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Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Science!

Some science and tech news that has built up in my in-box:

    An anomalous magnetic region in the South Atlantic Ocean is growing, according to data that appeared in a government report published earlier this year.

    The South Atlantic Anomaly is a location in the southern Atlantic where the innermost portions of the natural zone of energetic charged particles encircling Earth, known as the Van Allen radiation belt, makes its closest approach to the planet. The resulting outflow of energized particles produces a higher yield of ionizing radiation detectable by satellites orbiting Earth.

And:

    “The SAA is deepening and moving westwards,” the authors state in the January report.

    “The area affected,” the authors state, “has increased by about 5% over this time. This contour approximates the region where radiation damage to satellites is most likely to occur.”

    According to the report, the SAA continues to have an impact in a variety of ways that range from potential damage to satellites from excessive radiation, to obstructing radio propagation. Although the report’s authors also note that the SAA is believed to impact polar regions, they add that “the impacts there are less dependent on field intensity.”
    The sounds plants emit are like popping or clicking noises in a frequency far too high-pitched for humans to make out, detectable within a radius of over a meter (3.3 feet). Unstressed plants don't make much noise at all; they just hang out, quietly doing their plant thing.

    By contrast, stressed plants are much noisier, emitting an average up to around 40 clicks per hour depending on the species. And plants deprived of water have a noticeable sound profile. They start clicking more before they show visible signs of dehydrating, escalating as the plant grows more parched, before subsiding as the plant withers away.

    The algorithm was able to distinguish between these sounds, as well as the species of plant that emitted them. And it's not just tomato and tobacco plants. The team tested a variety of plants, and found that sound production appears to be a pretty common plant activity. Wheat, corn, grape, cactus, and henbit were all recorded making noise.

Reminds of this "Deep Thoughts" from Jack Handey: "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."

  • "Circumcision Appears to Alter The Penis Microbiome, Study Finds"--ScienceAlert. The article relates that "[s]ome of the bacterial communities that shrank following circumcision have been linked to inflammation and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in other research. That tentatively implies circumcision may reduce a person's susceptibility to STIs by limiting inflammation in penile tissues and viral targets on the skin." It's long been known that circumcision reduces the overall rates of transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, but this provides a mechanism for why that is so.
  • "The secret iPhone feature you NEVER knew existed"--Daily Mail Online. Apparently you can set your phone to perform certain tasks, like turn on the flashlight or take a screen shot or mute the device, by tapping on the Apple icon on the back of the device, although you are limited to selecting just two tasks.
THE BACK TAP - HOW TO TURN ON SECRET IPHONE FEATURE  
  1. Go to the phone's home screen
  2. Head over to settings 
  3. Click accessibility
  4. Click Touch
  5. Scroll to Back Tap
  6. Select the functions for Double Tap or Triple Tap - the options include:
    • Open an app
    • Lock screen
    • Screenshot
    • Mute
    • Activate Siri
    • Adjusting the volume
    • Open camera
    • Turn on the torch
    • Adjust screen's zoom 
    While the burst -- known as GRB 221009A -- was so bright it blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, scientists were able to reconstruct the information from data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The results were confirmed with data and analysis from Russian and Chinese teams. Together, they concluded that the burst was 70 times brighter than any others seen.

    Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe, producing more energy than the sun will generate over its 10-billion-year lifetime.

    Astronomers believe most occur when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight and forms a black hole, as seen in NASA's gamma-ray burst animation.

Scientists say that it is a once in 10,000 years event, which is why they are suggesting it is the brightest that could have been seen since the beginning of civilization.  Fortunately the burst occurred about 1.9 billion light-years from Earth--much closer and the emission of gamma radiation could have sterilized the planet.

New evidence suggests that one or two of the gas giant's 27 known moons might be harboring liquid oceans beneath their crusty rock-and-ice exteriors. The possible culprits for seeding the space around Uranus with plasma are Miranda and Ariel, one or both of which might be erupting with ocean plumes.
Scientists have discovered the first known piezoelectric liquids, which are able to convert mechanical force to electric charge, and vice versa. The generally environmentally friendly nature of these materials suggests they may find many applications beyond standard piezoelectric compounds, such as novel, electrically controlled optics and hydraulics. However, much remains unknown about how they work, and therefore what they may be capable of.
  • "What Is Tesla’s Mystery Magnet?"--IEEE Spectrum. Tesla claims to have a magnet scalable to mass production that does away with having to use rare earth elements, but has not released details. This article delves into what Tesla might be using. 
    The problem here is physics, which not even Tesla can alter. Permanent magnetism occurs in certain crystalline materials when the spins of electrons of some of the atoms in the crystal are forced to point in the same direction. The more of these aligned spins, the stronger the magnetism. For this, the ideal atoms are ones that have unpaired electrons swarming around the nucleus in what are known as 3d orbitals. Tops are iron, with four unpaired 3d electrons, and cobalt, with three.

    But 3d electrons alone are not enough to make superstrong magnets. As researchers discovered decades ago, magnetic strength can be greatly improved by adding to the crystalline lattice atoms with unpaired electrons in the 4f orbital—notably the rare-earth elements neodymium, samarium, and dysprosium. These 4f electrons enhance a characteristic of the crystalline lattice called magnetic anisotropy—in effect, they promote adherence of the magnetic moments of the atoms to the specific directions in the crystal lattice. That, in turn, can be exploited to achieve high coercivity, the essential property that lets a permanent magnet stay magnetized. Also, through several complex physical mechanisms, the unpaired 4f electrons can amplify the magnetism of the crystal by coordinating and stabilizing the spin alignment of the 3d electrons in the lattice.

    Since the 1980s, a permanent magnet based on a compound of neodymium, iron, and boron (NdFeB), has dominated high-performance applications, including motors, smartphones, loudspeakers, and wind-turbine generators. A 2019 study by Roskill Information Services, in London, found that more than 90 percent of the permanent magnets used in automotive traction motors were NdFeB.

    So if not rare-earth permanent magnets for Tesla’s next motor, then what kind? Among experts willing to speculate, the choice was unanimous: ferrite magnets. Among the non-rare-earth permanent magnets invented so far, only two are in large-scale production: ferrites and another type called Alnico (aluminum nickel cobalt). Tesla isn’t going to use Alnico, a half-dozen experts contacted by IEEESpectrum insisted. These magnets are weak and, more important, the world supply of cobalt is so fraught that they make up less than 2 percent of the permanent-magnet market.

    Ferrite magnets, based on a form of iron oxide, are cheap and account for nearly 30 percent of the permanent-magnet market by sales. But they, too, are weak (one major use is holding refrigerator doors shut). A key performance indicator of a permanent magnet is its maximum energy product, measured in megagauss-oersteds (MGOe). It reflects both the strength of a magnet as well as its coercivity. For the type of NdFeB commonly used in automotive traction motors, this value is generally around 35 MGOe. For the best ferrite magnets, it is around 4.

    “Even if you get the best-performance ferrite magnet, you will have performance about five to 10 times below neodymium-iron-boron,” says Daniel Salazar Jaramillo, a magnetics researcher at the Basque Center for Materials, Applications, and Nanostructures, in Spain. So compared to a synchronous motor built with NdFeB magnets, one based on ferrite magnets will be much larger and heavier, much weaker, or some combination of the two.

One promising candidate that would have the necessary strength is iron nitride, Fe16N2. But, according to the article, it is still at the experimental stage and years away from commercial manufacture.
    Sales of vinyl records have been on the rise for years, but according to the RIAA's 2022 year-end revenue report for the music industry (PDF), record sales hit a new high last year. For the first time since 1987, unit sales of vinyl albums outpaced those of CDs, vindicating all the people who have spent decades of their lives talking about how vinyl "just sounds better."

    Although vinyl unit sales only surpassed CDs last year, revenue from vinyl records has been higher than revenue from CDs for a while now. In 2022, the RIAA says that vinyl albums earned $1.2 billion, compared to $483 million for CDs. The growth in vinyl was more than enough to offset a drop in CD revenue, helping overall physical media revenue climb 4 percent over 2021 (which was already way up over 2020).

I noticed that my local Fred Meyer department store began selling vinyl albums about a year ago, as well as carrying a handful of record players and turntables. 

    A group of researchers has achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden.

    The team, led by the University of Oxford in close collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, envisages that this method may soon be used widely in digital human communications, including social media and private messaging. In particular, the ability to send perfectly secure information may empower vulnerable groups, such as dissidents, investigative journalists, and humanitarian aid workers.

    The algorithm applies to a setting called steganography: the practice of hiding sensitive information inside of innocuous content. Steganography differs from cryptography because the sensitive information is concealed in such a way that this obscures the fact that something has been hidden. An example could be hiding a Shakespeare poem inside an AI-generated image of a cat.

    Despite having been studied for more than 25 years, existing steganography approaches generally have imperfect security, meaning that individuals who use these methods risk being detected. This is because previous steganography algorithms would subtly change the distribution of the innocuous content.

    To overcome this, the research team used recent breakthroughs in information theory, specifically minimum entropy coupling, which allows one to join two distributions of data together such that their mutual information is maximized, but the individual distributions are preserved.

    As a result, with the new algorithm, there is no statistical difference between the distribution of the innocuous content and the distribution of content that encodes sensitive information.

Of course, none of this makes any difference if they are logging your keystrokes or using a Tempest type device to read your monitor. 

    Web developer Steven Tey then [after Musk released Twitter's selection code] claimed to have discovered a particular mechanism within the code that allows the U.S. government to make changes to the website’s algorithm.

    “When needed, the government can intervene with the Twitter algorithm. In fact, @TwitterEng (Twitter Engineering) even has a class for it – ‘GovernmentRequested,” Tey tweeted, including a link to the code on GitHub.
The FBI’s cybersecurity division has been purchasing bulk internet data from a little-known tech firm based in Florida, Motherboard reports. Team Cymru, which calls itself a “global leader in cyber threat intelligence,” sells access to bulk web traffic and tells clients it can act as a gateway to a “super majority of all activity on the internet.” It has previously been found selling its services to a number of other federal agencies.
    Pfizer and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) withheld evidence that COVID-19 vaccinations led to an increased risk of myocarditis, especially in young males, according to two sets of documents made public this week.

    Confidential Pfizer documents leaked Thursday by Project Veritas show the company had “evidence that suggests patients who receive a COVID-19 vaccine are at an increased risk of myocarditis.”

    And heavily redacted CDC documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request indicate the agency provided an undercounted figure of post-COVID-19-vaccination myocarditis cases to Israel’s Ministry of Health in early 2021.

    The latest revelations come as Germany, Japan and other governments are raising questions about the significant numbers of severe adverse events recorded in individuals following administration of the COVID-19 vaccines.

    According to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections, or it may result directly from a toxic effect such as a toxin or a virus.

    “More commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage,” researchers said.
    According to a paper published at the end of December 2014, the Ebola epidemic was traced back to a 2-year-old boy in Meliandou, Guinea, named Emile Ouamouno. Supposedly, the boy had come in contact with an infected fruit bat in a hollowed-out tree.

    This, even though no Ebolavirus RNA was ever detected in any of the bat samples collected from the area. Interestingly enough, the senior author on that paper was Fabian Leendertz, a renowned virus hunter with the Robert Koch Institute in Germany.

    Leendertz was also a member of the World Health Organization team that investigated the origin of COVID-19. As you may recall, they also concluded, without evidence, that SARS-CoV-2 was most likely of zoonotic origin and dismissed the lab leak theory as not worthy of further consideration.

    However, just as with SARS-CoV-2, suspicions and rumors that the Ebola outbreak was the result of a lab leak were present from the start. Some scientists even suspected the virus might be a weaponized form of Ebola. As noted in a 2014 paper in the Journal of Molecular Biochemistry:

“Another subject that may cause a plethora of arguments is that this virus may be a laboratory generated virus … There is a conjecture that the virus is transmitted to people from wild animals. However, by reason of the high mortality among them, it is impossible that these animals are the reservoir host of EVD.”

    In late October 2022, Sam Husseini and Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., published a new analysis in Independent Science News, in which they laid out the evidence pointing to a lab leak. They also dissect Leendertz December 2014 report, highlighting the holes in the zoonotic origin narrative. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest the outbreak in in Meliandou wasn’t Ebola at all. Husseini and Latham write:

“Chernoh Bah, an independent journalist from Sierra Leone, wrote a book on the 2014 Ebola outbreak and visited Meliandou. Bah found that: ‘Local health workers still think malaria may have been the actual cause of his [Emile’s] death.’

While in Meliandou, Chernoh Bah also interviewed Emile’s father. According to Bah, the Leendertz team (who never claimed to have interviewed the father) made a crucial error: ‘The child was actually 18 months old when he died’ … The age question, it should be noted, is crucial to the entire outbreak narrative. As Emile’s father told Reuters:

‘Emile was too young to eat bats, and he was too small to be playing in the bush all on his own. He was always with his mother.’ Bah also identified another apparent error: that Emile had four siblings who never became sick. These siblings are not mentioned anywhere in the scientific literature …

Further, although some bats appear to carry antibodies against Ebola viruses, only intact Bombali Ebola (a different virus species in the Ebola genus) has ever been isolated from a bat, despite intensive searches … Bombali is a species of Ebola that does not infect humans.

Taken together, this suggests that bats rarely carry Ebola viruses and when they do it is in small quantities. This context makes it somewhat surprising that Saéz et al. ascribed the 2014 outbreak (without supporting evidence) to contact with bats.

Indeed, Fabian Leendertz now doubts that bats are true reservoirs of Ebola viruses. Given the general want of evidence, one wonders by what exact process such poorly supported claims were transmuted into international headlines.”

The article then explores the possibility that the Ebola outbreak actually came from a research laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone, run by the U.S.-based Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), which studies viral hemorrhagic diseases. The lab is located about 50 miles from the village in Guinea where the Ebola outbreak first emerged. But, as the article points out, "[a]ll previous outbreaks of this most-lethal strain of Ebola occurred in the Congo basin, in the central African equatorial zone, some 3,000 kilometers (approximately 1,864 miles) from Guinea."

    A study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) has been well-hidden by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). All three agencies conspired in tandem to cover up the findings of a six-year, long-delayed review of fluoride’s toxicity.

    Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the infamous transgender woman that Joe Biden appointed to head up the HHS, intervened last June to stop the release of the May 2022 NTP review, known internally as a monograph. The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) responded to Levine’s obstruction of the review by filing a lawsuit, which ultimately prompted the report’s release on March 15, 2023. The mainstream media is obviously ignoring the report, but it does show there’s no “safe exposure” to fluoride.

    “[R]esearch on other neurotoxicants has shown that subtle shifts in IQ at the population level can have a profound impact … a 5-point decrease in a population’s IQ would nearly double the number of people classified as intellectually disabled,” the NTP review states.

    • The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. —Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet
    • lt is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. —Dr. Marcia Angell, physician and editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine
    • The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful. —Arnold Seymour Reiman (died 2014), Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine
    • Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them. —Dr. Linus Pauling, (died 1994), two-time Nobel Prize winner in chemistry
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2 comments:

  1. John WilderApril 4, 2023 at 6:10 PM

    Can confirm: DAN still works.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 5, 2023 at 11:40 PM

    Perhaps the deeper question one should ask is WHY did it come to this terrible point in time where we cannot "trust the science", how did we end up here at this most fraudulent criminal state of affairs? Because the recognition of the underlying cause(s) would be instructive in terms of HOW we should tackle it to potentially manifest real change.

    A coherent theory of how we got to this dismal point has been proposed, see “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room –The Holocaustal Covid-19 Coronavirus Madness: A Sociological Perspective & Historical Assessment Of The Covid “Phenomenon”” at https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html

    A problem can only get solved/cured if cause(s) are dealt with.

    ReplyDelete

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