Chunks: Self-healing technology; Israel's bitter fight over democracy, separation of power and reasonableness

Alright, listen up peeps. Something is very wrong and creepy here. A few days ago tech sites were gushing about metals that self-heal microfractures. The idea is to try to eventually make metals that do not fail under years of heavy stress. That was cited as relevant to bridges, airplanes, skyscrapers, big trucks, ships, gerbil cages and anything else where tons of metal is put under a lot of recurring heavy stress.

OK, maybe not gerbil cages.

Now today another blast about self-healing technology came out about self-healing of tiny stress damage from high energy proton irradiation. Something very strange is afoot. Techspot writes about a recent paper in the journal Advanced Energy Materials entitled Effect of Hole Transport Materials and Their Dopants on the Stability and Recoverability of Perovskite Solar Cells on Very Thin Substrates after 7 MeV Proton Irradiation: 

Scientists develop self-healing solar panels that can 

reverse the effects of radiation damage

Scientists from the University of Sydney in Australia have developed a solar panel with self-healing capabilities that could drastically extend the life of satellites in orbit. The panel utilizes perovskite, a calcium titanium oxide mineral that has been hailed by some as a "miracle material" due to its unique properties.

Satellites have relied on solar panels for decades to convert sunlight into electricity using photovoltaic cells, but damage from certain types of radiation can cause them to lose up to 10 percent of their efficiency annually.

At that rate, it isn't long before they're rendered useless and turn into space junk.

The scientists discovered that radiation damage can be reversed in perovskite solar cells when heat is applied in a vacuum. Simulated testing here on Earth demonstrated that degraded solar panels can recover 100 percent of their original efficiency when warmed up, and it just so happens that the Sun is a perfect space heater.

The earlier reporting a few days ago about self healing metals included this blast of technology from Science Daily:

'Stunning' discovery: Metals can heal themselves

Microscopic cracks vanish in experiments, revealing possibility of self-healing machines

Researchers announce the first observation of a self-healing metal. If harnessed, the newly discovered phenomenon could someday lead to engines, bridges and airplanes that reverse damage caused by wear and tear, making them safer and longer-lasting.

Scientists for the first time have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process. If the newly discovered phenomenon can be harnessed, it could usher in an engineering revolution -- one in which self-healing engines, bridges and airplanes could reverse damage caused by wear and tear, making them safer and longer-lasting.

The research team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University described their findings today in the journal Nature.

"This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand," said Sandia materials scientist Brad Boyce.

"What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale," Boyce said.

Fatigue damage is one way machines wear out and eventually break. Repeated stress or motion causes microscopic cracks to form. Over time, these cracks grow and spread until -- snap! The whole device breaks, or in the scientific lingo, it fails.

The fissure Boyce and his team saw disappear was one of these tiny but consequential fractures -- measured in nanometers.

In 2013, Michael Demkowicz -- then an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of materials science and engineering, now a full professor at Texas A&M -- began chipping away at conventional materials theory. He published a new theory, based on findings in computer simulations, that under certain conditions metal should be able to weld shut cracks formed by wear and tear.

The discovery that his theory was true came inadvertently at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a Department of Energy user facility jointly operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

"We certainly weren't looking for it," Boyce said.

Khalid Hattar, now an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Chris Barr, who now works for the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, were running the experiment at Sandia when the discovery was made. They only meant to evaluate how cracks formed and spread through a nanoscale piece of platinum using a specialized electron microscope technique they had developed to repeatedly pull on the ends of the metal 200 times per second.

Surprisingly, about 40 minutes into the experiment, the damage reversed course. One end of the crack fused back together as if it was retracing its steps, leaving no trace of the former injury. Over time, the crack regrew along a different direction.

Another, more restrained and professional tech source commented:

We're all gonna die!!!

Scientists observe metal repairing itself for the first time. Could Terminator robots be on the horizon? 

But for those worrying about the rise of real-life Terminator robots — don't: The newly discovered mechanism only works on a few metals and on incredibly small scales — at least, for now.

Alright people, what the heck is going on here? Somebody do something! 

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An Israeli-style variation of what is happening in the US is also going on in attacks on Israel's democracy right now. The reasoning and goals are about the same, authoritarians fight for bigoted dictatorship and democrats oppose both. The countries, languages and cultures are different, but the underlying and rhetorical tactics are quite similar. At this point, the fight in Israel is dark free speech and corrupt, bigoted dictatorship vs secular democracy.

The NYT writes: 

Israeli lawmakers on Monday approved the contentious plan of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrict the influence of the Supreme Court, defying a wide array of opposition movements that have threatened to shut down large parts of the country with protests.

The plan limits the ways in which the Supreme Court can overturn government decisions, part of a deeply divisive judicial overhaul that has led to perhaps Israel’s gravest domestic crisis since its founding 75 years ago. 

The dispute is part of a wider ideological and cultural standoff between Mr. Netanyahu’s government and its supporters, who want to make Israel into a more religious and nationalist state, and their opponents, who hold a more secular and pluralist vision of the country.

The governing coalition says the court has too much leeway to intervene in political decisions and that it undermines Israeli democracy by giving unelected judges too much power over elected lawmakers.

The coalition says the court has too often acted against right-wing interests — for instance by preventing some construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank or striking down certain privileges granted to ultra-Orthodox Jews, like exemption from military service.  

To limit the court’s influence, the government seeks to stop its judges from using the concept of “reasonableness” to countermand decisions by lawmakers and ministers.

Reasonableness is a legal standard used by many judicial systems, including Australia, Britain and Canada. A decision is deemed unreasonable if a court rules that it was made without considering all relevant factors or without giving relevant weight to each factor, or by giving irrelevant factors too much weight.

The government and its backers say that reasonableness is too vague a concept, and one never codified in Israeli law. The court angered the government this year when some of its judges used the tool to bar Aryeh Deri, a veteran ultra-Orthodox politician  [and the leader of an ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party], from serving in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet. They said it was unreasonable to appoint Mr. Deri because he had recently been convicted of tax fraud.

This looks very much like a Jewish version of Christian nationalism in the US forcing radical theocracy down the throats of secular people who oppose it. That is the epitome of anti-democracy and pro-authoritarianism. 

As we all know by now, the concept of reasonableness is an essentially contested concept. Israel's corrupt far right theocrats and secular grifters like Netanyahu think it is reasonable to install a convicted tax fraud criminal as a government minister in Netanyahu's morally rotted authoritarian coalition.  

Maybe I am seeing things, but Israel's corrupt far right authoritarians and Zionist theocrats look a lot like America's corrupt far right authoritarians and Christian theocrats. And from what I can tell, both of those look uncomfortably similar to corrupt far right authoritarians and Hindu theocrats in India. Of course, the corrupt far right authoritarians and Islamic theocrats in some places, e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia put all of those theocrats to shame in terms of their corruption, brutality and anti-secular malice. So on the bright side(?), things could be a lot worse if global radical religionism overwhelms secular democracies.

But in Israel, at least some of the public is fighting back to try to save democracy. The NYT writes about public resistance to the fall of democracy:

The Israeli Medical Association, which represents 97 percent of Israel’s doctors, announced it would strike on Tuesday in much of the country in protest of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to enact the first part of his coalition’s divisive judicial overhaul. Members around the country will handle only emergencies and critical care for the day. The union exempted Jerusalem.

For Moti Havlin, a 31-year-old Jerusalem real estate developer who voted for Prime Minister Netanyahu, the anti-reform camp is “trying to burn down the country.” He accused pilots and other military reservists of conducting “a military coup” after they said they would stop volunteering for duty to protest passage of the judicial overhaul.

Havlin accused the demonstrators of clinging to the Supreme Court as a “time capsule” of liberal secularism. “The struggle is over whether we’ll have popular sovereignty — democracy — or if we’ll keep being ruled by judges and Air Force pilots,” Havlin said.

Jerusalem Monday night

Israel’s Supreme Court will soon face a challenging question: whether to review the first part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, which aims to rein in the power of the court itself.

Opponents of the law have already vowed to petition the court to take on the case. If the justices agree, it could open the door to a serious crisis among the country’s branches of government.

Israeli police said three protesters demonstrating against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul in central Israel were injured after a car drove into a crowd. Police said they had arrested the car’s owner.

Responding to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks about restarting negotiations with the opposition over future judicial changes, Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of the opposition, said it was an empty offer because the hard-line members of the prime minister's coalition have rejected any compromise. “This extremist and messianic government cannot tear our democracy to shreds at noon, and in the evening send Netanyahu to say that he offers negotiations,” Lapid said. “We won’t give up. The struggle has just begun.”

Two New Yorkers are behind a once-obscure, libertarian and conservative think tank in Jerusalem that became a chief architect of the judicial overhaul plan now dividing Israel. Read more about them here.

Before the Israeli Parliament passed the new judicial law, a group of protesters beating drums and chanting “Democracy” evaded police barriers around the Knesset by entering through the rose garden.

A giant screen showed the proceedings in the chamber, and as the vote started on the third and final reading of the bill, which limits the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions made by government ministers, the crowd shouted, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

People fighting to save democracy in Israel

America's authoritarian far right accomplished the judicial reform it wanted by installing six radical authoritarian, pro-theocracy Christian nationalist judges on the US Supreme Court. Israel does not have a  constitution and the authoritarian radical theocrats there have to knock down norms that used to restrain authoritarian extremism, just like the Republican Party authoritarians did to the US. There are powerful forces in Israeli society that support extreme Zionist theocracy and a toxic accompanying racism.