Overview
America’s low-speed, long-term political trainwreck now includes geriatric mockery. I don’t recall a presidential election between two octogenarians in US history. In the past, such people had the decency to die before something like this could happen.
Future histories, such as may exist, will see this election as only a footnote in the impending collapse of the modern world and its iconic American Empire.
The chasm between current politics and economics and the implementation of technology continues. This is a desperate search for a future that will survive the impending disasters.
In the larger view, the decline in American scientific originality has already been mostly replaced by Asian development, which has evolved from American universities that can no longer find suitable American students.
However, the American military-industrial complex’s requirement for constant war is focused on China and Russia and is driving away the top foreign students in American science graduate programs.
There are several relevant links on this below.
WARS - GAZA
'Genocide denial': US Congress passes amendment denying Gaza death toll
The majority of members of the US Congress, including more than 60 Democrats, have voted in favour of an amendment that would bar the State Department from using the Gaza health ministry's count for the death toll in Gaza.
The vote pushes forward a piece of legislation that, if it passes, could further silence the discussion within the US government about the devastating impact that Israel's war on Gaza has had on the enclave's Palestinian population. . . .
. . . .
It has been the sole source of regularly updated information on the death toll, as Israeli forces have decimated the enclave's health infrastructure and repeatedly laid siege to several hospitals.
So far, the death toll stands at nearly 38,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children.
However, with thousands of Palestinians likely under the rubble and the ministry facing a lack of resources, health experts believe the death toll is likely to be far higher.
While the legislation would force the State Department not to use the death toll, the Biden administration had already cast doubt on it early on in the war.
"[There is] no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people were killed," Biden said in a press conference in late October.
Those comments sparked outrage not just among Palestinians but also among rights groups and NGOs working on the ground in Gaza.
That same week of Biden's denial of the death toll, reports surfaced that officials within the Biden administration had cited the Gaza health ministry's death count in 20 different situation reports, with one official saying at the time that the toll was likely an undercount, not an overestimate.
The Palestinian Health Ministry’s statistics are admittedly only partial, given the ongoing destruction in Gaza. But, as the UN and other NGOs state, the Health Ministries’ statistics are the best available:
Julian Assange Is Finally Free, But Let’s Not Forget the War Crimes He Exposed
After a 14-year struggle, including five years spent in Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is finally free. Under the terms of a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain documents, writings and notes connected with the national defense under the Espionage Act. Assange was facing 175 years in prison for 18 charges in the indictment filed by the Trump administration and pursued by the Biden administration.
The Justice Department agreed to the plea bargain a little over a month after the High Court of England and Wales ruled that Assange would be allowed to appeal an extradition order. The High Court found the U.S. government didn’t provide satisfactory assurances that Assange could rely on a First Amendment defense if extradited and tried in the U.S. The Justice Department, now fearful it would lose the case, scrambled to strike a deal with Assange.
. . . .
Assange was prosecuted because WikiLeaks exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who had a “TOP SECRET” U.S. security clearance, furnished WikiLeaks with 700,000 documents and reports, many of which were classified “SECRET.”
These documents included the “Iraq War Logs,” 400,000 field reports documenting 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces transferred detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad.
They also contained the “Afghan War Diary,” comprising 90,000 reports that documented more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And they included the “Guantánamo Files” — 779 secret reports containing evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantánamo Bay for years. The reports explain how the nearly 800 men and boys there had been tortured and abused, which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
American complicity in the Gaza genocide will add to this history of atrocities.
As the war in Ukraine has brought home to many people, drones are the new tool of power. But most of the drones in the world today are made in China, by companies with close ties to the People’s Liberation Army and the Communist Party. That’s got U.S. leaders and the military worried.
CLIMATE DISASTER
“Arctic wildfires tear through Russia’s Far North releasing megatonnes of carbon.
“Hot, dry weather has created conditions conducive for fires to ignite in the Arctic. Intense wildfires above the Arctic Circle this June have released megatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, according to EU scientists.”
“Is the future of Italy tropical? Why Sicilian farmers are trading olives for papayas…
“Facing rising temperatures and increasingly unpredictable rainfall, some Sicilian farmers are trading their traditional crops for exotic fruits like mangoes, avocados, bananas, and papayas, heralding a new era in Italian agriculture.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/italy-sicily-agriculture-tropical-
“RECORD HEAT ALL OVER ASIA – SAUDI ARABIA MIN 35.0 [95F] Makkah Hottest June night on record, just a few days after its hottest day.
“44.0 Najran 1200m all time high tied; 46.0 Sharurah monthly record.”
SCIENCE / TECHNOLOGY
AI plus gene editing promises to shift biotech into high gear
During her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture in 2018, Frances Arnold said, “Today we can for all practical purposes read, write, and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.”
That isn’t true anymore.
Since then, science and technology have progressed so much that artificial intelligence has learned to compose DNA, and with genetically modified bacteria, scientists are on their way to designing and making bespoke proteins.
The goal is that with AI’s design talents and gene editing’s engineering abilities, scientists can modify bacteria to act as mini-factories producing new proteins that can reduce greenhouse gases, digest plastics, or act as species-specific pesticides.
As a chemistry professor and computational chemist who studies molecular science and environmental chemistry, I believe that advances in AI and gene editing make this a realistic possibility.
First ever rocks from the Moon’s far side have landed on Earth
The first rocks from the far side of the Moon have just landed safely on Earth and scientists can’t wait to study them.
China’s Chang’e-6 re-entry capsule, containing up to two kilograms of materials scooped and drilled from the Moon’s most ancient basin, touched down in the grasslands of Siziwang Banner in the Chinese northern autonomous region Inner Mongolia at 2.07 p.m. Beijing time on Tuesday, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
“The samples are going to be different from all previous rocks collected by the US, Soviet Union and China,” which came from the Moon’s near side, says Yang Wei, a geochemist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. “We have very high expectations for them,” Yang says.
Chang’e-6 launched on 3 May and arrived at the Moon five days later, where it stayed in lunar orbit to prepare for landing. On 2 June, it touched down at a preselected site inside the South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin, which is covered in dark-coloured cooled lava rocks known as basalt, and conducted intense sampling using a drill and a robotic arm for two days. The precious cargo then lifted off from the Moon, docked with the re-entry capsule in lunar orbit and headed towards Earth.
At about 1:20 p.m. Beijing time on Tuesday, the landing procedure kicked off. The capsule skipped off the atmosphere to reduce its speed, before diving down at 11.2 kilometres a second. A parachute was deployed to assist with the decent. A recovery team located the capsule shortly after it landed. Once they have processed the capsule on site, it will be transported to Beijing, where it will be opened and the samples removed for scientific analysis and storage, says CNSA.
Watch a 6-axis motor solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than a third of a second
The last time a human set the world record for solving a Rubik's Cube, it was Max Park, at 3.13 seconds for a standard 3×3×3 cube, set in June 2023. It is going to be very difficult for any human to pull off a John Henry-like usurping of the new machine record, which is more than 10 times faster, at 0.305 seconds. That's within the accepted time frame for human eye blinking, which averages out to one-third of a second.
TOKUFASTbot, built by Mitsubishi Electric, can actually pull off a solve in as little as 0.204 seconds on video, but not when Guinness World Records judges were measuring. The previous mechanical record was 0.38 seconds.
Until Next Week