 2021, the United Nations Environment Program and the European Commission launched the "International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO)" to help coordinate these efforts and drive action. The observatory will also have access to estimated emissions inventories from governments and industry. Around 70 oil and gas producers, including giants such as Shell and BP, have committed to setting clear emissions-reductions targets and reporting emissions under an initiative led by the Climate & Clean Air Coalition, an international initiative involving governments, non-profit organizations, businesses and others. This work will also help to inform new methane-reduction commitments due to be made at the UN climate conference in Glasgow, UK, in November 2021.
* Along similar lines, a news brief from SMITHSONIANMAG.com ("Just 5% Of Power Plants Release 73% of Global Electricity Production Emissions" by Alex Fox, 4 August 2021), researchers mapping out emissions from the world's power plants found that of the 29,000 facilities in 221 countries surveyed, only 5% of them accounted for 73% of emissions from the power generation sector.
The ten worst offenders were inefficient coal-fired power plants located in East Asia, Europe, and India. The absolute worst is the 27-year-old Belchatow plant in Poland. The plant generates 20% of Poland’s electricity, but does so by burning a particularly dirty form of coal known as lignite or brown coal. Although it is Europe’s biggest coal plant, it actually has less power capacity than smaller plants that produce lower emissions. Fortunately, Poland plans to shut down Belchatow by 2036.
Studies show that super-emitter plants could cut their emissions by 30% simply by switching from coal or oil to natural gas. Adding on carbon-capture systems could reduce emissions a total of 50%.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from BBC.com ("Retired Colonel Speaks Out On Russian TV" by Steve Rosenberg, 5 May 2022), state-controlled media in Russia has been "all in" on Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, proclaiming the nobility of the Russian cause and the inevitability of Ukrainian defeat.
However, the facade slipped when Russian state TV brought on a guest commentator named Mikhail Khodarenko, a retired Russian Army colonel and military analyst. When asked about the war, he said that "the situation [for Russia] will clearly get worse" as Ukraine receives additional military assistance from the West and that Ukraine could "arm a million people". He continued:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
The desire [of Ukrainian troops] to defend their motherland very much exists. Ultimate victory on the battlefield is determined by the high morale of troops who are spilling blood for the ideas they are ready to fight for.
The biggest problem with [Russia's] military and political situation is that we are in total political isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don't want to admit it. We need to resolve this situation. The situation cannot be considered normal when against us, there is a coalition of 42 countries and when our resources, military-political and military-technical, are limited.
END_QUOTE
In February 2022, even before the invasion of Ukraine, Khodarenko had written an article in a military journal, criticizing "enthusiastic hawks and hasty cuckoos" for proclaiming that Russia would easily win a war against Ukraine. He concluded: "An armed conflict with Ukraine is not in Russia's national interests."
The question was whether Khodarenko was really bucking the Kremlin line, slipping through the cracks of traditionally clumsy Russian bureaucracy, or was working on behalf of the Kremlin, paving the way for withdrawing from the war. It appears he was working on his own, since the next day he appeared again on state TV -- parroting the Kremlin line. One suspects threats were involved.
* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Inside Russia's Failure To Control Ukrainian Airspace" by Piotr Butowski, 06 May 2022), the expectation when the Ukraine war began in February was that Russia would swiftly establish air superiority over Ukraine, cleaning the Ukrainian Air Force out of the skies. As with other expectations, that didn't happen, despite the Russians sending in a majority of their total tactical air assets.
The Ukrainians were prepared, having sent their combat aircraft to temporary airfields before the invasion began -- most Russian-style tactical aircraft are built to handle rough field operations -- and littered the original airfields with dummies, which soaked up Russian cruise missile attacks. Russian intelligence was inept and faulty.
Russian aircraft did not then control the skies, in large part because of the threat of being picked off by Buk-M1 surface-to-air missiles (SAM) on mobile launchers. The threat of the Buk-M1 has kept the Russian Air Force operating at low altitudes, where Russian combat aircraft are vulnerable to Stingers and other infantry SAMs provided by the West. The Ukrainians also already had some more effective S-300 long-range SAMs, and are increasing their stocks. One US defense official said in March:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
[The Ukrainians] are being very nimble, very agile in how, when and where they apply air defense. I'm not just talking about shoulder-fired air defense, short-range, but also long-range mobile air defenses.
END_QUOTE
The US and other NATO countries have also been providing real-time intelligence, obtained from a matrix of sources, giving warning of attacks. Although nothing has been said about it, it appears that Ukraine is operating a sophisticated networked combat control system, ensuring that Ukrainian warfighters have an immediate and detailed knowledge of the national battlespace, down to the level of individual combat vehicles. The Ukrainians have a highly accurate and timely picture of adversary disposition and actions.
Russia has been operating about 200 aircraft sorties per day since the start of the war, that being an order of magnitude more than Ukraine. The Ukrainians are selective in their use of crewed tactical aircraft, since Russian forces have plenty of mobile SAMs that would readily destroy them. Exactly what missions they are assigned is not all that clear. By early May, the Ukrainians say, they had destroyed almost 200 Russian fixed-wing aircraft, and over 150 helicopters. The Russians claimed they had destroyed a comparable number of Ukrainian air assets -- which was suspect, because the losses were greater than the numbers the Ukrainians had. By that time, according to US sources, the Russians had fired over 2,000 missiles of all types into Ukraine. The failure rate of these missiles has been apparently high: some have failed on launch, some missed their targets, some hit but did not go off.
While the Russians do operate a range of different drones, apparently their numbers are small, and Russian forces not very well trained in their use. So far, the Ukrainians have been winning the drone war hands down, their Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones terrorizing Russian troops in continuous night attacks. The Ukrainians are obtaining more drones with different capabilities, and are well prepared to make good use of them.
* American President Joe Biden has proposed a new tax plan, with a controversial element: a proposal to tax unrealized gains. On the face of it, that sounds preposterous -- but the Biden Administration has the best and the brightest, so it would seem there's more to it than meets the eye. One Jason Furman, previously chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the second Obama term, wrote an essay for WSJ.com ("Biden's Better Plan to Tax the Rich", 28 March 2022), to lay out the case.
Currently, taxes are collected on capital gains only when an asset is sold, not when the asset increases in value. However, that has three disadvantages:
Trying to determine schemes to get around these problems has not been easy, but the Biden team has come up with a workable proposal. The plan would apply only to households with a net worth of $100 million USD or more. It would levy a minimum tax of 20% on all income plus unrealized capital gains. The tax on unrealized capital gains would be a one-shot deal, effectively an advance payment on capital gains to be made in the future, with the payments spread out over five years. Assets would be valued at their market value. Presumably, if the actual capital gains were less than estimated, the taxpayer would get taxes back.
What about "illiquid" assets that aren't readily converted to cash? The idea is to impose a "deferral charge" on such that would effectively increase the capital gains rate when they were finally cashed in. That would prevent people from converting liquid assets to illiquid ones to dodge taxes. There's a lot of pushback on the Biden tax plan and it is likely to go through changes, but it is not unreasonable in any sense on the face of it. [ED: It didn't fly, at least not right away.]
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (29): Artificial intelligence research, having endured a "winter" in the 1970s, underwent a second boom in the 1980s, thanks to renewed funding and new thinking. The most visible effort in the decade was the "expert system", most significantly promoted by AI researcher Edward Feigenbaum. An expert system included a set of rules, mimicking those used by a human expert, performing interferences from the rules and yielding recommendations to users.
There was a big fad for expert systems, with the Japanese government heavily funding them -- and other advanced computer technologies -- as part of their Fifth Generation Computer Project (FGCP). From 1982 to 1990, the Japanese invested $400 million USD in the FGCP -- but found the payoff meager. Expert were, in practice, not such a big advance over decision trees. They worked well enough for relatively simple applications, but as applications grew more challenging, the number of rules proliferated until they became unmanageable.
Along another path, John Hopfield and David Rumelhart promoted "deep learning" schemes, based on artificial neural nets with many levels, which allowed computers to be trained on specific topics by being fed datasets with various inputs matched to various outputs. If given a big enough dataset, the neural net would be able to take an input and give the most closely associated output. It was much more the way of the future than expert systems, but the technology wasn't available to build ANNs big enough to do serious work at reasonable cost.
In any case, by the end of the 1980s, AI was enduring its second winter. It was not unproductive, however; for the next two decades, AI researchers avoided the hype and plugged away at refining the technology.
* In the domain of video entertainment, the biggest revolution of the 1980s was the introduction of the video-cassette recorders (VCR), unchaining viewers from the tyranny of broadcast-TV network schedules. As noted earlier, videotape recorders had been in common use by TV networks from the 1960s, and by the 1970s, VCRs using tape cassettes were in widespread use for business, educational, and other organizations. During that decade, the first VCRs cheap and useful enough for consumer use hit the market, with a shoot-out between the "Betamax" standard pushed by Sony of Japan, against the "VHS" standard of JVC of Japan.
During the 1980s, VHS gradually left Betamax in the dust. The VCR led to the rise of a video-rental industry, with a rental outlet at every shopping mall -- most prominently, the Blockbuster chain, which opened its first outlet in Dallas, Texas, in 1985. Just as with the 8-track audio tapes of the 1960s, the VCR led to the growth of a piracy industry, turning out illegal copies of popular movies and the like.
Videotape-based video cameras, known generally as "camcorders", also became popular during the decade, Sony being a pioneer with the "Betacam" professional system, followed by the "Betamovie" consumer camcorder. Roughly in parallel, cable TV services spread in the 1980s, complemented by the rise of consumer satellite TV services.
As far as audio entertainment went, the 1980s saw the rise of the "compact disc", metallized plastic disks that quickly replaced the phonograph -- and also spawned product piracy. One minor item was the introduction of the Sony "Walkman" portable cassette player late in the decade. It was much the same technology as earlier portable cassette players, but it could be clipped onto a belt, ran on two AA batteries, and used stereo headphones for audio output. It was an innovation in that it allowed people to carry their music with them, most stereotypically while running, insulated from the world by their headphones. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for April included:
-- 01 APR 22 / TRANSPORTER 4 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1624 UTC (local time + 4), on the "Transporter 4" mission, a rideshare flight to low-Earth orbit, carrying 40 payloads. The dedicated Transporter rideshare missions featured a payload stack of several rings that each contain circular attachment points, or ports, with a defined volume around them that can be filled with one or many satellites depending on customer needs.
The primary payload was the "Environmental Mapping & Analysis Program (EnMAP)" hyperspectral imaging satellite, with a launch mass of about 980 kilograms (2,160 pounds). The EnMAP project is managed by DLR, the German space agency, which first approved the satellite for development in 2006. The launch of EnMAP was delayed a decade due to technological and engineering problems, mainly associated with the satellite's hyperspectral imaging instrument. The instrument had 242 channels; the satellite and payload were built by the German space company OHB. The flight was originally supposed to have over a hundred payloads, but the number was reduced to 40 because of the large size of EnMAP.
EnMAP was the first payload released, with two other relatively large satellites then released from the payload stack:
The rest of the payloads were release in a lower orbit. They included:
The Italian company D-Orbit flew an "ION" satellite deployer, which then released seven payloads:
The ION carrier also carried a fixed payload containing small items from four clients of Upmosphere, an Italian startup offering accommodations for customers to place keepsakes and mementos into wooden boxes for a flight into orbit.
-- 02 APR 22 / BLACKSKY GLOBAL 16 & 17 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 1241 UTC (next day local time - 13) to put the two "BlackSky Global" remote sensing satellites into orbit.
Each BlackSky satellite weighed about 55 kilograms (121 pounds). The satellites were built by LeoStella, a joint venture between BlackSky and Thales Alenia Space. LeoStella's production facility is located in Tukwila, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. BlackSky, with offices in Seattle and Herndon, Virginia, is deploying a fleet of small remote sensing satellites to provide high-resolution Earth imagery to commercial and government clients. This launch expanded the company's fleet to 14 satellites.
-- 06 APR 22 / GAOFEN 3-03 -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2347 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 3-02" civil radar remote sensing satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit.
The Gaofen 3 satellites are based on the CS-L3000B bus, built for a lifetime of up to eight years. They carry a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload. They were built and developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), which is part of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The Gaofen 3 satellites have a launch mass of about 3 tonnes (3.3 tons) and carry a C-band SAR. They are part of the China High-Resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS). 24 have been launched to date.
-- 07 APR 22 / LOTOS S1 (COSMOS 2554) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1120 UTC (local time - 3) to put the "Cosmos 2554) satellite into orbit. It was believed to be the fifth "Lotos S1" electronic intelligence satellite. The Lotos S1 satellites were built by KB Arsenal, a Russian military contractor in Saint Petersburg, in partnership with TsSKB Progress. According to the manufacturer, the Lotos S1 satellites have a launch mass of about 6,000 kilograms (13,000 pounds).
-- 08 APR 22 / SPACEX CREW DRAGON AXIOM 1 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1517 UTC (local time + 4), carrying a "Crew Dragon" space capsule on its sixth crewed space flight, to the International Space Station. The commercial mission, managed by Axiom Space, will be commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria. Paying passengers included Larry Connor, Mark Pathy, and Eytan Stibbe. The booster stage landed on the SpaceX recovery barge, this being its 5th flight. The visitors returned to Earth on 25 April, splashing down in the Atlantic off the coast of Georgia.
-- 15 APR 22 / CHINASAT 6D -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1205 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Chinasat 6D" AKA "Zhongxing 6D" geostationary comsat into space. The satellite was built by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and based on the DFH 4 bus.
-- 15 APR 22 / DAQI 1 -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from Taiyuan at 1816 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Daqi 1" environmental monitoring satellite into orbit. The Daqi 1 satellite AKA "Atmospheric Environment Monitoring Satellite", was developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), and was the first of a new series of Chinese satellites designed to monitor atmospheric gases and pollution. The satellite's instrument payload included LIDAR, high-precision scanning and multi-angle imaging polarimetry, UV hyperspectral atmospheric composition detection, and wide spectral imaging.
-- 17 APR 22 / NROL 85 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1313 UTC (local time + 8) to put a classified dual payload into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. The mission was designated "NROL 85". They were believed to be INTRUDER-class naval signals intelligence satellites. The Falcon 8 first stage performed a soft landing at Vandenberg.
-- 21 APR 22 / STARLINK 4-14 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1751 UTC (local time + 4) to put 53 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 booster first stage soft-landed on the SpaceX recovery barge. This was its 12th flight.
-- 27 APR 22 / SPACEX CREW DRAGON ISS 4 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0752 UTC (local time + 4), carrying a "Crew Dragon" space capsule on its seventh crewed flight. The crew included NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Robert Hines, commander and pilot respectively, plus NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The capsule docked with the ISS about five hours later.
-- 29 APR 22 / SIWEI 01,02 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0411 UTC (local time - 8) to put a "Siwei 01 & 02" AKA "Superview NEO 01 & 02" satellites into orbit. The two satellites had a launch mass of about 540 kilograms (1,190 pounds) each, and carried an optical imaging payload with a best resolution of 50 centimeters (20 inches). The satellites were operated by the China Siwei Survey and Mapping Technology CO LTD, a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation (CASC). They were built by China Spacesat CO lTD, under the direction of the China Association for Science & Technology (CAST).
-- 29 APR 22 / COSMOS 2555 -- An Angara A5 booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1955 UTC (local time - 3) to put a secret military payload into orbit. The payload was designated "Cosmos 2555". The altitude and inclination of the satellite suggested it might be the next in a line of small Russian military reconnaissance spacecraft, known as EMKA. Russia launched the first two EMKA satellites in 2018 and 2021. This was the first orbital mission of the Angara.
-- 29 APR 22 / STARLINK 4-16 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2127 UTC (local time + 4) to put 53 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 booster first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.
-- 30 APR 22 / JILIN 1 GAOFEN -- -- A Chinese Long March 11 booster was launched from a platform in the Yellow Sea at 0330 UTC (local time - 8) to put five "Jilin 1 Gaofen" remote sensing satellites into Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Jilin 1 is a series of Earth observation satellites operated by Chang Guang Satellites Technology Corporation. The first four Jilin 1 satellites were launched on a CZ-2D in 2015. Over 40 Jilin 1 satellites have been successfully launched to date. The plan is to launch 138 satellites by 2030. The Jilin 1 Gaofen series carry a high-resolution optical imaging payload with a resolution of 75 centimeters (30 inches).
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NEW TRADE ORDER (1): A survey from ECONOMIST.com ("The New Order Of Trade" by Soumana Keynes, 6 October 2021) gave the current global trade order an inspection. International trade has traditionally balanced between two poles, with "free trade" at one end, and protectionism on the other. Advocates for free trade believe that protectionist tariffs hurt consumers while benefiting domestic producers, and also invite retaliation by other countries, choking off commerce. Advocates of protectionism see free trade as allowing other countries to kill local jobs and industries, and in modern times support malign environmental policies in exporter nations.
Economists have traditionally been in favor of free trade, though politicians sometimes have tilted more towards protectionism. In the postwar period, however, the overall push was towards trade liberalization -- notably with the formation of the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade (GATT) in 1948, and then the transformation of GATT into the World Trade Organization in 1995.
The WTO was a big step forward. For the first time, almost uniquely for international institutions, the system including binding dispute settlement: if the WTO judged against a country, penalties would follow -- penalties that could be enforced via trade mechanisms. When China finally joined in 2001, the broad opinion was that it would lead to China's economic and political harmonization with the rest of the world.
Exceptions were carefully permitted under the WTO regime. Those for national security were invoked sparingly, since it was obvious they could be easily abused. Environmental protection was allowed as a justification in some cases, but no more than necessary. Labor lobbyists complaining about "exporting jobs" were not paid much mind, that being seen as a simplistic point of view. Indeed, there was a perception that the WTO way would, by encouraging economic growth and efficiency, actually further goals such environmental protections and labor standards.
The result was generally lower tariffs. Between 1990 and 2017 the trade-weighted average global tariff applied under WTO rules fell by 4.2 percentage points. The drop was biggest in poorer countries: in the same period China's tariffs fell by 28 points, India's by 51, and Brazil's by 10. The WTO regime also encouraged bilateral and regional trade deals, which expanded from around 50 in the early 1990s to as many as 300 in 2019, helping to further cut tariffs.
The consequence was a boom in global trade as a share of gross output -- from about 30% in the early 1970s to 60% four decades later. During the same time period, global supply chains expanded their share of total trade from about 37% to 50%. The steep drop in transport costs, mostly due to container shipping, helped drive the growth of global commerce; so did international harmony.
As the WTO optimists expected, freer trade meant higher living standards, with a World Bank report from 2019 stating that a 1% rise in participation in global value chains means an increase in income per head of more than 1% in the long run -- with poorer countries benefiting more. The US International Trade Commission, an independent government agency, estimates that America's bilateral and regional trade agreements have raised real incomes by 0.6%.
Trade liberalization continues. In November 2020, 15 Asia-Pacific countries signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, establishing the world's biggest trade block. Trading in the African Continental Free Trade Area, a deal ratified by 38 countries, began at the start of 2021. America and the EU are discussing common international standards for the digital economy. Post-Brexit Britain is trying to cover 80% of its trade with preferential deals. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DRONE WAR UKRAINE: As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("Ukraine Conflict: AeroVironment to Donate UASs to Ukraine" by Gareth Jennings, 20 April 2022), US drone-maker Aerovironment has donated 100 of the "Quantix" small tactical drones to Ukraine. The Quantix can be carried around by infantry; it is a "hybrid" design, a rear-wing aircraft that has twin electric props on a "vee" on each wingtip, allowing it to take off and land tail-first in a "quadcopter" configuration.
It is battery-operated, with a flight endurance of 45 minutes and a linear range of 20 kilometers (12 miles). It is controlled with a tablet and has an autonomous guidance system, allowing it to fly in an "RF-silent" mode. It doesn't have a laser target designator -- instead having twin imagers, one color and one multispectral. It may be able to designate targets using GPS coordinates.
Aerovironment has already made a contribution to the war with its "Switchblade" kamikaze drones. They all have a similar configuration, being battery-operated, with a pusher prop, pop-up tailfins, and fore-aft pop-out wings; they are tube-launched, somewhat like a mortar round. They carry a warhead and a fixed camera array. There is the "Switchblade 300", which only weighs 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds), with the "Switchblade 600" having a weight of 15 kilograms (33 pounds), and having the capability of taking out armored vehicles.
There's also a very small "Blackwing" kamikaze drone of similar configuration, with a weight less than 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds), intended for maritime operation -- including a launcher that can be deployed from a submarine, to float to the surface and send off a set of Blackwings. Apparently, the Blackwing is primarily intended to support special-operations teams.
It is puzzling that nothing at all is being said about long-range kamikaze drones in the Ukraine war, the Houthis in Yemen having used them in devastating precision attacks on the Saudi oil infrastructure. These drones, obtained from the Iranians, are cheap, small, and very hard to detect or defend against. It is hard to believe the Ukrainians and their NATO allies haven't noticed how effective they were; either they are not seen as relevant to the defensive war strategy, or a secret program is under way to make use of them.
In the meantime, NATO 155-millimeter guns of various sorts have been flowing into Ukraine, along with vast quantities of 155 mm ammunition. This was a bit puzzling at first, because the Ukrainians have been reliant on Russian-style 152 mm guns -- but apparently it was seen as more practical to upgrade the Ukrainians to 155 mm guns than to support 152 mm weapons. In additions, it seems plausible that a good proportion of the 155 mm ammunition being provided is rocket-boosted and guided. NATO already fields GPS-guided 155 mm ammunition; there may also be 155 mm shells with terminal targeting seekers as well, using imaging infrared or radio-emitter targeting.
The US military has been moving towards a concept called "long-range precision fires (LRPF)", in which battled are conducted using sets of precision-guided weapons in various range categories. It appears the US sees Ukraine as a useful "battle lab" for LRPF. There's been talk of supplying Guided Multiple-Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles to Ukraine, along with HIMARS wheeled launchers. One wonders what weapons are being provided that nobody is talking about.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The war in Ukraine burns on. Russian offensive thrusts have been generally blunted, at high cost to the Russians. One armored unit crossed a river on pontoon bridges; the Ukrainians destroyed the bridges, and then utterly crushed the Russians stranded there.
In an interview with Sky News UK, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence, said that Vladimir Putin was critically ill with leukemia, and that a coup was underway to topple him. No evidence was offered for these claims; they may have been psychological warfare to unsettle Putin, and stood to be effective on that basis. Budanov said that Ukraine will take the counter-offensive in the summer, and that the Russians will be cleaned out by the end of the year. We'll see.
Along related lines, the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation has been tasked with trying to identify Russian war dead using various techniques -- particularly facial recognition software that searches the internet for matches to photos of the dead. Once they have a candidate match, they try to track down the families of the dead for verification, and invite them to recover the bodies.
Clearly, such actions serve a propaganda purpose, to bring the war back home to Russians, and cut through the lies of Russian media. The ministry's Mykhailo Fedorov says they often get responses, with about 80% of the responses being threats to kill Ukrainians. What about the other 20%? Fedorov says: "Some of them say they're grateful, and they know about the situation, and some would like to come and pick up the body."
In more amusing news of the war, the Russians looted the John Deere dealership in Mariupol of fancy expensive farm equipment, and hauled it off to Russia. They couldn't get any of it to work, since it had all been digitally locked out. Apparently they're trying to hack their way in now.
* My Logitech wired mouse started to act up, getting jumpy and balky. It was, of course, an optical mouse, so I tried cleaning the lens and the mousepad. That didn't work. I was puzzled -- what could go wrong with the mouse when it had no moving parts? -- but I shrugged and junked it, getting by with an old mouse I had.
Of course, I went to Amazon.com to get a proper replacement. Wired mice are somewhat unusual these days, but I have no particular use for a wireless mouse, it's more trouble than it's worth to me. I was having trouble finding anything satisfactory, until I found the Redragon M602 wired gaming mouse. It looked overly fancy, but the price was right -- less than $20 USD -- so I ordered it.
When it arrived, I promptly plugged it into my PC and played with it. First thing I noticed was that it's illuminated with colored variable LED patterns. It was pretty, but I didn't see it as useful, which led to my first problem: how to turn the LEDs off.
As it turned out, the M602 has four auxiliary buttons:
After puzzling around, I found that the rear top button allowed me to cycle through the LED modes until I found the OFF mode. The front top button was a bit harder to figure out, until I realized that it controlled the speed of the mouse cursor, allowing me to control the sensitivity of the mouse. The sensitivity was given in DPI -- dots per inch -- which confused me, until I realized it meant that moving the mouse an inch would move the cursor the specified number of dots. "Hey, that's a nice feature!" The LEDs light up in a different color for each sensitivity setting.
It is apparently possible to reprogram the buttons, but I had no reason to do so. I found yet another button on the bottom of the mouse for changing modes; I don't know exactly what it does yet. As gadgets go, a mouse is an unexciting item, but I was very pleased with the product, and intend to buy another one as a spare.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (28): By the mid-1980s, pocket calculators had reached a certain technological maturity. Four-function calculators were cheap to the point of being used as promotional items, with the result that the profit margins were so low that many players had to drop out. Low-end scientific calculators also became dirt-cheap, though high-end scientific calculators -- such as the Texas Instruments TI-89 -- could perform functions such as plotting graphics and even solving differential equations.
There was a fine line between these high-end pocket calculators and the emerging "pocket computers", most notably the Japanese Sharp PC-1500, a handheld BASIC machine introduced in 1981. It was an earlier user of "complementary MOS (CMOS)" technology, which combined nMOS and pMOS devices to reduce power consumption. The pocket computers of the era were whizzy and cute, but also limited and somewhat awkward. Better technology was on the horizon -- with CMOS gradually becoming the predominant digital circuit technology all along the line of computing. As the number of components in VLSI systems continued to increase, power dissipation became a bigger problem, with CMOS keeping power consumption to a reasonable level.
Pocket computing was only getting started. In contrast, by the end of the decade, pocket calculators had become a mature market, with only a few major players, low prices and low profit margins, and little technological innovation -- there being no particular need for it.
In the meantime, thanks to the introduction of very cheap single-chip processors, incorporating a program ROM, a small amount of memory, and I/O, meant that any device that required a bit of smarts -- a washing machine, a sprinkler system controller, security alarms -- became, to a degree, computer-enabled.
* During the 1980s, desktop computing was gradually pressuring mainframe computers; in 1984, the market for desktop computers exceeded that for mainframe computers for the first time. Mainframes and minicomputers still remained a big market, with IBM retaining its pre-eminence, and DEC expanding and diversifying its product line. However, the pressure on the market through the decade.
Adding to the pressure was the rise of "computer workstations", enabled by the introduction of powerful 32-bit CPUs such as the Motorola 68000. A workstation was like a high-end PC, intended for a single user, with features such as generous memory and mass storage, by the standards of the time, auxiliary floating-point processors such as the Motorola 6888X chip to soup up processor performance, high-resolution graphics, and network connectivity. They typically ran UNIX, being intended for use in technical organizations for design and analysis. Major players included Apollo and Sun, with Sun getting a jump on the market with workstations based on the Sun "Scalar Processor Architecture (SPARC)" processor chip, introduced in 1987. It was a 32-bit reduced instruction set processor, with a streamlined and optimized instruction set and a large number of registers, based on a RISC design developed at UC Berkeley.
The workstations were heavily used for computer-aided design, mechanical modeling having advanced considerably during the time, allowing the creation of digital "virtual machines" that could be tested to an increasing degree without being built. Along the same lines, scientific researchers developed more sophisticated models of physical systems, leveraging off the advanced graphics technology. The rise of workstations also led to the rise of "server" computers -- networked computers that provided services to workstations, such as mass storage, network interaction, and computing. The rise of advanced computer graphics technology led to commercial development of "digital animation" for movies and TV shows.
At the time, it was expensive and limited, but there was a spirit of experimentation at work, one of the biggest players being Industrial Light & Magic. ILM had been founded by George Lucas in the 1970s to provide special effects for his STAR WARS films, and began to investigate digital effects in the 1980s. For the time being, traditional special effects with models and the like remained the norm, but the digital tech kept on being refined and becoming less expensive.
Supercomputing during the 1980s was dominated by the Cray Corporation, with Control Data in competition. Cray's offerings included:
Software development for supercomputers became an increasing burden, driving a move away from the proprietary Cray Operating System to the UNIX-based UNICOS.
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("New All-Solid-State Battery Holds Promise For Grid Storage And EVs" by Nick Lavars, 26 September 2021), there's considerable research in battery technology, particularly on solid electrolytes. Another innovation in battery research has been anodes with silicon, increasing energy density. Now a new demonstrator battery has integrated the two.
Replacing the traditional graphite anode partly or completely with silicon might increase battery capacity by a factor of ten. The problem is that liquid electrolytes tend to rapidly degrade the anode, leading to failure. Researchers at the University of California in San Diego decided to take the straightforward approach of trying solid electrolytes instead.
That required rethinking the silicon anode, eliminating carbon and binders normally used, and using a cheaper, less processed silicon. Using a sulfide-based electrolyte resulted in a battery that could tolerate 500 charge-discharge cycles and still have 80% of its original capacity.
Darren HS Tan -- lead researcher and CEO of startup UNGRID Battery, which has licensed the technology -- says: "The solid-state silicon approach overcomes many limitations in conventional batteries. It presents exciting opportunities for us to meet market demands for higher volumetric energy, lowered costs, and safer batteries, especially for grid energy storage."
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("China Adding Finishing Touches To World-First Thorium Nuclear Reactor" by Nick Lavars, 20 July 2021), the element thorium (atomic number 90) is most commonly found as the thorium-232 isotope. It is weakly radioactive, with a half-life of billions of years. However, under neutron bombardment, it can be converted into uranium-233, which can be used as a nuclear fuel. It is about three times as abundant as uranium, being almost as common as lead, and so has been attractive as a fuel for nuclear reactors.
The Chinese government is now working on a prototype nuclear reactor using thorium in the desert city of Wuwei, in Gansu Province, to follow with other reactors of the same configuration if all goes well. In this scheme, thorium is dissolved in molten salt, which is cycled through the reactor core, driving a secondary molten-salt coolant loop that ultimately drives a power turbine. The molten-salt reactor has no fuel rods, operates at low pressures if high temperatures, and if there's a reactor failure, the fuel will solidify as it cools and not contaminate the surrounding area.
In 2011, the Chinese government began work on a 2-megawatt prototype reactor in Gansu, with the reactor now being completed. It is the first operational thorium molten-salt reactor in the world. Design work is underway for operational reactors with capacities of up to 100 megawatts, with the first to be completed no earlier than 2030.
Details are not clear. Uranium or some other nuclear fuel is still required to kick-start a thorium reactor by providing neutron bombardment, and the molten-salt fluid is notoriously corrosive. Presumably, these issues have been addressed in the prototype reactor.
* The title of a CNN.com article: "Wind & Solar Generated A Record 10% of the World’s Power in 2021" (30 March 2022) -- speaks for itself. According to a study from climate think-tank Ember, not only is 10% of the world's electric power supply today, clean sources in general accounted for 38% of the power supply, even more than coal.
According to the study, 50 countries are generating more than 10% of their power from wind and solar, with the fastest transformations happening in the Netherlands, Australia, and Vietnam. Those countries have switched around a tenth of their power from fossil fuels to wind and solar in just the last two years. Ten countries generated more than 25% of their power from wind and solar, led by Denmark at 52%.
The report found that solar and wind power could grow fast enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels before industrialization, given the 10-year average compound growth rate of 20% to be maintained to 2030.
Solar generation rose 23% globally in 2021, while wind supply increased 14% over the same period. Together, both renewable sources accounted for 10.3% of total global electricity generation, up 1% from 2020. The report included data for 209 countries covering the period 2000 to 2020. For 2021, it added data for 75 countries.
However, coal-fired power generation also saw its fastest growth since at least 1985, up 9% in 2021 at 10,042 terawatt hours (TWh), or 59% of the total demand rise. Gas generation, in contrast, increased by only 1% in 2021. The biggest demand rise for coal is in China. Renewables are gaining on coal, and coal's external diseconomies make it a bad bargain, but it's not going away just yet.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INSAR SCANS THE WORLD (3): InSAR was not very practical before the emergence of widespread computing power. In the 1990s, stacking a single pair of SAR images could take days, and interpreting the results could take much longer -- but now hundreds of images can be fully processed overnight. Use of machine learning schemes is growing, replacing brute force with intelligence. In one test, an ML algorithm was commanded to identify small fault movements known as "slow earthquakes". It correctly found simulated and historical events, including ones that had escaped human InSAR experts.
Bertrand Rouet-Leduc -- a geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory -- says that he and his team now plan to monitor faults around the world using the same approach. He says it's mostly a matter of exploiting the vast quantity of data that "sits on servers without being looked at," because it's simply too much for scientists to handle.
Researchers themselves may not have the expertise to process InSAR data, so scores of companies have emerged to do it for them. Dares Technology, for example, monitors the ground for the construction, mining, and oil and gas industries. By tracking surface changes as fluids are injected or extracted from an oil reservoir, Dares can help companies estimate pumping efficiency and prevent dangerous well failures.
Dares CEO Javier Duro said that clients were skeptical of InSAR data, not seeing it as useful or trustworthy, but now: "Everybody wants to include InSAR in their operations." Dares has a particular focus on sensing precursors to accidents -- by, say, looking for signs of instability in the walls of open-pit mines, or in the dams used to store mine tailings. The company often sends out alerts to clients so they can deal with the problems. Duro says: "Typically, InSAR data have been used for back analysis. Our mission is to focus on the present and the future, and try to predict what could happen."
Many more SAR satellites are coming. Italy, Japan, Argentina, and China plan to launch more SAR satellites soon, while NISAR -- the NASA-ISRO mission -- will be launched in 2022 or early 2023. NISAR will image Earth's full land surface every 6 days, on average. Its two radar sensors will help researchers track such features as crop growth, global woody biomass, and changes in ice mass.
Sentinel 1, NISAR, and the other civil satellites will, as a collective, be able to image most places on Earth at least every 12 hours. However, that revisit rate doesn't help much with InSAR, because it can't be used with imagery from different missions. Private companies with large constellations of microsatellites hope to advance the technique by greatly increasing revisit rates.
For example, consider Iceye of Finland, which has to date put 14 SAR satellites into orbit, the production versions having a launch mass of 100 kilograms (220 pounds). The company wants to launch up to 100 satellites, allowing every square meter of the planet to be imaged every hour. Capella Space and Umbra, both out of California, are chasing after the same goal. The InSAR data collected by Iceye, and their competitors, would have a broad range of applications -- for example, tracking how buildings and dams expand during the day and contract at night, revealing clues to their structural integrity. Iceye data is already being used to guide ships through Arctic sea ice, and to track illegal fishing vessels.
Iceye, for the moment, is focusing on flood monitoring, having provided some of the first images of Grand Bahama after Hurricane Dorian hit the island in 2019. Precise flood data is valuable to insurers, who can use them to trigger automatic insurance payouts after an event instead of going through the cost of processing claims and sending out inspectors. Until now, Iceye has tracked floods using regular SAR data, but plans to use InSAR as it increases its revisit frequencies, since InSAR can measure the height and extent of inundation much more precisely.
Iceye officials say the company's ultimate goal is to build a "new layer of digital infrastructure" that will provide a "real-time, always-available, objective view on the world." They compare it to GPS, which proved to have far more application than anyone expected at the outset. InSAR promises an era of precision global monitoring of tilting buildings and slumping slopes, the growth of crops and the flow of commodities around the world. It will be data that we never thought we needed, but then find we can't do without. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* IT ARMY UKR: As discussed in an article from WIRED.com ("Russia Is Being Hacked at an Unprecedented Scale" by Matt Burgess, 27 April 2022), it was apparent from the start that the Russo-Ukraine War would feature a substantial cyber-war component. What was not obvious was that the Ukrainians would prove so highly effective in that arena.
Ukraine's "IT Army" is one of the major components of the effort. The volunteer group uses the Telegram instant messaging service to send out lists of Russian websites to target, which are then hit with "distributed denial of service (DDOS)" attacks -- flooding them with traffic and bringing them to their knees. Russian online payment services, government departments, aviation companies, and food delivery firms have suffered accordingly.
The IT Army is not a monolithic organization, instead being a collaboration of Ukraine government cyberwar services, Ukrainian hackers, and outsiders from all over the world who want to help. DDOS attacks are the most apparent weapon, but there's evidence of the use of ransomware and hunts for "exploits" in Russian systems that could lead to more devious attacks -- or maybe already have.
The scene has flipflopped from that before the war, when Russia was seen as the evil genius of cyberwarfare. Stefano De Blasi, a cyber-threat intelligence analyst at security firm Digital Shadows, says: "Russia is typically considered one of those countries where cyberattacks come from and not go to." Indeed, during the buildup to the invasion of Ukraine, Russian hackers inflicted a number of major blows on Ukraine's cyber systems. Once the fighting started, however, the Ukrainians began to pull ahead, implementing more ingenious and prolonged attacks -- one lasting for an unprecedented week.
Ukrainian tech companies leveraged the popular puzzle game "2048" -- developed by Italian software designer Gabriele Cirulli and introduced in 2014 -- into a tool for launching DDOS attacks, and have also developed tools that don't require deep knowledge to use. An IT Army message issued in March put it simply: "The more we use attack automation tools, the stronger our attacks," reads a message sent to the IT Army Telegram channel on March 24. In late April, the IT Army revealed a website to help coordinate the group's activities.
Dmytro Budorin, the CEO of Ukrainian cybersecurity startup Hacken, says: "We have made good strong hits, and a lot of [target] websites don't work." At the outset of the war, Budorin and colleagues modified one of the firm's anti-DDOS tools, named "disBalancer", so it could be used to launch DDOS attacks. He's also set up a "bug bounty" program to get information on security faults in Russian systems, and has obtained thousands of leads -- which Hacken validates, and passes on to the authorities. Budorin says the hunting is good: "You don't go through the main door. You go through the regional offices. There are so many bugs, so many open windows."
Budorin says DDOS has been useful for helping Ukrainians contribute to the war effort in other ways than fighting; he adds that both sides have improved their attacks and defense. He admits DDOS may not have a huge impact on the war: "It doesn't have a lot of effects with respect to the end goal, and the end goal is to stop the war." However, there have also been break-ins, with the IT Army obtaining significant Russian data files and databases, while cyber-espionage remains invisible but undoubtedly important.
In the meantime, Russian cyber-attacks on Ukraine have slackened off. Yurii Shchyhol -- the head of the State Service for Special Communication & Information Protection, Ukraine's cyber-defense organization -- said in a statement: "The quality decreased recently as the enemy cannot prepare as much as they were able to prepare. The enemy now mostly spends time on protecting themselves, because it turns out their systems are also vulnerable."
The attacks have increased pressure on the Russian government to isolate their national internet with an "Iron Firewall", but that won't happen soon. Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, says: "I believe that full disconnect from the internet would still be an extreme approach, even now. Furthermore, the government is apparently still in a kind of self-denial, acting as if nothing significant was happening due to the cyberattacks, or even due to the Western sanctions, too."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As usual these days, there was a bombshell last week -- with a draft of a Supreme Court decision penned by Justice Samuel Alito, in which SCOTUS overturned ROE V. WADE, the decision that legalized abortion. Although the decision hadn't been released, Chief Justice John Roberts attested that it was valid.
Of course, overturning RvW raised a firestorm, the decision seeming entirely perverse. Justice Alito, in the decision, pointed out that "abortion" isn't mentioned in the US Constitution. Then again, neither is "women's rights" or for that matter "women", and the Constitution doesn't say anything about judicial review of laws, either. On the heels of this, a measure going through the Louisiana state legislature that would not merely ban abortion, but make having an abortion an act of murder.
That would be funny, if it weren't so grotesque. Overthrowing RvW will be a legal and practical nightmare; it's just not workable. Congress, for the moment, can't get a consensus on a response. To no surprise, Chief Justice Roberts was very annoyed about the leak. That was a shrug; what was more interesting was the identity of the leaker. Was it someone on the Left, sending out a warning? Or was it someone on the Right, jumping the gun? There's been much speculation, but that's all it is, and we may never know.
[ED: Only four months on, it is clear that overturning RvW set off a political earthquake that is going to cost the Republicans in the fall midterms.]
* The war in Ukraine burns on. One video on YouTube revealed intercepted phone conversations from Russian troops, revealing a number of interesting things:
The intercepted communications of that Russian officer were obtained from his voicemail account. Entries in that account came to an abrupt stop one day, and were not resumed. Apparently something happened to him.
* I drove down to Denver to do some plane-spotting at Denver International Airport, and go to the Denver Zoo. This was the first time I'd been out of town, not counting a few errands to Fort Collins in the north, in three years, and it was something of a test / training exercise on a number of fronts:
It was a pleasant day out. I had no problems with the traffic, though I never went through downtown Denver. The only problem with the mask is that I got sore a bit wearing it, but I concluded I could take it off while I was in the car, then put it on when I arrived someplace.
The trip was, however, a let-down in some ways. Air traffic at DIA was light and uneventful, while a lot of the zoo was shut down: all the bird exhibits were closed off because of the bird flu pandemic. However, the real disappointment was the S21 Ultra, which proved well inferior to the Powershot, despite the fact that it was much more expensive. Its ability to take shots in dark conditions, which was primarily what I bought it for, was very poor.
I think I can learn how to use the S21 Ultra better, and am likely to get better camera software over time. Nonetheless, on considering matters I ended up doing a substantial rethink of my photo hobby. I realized that my goal of taking good shots inside aircraft museums was likely out of reach -- with further thought suggesting that there was no great point in it anyway. I could easily find good open-source photos of those same aircraft online, and would never be able to match them. I would be making more of a contribution working on aircraft drawings, and retouches of old pictures of aircraft.
That led to fundamentally reconsidering plans for future road trips. I was thinking of going back to Washington DC, following up my 2016 trip, but then I thought: What for? I had plenty of photos of sights in that city, I wouldn't get any more out of it with a new trip. I still want to take some trips, but now for somewhat different rationales. I remembered that the Air Force Museum in Dayton OH had a "Dawn Patrol" airshow some years, showing off World War I aircraft replicas. That sounded like fun, and getting good shots of them would be easy.
On investigation, it turns out that there will be a Dawn Patrol show in early October, and I started sketching out a road trip. As for my day trip to Denver, I'd made pretty much the same day trip a dozen times before, but probably won't do it again for a long time. However, the day was well spent, having led to a substantial rethinking of my activities -- so I didn't really feel let-down by the exercise. My world after the pandemic is not the same as the one before.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (27): Portable computing got off to a slow start in the 1980s. Alan Kay of Xerox PARC had helped develop a demonstrator laptop computer, the "Dynabook", in the late 1970s, but it was not ready for prime time. One of the first "luggable" computers was the Osborne 1, developed by Adam Osborne of Osborne Computer Corporation, introduced in 1981 and running CP/M. It was about the size and configuration, bundled up, of a portable sewing machine; it had 5.25-inch floppy drives, a 12.7-centimeter CRT display, and ran off AC power, having no batteries. It wasn't particularly successful, but it did inspire comparable luggables -- most notably the Compaq Portable of 1983, which ran MS-DOS and had a larger display.
The luggables were a dead end, though the Compaq Portable got Compaq up and running, with the company becoming solidly established with its later DeskPro desktop MS-DOS machines. More the way of the future was the GRiD series, the first introduced in 1982, which was recognizable as a modern clamshell-type laptop computer. The GRiDs were built to high specification, featuring such leading-edge technologies as bright-red plasma displays, with sales focused on the military-government market. A GRiD was an element in the popular 1986 movie ALIENS.
The GRiD company was eventually bought out by the Tandy-Radio Shack company, which had already introduced a portable computer, the "TRS-80 Model 100", in 1983. It was actually a design by Kyocera of Japan, which ended up being licensed to a number of companies worldwide. It was a very limited machine, with a CMOS 8085 CPU; a baseline 8 KB of RAM, expandable to 32 KB; and an LCD display with 8 lines of text, 40 characters per line. It could use an audio cassette or external disk drive for mass storage; an adapter was also introduced to interface to a TV set. It could use external power or four AA cells. Software included BASIC, a terminal emulator, an address / phone number organizer, a to-do list organizer, and a simple text editor. Although primitive by modern standards, it was relatively cheap, and millions were sold.
In 1987, the US Air Force issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a laptop computer that led to intensive work on a better portable computer. The competition was won by Zenith Data Systems with the ZDS Supersport, which was an MS-DOS machine, with a relatively large backlit LCD display, some models having a 20 MB hard disk. It wasn't that far off a desktop MS-DOS machine, with comparable machines introduced by IBM, Compaq, and others. Apple countered with the Macintosh Portable in 1989. Although these machines were a great improvement over those introduced earlier in the decade, they were still expensive, with flat-panel display technology being a particular bottleneck, being both expensive and immature: the LCD displays tended to be difficult to read.
* Computer gaming boomed in the 1980s, with the introduction of arcade classics such as Pac-Man, Defender, and Missile Command, in 1980; Tempest, Galaga, and Donkey Kong, in 1981; and many other titles following. New concepts were introduced, such as games that followed a story line. Makers of arcade machines such as Atari, Namco, Taito, Williams, and Nintendo did a thriving business; by 1983, there were 25,000 arcade sites around the world, not counting the numbers of game machines in bars and such that kept a few of them around. It was a business worth billions of dollars, bigger than Hollywood movies and pop music combined.
As noted, the PCs introduced in the 1970s tended to be game-oriented; with the introduction of the IBM PC, there was a push towards more serious applications, but games remained popular as well. Cheaper PCs were also introduced at that time, notably the Commodore 64, the ultra-cheap Sinclair ZX-81, and the BBC Micro -- the last leading to the Acorn series of PCs, popular in the UK.
The Commodore 64 was particularly popular, selling from 10 to 20 million units from its introduction in 1982. It looked merely like a fat keyboard, using a TV set for a display, with a Mostek 6510 processor -- an improved 6502 -- and 64 KB of RAM standard. It allowed music programming with an audio output jack, featured a plug-in ROM slot, and could hook up to tape drives, floppy drives, hard disks, and a printer. The C64 and other PCs in its class led to the creation of an industry of software developers and distributors, particularly focused on games.
Pure game consoles thrived as well. In the USA, Atari was the biggest player in the game console market, with its Atari VCS system, leading to the "Atari ST" in 1985, which featured a 32-bit processor and took home video gaming to a new level. However, that same year, Nintendo introduced the "Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)" into the US market, the NES being derived from the Nintendo "Famicom (Family Computer)" that was already a hit in Japan. Sega also introduced a series of video game consoles, but Nintendo remained dominant. Unlike PC games, which were distributed on floppy disks, games were loaded into consoles with plug-in ROMs.
In 1989, Nintendo cemented its lead in the game market by introducing the handheld "Game Boy". The result of the home video game wars was a decline of interest in game arcades; it was getting cheaper to buy a game console than to shove quarters into arcade games, while the consoles were upping their game on graphics, performance, and audio.
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("AI Cracks The Code Of Protein Complexes" by Robert F. Service, 11 November 2021), artificial intelligence (AI) technology has proven useful in the difficult task of determining the 3D shapes of proteins. Researchers have, to date, acquired a large, if not yet complete, catalog of the structures of human proteins. Proteins do not always act by themselves, instead joining forces to form protein complexes. Now a system of programs has been developed to determine what proteins are likely to interact with one another and what the resulting protein complexes look like.
In 2020 two groups -- one from a UK company called DeepMind and the other led by David Baker at the University of Washington in Seattle -- each created AI systems that generated thousands of predicted protein structures, including a few protein complexes found in bacteria. Now, both groups have improved their programs so they can solve hundreds of structures of protein complexes, Baker and his team having announced that they have unraveled the structures of 712 complexes in eukaryotes, or cells with nuclei.
To hunt down proteins that could form complexes together, Baker's team began by comparing the amino acid sequence of all 6000 yeast proteins to those from 2026 other fungi and 4325 other eukaryotes. The comparisons allowed the researchers to track how those proteins changed over the course of evolution and spot sequences that appeared to change in tandem in different proteins -- hinting that the parallel changes suggested the proteins were elements of complexes.
The researchers then used its AI system, named "RoseTTAFold", in conjunction with DeepMind's publicly-available AlphaFold, to attempt to solve the 3D structures of each set of candidates. Out of 8.3 million identified co-evolving yeast protein pairs, the AI programs identified 1506 proteins that were likely to interact, and was able to map the 3D structures of 712.
Among the highlights of the discoveries are structures for protein complexes that help cells to repair damage to their DNA, translate RNA into proteins in ribosomes, pull chromosomes apart during cell reproduction, and ferry molecules through the cell membrane. DeepMind's John Jumper, one of AlphaFold's lead developers, is leading a team working along the same lines, having announced an updated "AlphaFold-Multimer", which mapped structures of 4433 protein complexes. Baker says: "It's really an exciting time for structural biology."
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("NASA's Exoplanet Count Surges Past 5,000" by Liz Kruesi, 22 March 2022), NASA has announced the discovery of over 5,000 extrasolar planets to date, in 30 years of exploration.
The 5,005 confirmed exoplanets can be categorized and divided into several distinct types. They include almost 1,500 giant gassy planets, as big as Neptune or bigger; about 200 that are small and rocky; and almost 1,600 "super-Earths," which are bigger than our Solar System's rocky planets, but smaller than Neptune.
More will be found. NASA's latest exoplanet hunter, the TESS mission, has confirmed more than 200 planets, with thousands more to be confirmed from its data. At the present time, there's not much known about the exoplanets beyond their diameters, masses and densities -- but new observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, will be able to find out more. It may not be too long before we can reconstruct images of exoplanets.
* Plastics are an environmental nuisance, and there's been ongoing work to make them less so. As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Embedded Enzymes Make For Compostable Plastics That Break Down In Days" by Michael Irving, 21 April 2021), researchers have developed a "compostable plastics" that is embedded with enzymes -- catalytic proteins -- allowing them to be broken down into constituent molecules.
Enzymes can be used to break down normal plastics, but that's obviously not a general solution, and it's not very efficient any. Ting Xu -- a chemist at the University of California in Berkeley -- says: "If you have the enzyme only on the surface of the plastic, it would just etch down very slowly. You want it distributed nanoscopically everywhere so that, essentially, each of them just needs to eat away their polymer neighbors, and then the whole material disintegrates."
Ting's researchers decided to embed enzymes into the plastic, but had to factor in the possibility that the enzymes might degrade the plastic items in normal use. To get around that problem, they added a "protectant" named "four-monomer random heteropolymer (RHP)", which ensured that the enzymes were spaced apart. That ensured that the plastics would only break down when exposed to compost soil or hot water. They found that the plastics would not break down if kept in water at room temperature for three months.
They integrated an enzyme named "BC-lipase" into PCL plastic, and another named "proteinase K" into PLA plastic. The PCL broke down completely within two days at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), while the PLA degraded within six days at 50C (122F). They both broke down into lactic acid. It is not clear how much expense the enzymes could add to plastics production; widespread adoption of such a scheme may be dependent on regulatory intervention. The research team is seeking a patent for the scheme, and has founded a startup to commercialize it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INSAR SCANS THE WORLD (2): NASA pioneered the use of orbital SAR -- and InSAR -- with the launch of Seasat, the agency's first ocean-observing satellite, in 1978. It only operated for 105 days before a power failure disabled it. However, in that time it was able to, among many other things, collect repeat images of California's Imperial Valley over the course of 12 days. Researchers at JPL later analyzed those images using InSAR to show the subtle swelling of fields as they soaked up irrigation water. This was more or less a demonstration, with the JPL researchers suggesting in a 1989 paper: "It is not hard to think of numerous applications for the type of instrument demonstrated."
A more significant demonstration of InSAR was provided in a 1993 study from French researchers, who used data from the SAR-carrying European Remote Sensing satellite to study a major earthquake that rocked Landers, California, in 1992. By analyzing images taken before and after the quake, they determined that the fault had slipped by up to 6 meters (20), which agreed with ground observations. The InSAR data also showed how the ground buckled for kilometers around the fault, giving a wide-scale view of the effects of the quake.
The paper inspired scientists like Michelle Sneed of the US Geological Survey (USGS), who went on to use InSAR to study how groundwater extraction causes the ground to sink. During a drought in California's San Joaquin Valley in the late 2000s, she and her team found that the surface was subsiding as fast as 27 centimeters (11 inches) per year in places where farmers pumped the most groundwater. Irrigation canals were sagging as a result of uneven sinking, impeding water flow. A more recent study linked certain water-intensive crops -- such as corn, cotton, and soy -- to increased subsidence.
Glaciologists have become enthusiastic about InSar as well. In the 1990s, Ian Joughin of JPL used InSAR -- which can measure both vertical and horizontal movements -- to nail down the speed of polar ice streams. Some researchers thought flow rates would be relatively immune to climate change. However, InSAR studies by Joughin and others showed that was not true. Joughin, now at the University of Washington in Seattle, says: "Especially in the early 2000s, we just saw all kinds of glaciers double their speed."
Similarly, flood damage in the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian in 2019 was remotely assessed by NASA JPL and the Earth Observatory of Singapore using SAR data from Europe's Sentinel 1 satellites to spot shifts in ground surface related to flooding.
By the 2000s, InSAR was popular among Earth scientists, who were then finding out about its limitations. There weren't that many SAR satellites in orbit, and they could have multiple payloads, not all of them in use at the same time -- meaning gaps in radar coverage. Revisit time of observations of any one location of the Earth was like a month, and the orbits of the satellites were imprecise, requiring corrections. Researchers could study events after the fact, but they were hobbled in observing them in real time.
Officials at the European Space Agency (ESA) thought there was a better way, the result being the launch of the "Sentinel 1a" SAR satellite on 3 April 2014. It was a dedicated SAR satellite, carrying no other significant payloads. Its primary imaging mode over land observed a 250-kilometer (155-mile) wide swath, with a resolution of 5 x 20 meters (16 x 50 feet), and it maintained a precise orbit. Sentinel 1a had a revisit time of 12 days. The launch of "Sentinel 1b" in 2016 cut the revisit time in half, for most locations on Earth. The "Sentinel 2" series, incidentally, are optical Earth-observing satellites.
Other SAR constellations have been flown, including Italy's COSMO-SkyMed and Germany's TerraSAR-X; they can support InSAR and can have higher resolutions. However, they don't distribute data freely like Sentinel, with the availability of data transforming InSAR from something of an experimental toy to an operational procedure. Using Sentinel 1 data, Norway put together a national deformation map that has helped identify rockslide hazards and showed that parts of Oslo's main train station were sinking. Water managers in California use the data to track groundwater use and subsidence, while in Belgium, it's used to monitor the structural integrity of bridges.
The growing body of InSAR data has also turned up small surface movements that were previously hidden by noise. As radar signals pass through the atmosphere, they slow down by an amount that depends on the weather, producing variability that can hide tiny but important displacements. Thanks to long-term records from missions like Sentinel, researchers can now extract information from the noise -- for example, tracking movements of a few millimeters per year in Earth's crust to spot faults and warn of potential earthquakes. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* PRINTED GLASS: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Intricate Gearlike Shapes Created With A New Method" by Robert F. Service, 8 April 2021), glass jars and such can be mass-produced, but "stamping out" elaborate glass artifacts hasn't proven easy to, with such items having to "carved out" of a blank.
Glass was first produced in Egypt and eastern Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. The material was made by melting silica, silicon dioxide -- at high temperature, and then blowing it or casting it into specific shapes. That was basically how it stayed until recently. In 2017, a research group led by Frederik Kotz -- a microsystems engineer at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany -- got to working on the 3D printing of glass.
The researchers came up with a printable powder, in the form of a mix of silica nanoparticles along with a polymer that could be cured with ultraviolet light. They printed the object, then exposed it to UV to ensure it kept its shape, and cooked the object in an oven to get rid of the polymer and fuse the silica particles together. They synthesized tiny pretzels and castle gates; they got interest from companies out to fabricate tiny lenses and other optical kit for telecommunications equipment.
The problem with the scheme was that it was slow, inadequate for a production process. Kotz and the research team then went on to adapt it for injection molding. As before, they started out with silica particles, which were mixed with two polymers: polyethylene glycol (PEG) and polyvinyl butyral (PVB). The mixture, which had the consistency of toothpaste, was then extruded into a mold to be formed into the desired object.
Once ejected from the mold, the object could retain its shape, but it was still too weak to be used. To get to a finished item, the researchers:
Kotz says that "what you get in the end is high purity silica glass" in any shape desired, adding that the glass parts also have optical and chemical characteristics needed for commercial telecommunications devices and chemical reactors.
* SUPER GLASS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("World's Strongest Glass Can Scratch The Surface Of A Diamond" by Nick Lavars, 9 August 2021), Chinese researchers have developed a form of glass that is so hard that is can scratch diamond. It is also extremely strong, and can operate as a semiconductor, presenting possibilities for use in advanced photovoltaic (PV) cells.
The glass is designated "AM-III", and it is a carbon-based amorphous solid material -- as opposed to diamond, which is a carbon-based 3D crystal. Researchers from Yanshan University in China wanted to see if they could replicate many of the properties of diamond in an amorphous material, tinkering with different components, particularly the soccer-ball-shaped molecules of carbon known as "buckyballs" or "fullerenes".
Fullerenes were subjected to increasing heat and pressure, causing them to be crushed and merged together, with the heat and temperature increased until AM-III was formed. AM-III proved to have a hardness of 113 GPa on a Vickers hardness test. For comparison, mild steel has a Vickers hardness of around 9 GPa, while naturally occurring diamonds run at around 70 to 100 GPa. As a semiconductor, AM-III has a bandgap range of 1.5 to 2.2 eV, similar to amorphous silicon, which is often used in cheap PV cells. How easily AM-III can be produced in quantity, and whether it has advantages over existing materials, remains to be seen.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Disney's Self-Governing District Says Florida Cannot Dissolve It Without Paying Off Its Debts" by Jamiel Lynch, Chris Boyette, & Eric Levenson, 28 April 2022), the state government of Florida, in service to Governor Ron DeSantis, recently passed a bill to prevent public schools from teaching young students about sexual orientation. In response to the "Don't Say Gay" bill, Disney Corporation decided to end political contributions to DeSantis and others. He retaliated by passing a law that, in principle, stripped Disney of its self-government authority.
That's where it gets complicated. Disney World in Florida is a sprawling complex, including not only the theme parks, but many large hotels, conference centers, and other facilities -- it's big enough to be a good-sized city in itself. Unsurprisingly, arrangements were made to allow Disney to provide the necessary civic services to the complex on its own. The result was Reedy Creek, a special-purpose district created by state law in May 1967 that gives The Walt Disney Company extensive governmental control over the land in and around its central Florida theme parks. Reedy Creek, whose budget comes almost entirely from Disney, pays for its own fire department, water systems, roadways and building inspectors, and it can issue bonds and take on debt to pay for long-term infrastructure programs.
On reflection, it seems implausible that the state government could unilaterally overturn the 1967 agreement -- and it quickly became obvious that DeSantis hadn't thought out the implications of his action, the new law being brief and lacking in specifics. The first obstacle to the new law is that Disney has about a billion dollars in municipal bond debt on Reedy Creek. The old law states that Florida "will not in any way impair the rights or remedies of the holders ... until all such bonds together with interest thereon, and all costs and expenses in connection with any act or proceeding by or on behalf of such holders, are fully met and discharged."
Put a bit more simply, dissolving the Reedy Creek arrangement would require somebody assuming a billion dollars worth of debt. Who would pay? State lawmakers in adjoining Orange and Osceola counties worry that they would be stuck with the bill, and also have to take over providing public services to Reedy Creek. That would be economically disastrous to them, and it is very unlikely to happen -- all the more so because Florida Statute 189.072 stipulates that dissolving a special district requires approval by a majority of landowners. The land of Reedy Creek is mostly owned by Disney.
The new law actually addresses Statute 189.072, simply declaring it null and void. Republican State Representative Randy Fines says: "These are not constitutional requirements. These are statutory requirements. And this bill actually changes the law, which we're allowed to do at any time, and says that we don't have to do those things."
To which State Rep Representative Dotie Joseph, a Democrat, replied: "I think to change the law that exists you would repeal it, not just put another one that contravenes it, but what do I know? I'm just a lawyer." Incidentally, she's a black lawyer of Haitian origins, which seems unlikely to have endeared her to DeSantis and his gang.
In addition, Disney clearly would have a case against the State of Florida on a 1st Amendment basis, it being an unusual thing for American government officials to take vindictive action against a company for exercising the right of free speech. In short, Disney has multiple paths for challenging the new law in court. DeSantis is undeterred, saying that execution of the law will be an "ongoing process" -- meaning: "We're making it up as we go along." Who says law is boring?
Although DeSantis has a comically weak case, Disney doesn't want this fight. The most likely result will be that the two sides will renegotiate the Reedy Creek agreement, with Disney making cosmetic concessions -- say, proclaiming the company won't start fracking on the land, or set up a nuclear power plant -- to allow DeSantis to declare a win. In the meantime, Reedy Creek is still in business as it always has been.
* In other reports of skewed reality, an article from POLITICOO.com ("The Rise and Fall of the Star White House Reporter" by Max Tani, 29 April 2022) discussed why the mainstream media seems to have it in for Joe Biden, with reporting that takes a clearly negative view of him. Of course, the Rightist media has nothing good to say about Biden, and the MSM isn't so blatantly hostile -- but nonetheless seems unwilling to cut him much slack.
One of the main reasons for skew is that reporters covering the White House actually enjoyed the Trump years. They found the toxic atmosphere in the James Brady Press Briefing Room to their advantage, feuding with Trump's press secretaries being good for their careers. However, Joe Biden promised during his presidential campaign that he wanted to make the White House boring again.
Mission accomplished. One reporter who has covered both the Trump and Biden Administrations sees the issue as boiling down to Biden's press secretary, Jen Psaki: "Jen is very good at her job, which is unfortunate. And the work is a lot less rewarding, because you're no longer saving democracy from Sean Spicer and his Men's Wearhouse suit. Jawing with Jen just makes you look like an asshole."
No more wild and crazy tweets from Donald Trump; no more lunatic Friday initiatives from the White House to send the newsrooms into frenzies. No more big-budget White House specials, no more profitable book deals. By all measures, books on Trump sold about ten times as many copies as books on Joe Biden are now. Of course, that can't be called a problem, can it? Eric Schultz, a former deputy press secretary under Obama, says: "It's not such a bad thing that there's a new sense of sobriety in the White House briefing room. The histrionics probably got out of control. It is serious business ... It's probably good for democracy for this to be less personality based and more about the work."
Reporters, however, have had problems adjusting to the new environment, one saying: "It's a boring and difficult job. It's tough to be a White House correspondent if you want to break news -- they're so airtight."
The White House has been covered by the press from the start -- but the concept of the White House correspondent began emerging in the late 1800s and early 1900s when presidents started holding regular meetings with reporters. Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to actually give reporters a place to work in the White House, after taking pity on a group huddled in the rain outside the gates.
An actual association of those reporters came into place in 1914, when those covering the White House grew alarmed, either that the Congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents would get to choose who covered Woodrow Wilson's press conferences, or that Wilson would simply cancel the press conference altogether. The result was the White House Correspondents' Association, an institution explicitly devised to protect and promote the interests of those reporting on the president.
It didn't work out at first; Wilson ended up doing away with press conferences anyway. However, Warren Harding then revived them, and from then on the role of the White House correspondent continued to expand. Franklin Delano Roosevelt held a record number of press conferences, occasionally charming and butting heads with reporters. He expanded access in his final year of office, accredited the first black reporter to attend White House press briefings, but also barred specific reporters that he did not like.
After the introduction of cameras in the briefing room in the 1950s, and President John F. Kennedy's decision to hold frequent televised press conferences, it became clear that being at the White House granted a reporter a certain level of professional stature and celebrity. By the early years of the Barack Obama presidency, reporters were piling into the cramped briefing room, literally lining the aisles in hopes of lobbing questions at press secretary Robert Gibbs. Many of those who did became network anchor chairs.
The process greatly accelerated in the Trump years, with Trump baiting and insulting reporters to push his agenda, with the reporters becoming beneficiaries in return. CNN's Jim Acosta, who appeared to really enjoy his verbal shoot-outs with Trump, got his credentials revoked by the president's press office, and needed security guards when he reported live from Trump rallies. No worries; it helped his standing at CNN, where he leveraged the notoriety into a weekend hosting position that he currently occupies.
Joe Biden is not much like Trump. He has always made gaffes and can be blunt by presidential standards, but he's not remotely as attention-seeking as Trump was. His staff exerts far more control over his time and his media interactions, being generally successful to keep White House palace intrigues out of the media. They will take reporters to task for not focusing on policy. Press secretary Psaki rarely expresses emotion from the podium, where she speaks slowly and avoids lengthy confrontations with reporters. Reporters in the White House briefing room aren't getting celebrity status -- it's Psaki, who is about ready to leave her job, it seems to get a cushy MSNBC hosting job that she'll start in the fall.
The only reporter who has achieved any prominence in covering the Biden White House has been Peter Doocy of Fox News, well-known for his exchanges with Psaki, and for getting the worst of them. He doesn't mind; he's pushing the Fox News line, and it pays off for him. When Joe Biden called him a "stupid son of a bitch" under his breath, he elevated Doocy up a notch.
Psaki was asked if Doocy really was a "stupid son of a bitch, or just plays one on TV?" She replied, not unsympathetically, that Doocy "works for a network that provides people with questions that, nothing personal to any individual, including Peter Doocy, but might make anyone sound like a stupid son of a bitch." Doocy wasn't upset -- he had no reason to be, and there appears to be no real ill will between him and Psaki. He says he enjoys the White House beat, that he's having fun with it.
Not all the rest of the reporters have found the Biden White House a disappointment. Mike Menoli of NBC News is a pleasant, low-key individual who has been covering Joe Biden since Barack Obama tagged him as his running mate in 2008. Menoli is not after the big scoop, seeing himself as in it for the long haul. He says: "Maybe part of it is just that they see me as somebody who comes with that level of context, and has seen them through the ups and downs of a race and has an appreciation for the arc of his presidency, his candidacy and his career in a way that they're still challenging other reporters to understand as well."
Menoli is an exception; the others tend to be frustrated. Many in the MSM are predicting a Republican wave in November -- despite the fact that GOP's woes are deeper than those of the Democrats, and there's no saying how the election will go. It's almost like the MSM is rooting for a GOP win, for no other reason than because it will make life more interesting for them. One cable news executive says: "These reporters are there every day to get anything out of the Biden White House. But it's boring there. It's not what it was."
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE