Mosquito Coffee ... :)

An amazing portrait of the deadliest animal on planet earth, the mosquito, carriers of some of the deadliest diseases known to man & beast, has kept the secret of their success for finding prey for eons, until now. 

Geneticists have found a scent-sniffer protein molecule in mosquito antennae that — if somehow jammed — might leave a bloodsucker confused about whether we’re human enough to bite.

Insects evolved odor detection separately from vertebrates, and the six-legged version is “very complex,” DeGennaro says. Mosquitoes rely on three families of odor-sniffing proteins that have overlapping abilities to identify groups of airborne chemical compounds. Proteins called ionotropic receptors, which include IR8a, target acids among other compounds. As a mosquito hunts, the floating chemical cues get combined with other information such as atmospheric heat, moisture and the sight of something biteable. DeGennaro calls carbon dioxide “mosquito coffee,” revving the insects up to get to work seeking a meal. 

As an aside, yours truly, unlike his beloved wife, exudes a succulent scent, able to draw in expectant mother mosquitoes in ways that truly boggle the mind. :)

20 years ago ...

20 years ago, yours truly saw The Matrix with his son. Film has never been the same since.

Next, three men in sunglasses show up and scold the police for going in before they got there. “I think we can handle one little girl,” the officer says. “I sent in two units, they’re bringing her down now.” “No, Lieutenant,” the agent says. “Your men are already dead.” Interesting, but whatever. We then see the woman, whom we’ll later learn is named Trinity, as she’s about to be cuffed. Quickly she hits the cop with a few martial arts moves, jumps in the air, the shot freezes and the camera pans 180 degrees around her as she remains frozen in the air.

The Matrix Digital Rain ... Where does the code come from?

"The Wachowskis didn't feel like the design was old-fashioned and traditional enough. They wanted something that was more Japanese, more manga," Whiteley says. "They asked me if I'd like to have a go working at the code, mainly because my wife is Japanese and she could help me work out the characters and give me insight into which characters were good and which weren't."

So Whiteley went home and began browsing through the "stacks of Japanese cookbooks" owned by his wife, looking for inspiration. One recipe book in particular caught his eye and the recipes therein served as the basis for what would eventually become the film's iconic falling code.

One cannot make this up. Akin to tech Easter Eggs without a doubt. :)

Cool without question.

In a blink of an eye

In a blink of an eye, the dinos and significant others bought the farm back in the day.

The massive Chicxulub impact – the most cataclysmic event known to have befallen life on Earth – is widely held responsible for the end of the dinosaurs. This single event toppled the prehistoric lizards from the top of the food chain and allowed mammals to inherit the Earth.

Of course, not only dinosaurs were hit by this awesome event, a plethora of animals were wiped out. The fossil find by the KU palaeontologists shows a snapshot of this vibrant ecosystem.

“A tangled mass of freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, trees, branches, logs, marine ammonites and other marine creatures was all packed into this layer by the inland-directed surge,” said DePalma.

“Timing of the incoming ejecta spherules matched the calculated arrival times of seismic waves from the impact, suggesting that the impact could very well have triggered the surge.”

This wasn’t a tsunami that arrived after the impact – but a seismic surge that pushed the waters into chaos.

“A tsunami would have taken at least 17 or more hours to reach the site from the crater, but seismic waves - and a subsequent surge - would have reached it in tens of minutes,” said DePalma.

Where & when the astroid struck earth.

The Chicxulub impact event was an ~100 million megaton blast that devastated the Gulf of Mexico region. 

The blast generated a core of superheated plasma in excess of 10,000 degrees.  Although that thermal pulse would have been relatively short-lived, a handful of minutes, it would have been lethal for nearby life. 

The Chicxulub Impact event produced a shock wave and air blast that radiated across the seas, over coastlines, and deep into the continental interior.  Winds far in excess of 1000 kilometers per hour were possible near the impact site, although they decreased with distance from the impact site.  The pressure pulse and winds would have scoured soils and shredded vegetation and any animals living in nearby ecosystems.  An initial estimate of the area damaged by an air blast was a radius 1500 kilometers.  There are several factors that can affect this estimate, so the uncertainty might be better reflected in a range of radii from ~900 to ~1800 km.  The travel times are quite short, so this effect would have occurred in advance of any falling debris ejected from the Chicxulub crater.  

Intense without question.

Epic Moves :)

Epic ninja moves, worthy of Bruce Lee at his best, is the method of defense employed by Kangaroo Rats vs Diamondback Rattlers.

The wily predator rears back and lunges at its prey — a lightning-fast attack that for a number of other living creatures would probably mean certain death. But in less than a second, the snake is on the ground with nothing but dust in its jaws and the kangaroo rat is bounding away to freedom.

The rat’s harrowing escape, however, isn’t just luck, according to a pair of papers published this week by a team of researchers from San Diego State University, University of California at Riverside and University of California at Davis. The desert-dwelling critters commonly found in western North America have a rather impressive arsenal of evasive maneuvers, including, much to the shock of scientists, the ability to deliver punishing midair “ninja-style” kicks in a fraction of a second, according to a Wednesday news release.

Epic moves indeed. :)

What's Real, What's Not ...

Finding out what's real news is hard enough, finding out real news generated by humans, even tougher until now if GLTR proves to be a viable solution to a problem becoming ever more serious as we speak.

To whit:

As a first example, we investigate a now famous generated text, the unicorn sample from an unreleased GPT-2 model developed by OpenAI. The first sentence is the prompt given to the model, and the rest of the text is entirely generated. The text looks very realistic and it is very hard to detect from reading it whether it was written by an algorithm or a human.

We can see that there is not a single purple word and only a few red words throughout the text. Most words are green or yellow, which is a strong indicator that this is a generated text.

See what I mean?

If nothing else ...

If nothing else, this video rocks.

SpaceX recently updated the Falcon 9 page of its website with a new video showcasing some of the rocket's recent launches and landings. On the video's YouTube page, there's an option for 4K video, and it is spectacular.

Block 5 rocket launch marks the end of the beginning for SpaceX
Some highlights of the video include close-ups of the Falcon 9 engines re-lighting to prepare for landing and deployment of the landing legs themselves.

We've seen a lot of these views before, but we've never seen them with this amount of clarity. Anyway, stop wasting your time reading this article and just watch the video.

Any questions?

The First Circle

This clip is not about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The First Circle but rather the first circle(s) seen by man, first the Sun, then the Moon and lastly by rain drops falling into water. Enjoy.

FUBAR inc.

A week ago, BRT stated that the actions of the MIC is bankrupting the country with endless wars and untold waste at unimaginable scale. Factor in ineptness and the inability to manage money at any  reasonable level whatsoever describes the defense department black hole where, beyond its event horizon, nobody ever sees just how much of a FUBAR the Pentagon truly is.

Simulation of gravitational lensing by a black hole,
which distorts the image of a galaxy in the background.

Now retired, Andy sometimes visits his neighborhood library, which uses RFID smart labels, or radio frequency identification, allowing it to know where all its books are at all times.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

It gets better.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

Sounds like healthcare doesn't it?

Energy's gotta go somewhere, right? :)

Yours truly has always felt that the conjectured singularity in the center of a black hole was not possible given that energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed thanks to the 1st law of thermodynamics. With this in mind, scientists are starting to change their view of this notion to the possibility black holes are, in fact, worm holes, supporting the concept that everything is entangled, thus giving rise to reality, something truly astounding without question.

Loop quantum gravity is a difficult mathematical theory that has resisted the making of testable predictions inside black holes. However, Abhay Ashtekar and Javier Olmedo at Pennsylvania State University and Parampreet Singh at Louisiana State University have applied loop quantum gravity to the center of black holes. They claim that the result is not a singularity.

Their calculation predicts that space-time is curved very strongly near the center of the black hole. The result is that space-time continues into a region in the future that has the structure of a white hole. A white hole is like a black hole in reverse, meaning that unlike a black hole, which pulls matter in, a white hole shoots matter out.

Energy's gotta go somewhere, right? :)

It takes a little sweat ... :)

Something revolutionary is rare, something commonsensical and revolutionary at the same time is even rarer, especially when it comes to monitoring bodily processes noninvasingly, a notion whose time as come as seen by tech developed by the University of Cincinnati.

Making a revolutionary biosensor takes blood, sweat and tears.

And saliva, naturally.

University of Cincinnati professor Jason Heikenfeld examined the potential of these and other biofluids to test human health with tiny, portable sensors for the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Heikenfeld develops wearable technology in his Novel Device Lab in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. His lab last year created the world's first continuous-testing device that samples sweat as effectively as blood but in a noninvasive way and over many hours.

With luck, the era of painful finger pricks to draw blood will become a thing of the past. :)

Gharials - Extremely cool crocs. :)

Gharials are extremely cool crocs without a doubt, something that most people don’t even know it exists.

The gharial, also known as the gavial, is an extremely rare fish-eating crocodile. It’s estimated there are less than 200 individuals in the wild. Native to the Indian subcontinent, this unique crocodilian faced a massively population decline. Currently, the species is limited to only 2% of their historical range.

Cool without question, right? :)

Slip Sliding Away ...

Yours truly loves America, a country loaded with amazing talent, resources and the ability to do great things is now in crisis because endless war is killing our great nation, something that has to be corrected or all is lost as seen by Ike's last great speech depicting the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, a danger that is destroying our nation as we speak.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist." Dwight Eisenhower

Summing it up ...

According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).

So much for draining the swamp.

Anyone who suggests that the military needs more money is either criminally clueless or equally corrupt, because the military isn’t suffering from lack of funding—it’s suffering from lack of proper oversight.

Where President Trump fits into that scenario, you decide.

Trump may turn out to be, as policy analyst Stan Collender warned, “the biggest deficit- and debt-increasing president of all time.”

Rest assured, however, that if Trump gets his way—to the tune of a $4.7 trillion budget that digs the nation deeper in debt to foreign creditors, adds $750 billion for the military budget, and doubles the debt growth that Trump once promised to erase—the war profiteers (and foreign banks who “own” our debt) will be raking in a fortune while America goes belly up.

This is basic math, and the numbers just don’t add up.

It's time to take back our country before it's too late

War Games ...

Seems Russia and China have caught up to America regarding war even though we spend way more on defense than they do.

To whit ...

In war games simulating a high-end fight against Russia or China, the U.S. often loses, two experienced military war-gamers have revealed.

"In our games, when we fight Russia and China, 'blue' gets its ass handed to it," David Ochmanek, a RAND warfare analyst, explained at the Center for a New American Security on Thursday, Breaking Defense first reported. U.S. forces are typically color-coded blue in these simulations.

"We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary," he said.

Some specifics as to why this scenario rings true.

The simulated war games showed, the "red" aggressor force often destroys U.S. F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters on the runway, sends several Naval fleets to the depths, destroys US military bases, and through electronic warfare, takes control of critical military communication systems. In short, a gruesome, if simulated, annihilation of some of the most modern of US forces.

“In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with years of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

So, as Russia and China develop fifth-generation fighters and hypersonic missiles, “things that rely on sophisticated base infrastructures like runways and fuel tanks are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time.”

So when neocons like Bill Kristol, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton bloviate on how "easy" it would be to wax Russia and China in a fire fight, just channel Nam where the VC did a number on the US without having any high end tech like that of the US back in the day. Makes one think real hard about this don't you think?

Playing the long game ...

Yours truly has been fascinated by the rapid rise of China as nascent superpower thanks, in large part, to the largesse of the US in encouraging its corporations to offshore manufacturing to China back in the 1980s, something that has, and is, compromising the US in ways that truly boggle the mind. If that's not enough food for thought, a very good and wise Hong Kong friend of mine, who knows far more about this subject than this rube, generously sent BRT his take on what is happening to America when inept politicians encounter an adversary who plays the long game in the pursuit of global dominance as we move further into the 21st century.

To whit.

China’s industrial development plan named “Made in China 2025” aims to make China largely self-sufficient by 2025 in certain technologies Chinese leaders expect will drive the “4th industrial revolution”. The plan’s longer term goal is global dominance in these technologies by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. 

Already, China has claimed sovereignty over, and militarized the South China Sea in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and in defiance of a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague which has determined that China’s territorial claim is illegal. The tepid response to China’s blatant power grab by the United States and the western international community is an ominous harbinger of what’s to come with China’s ascendancy on the world stage.

Equally alarming is the increasingly strident tones of China’s calls for the reunification of Taiwan, again met with no substantive response by America or the western powers. The lack of a firm stance by America prompts the question: Will the United States live up to the security assurances accorded to Taiwan in the event of a military attack by China?

Across the globe, from Latin America to Africa and Asia, China’s strategy of building and financing infrastructure projects with the objective of gaining influence and control continues unabated under its Belt and Road Initiative.

These and other moves by China lend credence to the theory that it is pursuing a highly focused, methodical and relentless strategy to achieve global supremacy and displace America by its target date of 2049. 

The center piece of the game plan is to undermine and sabotage American interests and influence in Asia. To achieve this objective China is manipulating the puppet regime of North Korea and deploying its leader, Kim Jong Un, as a foil against President Donald Trump.

For its part, the current administration is playing right into China’s hands by retreating from the world, leaving behind a vacuum of leadership which the Chinese are only too happy to fill.

Any questions?

What if ...

Yours truly has often thought about this but Aeon fleshed out this idea big time. :)

Our ingrained understanding of the daily movements of the Sun, Moon and stars from the vantage point of Earth can make it eerily transporting to see unfamiliar celestial objects floating above the landscape in sci-fi films and TV shows. This imaginative short video is perhaps more surreal still, combining mundane, roadside scenes with the peculiar spectacle of planets from our solar system replacing the Moon in the dusk sky. The physics of it all is, of course, a bit creative, but the planets are shown at the same distance from Earth as the Moon. The result, in addition to the intriguing, almost ominous visuals, is a striking sense of the scale of our nearest planetary neighbors – many of which more usually appear as mere pinpricks or bright dots in our familiar night sky.

Stellar to a fault IMHO. :)

Late winter 2019

A Zen Space

Sherwood yet again

Dividing line

Prelude to snow

Composite II

The Great Wave ...

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏 Kanagawa-oki nami ura, "Under a wave off Kanagawa") "かながわ-おき なみ うら", also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. It was published sometime between 1829 and 1833[1] in the late Edo period as the first print in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is Hokusai's most famous work, and one of the most recognizable works of Japanese art in the world.

The image depicts an enormous wave threatening three boats off the coast of the town of Kanagawa (the present-day city of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture) while Mount Fuji rises in the background. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is more likely to be a large rogue wave.[2] As in many of the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.

When looking at this amazing work, one sees that the wave is a fractal in motion, where self similarity rules akin to how the center of a sunflower is created using a fibonacci fractal as the means to make it happen or the branching of trees where 7 or 8 subdivisions rule depending on the species of tree encoutered. 

The Fibonacci Sequence appears in many plants, and can be seen in the distribution of the seeds in the sunflower above.

The Fibonacci numbers are easily defined by an iterative process. We set F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1 and let F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2) for n = 2, 3, 4, … . Thus, the first few numbers of the sequence are

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and 233.

Each entry is the sum of the preceding two. As the values increase, the fractions formed by successive Fibonacci numbers – like 8/5, 13/8 and 21/13 – tend to a definite limit, about 1.618 or, more precisely,

φ = (1+√5)/2.  

I.E - The Golden Ratio/Golden Mean

With this being said, researchers now know that the great wave is a rogue, something suspected but not proven to be true until now.

A team of researchers based at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh have recreated for the first time the famous Draupner freak wave measured in the North Sea in 1995.

The Draupner wave was one of the first confirmed observations of a freak wave in the ocean; it was observed on the 1st of January 1995 in the North Sea by measurements made on the Draupner Oil Platform. Freak waves are unexpectedly large in comparison to surrounding waves. They are difficult to predict, often appearing suddenly without warning, and are commonly attributed as probable causes for maritime catastrophes such as the sinking of large ships.

The team of researchers set out to reproduce the Draupner wave under laboratory conditions to understand how this freak wave was formed in the ocean. They successfully achieved this reconstruction by creating the wave using two smaller wave groups and varying the crossing angle – the angle at which the two groups travel.

Ain't science grand? :)

Getting Hyper ... :)

Getting hyper is very cool if you are NASA testing out ultra high speed aircraft as seen by the pix above. Awesome to a fault.

Had to do another. :)

NASA captured the photos using a Beechcraft B200 Super King Air, a twin-turboprop aircraft with a top speed of about 350 miles per hour (570 kilometers per hour). The speed of sound is, of course, considerably faster at roughly 767 miles per hour (1,234 kilometers per hour). The subject of the photos is a pair of T-38 jets with a higher top speed. The B200 didn’t need to keep up, though. It just had to be in the right place at the right time as the jets flew in formation, passing about 600 meters from the observer aircraft.

NASA upgraded the camera aboard the B200 to capture wide frames and improved the connection to data storage so it could snap 1,400 frames per second. The final images are a result of a technique called schlieren imagery, which is used to visualize pressure fields. They also happen to look neat.

How these pix were done.

Schlieren photography (from German; singular "Schliere", meaning "streak") is a visual process that is used to photograph the flow of fluids of varying density. Invented by the German physicist August Toepler in 1864 to study supersonic motion, it is widely used in aeronautical engineering to photograph the flow of air around objects.

Very cool indeed.

Revolutionary indeed ...

A very close friend of mine, who happens to be really smart, unfortunately, turned me onto this amazing article that promises to change how medical & tech deal with amputation. Kudos to D who turned me onto this stellar NYTimes piece A Swimmer Saved by What She Lost. :)

Five years earlier, (Morgan) Stickney had dreams of becoming an Olympian. At 15, she ranked in the top 20 nationally in the mile, a freestyle event, and was a rising star out of Bedford, N.H.

But by the time she was wheeled into surgery last May, her Olympic dream had long since vanished. A relatively minor foot injury in 2013 had dragged her down a rabbit hole of five surgeries, numerous examinations and untold theories, none of which relieved — or even explained — the constant, excruciating pain that left her unable to walk by day and then, cruelly, stabbed her awake at night.

It gets better, really ...

Forced out of the pool by unrelenting pain, Stickney elected to have her leg amputated below the knee in a new medical procedure developed primarily by Matthew Carty, a specialist in limb restoration at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital in Boston.

The amputation procedure that Carty performs is designed to enhance the vitality and the possibilities for the portion of the limb that remains. Those possibilities include the potential of one day connecting the lower leg muscles to a futuristic robotic prosthesis currently in development across the Charles River at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The developers of the prosthetic hope it will operate much like a natural ankle and foot.

The operation is not yet perfect — Stickney will require at least one more surgical procedure — but it could forever change how amputations are performed. But in Stickney’s case, it has been transformative: Within weeks of her amputation last spring, Stickney, now 21, was back in the pool, swimming before she could even walk. By December, she had won the 400- and 100-meter freestyle races at the U.S. Paralympics national championships in Arizona. And while her experience has not been seamless, Stickney’s national team dreams, once abandoned, are flickering back into view.

Tech & medicine, when done right, never disappoints.

Stickney's physician, Matthew Carty. The amputation procedure that Carty performs is designed to enhance the vitality and the possibilities for the portion of the limb that remains.

Stellar without question.

Emergence ... for real

Artificial life now lives in a quantum computer with many of the same characteristics of the original as seen by It's Alive!, a blurb from Digital Trends.

The work was achieved by researchers from the University of the Basque Country in Spain. With the aid of an IBM QX4 quantum computer, they created tiny simulated life forms capable of carrying out many of the behaviors seen in real-world life forms — including reproduction, mutation, evolution, and death. They hope that doing so will help researchers to better understand the origins of life and whether it can be explained through quantum mechanics. This is something that has been hypothesized for decades, dating back to Erwin Schrödinger’s influential 1944 book What is Life?

Both James D. Watson,[2] and Francis Crick, who jointly proposed the double helix structure of DNA based on X-ray diffraction experiments by Rosalind Franklin, credited Schrödinger's book with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and each independently acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for their initial researches.[3]

Conway's game of life writ large without question.

The Rules

For a space that is 'populated':

• Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by solitude.
• Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.

For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'

• Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

Any questions?