DayVectors

* 23 entries including: Kamala Harris (series); gold hydrogen (series); new car batteries (series); Turkish Kaan fighter | VTOL wingfan transport; HIV action in dormancy; Kamala & big-bang DNC | news media dying | last airshow trip; deep-sea bacteria; AFU in Kursk Oblast | decaying MSM | Kamala rolls | Ukraine gets the edge; mini pharma factory | qdot solar cells | titanium lattice material; future pathogens; Tim Walz for VP | fires continue | UK riots | Ukraine raiders; strange pulsar companion | LMC is dual galaxy; mRNA vaccines against bird flu; KamalaMania V Trump fatigue | local forest fire | Zelenskyy gripes; & supermassive black hole.

[FRI 30 AUG 24] KAMALA HARRIS (5)

* KAMALA HARRIS (5): Kamala took great pride when she was sworn in as an officer of the court, from then on introducing herself in trial with the prosecutor's declaration: "Kamala Harris, for the people." She was not on a joyride, however, writing:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Like any other serious job, being a prosecutor meant a lot of grunt work -- in her case reading police reports, interviewing witnesses, talking to coroners and inspecting the results of autopsies, observing police interrogations of suspects through a two-way mirror, then dealing with the mountain of labor to prepare, present, and argue a solid case to the court.

It was less pleasant work than most other jobs. Going through the autopsies of victims was difficult, but not as hard as, say, getting children who were victims of sexual abuse to testify in court -- all the more so because children are not necessarily reliable witnesses, are impressionable and easily pressured, and their testimony can often be demolished by the defense. Some of the kids she dealt with who had a long history of being abused were hard cases who were unlikely to win the sympathy of a jury.

Kamala, as a prosecutor, lived in a continuous balance of judgement of the lives of the victims and perpetrators of the crimes she prosecuted. The victims were not always perfectly innocent; the perpetrators ranged from decent people who had made ugly mistakes to hardened criminals who were capable of anything and did not think twice about the damage they did. The work demanded a certain toughness and inevitably a certain hardening of the heart -- which had to be balanced against a bedrock of principles, of EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW, of doing what could be done to improve the system. The conflicts in her mind had the inevitable effect of driving her upward.

* Kamala's introduction to the justice system took place against a backdrop of America's swing to the Right. It had preceded the presidency of Ronald Reagan, but it took hold during his time in office. Reagan was charismatic, non-confrontational, and willing to compromise -- as well he might be, since he didn't have a full Congressional majority all the time he was in office, and Congress could block legislation he backed. However, Reagan also turned the dial down on Federal regulation, and in particular greatly cut taxes on the rich.

He sincerely believed in "trickle-down" or "supply-side economics", in which big tax cuts would lead to an economic boom that would increase government revenues. The actual result was to run up deficits; more cynical GOP didn't care about "supply-side", instead seeing deficits as a weapon to throttle government. In the private sector, businesses took an increasingly single-minded focus on profits to the exclusion of other factors, the mantra of "greed is good" becoming established.

Reagan's vice-president, George Herbert Walker Bush, won the 1988 election. Bush was a Boston patrician who had been transplanted to Texas; he was an instinctive moderate, but he believed that the voters who put him in the White House wanted him to continue the "Reagan Revolution". He accordingly leaned to the Right.

George H.W. Bush got his presidency off with a literal bang when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. When Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw from Kuwait, Bush assembled a coalition and drove him out in early 1991 in a lightning offensive. The First Gulf War was a grand triumph of American arms, but of course it left a lot of issues to be confronted later. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 29 AUG 24] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from THEWARZONE.com ("Turkey's Kaan Next-Generation Fighter Has Flown" by Thomas Newdick, 21 February 2024), Turkey performed the first flight of a demonstrator for their 5th-generation fighter, the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) "TF-Kaan" -- originally "TF-X", for "tactical fighter experimental" -- on 21 February 2024.

TAI test pilot Barbaros Demirbas was at the controls, flying for 13 minutes with gear down -- customary for first flights -- and accompanied by a Turkish Air Force (TAF) F-16. The Kaan has a general configuration similar to that of the US F-35 fighter, with stealthy contours and twin tailfins, though the Kaan has twin engines instead of one as for the F-35.

It should be noted that simply flying a stealthy-looking airframe does not guarantee stealth, and also that a stealth fighter needs leading-edge avionics to be effective. The prototype, after roll-out, had faceted enclosures for what appeared to be an infrared search & track sensor system (IRST) in front of the cockpit, and a multi-purpose electro-optical targeting system (EOTS), but both were removed for the prototype's flight.

In its current form, the Kaan is powered by US-supplied General Electric F110 afterburning low-bypass turbofan jet engines with non-stealthy exhaust nozzles. The rear of the aircraft features prominent tail booms on which the tailplanes are mounted, and which could provide internal volume for avionics systems.

A full-scale mockup of the TF-X was displayed for the first time at the Paris Air Show in 2019 -- not long after Turkey was kicked out of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, in which it had been deeply involved. The USGOV took that decision after Turkey refused to cancel on plans to purchase Russian-made S-400 air defense systems. The USGOV also denied Ankara's request to buy more F-16 fighters.

Relations between the two countries have improved, notably after Turkey finally approved Sweden's entrance into NATO, with the Biden administration now seeking to push through sales of new F-16s and upgrade kits to Turkey. There have even been suggestions that the F-35 is potentially back on the table for Turkey.

While the TF-X program has moved ahead despite these difficulties, questions remain about Turkey's ability to build a credible fifth-generation fighter. There are also issues over the Americans denying export of the F110 engines. The Turks have been talking to Ukraine about alternative engines, but that's not a real thing just yet.

As well as weighing up its options for future crewed fighters, Turkey has been busily developing advanced combat drones as well. Most notably, in-development drones include the ANKA-3, a low-observable flying wing uninhabited combat air vehicle (UCAV), and the fighter-like Bayraktar Kizilelma UCAV. Given the shifting realities of war as demonstrated by the Ukraine conflict, these could end up being more important than the Kaan.

* As discussed in an article from the WarZone / TWZ.com ("VTOL Lift Fan Tactical Transport Design Emerges" by Joseph Trevithick, 16 November 2023) a number of different approaches have been considered for vertical take-off & landing (VTOL) -- one of the more interesting being the "lift fan", in which fans are embedded in the wings and nose of the aircraft to provide vertical lift. However, after the experimental Ryan XV-5 Vertijet was flown in the 1960s, the USA hasn't built another lift-fan aircraft.

Aurora Flight Sciences, a subsidiary of Boeing, has revived the lift fan for experimental high-speed VTOL transport -- being investigated under the "Speed & Runway INdependent Technologies (SPRINT)". SPRINT is being conducted by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's "blue sky" research agency -- with DARPA having also awards SPRINT study contracts to Bell, Northrop Grumman, and Piasecki Aircraft. Aurora has investigated designs for lift-fan drones, and is interested in taking the concept further; according to an Aurora press release:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Aurora's concept for SPRINT shows a "blended wing body" aircraft of medium size for cargolifter, with twin engine intakes behind the cockpit, and twin doors for the lifts fans inboard on each side of the wing-body. It looks somewhat like a B-2 stealth bomber, and may be intended for stealthy operations. It is not clear if the lift fans are supposed to be driven by engine exhaust, as in the XV-5A, have direct drive from the engines, or are driven by electric motors. Exhaust-driven fans might not have the push to do the job.

[WED 28 AUG 24] GOLD HYDROGEN (1)

* GOLD HYDROGEN (1): As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Hidden Hydrogen" by Eric Hand, 16 February 2023), in 1987 well-diggers were drilling boreholes in the village of Bourakebougo in Mali. They got to 108 meters (355 meters) and didn't strike water, and so they gave up. There was a wind coming out of that borehole, however; a driller looked into the hole while smoking a cigarette -- with an explosion as the result. Mamadou Ngulo Konare, one of the villagers, later said:

QUOTE

END_QUOTE

It took a crew a number of weeks to put out the fire and cap the well, and there things sat until 2007. In that year Aliou Diallo -- a wealthy Malian businessman, politician, and chair of Petroma, an oil and gas company -- acquired the rights to prospect in the region surrounding Bourakebougou. It was supposed to be "cursed place", but he was intrigued.

In 2012, Diallo contracted with Chapman Petroleum Engineering -- a Canadian energy consulting firm -- to investigate the well. The company's Denis Briere and his team of technicians, working from an air-conditioned mobile lab, made a startling discovery: the gas was 98% hydrogen. Hydrogen rarely turns up in oil operations, and nobody thought there were substantial reservoirs of it underground. Briere says: "We had celebrations with large mangos that day."

Within a few months, the Chapman team had installed a Ford engine tuned to burn hydrogen, with water vapor coming out its exhaust. The engine was hooked up to a 300-kilowatt generator that gave Bourakebougou its first steady electrical power supply, driving freezers, lighting, and a TV. Diallo decided to go into the hydrogen business, renaming his company Hydroma, and drilling wells to find more hydrogen.

* Hydrogen is an excellent fuel in some ways: it burns well and clean, producing water as an emission. It can also be used in fuel cells, also generating water as the emission. However, production is an issue: currently most hydrogen is "gray," made by reacting methane with steam at high pressures or deriving it from fossil fuels in other ways. Those processes emit some 900 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, almost as much as global aviation.

In principle, that carbon could be captured and sequestered underground, yielding "blue" hydrogen. However, hopes generally rest on "green" hydrogen -- using renewable solar or wind power to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen with electrolyzers. Unfortunately, green hydrogen costs about $5 USD per kilogram, more than twice as much as gray hydrogen, which tends to track the price of natural gas. Cheaper electrolyzers will help, with the US Department of Energy (DOE) sponsoring an effort to reach $1 per kilogram within a decade, but green hydrogen would also require a huge scale-up of renewable electricity. In addition, gaseous hydrogen also has low energy density, demanding big robust storage tanks, and has to be cryogenically cooled to be liquefied for more compact storage.

That makes the idea of drawing hydrogen straight out of the ground as needed and consuming it directly very attractive. Traditionally, few believed that such "natural hydrogen" -- sometimes called "gold hydrogen" -- was any more than a pipe dream. A few researchers, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, thought there might be something to it. They suspected large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas, just not in the same places -- with the hydrogen generated by water-rock reactions deep within the Earth percolating up through the crust and sometimes accumulating in underground traps. A US Geological Survey (USGS) report release in 2022 suggested there might be enough natural hydrogen to meet growing global demand for thousands of years. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 27 AUG 24] DORMANT HIV

* DORMANT HIV? As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("Dormant HIV Has Ongoing Skirmishes With The Body's Immune System" by John Carey, 5 October 2023), AIDS is a particularly stubborn disease. To this time, antiretroviral (ARV) therapy effectively wipes out active HIV viruses that cause the disease, but leave behind a reservoir of infected cells that evade the immune system, until treatment is stopped. Then the virus comes roaring back.

Two recent studies now suggest that view isn't quite right -- that even when AIDS is in remission, HIV is continuing to challenge the immune system. Some infected cells produce bits of viral RNA and protein that provoke an immune response. Although those broken viral particles aren't infectious, they seem to weaken the immune system, paving the way for resurgence later. This discovery may provide a big hint as to why HIV re-emerges so aggressively once patients stop taking anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs.

The studies are troubling in the greater effort to find a cure for AIDS because the results show that the immune system can detect, but not successfully respond, to the viral proteins, even when the virus's replication is stopped with medication. Immunologist Lydie Trautmann -- of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine in Bethesda MD -- says: "It makes our job much harder." However, she adds that the findings do point the way to making the immune response to HIV more effective.

Both studies took blood cells from people on HIV antiretroviral therapy and looked for evidence of viral activity. Virologist Mathieu Dube -- of the University of Montreal Hospital Research Center -- and colleagues used fluorescent RNA probes to look for viral genes in immune cells known as "helper T cells", which are targeted by the virus. They sorted out the infected cells and analyzed them for viral RNA and protein production.

Dube was surprised at how many of the cells were generating viral proteins: "We expected to see some spontaneous expression in a couple of cells, but not in so many." The cells weren't actually producing operational viruses, however; instead "most of what we found was defective, what we call junk." Another surprise was that even T cells that contained defective HIV genes, such as those with big chunks of DNA missing, could still produce viral proteins.

The junky viral proteins are a big problem, Dube saying: "Even though they are defective and do not trigger infection, they can still drive immune responses." In a healthy immune system, certain T cells would respond to the viral proteins by turning into specialized "killer T cells" that would target and destroy HIV-infected cells. However, research by Trautman's team shows that in people with HIV, the immune cells fail to become effective killers. It appears that there are so many viral bits floating around that the immune cells are run ragged, Trautman saying: "They can't keep up."

The new studies do suggest two possible strategies for improving treatments of HIV-infected patients:

• Redouble efforts to dramatically shrink the reservoir of infected cells, which could reduce the production of the problematic viral particles.
  
  
• Determine to reinvigorate T cells, possibly by applying lessons from successes in boosting the immune response to cancer. If the T cells are more capable, then the bits of viral protein floating around could have a vaccinelike effect, keeping the immune system on guard to suppress infections.

However, neither strategy is easy. We've made a lot of progress against HIV, but it's taken a long time, and further progress will take time as well.

[MON 26 AUG 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 34

DAYLOG MON 19 AUG 24: A BBC Online article reviewed the rise of Kamala Harris from 2020 presidential candidate, to vice-president, and now a presidential candidate again. It was a flattering article, but peculiar in some ways.

The premise was that, as vice-president, Kamala got off to a shaky start, confronted with a series of stumbles. She took on immigration as an early issue, even though it was a thankless task where success was elusive. The fall of ROE V WADE then gave her a strong platform.

All that was more or less true, though talk of internal White House difficulties is not credible; the Biden White House ran a tight ship, with commenters trying to read big things into little rumors. In reality, she didn't have much of a public profile.

That worked to her advantage. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley suggested that Kamala's low profile makes her a blank slate to voters -- in a good sort of way, everyone seeing in her candidacy what they want to see in it. The low profile also left the trolls at a loss when Joe Biden bowed out and the campaign flipped.

The article suggested the election will be a tough contest, and Kamala will find tougher going as election day approaches. That clashes with the reality that Trump, MAGA, and the GOP are steadily disintegrating. It will get worse for them. Some of the same nonsense was circulated by other articles, one saying that Kamala's wild popularity is resented by some Biden associates. Possibly so, but JB himself is likely very pleased with the energy of the campaign. He kicks off the Dem National Convention tonight.

DAYLOG TUE 20 AUG 24: Joe Biden spoke at the DNC last night, saying: "Democracy must be preserved." -- and: "I made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you." He certainly did. He got a standing ovation and cheers of: "Thank you, Joe."

The DNC is turning out to be precisely organized, one interesting detail being the accommodation of online influencers -- with an implied snub to the mainstream media. The MSM has been declining for years, but now it's falling apart. I didn't see the collapse coming.

Few are sorry to see them fall. The MSM started going off the rails in 2016 with "Hillary & the emails". They're not able to touch Kamala, however; although the MSM had been cutting down Hillary for about two decades before 2016, they were caught flat-footed with Kamala. They just had basically ignored her and didn't have much to throw at her.

I sometimes wonder why I'm still stressed out over the election when it's obvious Trump is falling apart; I think it's because the MSM's nonsense frustrates me. The bogus polls are part of the problem. We have polls saying Trump is seen as better on economic policy; ridiculous, Trump never had any real policies, and nobody voted for him on the basis of economic policy. They only voted for him to "own the libs".

DAYLOG WED 21 AUG 24: Barack and Michelle Obama were the stars of the DNC last night. Barack got in a good one, talking about Trump's "weird obsession" with crowd sizes, moving his hands in Trump's "squeezebox" gesture. Barack then glanced at his hands and put them down.

C'est drole. It got roaring laughter. Apparently, the gag wasn't scripted, it just happened. The Obamas also warned that it was going to be a close race -- myself, I don't think so. Trump continues his steep decline, and the Obamas aren't in a position to notice the general disappearance of TRUMP signs, hats, & bumper stickers.

* The Kamala campaign has generated its list of economic objectives, one being to curtail "price gouging" and overblown profits. Of course, the GOP trolls were quick to claim that meant "price fixing" -- which has a long and perfect level of failure.

That's not what it means. Joe Biden has been publicly denouncing companies jacking up prices, shrinking their product packages, and piling up profits, accusing them of driving inflation. Economists say that's simplistic, but it's not completely wrong either.

It does deflect blame from the White House to the companies, but more importantly it pressures the companies. Inflation can be driven by material factors, but it has a strong psychological component; Biden's psychological warfare is likely to be effective.

It seems that many states do have price-gouging laws, targeting excessive price hikes for necessities during a crisis. The FTC can implement comparable policies, but again much of the effect is psychological. The Biden White House is not really anti-business, instead seeking to build communications with the business community, and encourage them to be good actors.

* Ukraine launched a big drone attack on Moscow last night, the Russians claiming they shot down 11 drones, suffering no damage. I'm wondering if the Ukrainians are flying in jammer drones and lots of small decoys, possibly with light warheads.

In the meantime, the Kursk incursion continues. Some reports say it's still a roaring success, others that Ukraine made a ghastly mistake and is suffering badly. The reality is: OPSEC continues to be tight, and we don't know what's going on.

* A Spouter today proposed the nickname "0R@nGe DiP$h1T" for Trump. I replied: "Definitely not the taste you'd go for at Baskin-Robbins." I got a LIKE out of that.

DAYLOG THU 22 AUG 24: News reports say that since Kamala Harris went on campaign, she's pulled in over a half-billion USD in donations, and money's still coming in. The big haul is partly due to donors who didn't want to support Joe Biden but are now paying up. In any case, Trump is falling behind ever faster.

* A few days back, there was irritation online about the bogus fact-checking from the media -- the case in point being one Amy Gardner of WAPO, who dinged Joe Biden for saying Trump won't accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses.

Gardner took the gaslighting way Trump makes such declarations at face value and said JB had got Trump wrong. Gardner was widely mocked, since everyone knows that Trump's SOP is: Heads I win, tails you cheated. He never varies from that principle.

The DNC's favoriting of online influencers over the traditional media has got the media really mad. Too bad for them. The media is imploding. I had been wondering for some time what would happen to FOX News in the post-Trump era, but now it's obvious: FOX will be flushed down the dumper along with the rest of the media. Parts of the media will survive, but it's not clear what the new landscape will look like.

I had a thought that the White House should abandon the press room and do daily press briefings on Zoom. Not only would that generally shut down pests like FOX's Peter Doocy, it would allow much wider access. It would be tricky to implement, but the current scheme is no longer working.

DAYLOG FRI 23 AUG 24: Last night was the end of the DNC, with Kamala Harris pumping up the crowd with an acceptance speech. I haven't had time to listen to all of it -- though I did find a site named SINGUPOST.com that provides transcripts and had the speech.

I did listen to Republican Adam Kinzinger's short speech, which blasted Trump, praised Kamala, and asked GOP to vote for her. Some of the Redline Left on Spout were contemptuous, saying that Kinzinger is still GOP under the skin, but my attitude is: So what?

It's good for enemies to surrender; it means we're winning. As for their allegiance to GOP memes, that ship is sinking, will sink, and they can't go back to it. What happens to them after the election? They can't form a Center-Right party; as I keep saying, the Center has shifted Left. DEI, LGBT and reproductive rights, sensible gun-safety laws, climate change action, and in general responsible government are now Centrist ideals. They'll end up Moderate Democrats. They try to stay Right instead, they end up joining hands with MAGA, which doesn't have a future. America after the election will be turned upside down, and it's impossible to say what it will be like after it settles out.

* Reports from Ukraine indicate that the Russians are unable to effectively respond to the Armed Forces Ukraine offensive and are reeling -- the Orcs aren't even replying with much of a propaganda offensive, like they don't know how to react.

What is the plan? AFU's not talking. Could they be trying to perform an end run all the way around the Orcs, cutting off Luhansk and Donetsk Cities, terminating in Melitopol? That seems impossibly ambitious, but then what are they doing?

Last year, Orc countermeasures neutralized GPS-guided munitions. Now AFU guided munitions seem to be working lethally well. What's changed? I was reading about the Precision Guidance Kit from Northrop Grumman, which is a finned smart fuze to screw into 155-mm shells. Circular error probability for the PGK is given as 30 meters / 100 feet, which seems poor. NorGrum says they're refining the PGK, but not saying how. Latest PGKs are much chunkier than the originals. I'd sure like to know what's going on, but I'll just have to wait.

AND SO ON: Last Sunday I went to the Pike's Peak Airshow in Colorado Springs. It's like about a three-hour drive south from Loveland Colorado, so I got up early and arrived when it opened. There was a good number of nice aircraft displays, including an MV-22 Osprey, some E/A-18 Growlers, and some F-35s, and I got a pile of good photos. I only stayed about 90 minutes, since I don't have good enough gear to get worthwhile aerial shots, and then took the 3-hour trip back north.

The trip went perfectly -- all on schedule, did all I wanted to do, no wrong turns on the road. I did forget to mark the critical exit number on my map notes, but after some anxiety I identified the exit when I came up to it. There was moderate congestion going through Denver on the way back north, but no gridlock.

I had to conclude, however, that I won't go to an airshow again, unless it's something really special. I was getting photos of aircraft that I already had plenty of good shots of in my collection; I was clearly at the point of diminishing returns. I may go to the Smithsonian Museum of Air & Space on the National Mall in DC when it re-opens in later 2025, but I'll fly in and out.

I took my Osmon Pocket 3 gyro-stabilized camera with me to tinker with it, but I couldn't get it to work right -- it was hard to aim with the stabilization system fighting me. It's substantially different from any other camera I've owned. I thought I had lost it when I got home, but after some anxious moments I found out I'd carelessly hidden it from myself in the car.

On further investigation after I got back home, I figured out how to aim the camera. There's a little joystick button next to the power / shutter button; press the button twice, it sets the camera to stare straight ahead. The consequence is I have to point the camera in the right direction without looking at the display, then center the camera. There's a trick in that by default, the camera will always be on the level, making it impossible to take downward shots -- but I can set a stabilization mode that permits it. I can also touch the display to select a tracking target. I'm still not sure how really useful the camera is to me, but it's fun to play with.

[FRI 23 AUG 24] KAMALA HARRIS (4)

* KAMALA HARRIS (4): Kamala graduated from Howard in 1986, to then go the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco -- now simply known as "UC Law San Francisco" -- which is how it's referred to here for simplicity. Richard Sakai, one of her first-year professors, described her as "very polite" and with "reserved" demeanor, sitting in the rear and listening, but not saying much. Sakai said: "She was very intense. ... It was almost like still waters. "You could tell she was absorbing and taking everything in."

At UC Law SF, Kamala engaged in student activism with an emphasis on black civil rights, but she was not a bomb-thrower in any sense; she always wanted to work within the system. That was the seed of sharp tensions between Kamala and the uncompromising (UC) Left that would long persist, with the edge cutting both ways. Veronica Eady, one of her classmates, said: "I never thought of [Kamala] as a moderate ... she often talked about civil rights." Presciently, Eady added: "She was somebody that people wanted to know -- it was clear that she was an important person or going to be an important person."

In her second year at UC Law, Kamala became much more involved in the college's chapter of the Black Law Student's Association (BLSA), which had been founded in 1968 to "increase the number of culturally responsible Black and minority attorneys" -- and became its president.

Those who knew her saw that she was focused on signing up with law enforcement. During the summer of 1988, Kamala worked as an intern at the Alameda County District Attorney's office during the summer of 1988, between her second and third years of law school. She recalled in her biography how she was handed a case that involved a young woman who had been arrested in a drug bust, though she was clearly an innocent bystander. The woman had kids at home, and nobody to care for them while she was locked up for the weekend. Kamala wrote: "I rushed to the clerk of the court and asked to have the case called that very day. I begged. I pleaded."

Kamala got a job offer to work as a prosecutor in Alameda County after she graduated and passed the bar exam. There was some resistance to that notion, it appears primarily from Shyamala; prosecutors were often seen as "The Man", out to put people in jail, with the public defender role seen as more appealing. However, Keith Wingate commented: "There were a lot of people who thought that one way to make the system fair was to have some people of color in those positions."

He added that black students often got jobs at the public defender's office or the district attorney's office, in both San Francisco and Alameda Counties. Diane Matsuda, one of Kamala's friends at UC Law SF, said:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

It appears Kamala's career course was only an issue to people who wanted to make it one. In any case, Kamala started work as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County after graduating from UC Law SF with a JD in 1989.

* During this time, Shyamala had continued her work in Montreal -- but she came back to the USA in the early 1990s, getting a research position at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. Maya had returned to the USA earlier, living in Oakland -- when, at age 17, she gave birth to a daughter, Meena Harris, on 20 October 1984. There was obviously a story there, but the family did not see fit to publicly discuss it, and it remains nobody's business but their own. In any case, Maya graduated from UC Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989, and then received a JD degree from Stanford Law School in 1992. She started out her legal career as a law clerk. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 22 AUG 24] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches in July included:

• Nine US flights, six of them being SpaceX Falcon 9 shots, five of those for SpaceX Starlink comsats, one for the "Turksat 6A" geostationary comsat. There was an Atlas V flight to put the secret "USSF 51 / USA 396" payload into orbit -- that was the last flight of the Atlas V for USGOV -- and a launch of a Firefly Alpha light booster to put the "ELANA 43" smallsats into orbit for NASA.
  
  
• Three Chinese flights, one with the legacy Long March 4B booster; one with the new-generation Long March 6A booster; and one with the commercial Hyperbola 1 booster.
  
  
• The ESA performed the first flight of the new Ariane 62 booster, see below.
  
  
• Japan flew an H3 booster, with the ALOS 4 remote-sensing satellite.

[09 JUL 24] EU KR / ARIANE 6 / SMALLSATS x 11 -- An Ariane 6 booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1900 UTC (local time + 3) on its maiden flight. It carried a set of rideshare smallsats, provided by different space agencies, commercial companies, and universities, including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The payloads included:

• The "ExoPod Nova" deployer, carrying four payloads:
  
  [-] 3Cat 4: A nanosatellite of the University of Catalonia, to demonstrate a new to demonstrate a novel dual-frequency GNSS altimeter and scatterometer, to measure altitude and wind vectors respectively.
  
  [-] ISTSat 1: A CubeSat from the University of Lisbon in Portugal, developed under the ESA "Fly Your Satellite" program. It demonstrated an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) aircraft flight management system.
  
  [-] Cubesat Radio Interferometry Experiment (CURIE): A solar radio astronomy mission from the University of California and NASA, consisting of two 3U CubeSats.
  
  [-] GRBBeta: From the University of Kosice in Slovenia, GRBBeta was designed to detect and characterize gamma-ray bursts. It followed "GRBAlpha", launched on a Soyuz booster in 2021.
  
  
• Nyx Bikini: A re-entry capsule, flown as a demonstrator by The Exploration Company of Munich & Bordeax. It was 60 centimeters (2 feet) in diameter.
  
  
• OOV-Cube: Built by TU Berlin and Rapid Cubes GMBH, to test in-orbit verification of L-band transceivers for inter-satellite communications between low-Earth orbit and geostationary orbit -- plus test of perovskite solar cells, onboard AI processing, and IoT link communications.
  
  
• LIFI: A pair of satellited provided by Oledcomm testing a "light wi-fi" scheme for intersatellite communications.
  
  
• Spacecraft Identification and Localization (SIDLOC): A "space situational awareness" payload from a Greek non-profit called the Libre Space Foundation, intended to spot and catalog space missions in orbit.
  
  
• PariSat: A demonstrator CubeSat developed by the amateur space club Garef Aerospatial in Paris.
  
  
• Peregrinus: A fixed payload onboard the Ariane 6 upper stage. The experiment was developed by high-school students at Sint-Pieterscollege in Brussels and the Institut Vallee Bailly in Belgium. Peregrinus was designed to measure the correlation between Earth's magnetic field and the occurrence and intensity of X-ray and gamma radiation.
  
  
• RAMI: Another deployer launched on this mission, produced by UARX Space. It carried two CubeSats: "Replicator" from Orbital Matter and "Robusta 3A" mission from the University of Montpellier.
  
  
• SpaceCase SC-X01: A re-entry capsule from the ArianeGroup.
  
  
• Curium One: A 12U CubeSat designed by Berlin-based Planetary Transportation Systems, being an amsat for use as an open-source hardware and software testbed.
  
  
• Young Professionals Satellite (YPSat): An ESA payload, it appears developed as something like a studentsat, to provide data on the flight.

Ariane 6 is a follow-on to the workhorse Ariane 5, designed to halve the launch cost over time, support more rapid launches, and featuring a re-ignitable upper stage.

The first stage of Ariane 6, also referred to as "the core," stores most of the rocket's liquid propellant, consisting of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, feeding the Vulcain 2.1 main engine. The core has a diameter of 5.4 meters (17"8') and has a propellant load of 140,000 kilograms (308,000 pounds). The Vulcain 2.1 engine is similar in thrust and performance specs to the Vulcain 2 engine that was used by the Ariane 5. Vulcain 2.1 delivered 1,370 kN (140,000 kgp / 308,000 lbf) of thrust at lift off and has a specific impulse in a vacuum of 431 seconds. The most significant difference between Vulcain 2.1 and Vulcain 2 is the manufacturing process; the total part count of the nozzle was reduced by 90%, the cost by 40%, and the production time by 30%.

The Vinci upper stage engine was developed and designed by the ArianeGroup and burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Vinci is based on the previous HM7B engine platform, but in contrast, can restart up to five times. The engine also features a deployable rocket nozzle extension, which increases the engine's overall length after stage separation from 2.3 to 4.2 meters (7'6" to 13'9"). Vinci's upgraded ability to reignite means that the upper stage can be de-orbited at the end of missions.

For this flight, the Ariane 6 was in the "62" configuration with two P120 solid rocket boosters (SRB) -- there is also a "64" configuration with four P120s. The P120s are built by Avio and replace the earlier P80 SRBs. The P120 boosters are not only used on Ariane 6, but also on the Vega-C rocket, where they serve as the rocket's first stage. Each P120 has a diameter of three meters (10') and provide the majority of thrust at liftoff. Each generates 4,650 kN (474,000 kgp / 1,045 lbf) of thrust and has a propellant mass of 140,000 kilograms (309,000 pounds).

A P120's casing is made of carbon fiber. The solid propellant consists of 19% aluminum powder, 69% ammonium perchlorate, and 12% hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene binder. In the future, the boosters are planned to be upgraded to the stretched P120C+ version. This would increase the LEO performance of Ariane 6 by two tonnes in each configuration.

Ariane 6 also flew with a "short" fairing for its maiden flight, bringing the rocket's height to 56 meters (183'9"). Launch mass was 540 tonnes (595 tons). The payload mass to low-Earth orbit for the A62 configuration is 10.3 tonnes, (11.3 tons), while the A64 is capable of carrying up to 21.6 tonnes (23.8 tons).

Ariane 6 was developed and built through the cooperation of many European countries. France contributes the most, with 55.6% of the rocket's development and construction coming from the country, with Germany contributing an additional 20.8%. This is followed by Italy with 7.7%, Spain with 4.7%, and Belgium with 3.8%. Overall, 13 European countries are contributing funds to the development and operation of Ariane 6.

[WED 21 AUG 24] NEW CAR BATTERIES (7)

* NEW CAR BATTERIES (7): Increased lithium production for EV batteries raises environmental concerns: current forms of extraction require great amounts of energy, for lithium extracted from rock, or water, for extraction from brines. Relatively recent techniques that extract lithium from geothermal water, using geothermal energy, are seen as more benign. In any case, trading lithium extraction for fossil-fuel extraction is a bargain.

In terms of availability, researchers are more worried about cobalt, which is the most expensive ingredient of current EV batteries. Two-thirds of global supply are mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- the metal ore being obtained with little concern for the well-being of those who mine it. [ED: As of late, Indonesian production has been sharply rising.] Nickel, another major component of EV batteries, could also face shortages.

As discussed earlier, there's been work to reduce or even eliminate the use of cobalt -- and nickel -- in cathodes. Researchers feel that issue is solvable, though the new technology isn't in production yet. Ironically, however, eliminating cobalt and nickel makes recycling batteries less attractive, since at present it's cheaper to mine lithium than to recycle it. However, a number of Chinese firms are improving the recycling process to make it more cost-effective, with the Chinese government providing incentives to move things along. Europe and the USA are also pushing for recycling batteries, but aren't as far along.

One complication towards effective recycling of batteries is that, also as discussed earlier, the chemistry of cathodes is rapidly evolving -- and a recycling scheme for the current generation of batteries may not work well or at all with a later generation. However, the growing volume of batteries to recycle presents both a challenge and an opportunity: yes, it will be a big job, but also means economies of scale, with the recycling getting ever more efficient.

Analysts say the example of lead-acid batteries, the traditional battery technology for cars, gives cause for optimism. Since lead is a toxic heavy metal, those batteries are classified as hazardous waste and have to be disposed of safely. Recycling turned out to be the best way to do it, even though lead is cheap. Haresh Kamath -- a specialist in energy storage at the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California -- says:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

There's another factor in the recycling equation, in that modern lithium-ion batteries are very durable, Kamath saying they can last up to 20 years. In a typical electric car sold today, the battery pack will outlive the vehicle it was built into. When old EVs are sent to scrap, the batteries are often neither thrown away nor recycled. Instead, they are taken out and reused for less-demanding applications, such as stationary energy storage or powering boats. After ten years of use, a car battery such as the Nissan Leaf's, which originally held 50 kilowatt-hours, will have lost at most 20% of its capacity.

Overall, there is a growing consensus among policymakers, researchers and manufacturers that challenges to electrifying cars are now entirely solvable -- and the threat of climate change means there's no time to lose. Some researchers do complain that EVs seem to be held to an impossible standard in terms of the environmental impact of their batteries. Kamath says:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

[END OF SERIES]

[TUE 20 AUG 24] DEEP-SEA BACTERIA

* DEEP-SEA BACTERIA: As discussed in an article from LIVESCIENCE.com ("Scientists Find Deep-Sea Bacteria That Are Invisible To The Human Immune" by Ben Turner, 26 March 2021), bacteria are everywhere on Earth, including underground and in the depths of the oceans. Bacteria collected from deep in the Pacific Ocean, it turns out, are so alien that the mammalian immune system can't recognize them as foreign.

The bacteria were obtained specifically to test the functioning of the immune system, to determine how it reacted to extremely alien species. The researchers took their samples from the ocean in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area in Kiribati, in the Central Pacific. Randi Rotjan -- a Boston University marine ecologist and one of the study leads -- says the site was carefully selected:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

A "whale fall", incidentally, is the descent of a dead whale carcass to the bottom of the sea. Whales tend to seasonally transit from one hemisphere to the other, and so don't spend much time in the equatorial regions.

Once on location, the researchers used a robot submarine to collect marine bacteria from samples of water, sponge, sea star, and sediment. They then sorted the samples out into 117 culturable species, and characterized them. They found out that 80% of the microbes, mostly belonging to the genus Moritella, were not flagged by the immune system. The receptors on the mammalian bone marrow immune cells used in the study were incapable of seeing them.

Jonathan Kagan -- an immunologist at Boston Children's Hospital and another team lead -- says:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

To narrow down which features of the marine bacteria made them invisible to our immune receptors, the team exposed the mouse and human cells to just one specific part of the bacterial cell wall, known as the "lipopolysaccharide (LPS)". Mammalian immune systems are known to use this outermost part of the bacterial cell wall to recognize what are known as "gram-negative bacteria" and target them. The researchers found that the mammal cells' receptors were blind to the LPS on its own, too. Kagan says:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

[ED: It is a little puzzling as to why anyone would find these results surprising. The researchers didn't know whether the immune system would recognize the deep-sea bacteria or not, so why be surprised when they didn't?]

[MON 19 JUL 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 33

MON 12 AUG 24: I was thinking the Armed Forces Ukraine incursion into Russia's Kursk Oblast was a raid and would be over with quickly, but the fighting seems to be intensifying this week. At least 2 AFU brigades are in the battle. [UPDATE: It seems more like 4 at last notice.]

Their columns appear to have SAM support, possibly with the German MEADS mobile Patriot system. Presumably other advanced weapons that we don't know about are in the fight as well. There is clearly an ambitious plan, but it's not easy to see what it is.

Vladimir Putin says he will hit back. What? "No more Mister Nice Guy?" The AFU is a step ahead of him. Reports of fighting on the Donbas front indicate a sharp recent uptick in Orc casualties -- another hint of new AFU weapons, in quantity.

TUE 13 AUG 24: Relative to Ukraine's operation in Kursk Oblast ... is it a coincidence that it followed the arrival of F-16s in Ukraine? The F-16s are clearly being used for air defense; might Ukraine be calling out Orc air power to destroy it? At least, that might be part of the game.

* Elon Musk had an interview with Donald Trump on Twitter yesterday that was, by all reports, exactly as big a dumpster fire as it could be expected to be. Musk is pathetic. Today, a GIF went around on Spout: "Elon Musk went from Tony Stark to Lex Luthor in 2 years."

* I like to pick up trash on my morning walks. The trash can reflect current technological trends -- some years back, CD-ROMs were nothing unusual. The other day I found a gadget that looked like a bright translucent orange toy version of an old-time phone pager.

It was labeled RAZ. I was mystified, but found out it a disposable vape unit. Not being into vaping, I can forgiveably admit ignorance. What looked like an antenna was a nipple. I wanted to see if I could fill it with water so I could use it as a steam inhalator, but no joy.

WED 14 AUG 24: Kamala Harris's presidential campaign has been on a big roll since it kicked off. As pointed out by a number of people just recently -- most prominently one John A. Stoehr -- she's been driving forward while limiting access by the press.

Of course, the media's disgraceful treatment of Joe Biden is clearly a factor in this, but likely more importantly, she just doesn't really need the media very much. In the modern age, the press is only one pathway to the public, and has become very weak.

Media figures aren't happy with that, CNN's Chris Cillizza saying that "the media is a critical part of our political system and any candidate ... should be regularly subjected to scrutiny from the press."

This from people who ignored all of Joe Biden's major accomplishments and carped endlessly about petty verbal gaffes -- while simultaneously giving Donald Trump generous benefit of the doubt. The media's credibility is shot. Kamala gives them the respect they deserve. As Stoehr put it: "This is a democracy. Harris is obliged to talk to Americans. That's the end of her obligation. She is not obliged to talk to the press corps as if it were a constituency." The press, in saying otherwise, shows an inflated sense of its own importance.

The press corps can get the campaign's press releases and speeches just like the rest of us. The irony is that the press is likely to be nicer to Kamala if she's not so nice to them. The press is now going through a transformation that will take some years to sort out. America after Trump will be clearly different than it was before, but we can't know in what way.

* Ukraine's offensive into Russia's Kursk Oblast continues, as does the effective news blackout of what's going on. Kyiv reports that four Orc airbases have been hit, presumably by drones and maybe some missiles -- but we don't know what damage has been done yet.

THU 15 AUG 24: One Gary Franks, previously a black congressman, wrote an essay titled: "America's Honeymoon With Kamala Harris Is Ending Soon". It was straight MAGA trash: Kamala is only doing one debate and not courting the press; crooked Dems are unfairly cornering the black vote; Kamala spoke at her AKA sorority gathering instead of listening to Bibi in Congress; Trump is playing it cagey; yada yada yada. Mr. Franks does not notice Trump's ongoing disintegration, and doesn't realize that Kamala will beat Trump like a drum.

Trump is playing small venues and not so many of them. Since he rarely pays his debts, he has to pay in advance. When he talks, it's incoherent, mindless, and malign drivel.

I was chatting on Spout that even before Joe Biden dropped out, Trump was going down. Joe's debate pratfall derailed him, but Kamala came roaring on. Yeah, the miserable conduct of the MSM was what primarily did Joe in, but what's done is done. So ... pretty soon we won't be "Ridin' With Biden" any more. It was great while it lasted. I'm hoping he gets some work in the new era: ambassador to Ukraine? Joe wants to take down Putin, and I hope Joe sees it happen.

* Speaking of the Biden Administration, the FTC has now declared rules banning businesses from generating fake reviews. The FTC will fine violations. Businesses will not have to monitor their review pages for user-generated fake reviews.

FRI 16 AUG 24: The Armed Forces Ukraine incursion into Russia's Kursk Oblast has now passed its tenth day. The AFU is there in force and is not in any hurry to leave; the Russians have been caught flat-footed and are getting the worst of it.

Not much else is clear, AFU "OPSEC" being very tight. No specifics of the operation or its goals have been released. Some news media has said the operation caught the USA off-guard, but that's nonsense: it's a major operation, the USA had to be involved in planning.

The 2nd Battle of Kursk hints at the answer to the puzzle of why growing stocks of munitions don't seem to be getting to AFU defenders quickly: the munitions were being stockpiled for this operation. Clearly, new types of munitions have arrived in quantity as well. This relates to the myth that the USA has been "withholding" weapons from Kyiv. The reality is that almost everything useful that is available is being given to Kyiv -- with cover stories generated to conceal weakness.

AND SO ON: One Hans Petter Midttun -- a defense analyst and a former Norwegian military officer -- wrote in KYIV POST that the Ukraine War is often described as a "stalemate", but that's misleading, as demonstrated by the AFU invasion of Kursk Oblast. That's hardly all of it:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Ukraine has enjoyed particular success against the Russian Black Sea Fleet, using "sea baby" drones to sink a third of its vessels, and hitting the BSF's infrastructure as well. Ukraine is also making good use of commercial space intelligence, along with intelligence provided by NATO allies. In the meantime, Ukraine has been conducting an intensive cyberwar campaign, both to collect intelligence and degrade Russian information systems.

Warfare suffers from a dilemma: all preparations to take the fight to an enemy give that enemy the exact same amount of time to prepare themselves. As a result, from the fall of 2023 Russia has been able to take the initiative and make creeping gains on the battlefield. Getting out of this vicious circle requires obtaining an edge on the enemy, and in many dimensions Ukraine has already done so. With growing support from allies and new weapons, the edge is likely to get bigger.

[FRI 16 AUG 24] KAMALA HARRIS (3)

* KAMALA HARRIS (3): Kamala graduated from Westmount in 1981. She invited both her parents to her high-school graduation, even though putting them in the same room -- no matter how big -- was asking for trouble. Donald Harris showed up, but Kamala couldn't find Shyamala in the audience. She eventually strode in wearing a bright red dress and high heels. Shyamala usually wore jeans and tennies to work, but that night she wanted to make a statement.

Kamala attended Vanier College in Montreal for a year. She wasn't satisfied to remain at Vanier, however, and so decided to go to Howard University in Washington DC, focusing on a law degree. She wanted to work towards social change, and saw becoming a lawyer as the best route.

Howard University is the most prominent of the "historically black colleges & universities" of the USA, which number over a hundred, being rooted in the days of segregation. It was named after Oliver Otis Howard, a one-armed Civil War general who ran the government Freedmen's Bureau after the conflict, which provided assistance to freed slaves. He was instrumental in establishing Howard University, which opened its doors in 1867, and was one of its first presidents. One of its most famous graduates in past days was Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the US Supreme Court -- and in the modern day, its alumni are common among America's black cultural and political leadership.

When Kamala arrived in the fall of 1982, she thought she'd gone to heaven, soaking up the energy and diversity of the place. Yes, it was a black experience, but it covered the range of it. Kamala wrote:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

All this was played out against the backdrop of the Reagan presidency. Ronald Reagan, a likeable and charismatic Hollywood actor who had previously been governor of California, had been elected president in 1980 on a program to oppose communism, cut government regulation, reduce government spending, and cut taxes. He represented a shift to the Right, a reaction to the popularly-perceived excesses of the 1960s.

The shift to the Right had economic consequences as well, with major corporations proclaiming that their primary goal, generally to the exclusion of other goals, was to "increase shareholder value". Unsurprisingly, increasing shareholder value led to surging executive compensation, with boards of directors rubber-stamping grand pay packages -- on the assumption of those on the boards that they would get their turns later. With deregulation, the government became less interested in restraining mergers and the emergence of monopoly power.

In any case, living in Washington DC, Kamala got her first tastes of working in government:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The couple had grown up before World War II and, to them, the days of segregation were not such a distant memory. In the summer of her sophomore year, Kamala worked as an intern for Senator Alan Cranston, Democrat from California. Working in the Capitol Building was an experience, but she was also in awe of the presence of the nearby Supreme Court Building, with its legend engraved in marble: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

Incidentally, Kamala once said she worked at a McDonald's one summer while she was in college, "making fries and ice cream." However, it's not clear what summer that was. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 15 AUG 24] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("DARPA Weighs Development Of Battlefield Medicines" by Gerrard Cowan, 15 February 2024), trying to get medicines to troops in the field can be troublesome. The US "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)", the Pentagon's "blue sky" research office, has the bright idea of developing a miniature pharmaceutical factory that can produce drugs on demand.

That's not going to be easy to do, and there's also a regulatory obstacle in trying to do it. As preparation, in early 2024 DARPA set up the "Establishing Qualification Processes for Agile Pharmaceutical Manufacturing (EQUIP-A-Pharma)" program to "demonstrate a real-time digital regulatory approval framework for multiple finished drug products produced on a single reprogrammable hardware platform", according to the agency.

EQUIP-A-Pharma's objective is to bridge the gap between technology and the current regulatory framework. DARPA says that advances in machine-learning (ML) models, manufacturing hardware, and synthetic chemistry mean that drug products can be rapidly synthesized and produced at forward military bases and similar austere environments.

* Quantum dots are a coming technology, with a range of applications. As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Quantum Dot Solar Cells Break Efficiency Record" by Michael Irving, 30 January 2024), researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology (UNIST) in South Korea have fabricated quantum dot solar cells with a record efficiency of 18.1%.

Quantum dots are spherical, layered devices at the nanometric scale that have a semiconductor "filling". There are many different schemes for them, but those used for solar power of course absorb sunlight and generate electricity. The size of a quantum dot determines what wavelengths of sunlight it absorbs -- and so, they can be used to fabricate a solar panel that can absorb a wider part of the solar spectrum than traditional solar panels. In addition, they're cheap and easy to manufacture, and can even be made into a sprayable solution.

Quantum-dot solar cells can be made with organic or inorganic materials. Organic materials are more efficient, but traditionally they are not as stable in sunlight and weather. The UNIST team made their quantum dots out of an organic perovskite, and developed a new method for anchoring them to a substrate that allowed the dots to be placed closer together. That boosted the efficiency to a high of 18.1%, up from 16.6% in 2020 -- with the record confirmed by US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which tracks the efficiency of different solar cells. The first quantum-dot solar cells were fabricated in 2010, when they had an efficiency of about 4%.

The new solar cells were far more stable, maintaining their efficiency for 1,200 hours under normal conditions, and 300 hours at an elevated temperature of 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit). They did not degrade after two years in storage. They still have a way to go before they can be commercialized.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com "3D-Printed Titanium Lattice Is 50% Stronger Than WE54 Aerospace Alloy" by Loz Blain, 26 February 2024), at one time, 3D-printed parts tended to be weak and not useful for rugged purposes. That's no longer the case, with 3D-printed parts now being used in demanding applications. Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have demonstrated a 3D-printed titanium lattice that combines high strength with light weight.

RMIT researchers took hollow-strut lattice designs as a starting point, inspired by hollow-stemmed water lilies and organ pipe coral, and then investigated ways to reduce the high stress concentrations created at the join points. They got around that problem by laying a second lattice over the top, adding a thin cross-matrix lattice running through the tubes and joints that distributes load much more evenly.

It's a very elaborate shape, but easy enough to manufacture using a laser powder bed fusion 3D printer. Tests showed the resulting cube to be 50% stronger than cast magnesium alloy WE54 -- a material of similar density used in aerospace. It'll scale, they say, from millimeters to several meters in size, depending on the printers available, and it offers temperature resistance up to 350 Celsius (660 degrees F), or up to 600C (1,100F) if a more heat-resistant titanium alloy is used. The RMIT researchers see the scheme as useful for aerospace applications; they also see it as useful for bone implants, since the complex, partly empty structure would easily fuse with regrown bone cells.

[WED 14 AUG 24] NEW CAR BATTERIES (6)

* NEW CAR BATTERIES (6): As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("Electric Cars And Batteries: How Will The World Produce Enough?" by Davide Castelvecchi, 17 August 2021), electric vehicles (EV) are seen as one of the keys to a low-carbon future, with auto makers jumping on the EV bandwagon. In many countries, government mandates will accelerate change -- but even without new policies or regulations, half of global passenger-vehicle sales in 2035 will be electric, according to the BloombergNEF consultancy in London.

That means hundreds of millions of EVs on the road, loaded up with batteries -- each one of which relies on materials that have yet to be mined. The International Energy Agency (IEA) describes this as a "shift from a fuel-intensive to a material-intensive energy system."

Materials scientists accordingly have two challenges. The first is to cut down use of the metals in batteries that are scarce, expensive, or problematic because their mining carries painful environmental and social costs. Another is to improve battery recycling, so that the valuable metals in spent car batteries can be efficiently reused. Kwasi Ampofo -- a mining engineer who is the lead analyst on metals and mining at BNEF -- says "Recycling will play a key role in the mix."

Battery-makers and carmakers are already pumping billions into addressing these challenges, driven in part by government incentives and the looming threat of government regulations. National research funders have also founded centers to study better ways to make and recycle batteries. Since it is still less expensive, in most cases, to mine the relevant metals than to recycle them, a critical goal is to develop processes to recover valuable metals cheaply enough to compete with newly mined ones.

The first challenge for researchers is to cut down on the amounts of metals that need to be mined for EV batteries. A single typical car lithium-ion might contain about 8 kilograms (18 pounds) of lithium, 35 kilograms (77 pounds) of nickel, 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of manganese, and 14 kilograms (31 pounds) of cobalt. Lithium batteries are the preferred technology now and for the foreseeable future. They are now 30 times cheaper than when they first entered the market as small, portable batteries in the early 1990s, while as their performance has improved.

Lithium battery performance is continuing to improve, with prices dropping to the level that an EV will be price-competitive with a carbon-fuel vehicle before too long. Incidentally, some studies show that EVs are already cheaper on a life-cycle basis.

All batteries consist of two electrodes -- a cathode and an anode -- separated by an electrolyte that allows ions to flow from anode to cathode, and electrons flowing from anode to cathode through an external circuit. Cathodes are the main limiting factor in battery performance; they tend to use the most valuable metals in a battery.

The cathode of a typical lithium-ion battery cell is a thin layer of goo containing micro-scale crystals, broadly similar in structure to minerals that occur naturally in Earth's crust or mantle, such as olivines or spinels. The crystals pair up oxygen with lithium and various other metals -- in electric cars, typically a mix of nickel, manganese and cobalt. Recharging a battery pulls lithium ions out of these oxide crystals and draws the ions to a graphite-based anode where they are stored, sandwiched between layers of carbon atoms.

Current reserves of lithium are estimated at 21 million tonnes, enough to support EV production to mid-century. The stated reserves also do not represent a hard limit, instead representing the amount of a resource that can be economically extracted at current prices, and given current technology and regulatory requirements. In reality, reserves tend to grow with demand.

Demand for lithium is, of course, booming. Ampofo says: "It's going to grow by about seven times between 2020 and 2030." That will mean shortages and big price swings over the short term, but the long-term prospect for lithium production is good. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 13 AUG 24] FUTURE PATHOGENS?

* FUTURE PATHOGENS? As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("The pathogens that could spark the next pandemic" by Smriti Mallapaty, 02 August 2024) according to an updated list recently published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of pathogens that could trigger the next pandemic has grown to more than 30. It includes influenza A virus, dengue virus, and monkeypox virus,

Neelika Malavige -- an immunologist at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Colombo, Sri Lanka, who was involved in the effort -- says: "It's very comprehensive." She studies the Flaviviridae family of viruses, which includes the virus that causes dengue fever.

Although it's hard to predict where the next pandemic might come from, the researchers say that the list of "priority pathogens" will help organizations determine where to focus their efforts in developing treatments, vaccines and diagnostics. The priority pathogens were selected on the basis of evidence showing that the pathogens were highly transmissible and virulent, and that there was limited access to vaccines and treatments. The WHO's two previous efforts, in 2017 and 2018, identified roughly a dozen priority pathogens. Malavige says it's important to regularly revisit these lists to account for major global changes in climate change deforestation, urbanization, international travel and so on.

More than 200 scientists spent some two years evaluating evidence on 1,652 pathogen species -- mostly viruses but some bacteria -- to see which were the most menacing. Among the more than 30 priority pathogens are the group of coronaviruses known as Sarbecovirus, which includes SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that caused the global COVID-19 pandemic -- and Merbecovirus, which includes the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Previous lists included the specific viruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and MERS, but not the entire subgenuses that they belong to.

Other additions to the list include the monkeypox virus, which caused a global mpox outbreak in 2022, and continues to spread in pockets of Central Africa. Its relative, the variola virus -- which causes smallpox -- is also on the list, even though it is not known in the wild any longer. It might well be used by terrorists, however, and few are immune to it any longer.

Half a dozen influenza A viruses are also now on the list, including subtype H5, which has sparked an outbreak in cattle in the United States. Among the five bacteria, all newly added, are strains that cause cholera, plague, dysentery, diarrhea, and pneumonia.

Two rodent viruses were also added because they have jumped to people, with infrequent human-to-human transmission. According to the report, climate change and increased urbanization could raise the risk of these viruses transmitting to people. The bat-borne Nipah virus remains on the list because it is deadly and highly transmissible in animals, and there are currently no therapies to guard against it.

Naomi Forrester-Soto -- a virologist at the Pirbright Institute near Woking, UK, who also contributed to the analysis -- says that many of the priority pathogens are currently confined to specific regions but have the potential to spread globally. She studies the Togaviridae family, which includes the virus that causes Chikungunya.

In addition to the list of priority pathogens, researchers also created an additional list of "prototype pathogens", which could act as model species for basic-science studies and the development of therapies and vaccines. Malik Peiris -- a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, who was part of the Coronaviridae research group -- comments that before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no available human vaccines for any of the coronaviruses. He says that developing vaccines for one member of a family will bring confidence to the scientific community that it is better placed to address a major public-health emergency for those viruses. He adds that this applies to treatments as well, because "many antivirals work across a whole group of viruses".

Forrester-Soto says that the list of pathogens is reasonable given what researchers know about the viruses -- but cautions that the list has to be taken with a grain of salt, saying that ...

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Nonetheless, taking on pathogens that we do know about will make us better prepared for those that we don't.

[MON 12 JUL 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 32

DAYLOG MON 05 AUG 24: There was a GIF going around reading: "The biggest Super Bowl in history is coming up, November 5th: It's the PATRIOTS VS the STEALERS!"

There's a symmetry here that I didn't notice before it was pointed out. The UK's Tory-crushing general election was on the 4th of July. Our election is on ... Guy Fawkes Day. Suggestive?

This week, Kamala Harris does whirlwind campaigning through six states. Trump does ... Montana. It appears he's not up to campaigning any more, and would prefer to show in a state where he won't look too bad. Not incidentally, John Cleese recently tweeted: "I confidently forecast that Trump & his followers will get weirder & weirder the more that they panic. And panic they should, because what's happening is not the end of the world -- it's the end of THEIR world."

* Ukraine has finally got its hands on F-16s -- a fact that raises more questions than it answers. Were they upgraded to latest standard? Or just given a quick fix? Preparatory to much more significant upgrades? Are they only being transiently based in Ukraine? Shuttling to Romania or Poland for servicing? What sort of weapons are they getting? AMRAAMs to be sure, but maybe the new AIM-260, now going into production? Or the AIM-174, an air-launched SM-6 extreme-range missile? If we see a sharp uptick in Orc air losses, particularly at extreme range, that will be a big hint. I think things will be clearer by the end of the month.

* The Colorado Alexander Mountain fire continues to burn, but it's not much bother in Loveland, the winds pushing it west into the mountains. At last report, it's 3/4ths contained. As long as big winds don't come up, things are looking good.

I was thinking fire containment starts out slow, picks up pace, and then ends slow. MS Copilot confirms this: it starts out slow because it takes time to set up the system to control the fire, with fast progress once it's in place. Final mopping up then takes time.

DAYLOG TUE 06 AUG 24: Today the other shoe dropped and Kamala Harris announced her vice-presidential pick -- which turned out to be Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, 60 years old. I only vaguely knew the name, so I checked him out.

Originally from Nebraska, he became a high-school teacher of geography, and also a football coach. In parallel, he was with the Army National Guard, ultimately mustering out as a master sergeant. He became a Member of the House of Representatives in 2006, graduating from the House to Minnesota governor in 2018, being re-elected in 2022. He's entirely MidWestern in appearance, definitely appealing to rural white folks, but still has a good liberal record.

One could not have selected a better balancing act. There was talk about tagging Pete Buttigieg for the slot, but though he's clearly a megawatt-level intellect, he couldn't have balanced the ticket nearly as well. The selection further boosted KamalaMania, to which we can now add "TimInsanity". Of course, MAGA keeps up the smear campaign, playing up a drunk-driving rap from (checks notes) 1995. Boring.

* KYIV POST had an article titled: "Pro-Ukraine lobbying efforts bet on Trump pivot to look tough on Putin!" I had to think that people in Kyiv do not understand how absurd the headline was, on several levels.

The first misunderstanding was thinking that policy statements from Trump mean anything. He's no more capable of coherent policy than a 6-year-old. If returned to power, he would knife Ukraine without hesitation. The second misunderstanding was thinking that Trump has any prospect of winning this election. People in Kyiv see the polls and don't realize they are meaningless. Trump is in steady decay, while Kamala goes energetically from strength to strength.

In 2016, everything Trump threw at Hillary stuck; in 2024, nothing sticks to Kamala. People in Kyiv also do not realize that there is very little enthusiasm for Trump on the streets, with Trump hats and signs having largely disappeared.

DAYLOG WED 07 AUG 24: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, having become Kamala Harris' vice-presidential pick, has helped accelerate the campaign, Democrats greeting Walz with a wild excess of enthusiasm. Walz superficially looks like a traditional Republican, but he's fed up with the GOP's descent into crime and has embraced liberalism. I'm seeing more of these guys all the time. Good.

Trump, in the meantime, is losing it more every day. Latest story is that Trump thinks Joe Biden will try to steal the nomination back from Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention. Some people are offended at the suggestion; myself, I find it deranged.

Not really incidentally, Trump continues to sink with cryptocoin. Cryptocoin scammers are backing him heavily, since he promises to be nice to them. In the meantime, the SEC and the FTC are hammering away at cryptocoin companies. THEY DESERVE IT ALL.

* On 29 July, in Southport UK, a deranged teenager went on a stabbing spree at a Taylor-Swift-themed dance class, with three girls killed. The attacker was of Rwandan parentage; in response, the British Troglodyte Right rioted at immigrant centers and the like.

The demonstrations have persisted, the police having made hundreds of arrests. British PM Keir Starmer, once a prosecutor, denounced "Far-Right" thuggery and said there would be zero tolerance for attacks on British Muslims, who have been singled out by the rioters. The riots are not at all spontaneous, they are clearly part of an organized program, and I suspect the ring-leaders are going to be treated harshly by the authorities.

Prominent British Troglodyte Nigel Farage put in overtime encouraging action -- using dog whistles to deny responsibility, of course. One wonders if Starmer will find some way of stepping on him.

   I saw Farage upon the stair,
   talking trash that fouls the air.
   He's talking trash again today --
   Oh how I wish he'd go away.

In the wake of the collapse of the Tories, Britain's Troglodytes are asserting their fading relevance. We may see something of the same here in the USA next year.

DAYLOG THU 08 AUG 24: Donald Trump's dying presidential campaign took a big self-inflicted hit today, in the form of a 90-minute press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He was totally incoherent and disconnected from reality. The failure continues -- how will it end?

One Nicole Russell, writing in USA TODAY, admitted that Trump had lost it, but insisted he was still better for America than Kamala Harris. I stopped reading right there. Any GOP who are not saying VOTE FOR KAMALA are still obediently working for Trump.

Tony "The Mooch" Scaramucci, commenting on Trump's epic failure today, pointed out that from 2016, like 20 million baby-boomers have died, while 40 million Gen-X have come of voting age. MAGA is doomed whether they care to admit it or not. There is still a finite chance that Trump could win in November -- but it's not worth betting on. The only interesting question is how brutally the GOP will suffer on the down-ballot.

* An article from CNBC pointed to recent price fluctuations of cybercoin, saying it was a risky investment: "It's pure, unadulterated speculation." I had to echo the article, adding: "Well yeah duh." There's a fine line between "wild speculation" and a "con".

* Weather in Colorado has turned, somewhat surprisingly for August, cool and damp, with the effect that the Alexander Mountain Fire is nearing full containment. About 50 homes and buildings were lost. I was expecting it to go on for longer, but it's winding down.

The quick turn towards cool was educating: my digestion improved, I slept better, I didn't feel tired and grumpy all the time. Once I get through July, August isn't as tough. We'll still have hot days, but the longer nights will help.

DAYLOG FRI 09 AUG 24: Kamala & Tim continue to be on a roll, Trump (forget about Vance) continues to sink. Sometimes I look at KamalaMania and see it as hyped and theatrical, then think: So what? A presidential campaign is theater in the first place.

The MAGA trolls are out to get Tim Walz, but not having much luck. They threw the fact that he's not very rich at him, but that only helped prove he was an ordinary Joe. There's some MAGA calling him "Tampon Tim", for reasons not worth investigating.

They said he resigned from the Army National Guard to keep from going to Iraq, but he'd been in the ANG for 24 years, he could resign when he liked, and he wanted to run for Congress. Besides, his unit didn't get orders for Iraq until 2 months after he resigned.

Joe Biden has suggested Trump will contest the election if, as seems very likely, he loses. Again: So what? It didn't work before, and we're not going to be taken by surprise this time. I wrote on Spout in reply to Trump: Bring it on, loser.

* Armed Forces Ukraine has been conducting a raid in force into Russia's Kursk Oblast, on Ukraine's borders, on a tear and inflicting severe damage on the Russians. Russian forces have reacted, but the AFU doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. I was thinking they would hit and run, but this looks like a more serious operation.

AND SO ON: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has been on something of a tear himself lately, publishing a book saying Americans are drowning in regulations, saying that Democrats need to "be careful" about SCOTUS reform.

Justice Gorsuch seems to misunderstand his position. The decisions being made by the Right justices in SCOTUS these days seem to constitute a program in which the judiciary assumes the authority to override at will laws made by Congress. That appears to be the thinking behind the philosophy of "originalism", in which the Constitution is narrowly interpreted to only permit exactly what the original Framers decided to permit.

Originalism is a ridiculous idea, to the extent that the Right on SCOTUS tend to be evasive about their support of it. Not only is such thinking applied to issues the Framers couldn't have imagined, much less had an opinion on, but it also ignores the Elastic Clause -- which says Congress can pass any laws it likes as long as they don't violate the Constitution -- and the 9th Amendment -- which says that the American people could be granted rights even if not enumerated in the Constitution.

Alexander Hamilton once commented that the judiciary is the weakest of the three legs of the American government: the executive controls the government, including the military, while Congress controls spending -- and also creates the laws. The judiciary is dependent on the executive for carrying out its judgements, and is dependent on Congress for funding. If SCOTUS tries to override, on vaporous pretexts, laws passed by Congress, Congress will pass a new Judiciary Act to bring SCOTUS back in line. Assuming things go well in November, Justice Gorsuch and the other Right justices may find themselves in the doghouse.

[FRI 09 AUG 24] KAMALA HARRIS (2)

* KAMALA HARRIS (2): When Kamala was about five and Maya was still a baby, Shyamala took the two girls to present them to their grandparents. Gopalan and Rajam were not living in India at the time, Gopalan having been dispatched to Zambia in Africa to help with a refugee crisis; the neighboring state of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, had declared independence from Britain in 1965, with people fleeing the country.

Shyamala may have found a visit to Africa with the girls less problematic than a trip to India, having expressed fears to friends that the girls might be abused for their skintone in India. There was no evidence of any such bigotry in Gopalan and Rajam -- instead they doted on their grand-daughters. There would be further visits to the grandparents, it appears all the later visits being to India. Kamala became very attached to Gopalan, later describing him as "my favorite person in the whole world."

* Back in the Midwest, Shyamala and Donald took a series of positions at various universities. They had gradually taken to quarreling, the two strong-willed people finding out they could not get along. In 1970, Shyamala took the girls back to California, with Donald remaining in the Midwest. Shyamala sued for divorce in 1971. A bitter custody battle followed, with Shyamala winning the case the next year. American courts were biased towards the mother in custody cases.

The two girls retained contact with Donald Harris, but he was peripheral to their lives; they were raised by their mother -- who could not stand to talk to Donald Harris. Much later, Kamala would tell an interviewer: "My father is a good guy, but we're not close." Donald Harris became a professor of economics at Stanford University in 1972, and would become noted as a critic of mainstream economics from the Left.

If the marriage had caused distress among Shyamala's family, the divorce caused more, since divorce was strongly discouraged and stigmatized in India. Gopalan and Rajam were distressed, but forgiving; however, Shyamala could not really look back to India any more, having burned all her bridges. However, it is not apparent that she ever became an American citizen.

Incidentally, Gopalan Balanchandran got a doctorate in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1978; from that time, he had a prominent career in India in academia and as a government advisor. Sarala became an obstetrician, remaining in India, while Mahalakshmi got a degree in information science -- to ultimately become a Canadian citizen, living there as "Chinni Subash", with her husband Shankar Subash.

Shyamala was apparently getting by on what work she could find at the time, while she looked for an adequate academic position. She and the two girls lived in South Berkeley; when they started going to school, they were bused to a school in North Berkeley. School busing to redress racial imbalance was common at the time, though it was politically controversial -- to the point where it would ultimately be abandoned. However, it worked well enough in Left-leaning Berkeley. There, the two girls lived in a multi-cultural environment, exposed to white and black American as well as Indian ways of doing things.

In 1976, Shyamala finally got the job she wanted, with McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada -- teaching at the university and doing breast cancer research at the university's Jewish General Hospital. Shyamala tried to tell the girls it would be a great adventure, but Kamala never really bought it: she was at heart a California girl and generally went back there on holidays and during the summers, staying with her father or friends. Kamala particularly hated the cold winters.

The threesome spent five years in Montreal. Kamala was originally enrolled in a French-language school, but she didn't adapt to the language well. After a year, she transferred to Westmount, an English-language high school. She became good friends with one Wanda Kagan -- mixed-ethnic as well, with a white mother and a black father. When Kagan said her stepfather was molesting her Shyamala, always inclined to take charge, had Kagan move in with the family. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 08 AUG 24] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Astronomers Are Puzzled Over An Enigmatic Companion To A Pulsar" by Adam Mann, 18 January 2024), astronomers have discovered in our Galaxy an unusual cosmic object that might be a very heavy neutron star, one of the lightest black holes ever found, or an exotic and previously unknown quasi-stellar object.

The discovery came from MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, which monitored 13 millisecond pulsars in a dense cluster of stars 40,000 light-years from Earth. Pulsars emit radio pulses on intervals of clocklike precision, and variations in the timing of the pulses can reveal the presence of large masses near a pulsar.

The ticks of one particular pulsar, known as PSR J0514-4002E, revealed that it has an invisible companion weighing between about 2.1 and 2.7 times the mass of our Sun. The issue is that a neutron star will collapse into a black hole if it's from two to three times the mass of our Sun, but nobody's certain exactly where in that range the collapse will occur. Researchers have discovered a few similar objects before. The researchers involved suspect that this object resulted from the merger of two smaller neutron stars. By studying the pulsar ticks more closely, the researchers hope to determine the object's true nature.

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCE.org ("Familiar Astronomical Object May Be Two Galaxies, Not One" by Daniel Clery, 29 December 2023), the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a hazy blob in the night sky easily visible to people in the Southern Hemisphere, has long been the target of astronomical observations. Now observations are suggesting the SMC is actually two galaxies, one in front of the other.

Astronomer Claire Murray of the Space Telescope Science Institute and her colleagues came to this conclusion by tracking the movements of clouds of gas within the SMC and the young stars recently formed within them. Their investigation points to two stellar nurseries thousands of light-years apart.

Along with the SMC, there is a "Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)". The LMC is a disk galaxy, like a miniature Milky Way, while the SMC is two-thirds of the LMC's mass and irregular in shape. The SMC has been less investigated than the LMC because of its small size and confused structure -- Murray saying it "has suffered most" in its gravitational interactions with the LMC and the Milky Way: "It's simply full of disrupted gas. It's a train wreck of sorts."

Murray's team decided to use the most modern instruments to give the SMC a closer look. To study the SMC's gas clouds, the researchers they turned to the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, a radio telescope made up of 36 dishes each 12 meters (39 feet) in diameter, and mapped out the radio emissions of atomic hydrogen in the clouds. They then plotted the location and velocity of thousands of the SMC's young stars of less than 10 million years in age, using Gaia, an orbiting observatory from the European Space Agency.

The researchers merged the two data sets. Working from the assumption that young stars would still be moving along with the gas clouds from which they formed, they were able to identify two distinct star-forming clouds with different levels of heavy-element enrichment. By measuring how much light from the two clouds is absorbed by dust between them and Earth, they calculated that one is more distant than the other. However, determining how much space there was between the two clouds was hard. Working with a computer model, they came up with a distance of 16,000 light-years -- about half the distance between the Earth and the center of the Milky Way.

What is well harder to determine is if the two objects have always been separate, or if they were split apart from each other in the past. The concentrations of heavy elements in the two are similar, suggesting a common origin. In any case, if further study confirms the SMC is actually two relatively small galaxies, a name change is in order. There's already a push to change rename the Magellanic Clouds. They were originally brought to the general attention of Europeans from the voyages of sixteenth century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan; and Magellan is seen today as one of the fathers of European colonialism, which is not now seen in a favorable light.

[WED 07 AUG 24] NEW CAR BATTERIES (5)

* NEW CAR BATTERIES (5): Sodium-ion batteries are now going into production. Chinese conglomerate BYD -- which, as of 2024, has replaced Tesla as the world's largest EV manufacturer -- has broken ground on its first sodium-ion battery plant. Chinese car makers Chery, JMEV, and JAC have all announced budget cars powered by sodium-ion batteries in their line-up for China this year, with list prices to be around $10,000 USD.

Gerbrand Ceder points out that sodium's larger atomic size gives more options for the metals that can be used in the layered metal oxides at the cathode: "There's a lot more chemical flexibility." Linda Nazar adds that researchers could make an anode-less solid-state battery with sodium as well.

On the other side of that coin, the heavier weight of sodium compared to lithium makes it fundamentally harder to get to high energy densities. In addition, sodium-ion batteries being new, there hasn't been as much development of electrodes and electrolytes, compared to lithium-ion. Sodium-ion battery energy density now roughly matches that of the best lithium-ion batteries from a decade ago.

CATL has a sodium battery that hit an advertised energy density of 160 Wh/kg in 2021 at a reported price of $77 USD per kWh; the company plans to ramp up to 200 Wh/kg. That's still not spectacular, and that means limited range. The new ultra-compact batteries being introduced in China running on sodium-ion batteries advertised ranges of no more than 300 kilometers (185 miles), compared with twice that for a lithium-powered Tesla Model S. The short range is not acceptable for the US market.

Some companies, including UK-based Faradion and Swedish Northvolt, are promoting their sodium batteries, also both advertised at 160 Wh/kg to store excess renewable energy for electricity grids, where sodium's weight problem is less of an issue.

Jennifer Rupp says that battery development is troublesome because the behaviors of materials are not always predictable. For instance, it currently takes researchers 8 to 15 years to come up with new solid-state electrolyte designs and optimize the specifications, including which additives to use and how to pack in high densities of lithium. That means a materials scientist might work on three materials or so during an entire career. Rupp says: "That's too slow".

Help is coming from artificial intelligence (AI) and automated synthesis, which can help to find and explore more options more quickly. For example, the DoE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, is working with Microsoft to come up with new battery materials on a fast track; a lithium-sodium solid electrolyte found this way is now in initial tests.

The problem with an AI system is that it works better given a bigger training set, and the data available on battery technologies is still meager. Nazar says there are still plenty of unknowns, about what's actually going on at the atomic level at the interface of electrode and electrolyte materials.

In the end, experts say we're likely to see a variety of batteries for our future cars -- in much the same way that we have 2-, 4- and 6-cylinder engines today. For example, we might see sodium batteries or LFP for lower-range cars, forklifts or specialist vehicles. Then there might be improved lithium-ion batteries, maybe using silicon anodes or rocksalt cathodes, for mid-range vehicles, or possibly solid-state lithium batteries will take over that class. At the high end, there might be LiS or even lithium-air cells for expensive cars, or flying taxis. All we know right now is that it's going to take a lot more work to get there.

ED: Another promising battery technology is iron-air -- but though it's dirt-cheap, it's too bulky for cars, being seen as suited to fixed-site renewable energy storage. Using iron-air for such applications does mean reduced pressure on supplies of lithium. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 06 AUG 24] BIRD FLU & MRNA VACCINES

* BIRD FLU & MRNA VACCINES: As discussed in an article from APNEWS.com ("Health Scientists Are Testing mRNA Vaccines To Protect Cows And People Against Bird Flu" by Mike Stobbe & Lauran Neergaard, 31 May 2024), one of the positive results of the COVID-19 pandemic was the introduction of vaccines based on "messenger RNA (mRNA)". These vaccines proved fast to develop and highly effective.

Now a bird flu strain has jumped to cows, giving fears of a new pandemic. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now working on an mRNA vaccine, developed by University of Pennsylvania researchers, to be administered to calves. The idea is not only to protect the calves, but also the dairy workers who deal with them, heading off a flu jump to humans.

The jump remains a possibility, so the US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) has been talking to manufacturers about possible mRNA flu vaccines for people. The US government has large quantities of bird flu vaccines already in hand, but more can't hurt. Richard Webby, a flu researcher at Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, says: "If there's a pandemic, there's going to be a huge demand for vaccine. The more different [vaccine manufacturing] platforms that can respond to that, the better."

The bird flu virus started spreading through other animal species around the world in 2020. It was detected in US dairy herds in March 2024, although investigators think it may have been in cows since December. The USDA recently announced it had been found in alpacas for the first time. At least three people, all workers at farms with infected cows, have been diagnosed with bird flu, although they didn't get very sick. Unfortunately, earlier strains of the same H5N1 flu virus have been lethal to humans in other parts of the world.

Officials are taking steps to be prepared if the virus mutates in a way to make it more deadly, or allows it to spread more easily from person to person. Traditionally, most flu vaccines are made via an egg-based manufacturing process that's been used for more than 70 years. A target virus is injected into fertilized chicken eggs, which are incubated for several days to allow the viruses to grow. Fluid is harvested from the eggs and used to make vaccines, with killed or weakened virus priming the body's immune system. The problem with the egg approach is that bird flu spreading among chickens can cripple the supply of eggs, and so some flu vaccine is made in giant vats of cells.

Officials say they already have two candidate vaccines for people that appear to be well-matched to the bird flu virus found in US dairy herds. Government officials say they have hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses in pre-filled syringes and vials that likely could go out in a matter of weeks, if needed, They also have bulk antigen that could generate nearly 10 million more doses that could be filled, finished and distributed in a matter of a few months.

However, the production lines for flu vaccines are already working on this fall's seasonal shots, and that effort would have to be interrupted to make more bird flu shots. That's why the US government is interested in mRNA vaccines. These messenger RNA vaccines are made using a small section of genetic material from the virus that human cells use to generate a viral protein, which stimulates the immune system. The pharmaceutical company Moderna already has a bird flu mRNA vaccine in very early-stage human testing. Similar work has been going on at Pfizer.

As for the vaccine for cows, Penn immunologist Scott Hensley worked with mRNA pioneer and Nobel laureate Drew Weissman to produce the experimental doses. Hensley said that vaccine is similar to the Moderna one for people. In phase-one testing, mice and ferrets produced high levels of bird flu virus-fighting antibodies after vaccination. In another experiment, researchers vaccinated one group of ferrets and deliberately infected them, and then compared what happened to a control group of undocumented ferrets Hensley says the vaccinated animals survived, while unvaccinated did not.

The cow study builds on that. Calves are being given different doses, with blood drawn from them to determine their viral load. The primary goal is to determine the appropriate dosage. Hensley says that What "scares me the most is the amount of interaction between cattle and humans."

He adds: "We're not talking about an animal that lives on a mountain top," he said. "If this was a bobcat outbreak I'd feel bad for the bobcats, but that's not a big human risk." If the vaccine reduces the viral load in cows, "then ultimately we reduce the chance that a mutant virus that spreads in humans is going to emerge."

[MON 05 JUL 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 31

DAYLOG MON 29 JUL 24: The sniping at Kamala Harris is of course ramping up -- one of the most obvious shots being: sHE's nOt QuAliFiED fOr tHe JOB! Ignoring the fact that her opponent is totally unqualified for the job, & the difficulty of finding a better candidate on short notice, then we are left with a fair record: DA of San Francisco from 2003, AG of California from 2010, US Senator from 2016, VP from 2020. On the basis of the qualifications of past presidents, she's at least middle of the pack.

For example, Barack Obama: Illinois state senator from 1996, US senator from 2004, POTUS from 2008 to 2016. Of course, any troll would immediately reply that Obama was "ThE w0r$T pRE$IdeNT EVR!!!" -- a ridiculous claim considering his successor in the White House.

The attacks on Kamala come as no surprise, however, it being a certainty that MAGA would attack a ... well, rhymes with SLACK EMAIL. The only surprise is how lethargic the sniping is. The Trump campaign is out of steam. Not even an assassination attempt livened it up.

* It's been hot lately, and I was wondering if fires were popping up in Colorado. Possibly just for saying that, I go out to get my mail and see a big smoke plume coming up due west of me, in the Rocky Mountain foothills.

Checking online says the fire is on Alexander Mountain, with locals being evacuated to centers here in Loveland -- pets going to the humane society, livestock to the fairgrounds. A number of helicopters and a single BAE 146 air tanker are on the job. I was close enough to see the air tanker shuttling through the smoke plume.

It's not too threatening just yet, but it's not contained. If the wind comes up, there will be really big trouble.

DAYLOG TUE 30 JUL 24: It's being reported that Donald Trump's presidential campaign is getting some bigtime funding from cryptocoin scammers. Figures. I wrote online: "As if we didn't have enough reasons to suspect them already."

* The Alexander Mountain fire to the west of Loveland CO continues to grow. At mid-day, I saw two Air Tractor cropdusters, working as fire spotters and air tankers against small outlier fires, headed towards the fire area.

The smoke plume shifts across town on occasion. I went for a spin on my Razor kick scooter this morning, with misgivings about the funky air, but the wind shifted to give me some relief. However, this will go on for weeks.

DAYLOG WED 31 JUL 24: KamalaMANIA continues, with a stream of support efforts popping up -- the latest being an endorsement by a hundred tech CEOs. In the meantime, Trump appeared at the National Association of Black Journalists, and insulted everyone. Wotta loser.

I would not place a bet at any odds that Trump will win the election, but the dismal prospect that he could win is still draining. To add to the drain, it's still too hot in NE Colorado, and the Alexander Mountain fire continues to spread.

I got up this morning and the air seemed clear, and I wondered for a moment if the fire was under control. I immediately thought back: No way. Loveland just wasn't in the direction of the prevailing winds. I went for a walk after sunup and the plume was to the southeast.

At least, as a plane-spotter, I see some interesting flying machines; there was a big Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter shuttling over my house today. I think there may be some Boeing Chinook helicopters involved as well. This is a big fire and it's getting priority.

Anyway, things are crummy right now; between the heat and the smell of smoke, I've got no appetite, my weight's gone rock bottom, and I'm thin as a rail to begin with. Lingering anxiety over the election doesn't help.

Oh well, compared to the people fighting the fire or running away from it, I've got no complaints. The heat wave is supposed to break on Tuesday, and things may be looking up then. As for the election, it's a bother but I'm not really sweating it. I'm surprised that anyone is.

DAYLOG THU 01 AUG 24: President Joe Biden just scored a coup by arranging the release of a number of American prisoners languishing in Russian lockups. Apparently, the deal was finalized while JB was considering dropping out of the presidential race.

When told that Trump said he could have got the prisoners back without having to give anything up, JB asked: "Why didn't he do it when he was president?" So much for JB in cognitive decline.

JB is also working on a bill for Supreme Court reform, including term limits and an ethics code -- while also calling for a constitutional amendment to define presidential immunity. Obviously, the court-reform bill won't be passed before he leaves office, so clearly it is being pushed now so it can be introduced as soon as possible in the new year. As long as the Supreme Court is dominated by extremists, not much else will get done.

JB is clearly focusing on getting as much done as he can before he leaves office. It's not just a question of personal legacy, he's also giving Kamala the maximum boost for her election campaign, and paving the way for her own agenda.

DAYLOG FRI 02 AUG 24: Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy was saying that if Ukraine had been given weapons and Russia subjected to severe sanctions before the 2022 invasion, the war would be over by now. Nonsense:

• Ukraine was and is not a NATO member, and NATO was under no obligation to drop everything and help.
  
  
• Many thought Putin was bluffing; after all, he'd threatened the Baltics before, and done nothing more.
  
  
• If NATO jumped the gun on Putin, he could use that as a pretext for invasion, which would have greatly complicated support for Ukraine.
  
  
• Since there was little advance warning of the invasion, nothing much could have been done before the assault started.
  
  
• Once Putin did invade, NATO was solidly committed to support Ukraine, all real doubts about doing so having evaporated. Weapons had been stockpiled and were airlifted in quickly.
  
  
• Russia actually was hit with severe sanctions -- but sanctions are tricky to figure out and enforce, and they do not work quickly.

What is Zelenskyy trying to do, making unproveable claims about "might have beens"? History is not a controlled experiment, we have no way of knowing what the result might have been under different circumstances. It seems what he's trying to do is shift the blame for the persistence of the war onto Ukraine's allies. That's understandable, but it's still annoying. NATO was not prepared for a war of this magnitude, and it could not be won quickly.

* The Alexander Mountain fire rages on, having consumed dozens of homes -- but it's moving west into the mountains, and not such a smoky nuisance here in Loveland for the moment. It's still hot and dry here, likely to stay so for at least another week.

I endure. The political battle is also hard to deal with. Trump is going down, no real doubt about it, but we're not out of the woods just yet, and he's still a threat. Nonetheless, contrast 2016 against 2024. In 2016, Trump was frighteningly going from strength to strength. In 2024, we've got Decrepit Donald's Dumpster Fire Clown Parade, and there's no reason to bet he's going anywhere at any odds.

PALMER REPORT notes that he's doing little campaigning, and when he does show his face, he flounders -- like his nasty and foolish performance at the Association of Black Journalists meeting. Incidentally, he was queried by Rachel Scott of ABC News, who has received death threats in consequence. It also seems plausible that the assassination attempt has made him scared to show his face in public, all the more so because event security before the shooting appears to have been slipshod.

Kamala is on a roll and her campaign is a clockwork steamroller. The Trump clown parade, in contrast, is going from fail to fail. The lethargy is evident -- like Trump gasps for breath walking up stairs. The GOP has been hollowing itself out for decades, & there's barely a shell left. The GOP gradually lost the mission until they couldn't drive the machine any more, with Trump taking the wheel. He couldn't drive either, but they didn't have anyone who could take the wheel back from him. They've had it.

Oh, late-breaking news: appeals having been exhausted, at least for the moment, Judge Tanya Chutkin -- in charge of Trump's Federal "election fraud" trial -- is moving forward. Right now, it's just more procedural things, but it's moving again. More bad news for Trump.

AND SO ON: Somebody posted on Spoutible a clip from a newspaper from over a century ago, saying that burning coal could lead to warming the climate. Actually, I replied, global warming from carbon emissions was projected by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896 -- who didn't see it as a problem, saying that it would prevent another ice age. Indeed, there was a cooling trend in the postwar period due to air pollution.

My comment didn't seem to fly very well, so I added that the persistent warming trend began when air pollution declined. Up to that time, there had been a quarrel between factions, some predicting warming, some predicting cooling. It seems the faction predicting cooling was a minority, but whatever -- they lost the argument bigtime.

Climate change didn't really emerge as an issue until the 1970s and 1980s. Digital climate models require a lot of computing horsepower, and that was lacking in the 1980s. I found some blog comments saying that a Cray supercomputer of the 1980s was like three orders of magnitude less powerful than the cheap smartphone I just bought.

I then got to wondering if all smartphone processor chips have floating-point units -- way back when, processors normally didn't have an FPU. A quick check showed that all ARM chips, standard for smartphones, have an FPU. It would be absurd not to have one, since by modern standards an FPU doesn't take up much silicon real estate.

[FRI 02 AUG 24] KAMALA HARRIS (1)

* KAMALA HARRIS (1): Gopalan Shyamala was born in 1938 in the city of Madras in the Indian state of Madras -- the city now being known as Chennai and the state as Tamil Nadu. Her parents were P.V. Gopalan and his wife, Rajam, both of the Brahmin caste. Gopalan was a career civil servant, originally in the service of the British Raj; after independence, he directed the resettlement of refugees from what is now Bangladesh. It should be noted that Tamil names do not follow Western conventions; they do not have family names, instead the first name of offspring and wife being the father's name.

Shyamala was the eldest of four children of Gopalan and Rajam. She was closest to her brother Gopalan Balachandran, nicknamed "Balu", who was about two years younger; they were childhood "partners in crime". There were also two younger sisters, Sarala and Mahalakshmi. Shyamala was an accomplished singer, in classical Indian style, winning a competition once and singing on the radio.

Shyamala eventually attended Lady Irwin College, a prominent women's institution in New Delhi, studying "home science", basically home economics. Her parents thought she should set her sights higher, Balachandran recalling that Gopalan asked her: "What is home science? Are you learning how to invite guests?" Rajam, on her part, thought her children should aspire to be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer.

Shyamala took the hint, and in 1958, aged 19, she decided to apply for a masters program at the University of California in Berkeley. Gopalan told her: "Go ahead." She was accepted and went to California. It was a big jump, she'd never left India before. At Berkeley, she ended up working towards a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology; her goal was to do defeat breast cancer.

She was known as "Shyamala Gopalan", reversing the name order to fit Western convention. At the time, Indians in the USA were unusual, something of a curiosity, and Shyamala -- though hardly unassertive -- felt out of place. In the early 1960s, counter-culture activism was starting to take hold at UC Berkeley, and Shyamala gravitated toward the black activist community, notably joining up with a group of black students who discussed the works of black writers such as W.E.B. Dubois and Ralph Ellison. The "Afro American Association" was an "incubator" for black consciousness, and it would eventually end up linked to the Black Panther Party. Shyamala was the only non-black member.

Her involvement with black culture led her to attend a talk by Donald Harris, a Berkeley grad student from Jamaica working towards a doctorate in economics. After the talk, Shyamala introduced herself to Harris, and they struck up a friendship.

Donald Jasper Harris had been born in 1938, same year as Shyamala, in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica. He was of Afro-Irish descent, his parents being Oscar Joseph Harris and Beryl Christie Harris. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University College of the West Indies in 1960, to then go to Berkeley for a doctorate in 1961.

One thing led to another, and the couple married in 1963, simply going to the courthouse at lunch hour. Shymala was defying tradition in many ways by marrying Harris -- one reason being that arranged marriages were the norm for Indian women, another one being that Indians are inclined to be much more concerned about skintone than they like to let on. However, although Balachandran said Gopalan and Rajam were upset, skin color wasn't the issue: "They had not met the bridegroom before the wedding. I don't think they had any issues that he was Jamaican or anything like that."

Shyamala got her doctorate in 1964. The couple's first child, a daughter, was born in Oakland, California, on 20 October 1964, and was named "Kamala Devi Harris". "Kamala" means "lotus" in Sanskrit, and also is an alternate name for the "Lakshmi", the Hindu goddess of represents wealth and prosperity. "Devi" means "goddess", and is the name of the Hindu mother goddess. Much later, Shyamala provided a specific reason for the name: "A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women."

Donald Harris got his doctorate in economics in 1966. The family then moved to Champaign, Illinois, with the couple taking positions at the University of Illinois. Their second child and last child, another daughter, was born on 30 January 1967, to be named "Maya Lakshmi Harris". "Maya" can mean "dream", but it is also another alternate name for Lakshmi. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 01 AUG 24] SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE

* SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE: As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("A Supermassive Black Hole Orbiting A Bigger One Revealed Itself With A Flash" by Lisa Grossman, 15 June 2023), astronomers have suspected that a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy has a smaller companion that orbits it every 12 years. Now a flash of light from the smaller black hole has helped confirm its existence.

Astronomers have observed this object since the 1880s, spotting finding a bright point of light while hunting for asteroids. Much later, it would be given the designation of "OJ287" and identified as a "blazar" -- a distant and ancient galaxy with a supermassive black hole at the center that is emitting powerful jets of radiation into space that happen to point at Earth. OJ287 is about 3.5 billion light-years away.

Sometimes OJ287 shines brighter than usual. For the past 40 years or so, astronomers have noticed that the object has a dramatic jump in brightness every 11 to 12 years. In 1996, astronomer Mauri Valtonen and his colleague Harry Lehto -- both of the University of Turku in Finland -- suggested that the outbursts could be due to one supermassive black hole orbiting an even more massive black hole.

They estimated that the two black holes are huge. The smaller is around 150 million times the mass of our Sun, while the bigger is about 18 billion solar masses. For perspective, the black hole in the center of our Milky Way is about 4 million solar masses. The bigger black hole in the binary system can be assumed to be surrounded by a disk of white-hot gas and dust. The smaller black hole would then periodically plunge through the disk during its orbit, emitting flares that had been observed.

On the basis of their model of the binary system, Valtonen and his colleagues predicted that a flare should arrive in January or February 2022, and arranged to monitor OJ287 every day using telescopes on Earth and in space. The team saw flares like the ones they had seen before, providing validation for their model. However, they got a bonus, seeing a new flare that was different, being bright and short-lived, fading after one night.

The researchers proposed that this flare came from a jet created by the smaller black hole pulling material out of the disk as it approached, before the collision. Valtonen said: "It swallows a whole lot of disk matter. That matter falls into the secondary black hole, and you get a huge flare."

Caltech astronomer Seppo Laine says: "Mauri has been basically pushing this supermassive black hole binary model for decades now. It doesn't completely confirm it, but if this interpretation is correct, then it's a significant step forward." Valtonen suggests that the model may be eventually confirmed by a space-based radio telescope network.