Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award.Critics, including several Republicans in Congress, argued this work qualified as risky “gain-of-function” (GOF) research that makes potential pandemic viruses more dangerous and should have undergone a special review. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its director at the time, Anthony Fauci, responded that the work did not fit NIH’s risky GOF definition; the bat viruses weren’t known to infect people and WIV had no intention of making them more dangerous. NIH also pointed out that the WIV chimeras were only distantly related to SARS-CoV-2.NIH told EcoHealth in August 2022 that because WIV had not responded to requests to turn over lab notebooks and electronic records, it had terminated the subaward to WIV. But the agency also said EcoHealth could renegotiate the grant without WIV. As discussions continued, in January a federal audit found that EcoHealth had misreported nearly $90,000 in expenses, and that NIH had also erred by not justifying the grant’s April 2020 termination.
Refusal to turn over lab books constitutes science fraud on a massive scale, far worse than fabricating data in a research paper or two. In my opinion, Biden and the NIH are arrogant, incompetent, ignorant and out of control. That combination of bad could get tens of millions of Americans killed. The Chinese government will control everything that happens in China, including what real or fabricated data get turned over to the NIH. If Biden or the NIH think they are in control, they are gullible, shockingly stupid or both.
Searching for killer viruses in bats and bat
guano in China!
Not to worry, what could possibly go wrong?
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Could this be for real?: A couple day ago, reports surfaced that South Korean researchers announced they had made and tested a new metallic material (LK-99) that was a superconductor at room temperature and pressure. I ignored it. The announcement was met with a solid wall of skepticism from experts.
Nonetheless, labs rushed to try to confirm or disconfirm the asserted results. Tom's hardware writes that two separate labs are claiming they have preliminary evidence to support (but not yet confirm) the original finding:
Maybe this will turn out to be a true breakthrough of gigantic proportions. I still doubt it, but now that some preliminary supporting evidence is dribbling out, it's worth mentioning. Even if this is confirmed, it will take time (~2 years?) to figure out how to efficiently make LK-99 before it can have a major impact. That assumes it can ever be made efficiently, which is currently unknown. The current method is extremely inefficient.Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing
A tentative but less nebulous step toward superconductor-fueled electronics
Humanity may be in the throes of another breakthrough that's every bit as impactful as the invention of the transistor and the advent (and eventual vindication) of quantum computing. LK-99, as it's been named, is a new compound that researchers believe will enable the fabrication of room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors. Initially published by a Korean team last Friday, frantic work is underway throughout the research world to validate the paper's claims. For now, two separate sources have already provided preliminary confirmations that this might actually be the real thing — Chinese researchers have even posted video proof. Strap in; this is a maglev-powered, superconducting ride.Superconductors, a wild category of compounds that can conduct electricity without any losses, have been a metaphorical goose chase for years now, with multiple research teams claiming (and then retracting) papers and announcements of its achievement. The reason is simple: Few things come close to the potential of an actual superconductor discovery in terms of what it can do for humanity's current and future technology. Imagine if your 16-core mainstream CPU (which likely requires a competent watercooling solution to avoid incinerating itself) operated without power losses — no current leakage, no electricity waste in the form of heat. Superconductors mean almost perfectly efficient computing.Researcher Sinéad Griffin from the U.S.'s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab pored over the original paper, taking advantage of the supercomputing capabilities within the Department of Energy to simulate the LK-99 material. This complex-yet-simple concoction results from combining the minerals lanarkite (Pb₂SO₅) and copper phosphide (Cu₃P), which are then baked within a 4-day, multi-step, small batch, solid-state synthesis process.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics. [Note: this is computer simulated data, not making and testing the material like the Chinese group claims to have done]As a result of the simulations, the researcher published an analysis letter in pre-print form to Arxiv, where she confirmed that the resulting material should manifest the superconduction pathways for electrons to travel through unimpeded and without any resistance. Interestingly, she noticed that these superconducting pathways only form in very specific areas of the compound, namely the highest-energy areas of the resulting crystal lattice.
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Could this be for real?: Boffins at MIT have published a shocker of a paper describing a low cost supercapacitor that could utterly revolutionize energy storage. Right now, existing battery technology is puny compared to needs for greatly boosting the usefulness of intermittent power from wind and solar. Supercapacitors are akin to batteries but work in a different way. The new capacitor is made out of cement, water and disordered microporous carbon black. I can't find an online price for disordered microporous carbon black per ton or kilogram. The Register writes:
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black – a crystalline form of the element.
The materials can be cleverly combined to create supercapacitors, which could in turn be used to build power-storing foundations of houses, roadways that could wirelessly charge vehicles, and serve as the foundation of wind turbines and other renewable energy systems – all while holding a surprising amount of energy, the team claims.
According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 45 cubic meters of the carbon-black-doped cement could have enough capacity to store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy – roughly the amount an average household uses in a day. A block of cement that size would measure about 3.5 meters per side and, depending on the size of the house, the block could theoretically store all the energy an off-grid home using renewables would need."You have the most-used man-made material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material – the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it," said MIT Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Admir Masic.
"You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that's when things get really interesting," Masic added.The capacity of a capacitor or supercapacitor is largely determined by the surface area of its plates, and the MIT researchers explained that the material they've explored has an exceptionally high internal surface area thanks to the way the carbon black and water interact.
"The hydration reactions of cement in the presence of carbon generate a fractal-like electron-conducting carbon network that permeates the load-bearing cement-based matrix," the authors note. In essence, a block of this carbon-rich cement has highly-conductive carbon black wires running through it which drastically increase the surface area, and thus storage capacity.
Masic said that as the mixture cures, water is absorbed into the cement. Carbon black, which is highly hydrophobic, can't be dispersed in the same way, thus "the carbon black is self-assembling into a connected conductive wire."
In their paper, the researchers assert that this technology is immediately available, versatile, low cost and scalable to huge structures like concrete highways, bridges, buildings. Structures with high energy storage capacity, high-rate energy charge/discharge capabilities and structural strength can be built right now. This applies to residential and industrial applications including self-sufficient energy buildings and self-charging roads for electric vehicles, to intermittent energy storage for wind turbines and tidal power stations.
So, if a house is built on a concrete slab that is made as a giant capacitor, it could be used to store excess daytime power from solar panels on the roof and then power the house during the night. Or, a concrete highway could be made as a gigantic miles-long capacitor that stores extra wind or solar power and then uses that power to recharge electric cars or trucks, presumably by radio waves or maybe long-range induction, as they drive down the highway.
Strange as this is, this one feels like it's for real, right now.
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