Tree of Life

Our own trunk, known as eukaryotes, includes animals, plants, fungi and protozoans. A second trunk included many familiar bacteria like Escherichia coli.

The third trunk that Woese and his colleagues identified included little-known microbes that live in extreme places like hot springs and oxygen-free wetlands. Woese and his colleagues called this third trunk Archaea.

In greater detail, this means ...

The tree of life is one of the most important organizing principles in biology1. Gene surveys suggest the existence of an enormous number of branches2, but even an approximation of the full scale of the tree has remained elusive. Recent depictions of the tree of life have focused either on the nature of deep evolutionary relationships3,​4,​5 or on the known, well-classified diversity of life with an emphasis on eukaryotes6. These approaches overlook the dramatic change in our understanding of life's diversity resulting from genomic sampling of previously unexamined environments. New methods to generate genome sequences illuminate the identity of organisms and their metabolic capacities, placing them in community and ecosystem contexts7,8. Here, we use new genomic data from over 1,000 uncultivated and little known organisms, together with published sequences, to infer a dramatically expanded version of the tree of life, with Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya included. The depiction is both a global overview and a snapshot of the diversity within each major lineage. The results reveal the dominance of bacterial diversification and underline the importance of organisms lacking isolated representatives, with substantial evolution concentrated in a major radiation of such organisms. This tree highlights major lineages currently underrepresented in biogeochemical models and identifies radiations that are probably important for future evolutionary analyses.

As a good friend of mine, versed in medical, once said, it's all computational now as we have the compute power to crunch the genome. Truer words were never said.

The War on Cash

There is a global push by lawmakers to eliminate the use of physical cash around the world. This movement is often referred to as “The War on Cash”, and there are three major players involved:

1.  The Initiators
   Who?
   Governments, central banks.
   Why?
   The elimination of cash will make it easier to track all types of transactions – including those made by criminals.
2. The Enemy
   Who?
   Criminals, terrorists
   Why?
   Large denominations of bank notes make illegal transactions easier to perform, and increase anonymity.
3. The Crossfire
   Who?
   Citizens
   Why?
   The coercive elimination of physical cash will have potential repercussions on the economy and social liberties.

End game, the banks and government will control our money without question. Serious business don't you think?

The History of Money

Courtesy Mint.com

Although the infographic ends with the introduction of cryptocurrency in 2009, it should be noted that the newest chapter in the history of money is taking place right before our eyes.

The “War on Cash” has been accelerating in recent years, as governments and central banks have called for the elimination of high denomination banknotes. While these anti-cash motions have also been made in many Western countries, the most vivid example of the demonetization is currently happening in India.

Interesting to say the least. The War on Cash looms.

Another set of B&Ws :)

South Street

CH Public House

Sonic Switch Tower Museum

John Hurt, RIP

Another great actor died and we will miss him. John Hurt, RIP. 

John Hurt, the twice-Oscar-nominated English actor whose film career spanned six decades and multiple iconic roles, has reportedly died at the age of 77, according to reports in several British newspapers, including The Daily Mail. The cause of death was not immediately reported; Hurt was diagnosed in 2015 with pancreatic cancer, but in October of that year announced he was “thrilled” to have had his final scan, “and it‘s all gone brilliantly.”

A former art student who enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1960, Hurt paid his dues in British television before breaking through in 1966’s A Man for All Seasons, opposite Paul Scofield and Orson Welles. He earned his first BAFTA award in 1976, for playing gay author and ranconteur Quentin Crisp in the TV film The Naked Civil Servant; that same year he played notorious Roman emperor Caligula in the TV film classic I, Claudius.

His turn in V For Vendetta was stellar without question.

There is no plan

When looking at this picture, one sees a self satisfied Ryan and a worried McConnell as Trump takes control of the presidency. In the past week, the Repugs are touting the fact that Obamacare is in the crosshairs due to Trump's pledge to eliminate same with aid supplied by these two and the Republican controlled congress. The problem with this rosy scenario, from the GOP side, is the fact THEY HAVE NO PLAN. Now think about this. For 8 years they bloviated about replacing Obamacare, a weak but viable first step to change the ongoing train wreck of HC in this country but have supplied nothing of substance in place of OC, something rather astounding don't you think? Think how Patton, or Kelly Johnson or Steve Jobs, among significant other competent people, would react to this? Aside from disbelief, incompetence and blinding stupidity come to mind without question. The repugs are on the hook for this and ... remember, payback is a bitch.

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans, meeting behind closed doors this week in Philadelphia, expressed grave concerns about dismantling the Affordable Care Act on the urgent timetable demanded by President Trump, fretting that, among other things, they could wreck insurance markets and be saddled with a politically disastrous “Trumpcare.”

An audio recording of a session at their annual retreat, obtained by The New York Times, shows Republicans in disarray, far from agreement on health policy, and still searching for something to replace former President Barack Obama’s health care law. While their leaders called for swift action to rescue consumers from the Affordable Care Act, some backbench Republicans worried about potential pitfalls.

“We had better be sure that we are prepared to live with the market being created,” said Representative Tom McClintock of California, because “that’s going to be called Trumpcare.”

He added, “Republicans will own it lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged on that.”

Duh.

Transition

Almost all B&W, Transition goes from town to woods in the mild winter of 2017, something that may presage what winters will be like from now on, thanks to Global Warming.

Alternative Facts

sci·ence

ˈsīəns/

noun

the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

"the world of science and technology"

synonyms: branch of knowledge, body of knowledge/information, area of study, discipline, field

                       "the science of criminology"

Very precise is it not? A discipline, when properly done, is intended to be questioned, to be accurate and above all else, to be separate, as best as possible, from politics, prejudice and above all else, religion, vital considerations not even comprehended by the Trump administration.

Leaders of several of the nation's top science organizations say they've been shunned by the Trump administration and are alarmed by signs that the administration will muzzle government researchers and reject the scientific evidence that informs such critical issues as vaccine safety and climate change.

Their comments in interviews with The Washington Post come as scientists around the country are considering a grass-roots revolt against President Trump that could include a march on Washington. The sudden eruption of activism among people typically more comfortable in a laboratory or manipulating equations was incited in part by reports that the Trump administration is restricting the ability of government employees, including scientists, to communicate with the public.

“The signals are not encouraging, and they’re alarming, and they’re causing a lot of fear in the scientific community,” said Christine McEntee, chief executive and executive director of the American Geophysical Union.

“I’ve never seen the scientific community so concerned,” said Rush Holt, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “This goes way beyond funding. When fake news is accepted as just one of the alternate approaches, then there are serious problems to be addressed.”

Yes indeed.

NASA does it again :)

NASA research is now free and easily accessed. Awesome says it all.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a full-text, online archive of journal literature operated by the National Library of Medicine. NASA is using PMC to permanently preserve and provide easy public access to the peer-reviewed papers resulting from NASA-funded research. For more information about public access and other funders who use PMC, see Funders and PMC.

Studies in B&W

Fractal Tree

Bldg 101

Pampas Grass

We the People ...

We the People, in DC ... from my iPhone from DKDMedia on Vimeo.

A very good friend of yours truly created this gem because we are the people
and we must make our voices heard before it's too late.

Aja & Then Some :)

No words needed. Kind of along the lines of So What. Perfect, nuanced and elegant. Enjoy.

Had to add another. :)

Pretzel Logic

Another kind of Pretzel Logic. :)

A Retrograde Action

The Manchurian Candidate is one way to set up a dictatorship, another is for an incoming adminstration to systemically lie and censor information while quietly undoing modernity in America in order to gain power no matter what the cost may be.

It's been fun to point and laugh at the new administration. It's been fun to mock Sean Spicer's obvious discomfort at the podium, and to sit in awe at the obvious infighting within the White House this early in the game. But, while we're doing that, slowly and steadily, an actual government has been forming, and it is the most dangerously retrograde government that our system has produced in at least the past 150 years. It is secretive and it is resistant to any empirical information that it does not want to hear. It is grotesquely anti-science. It seeks to roll back progressive achievements dating back to Teddy Roosevelt and it has the power to do so, even if it is in its own bungling way. And it really hasn't gotten rolling yet.

1984 looms ... if we let it.

"If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, 
you have to get the consent of the ruled" - Aldous Huxley

Winter Pix

Pampas Grass/Closeup

Rural PA

Redding @ Nite

Picnic

Minimalism writ large :)

Elegant architecture, elegant time lapse, what more could anyone want. :)

Giedi Prime+

This is not a Democratic or Republican issue, this is a survival issue.

If this stands, the road to Giedi Prime is nigh. Think about it. I know I have.

Picture by Chris Valle

It gets better.

Last, week, under the cover of a media bliss-out except among Koch funded right-wing channels, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would effectively repeal future standard setting under every important environmental, public health, consumer protection, labor standards, occupational safety and civil rights law on the books.

The bill, called the REINS Act, requires that any future major regulation adopted by an Executive Agency — say a new toxic chemical standard required by the recently enacted Chemical Safety Act, or a new consumer protection rule about some innovative but untested kind of food additive — must be approved by a specific resolution in each House of Congress within 70 days to take effect.

Because congress is scientifically and technologically inept as well as technologically inefficient in moving and properly analyzing data through said chamber before having to vote on ALL major regulations as complex as these, the end result  will be ...

Over time, as new health, safety, consumer and labor protection issues arise, all of these laws will effectively have been repealed, with no public debate and no accountability. It will also be impossible to restore them as long as the REINS Act is in effect, because by requiring Congress to approve every regulation, it makes it impossible to pass technically complex and scientifically valid rules on any topic of controversy.

In effect, we are going back to the 19th century where the devil takes the hindmost and the middle class gets screwed. 

The Uncertainty Principle

The Uncertainty Principle, as conceptualized by Werner Heisenberg, states that one cannot know both the position and momentum of a subatomic particle simultaneously. It's impossible due to quantum mechanics but this is not about the esteemed W. Heisenberg and his principle but rather about the Donald, who became president by threading the needle of the Electoral College in miraculous fashion to deny Hillary Clinton the job even though she won the popular vote by nearly 3 million.

What lies ahead for America evokes the Uncertainty Principle in ways that truly boggle the mind.

Donald Trump won the Republican nomination because more people voted for him than voted for anyone else. Donald Trump won the presidential election because enough people voted for him in enough states to hit the tripwire on one of the oldest booby traps in American politics. And it worked precisely as it was meant to work, although it produced exactly the opposite of the result it was meant to produce.

I have no idea what to expect now, except the results likely will range from the marginally unpleasant to the completely catastrophic. The list of possible horribles is well-known by now. If the president-elect does what he's said he will do, 20 million Americans will lose their health insurance. The Ryan budget will sail through both houses of Congress and the president will sign it without reading it. At the very best, federal regulations meant to protect the public from everything from financial swindles to poisoned water to bad tuna fish will be handed to people opposed to the very existence of those regulations. It will be James Watt and Elaine Chao multiplied by 10. The lessons learned from the war in Iraq and from the recession of 2008 will be swiftly unlearned and forgotten. The elite political media will adjust. And I will not mention the future of the Supreme Court, because that's too self-evidently awful for words. - Charles P. Pierce

In Pierce's excellent analysis is a quote by the esteemed Dr. Gonzo regarding Nixon but is all the more relevant seeing the apoplectic state America finds herself in as we lurch further into 2017.

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President? - Hunter Thompson

Sound familiar but his take on Hillary is just as prescient as seen in a BRT piece tiled Hunter Thompson was Right. Check it out. The Gonzo man rates two 10s on this election from hell.

A Random Walk

A short clip showing random walks through nighttime Bethel, CT, nighttime Redding, CT and St. Mary's by the Sea @ dusk. Enjoy.

Internet Archive/Wayback Machine

The importance of this link to the Internet Archive and to the Wayback Machine cannot be understated given what happened on 1/20/2017.

Yet Another Stunner

If you look real close, you will see, in outline, a wave in the making by Saturn's tiny moon Daphnis.
Stellar without question.

The wavemaker moon, Daphnis, is featured in this view, taken as NASA's Cassini spacecraft made one of its ring-grazing passes over the outer edges of Saturn's rings on Jan. 16, 2017. This is the closest view of the small moon obtained yet.

Daphnis (5 miles or 8 kilometers across) orbits within the 42-kilometer (26-mile) wide Keeler Gap. Cassini's viewing angle causes the gap to appear narrower than it actually is, due to foreshorteneing.

 The little moon's gravity raises waves in the edges of the gap in both the horizontal and vertical directions. Cassini was able to observe the vertical structures in 2009, around the time of Saturn's equinox (see Rippling Shadows).

Cassini, the little engine that could. :)

The New Normal

Planetary creation was cut and dried, as seen in the top panel, before exoplanets were discovered. Now, confusion reigns as nature never disappoints in throwing curveballs at us rubes.

When astronomers discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star 2 decades ago, there was joy—and bewilderment. The planet, 51 Pegasi b, was half as massive as Jupiter, but its 4-day orbit was impossibly close to the star, far smaller than the 88-day orbit of Mercury. Theorists who study planet formation could see no way for a planet that big to grow in such tight confines around a newborn star. It could have been a freak, but soon, more “hot Jupiters” turned up in planet searches, and they were joined by other oddities: planets in elongated and highly tilted orbits, even planets orbiting their stars “backward”—counter to the star’s rotation. 

The planet hunt accelerated with the launch of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft in 2009, and the 2500 worlds it has discovered added statistical heft to the study of exoplanets—and yet more confusion. Kepler found that the most common type of planet in the galaxy is something between the size of Earth and Neptune—a “super-Earth,” which has no parallel in our solar system and was thought to be almost impossible to make. Now, ground-based telescopes are gathering light directly from exoplanets, rather than detecting their presence indirectly as Kepler does, and they, too, are turning up anomalies. They have found giant planets several times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting their star at more than twice the distance Neptune is from the sun—another region where theorists thought it was impossible to grow large planets. Other planetary systems looked nothing like our orderly solar system, challenging the well-worn theories that had been developed to explain it. 

As one very wise researchers says,

If the past is anything to go by, modelers will have to keep on their toes. “Nature is smarter than our theories,” Rafikov says.

Nolan Ryan anyone?

On Solitude

Blank on Blank,  a newly found treasure with wonderfully penned animation and interesting interviews with people such as Hunter Thompson, Meryl Streep and this gem, Francis Ford Coppola on Solitude, is eminently worthwhile to check out. Enjoy.

Endangered Data

Seen above is a picture of an incredibly valuable resource, the EPA Greenhouse Gas Emissions website that objectively monitors the output of CO2 and other GH gases produced by 9 different types of facilities (Power Plants, Petroleum & Natural Gas Systems, Refineries, Chemicals, Other, Minerals, Metals and Pulp & Paper) in scientific fashion, something that may go away under the aegis of the Trump administration. 

To whit.

Rogue Scientists Race to Save Climate Data from Trump

AT 10 AM the Saturday before inauguration day, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, roughly 60 hackers, scientists, archivists, and librarians were hunched over laptops, drawing flow charts on whiteboards, and shouting opinions on computer scripts across the room. They had hundreds of government web pages and data sets to get through before the end of the day—all strategically chosen from the pages of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—any of which, they felt, might be deleted, altered, or removed from the public domain by the incoming Trump administration.

Their undertaking, at the time, was purely speculative, based on travails of Canadian government scientists under the Stephen Harper administration, which muzzled them from speaking about climate change. Researchers watched as Harper officials threw thousands of books of aquatic data into dumpsters as federal environmental research libraries closed.

But three days later, speculation became reality as news broke that the incoming Trump administration’s EPA transition team does indeed intend to remove some climate data from the agency’s website. That will include references to President Barack Obama’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan and the strategies for 2014 and 2015 to cut methane, according to an unnamed source who spoke with Inside EPA. “It’s entirely unsurprising,” said Bethany Wiggin, director of the environmental humanities program at Penn and one of the organizers of the data-rescuing event.

Trump’s WhiteHouse.Gov Disappears Civil Rights, Climate Change, LGBT Rights

The minute Donald Trump was sworn into office, the White House’s web site changed—dramatically.

WhiteHouse.gov immediately wiped pages on LGBT rights, civil rights, climate change, and health care from its “issues” section after Donald Trump took the oath of office.

The page on climate change was replaced with a page entitled “An America First Energy Plan” that ignores climate change entirely and says, “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.”

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.

George Orwell - 1984

Addendum: Here's the link to the original dataset of WH.gov.

Automation ...

AI, automation and all things related to surveillance, video and search & rescue as tech has no morality, only the people who run it, do.

Very cool tech I must admit.

Goodbye jack-in-the-box, hello drone-in-the-box!

Although the picture below looks like an ordinary box, inside houses a complete drone management workshop. As the box opens up, it acts as a launch pad for the internal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). After the drone completes its assigned task, it lands on the opened container, which then folds back into its original form. Inside, a mechanism swaps out the drone's depleted battery in order to recharge.  

"And so it goes." - K. Vonnegut

Thoughtcrime

Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

A presage of things to come? Could be now that the outgoing Obama administration deemed it necessary for the NSA to share our data with other intel agencies whether we like it or not.

To whit.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is on the verge of permitting the National Security Agency to share more of the private communications it intercepts with other American intelligence agencies without first applying any privacy protections to them, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

The change would relax longstanding restrictions on access to the contents of the phone calls and email the security agency vacuums up around the world, including bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies.

It gets better.

The recent USA Freedom Act permits the NSA to ask the FISA court for a search warrant for any person — named or unnamed — based on the standard of “governmental need.” One FISA court-issued warrant I saw authorized the surveillance of all 115 million domestic customers of Verizon. The governmental need standard is no standard at all, as the government will always claim that what it wants, it needs.

Question, what actually constitutes government need? Interesting thought don't you think?

Sherlock vs. Org :)

The perfect retort

66% Give or Take

The Anthropocene is alive and well but the primates who live in it, not so much ...

Our fellow primates are in trouble.

In a study of unprecedented scope, a team of 31 primatologists has analyzed every known species of primate to judge how they are faring. The news for man’s closest animal relatives is not good.

Three-quarters of primate species are in decline, the researchers found, and about 60 percent are now threatened with extinction. From gorillas to gibbons, primates are in significantly worse shape now than in recent decades because of the devastation from agriculture, hunting and mining.

“I think we’re going to get quite a number of extinctions within next 50 years if things go on the way they are,” said Anthony B. Rylands, a senior research scientist at Conservation International and a co-author of the new study, which was published in Science Advances.

“It’s a landmark paper,” said Anne D. Yoder, the director of the Duke Lemur Center, who was not involved in the study. “It’s alarming without being alarmist.”

Something to consider without question.

Other Earths

Superbugs "R" Us

This pink variant on slime is not referring to Ghostbusters II but rather is of Klebsiella pneumoniae (a) bacteria ... commonly found in the human gastrointestinal tract, and are often the cause of hospital acquired, or nosocomial infections involving the urinary and pulmonary systems. Photo by CDC that can become a superbug, resistant to all antibiotics, if given a chance, something that happened to a woman who died in Reno after visiting India where she was treated for a broken bone.

Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. 

Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics.

“It was tested against everything that’s available in the United States … and was not effective,” said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of health care quality promotion.

This is where it gets scary. Click - Evolution in Real Time to see BRT's take on superbugs.

Antibiotics are failing us on a catastrophic scale. Once a magic bullet against infectious diseases, they’ve grown increasingly impotent as bacteria have evolved resistance. An estimated 700,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and within a few decades, that toll may rise to several million.

We live in interesting times.

47%

47%, no, not Mitt's Romney's gaffe in 2012 but rather the percentage of people predicted to be out of work 25 years hence, thanks to robotics, AI and nanotech. To whit ...

The Trump campaign ran on bringing jobs back to American shores, although mechanization has been the biggest reason for manufacturing jobs’ disappearance. Similar losses have led to populist movements in several other countries. But instead of a pro-job growth future, economists across the board predict further losses as AI, robotics, and other technologies continue to be ushered in. What is up for debate is how quickly this is likely to occur.

Now, an expert at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania is ringing the alarm bells. According to Art Bilger, venture capitalist and board member at the business school, all the developed nations on earth will see job loss rates of up to 47% within the next 25 years, according to a recent Oxford study. “No government is prepared,” The Economist reports. These include blue and white collar jobs. So far, the loss has been restricted to the blue collar variety, particularly in manufacturing.

It gets better ...

Accountants, doctors, lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, and financial analysts beware: your jobs are not safe. According to The Economist, computers will be able to analyze and compare reams of data to make financial decisions or medical ones. There will be less of a chance of fraud or misdiagnosis, and the process will be more efficient. Not only are these folks in trouble, such a trend is likely to freeze salaries for those who remain employed, while income gaps only increase in size. You can imagine what this will do to politics and social stability.

BRT talk about this transition regarding medical back in 2013 ago in a piece titled Heathcare, Days of Future Past. Not a bad guesstimate I must say.

By Moonlight

By Moonlight, a set of pix taken on two cold but beautiful nights. :)

The Wolf Moon rules. 

Billionaire Univerity

Talk to any successful person in business and they will tell you that developing a strong network is half of the battle. As far as schools go, Harvard is the perfect example of the “network effect” at work.

To date, a total of 35 of the richest 500 people in the world have emerged from the storied halls of Harvard. In fact, more billionaires have graduated from Harvard than all of those hailing from Saudi Arabia and Spain combined.

Interesting factoid for sure.

The Donald writ Large

A very good friend of mine turned me onto this amazing Japanese, over the top commercial depicting how the Donald views himself. Outrageously outrageous.

Of all the apocalyptic visions of a Donald Trump presidency, this bizzaro propaganda, in the style of a Japanese commercial, is hands down the greatest (with regard to what it's making America... again). Today, self-described "MAKER OF VIDEOS/ MUSIC/ MEMES/ DREAMS," Mike Diva dropped this explosion of seapunk, ~new aesthetic~, and over-the-top kawaii devotion to the Donald, and, simply put, we're not sure how long all the other Trump memes, #drumpf included, will last.

Thanks Doug, I needed this. :)

Foldscope

The Foldscope, a $1.00 microscope that's changing science and medical all over the world as we speak is akin to the amazing whirlygig/paperfuge approach for doing blood analysis on the cheap.

Creativity, like money, never sleeps. - Robert E. :)

DeepMind dreams

A pix by yours truly.

A pix by DeepMind

DeepMind's take on wildlife. 

This is where it gets kinda weird. :)

High Beams

Combining LEDs with lasers to illuminate the road is a really good idea as the precision in terms of how light can be intelligently applied is pretty astounding given what Audi has done with headlights and how they can be transformed into something very cool while being safe, something the US Government seems not to understand in any way, shape or fashion.

AUDI FRESH OFF MAKING some bold promises about self-driving cars and setting a US sales record, Audi built on a very good 2017 this week by lighting things up at the Detroit auto show. As in, it showed off a new headlight technology.

Too bad the “Matrix Laser” system, which debuted as part of Audi’s Q8 concept SUV and does everything from highlighting pedestrians to auto-dimming for the sake on oncoming cars, isn’t welcome in the US.

This tech is Audi’s latest push the reinvent the way drivers see the world around them, and its future-heavy name is actually accurate. “Each headlight uses a single laser as the light source, but the beam is broken into a million distinct pixels by the diodes,” says Volker Kaese, Audi’s director of innovation. A small mirror continuously aims the beam to different sections of the matrix to adjust its projection—wide or narrow, high or low, and anywhere in between.

The Utopia of Rules strikes yet again.

Cars sold in the US must obey a rulebook that spans more than a thousand pages and gets very details. One rule: You need separate light sources for high and low beams. (Conventional laser headlights are permitted here, usually supplemented with LEDs for the alternate beam.)

“The United States has very low receptiveness to new lighting technology,” says IHS Markit analyst Christian Müller. “It will permit some things—daytime running lights, directional lighting in turns—but not make them mandatory. And if there isn’t a proven life-safety benefit for a new innovation it’s very hard to change the regulations to even permit things like matrix laser lights.”

Looks pretty cool without question.

Addendum: Mercedes Benz is doing some cool stuff with high beams as well.