OVERVIEW
The shit just started to hit the fan in America. That there is still moral outrage among educated youth and faculty on American campuses at the open genocide of the Israeli government in Gaza is a cause for hope.
The moral squalor of our government in 2024 is shameful but not a surprise. That some of our lead university administrators jumped at the order to brutalize peaceful protests is cause for anger and shame.
Genocide is not a political debate. There are no two sides to complicity in genocide, no matter how hard you try and how deep you bury your head.
That our choice in this national election is between an Israeli stooge and a mentally ill, depraved criminal risks giving the election to the mentally ill criminal in reaction. There is hope that the Israeli stooge can learn a moral lesson and abandon Israel quickly. Biden at least retains some rationality.
There is no hope for the demented criminal or the frightening scum that supports him.
Closely related to the moral collapse in denouncing Israeli genocide in Gaza is an official media full-court press on climate disaster denial. The scientific data on those accelerating disasters is so bad that ignoring them is inadequate.
People may get the wrong idea and demand that we pull the plug on our entire suicidal capitalist, imperial economy. That would shift the focus to working with the millions of climate refugees beginning to overwhelm our antiquated national borders. Right, I forgot that it is not open for discussion as those people are all criminals.
Even if the sea temperature explosion peaks this year, as scientists hope, it has catapulted us twenty years closer to that future age of climate catastrophe that we thought we could ignore. 2030 rather than 2050 now looks very scary and very close.
GAZA WAR
Mass graves found in two hospitals in the Gaza Strip containing 392 bodies, including those of women, children and the elderly, showed signs of torture and executions, officials in the enclave have said. [Source: Al Jazeera]
The logical solution is to create a Palestinian state just as the Israeli state was created in 1948. Hamas has offered to lay down arms if a Palestinian state is created.
Some Hamas officials are signaling that the militant group could give up armed struggle against Israel if the Palestinians get an independent state in territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
The messaging suggests a softening of Hamas’ position as its fate hangs in the balance with Israel’s pummeling of the Gaza Strip, which Hamas ruled before the war. The Palestinian militant group has long called for the Jewish state to be destroyed.
Basem Naim, an Istanbul-based member of Hamas’ political bureau, told CNN on Thursday that the group would agree to disarm if an independent Palestinian state was established.
“If an independent state with its capital in Jerusalem, while preserving the right of return for refugees, (is created) Al Qassam could be integrated into (a future) national army,” he said, referring to the group’s armed wing. [Source: CNN]
CLIMATE DISASTER
Sea surface temperatures have continued far higher than expected. While some temperature increase was anticipated from the declining El Nino, it was not at the highs being recorded this year.
For more detail, see Richard Crim’s The Crisis Report— 33
The TLDR is that we appear to be moving to 2.0 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures now, and there is no known way to correct this without completely restructuring our planetary socio-economic systems.
H5N1 Avian Influenza
As we know, pandemics are a major cause of climate disasters, hence the great concern about H5N1 avian influenza. Things are not looking good.
The Bird Flu Situation Is Not Looking Great
FDA lab tests detected traces of H5N1 avian influenza in store-bought milk, suggesting it's spread further than currently documented.
Food and Drug Administration officials reported this week that lab tests have found genetic material from strains of H5N1 avian influenza in samples of store-bought pasteurized milk. Officials say these samples do not appear to contain live virus and that the commercial milk supply should still be safe. But the results suggest that the virus has spread further across dairy farms than previously indicated.
SCIENCE - TECHNOLOGY
A Universal Vaccine Against Any Viral Variant?
From Covid boosters to annual flu shots, most of us are left wondering: Why so many, so often?
There’s a reason to update vaccines. Viruses rapidly mutate, which can help them escape the body’s immune system, putting previously vaccinated people at risk of infection. Using AI modeling, scientists have increasingly been able to predict how viruses will evolve. But they mutate fast, and we’re still playing catch up.
An alternative strategy is to break the cycle with a universal vaccine that can train the body to recognize a virus despite mutation. Such a vaccine could eradicate new flu strains, even if the virus has transformed into nearly unrecognizable forms. The strategy could also finally bring a vaccine for the likes of HIV, which has so far notoriously evaded decades of efforts.
This month, a team from UC California Riverside, led by Dr. Shou-Wei Ding, designed a vaccine that unleashed a surprising component of the body’s immune system against invading viruses. [Source: Singularity]
This AI Just Designed a More Precise CRISPR Gene Editor for Human Cells
This week, Profluent, a startup based in California, outlined a strategy that uses AI to dream up a new universe of CRISPR gene editors. Based on large language models—the technology behind the popular ChatGPT—the AI designed several new gene-editing components.
In human cells, the components meshed to reliably edit targeted genes. The efficiency matched classic CRISPR, but with far more precision. The most promising editor, dubbed OpenCRISPR-1, could also precisely swap out single DNA letters—a technology called base editing—with an accuracy that rivals current tools.
“We demonstrate the world’s first successful editing of the human genome using a gene editing system where every component is fully designed by AI,” wrote the authors in a blog post. [Source: Singularity]
Trends in electric cars
Despite what you read in the mass media in America, there is no slowdown in the adoption of EVs. The American media is heavily influenced by the fossil fuel automobile industry and prefers that you not know that the rest of the world is moving on.
Nearly one in five cars sold in 2023 was electric
Electric car sales neared 14 million in 2023, 95% of which were in China, Europe and the United States
Almost 14 million new electric cars1 were registered globally in 2023, bringing their total number on the roads to 40 million, closely tracking the sales forecast from the 2023 edition of the Global EV Outlook (GEVO-2023). Electric car sales in 2023 were 3.5 million higher than in 2022, a 35% year-on-year increase.
A Critical Component of Life Can More Easily Form in Outer Space
The origin of life on Earth is still enigmatic, but we are slowly unraveling the steps involved and the necessary ingredients. Scientists believe life arose in a primordial soup of organic chemicals and biomolecules on the early Earth, eventually leading to actual organisms.
It’s long been suspected that some of these ingredients may have been delivered from space. Now a new study, published in Science Advances, shows that a special group of molecules, known as peptides, can form more easily under the conditions of space than those found on Earth. That means they could have been delivered to the early Earth by meteorites or comets – and that life may be able to form elsewhere, too. [Source: The Conversation]
Maybe life will have better luck somewhere else.
Until next week.