News bits: Legalized discrimination spreads; Next generation telescopes get huge; Etc.

After the recent Supreme Court decision in the 303 Creative case that legalized discrimination by Christians in commerce against non-heterosexuals, cases of discrimination were widely expected to increase. Apparently, the increase is beginning. A post on Threads says this about a hair salon in Michigan: 

If this is true, and it's being reported by several news outlets, savagery like this is just the beginning of a sustained, bigoted, cruel Christian assault on groups of people that God hates. God hates a lot of groups, including some groups of Christians. One can just feel the self-righteous, childish hate rising.

Note the gratuitous, childish insult "💋 my ass Governor

Witchmere 😝"

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Scaling up telescope size: An article in The Conversation:

A new, thin-lensed telescope design could far surpass James Webb 

– goodbye mirrors, hello diffractive lenses

Almost all space telescopes, including Hubble and Webb, collect light using mirrors. Our proposed telescope, the Nautilus Space Observatory, would replace large, heavy mirrors with a novel, thin lens that is much lighter, cheaper and easier to produce than mirrored telescopes. Because of these differences, it would be possible to launch many individual units into orbit and create a powerful network of telescopes.

Existing telescopes can detect exoplanets as small as Earth. However, it takes a lot more sensitivity to begin to learn about the chemical composition of these planets. Even Webb is just barely powerful enough to search certain exoplanets for clues of life – namely gases in the atmosphere.

Conventional lenses use refraction to focus light. Refraction is when light changes direction as it passes from one medium to another – it is the reason light bends when it enters water. In contrast, diffraction is when light bends around corners and obstacles. A cleverly arranged pattern of steps and angles on a glass surface can form a diffractive lens.

Over the following two years, our team invented a new type of diffractive lens that required new manufacturing technologies to etch a complex pattern of tiny grooves onto a piece of clear glass or plastic. The specific pattern and shape of the cuts focuses incoming light to a single point behind the lens. The new design produces a near-perfect quality image, far better than previous diffractive lenses.

Using the new technology, our team thinks it is possible to build a 29.5-foot (8.5-meter) diameter lens that would be only about 0.2 inches (0.5 cm) thick. The lens and support structure of our new telescope could weigh around 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms). This is more than three times lighter than a Webb–style mirror of a similar size and would be bigger than Webb’s 21-foot (6.5-meter) diameter mirror. 

The lenses have other benefits, too. First, they are much easier and quicker to fabricate than mirrors and can be made en masse. Second, lens-based telescopes work well even when not aligned perfectly, making these telescopes easier to assemble and fly in space than mirror-based telescopes, which require extremely precise alignment. 

 

Finally, since a single Nautilus unit would be light and relatively cheap to produce, it would be possible to put dozens of them into orbit. Our current design is in fact not a single telescope, but a constellation of 35 individual telescope units. 

Each individual telescope would be an independent, highly sensitive observatory able to collect more light than Webb. But the real power of Nautilus would come from turning all the individual telescopes toward a single target.

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Justice in Italy: The BBC reports:

Italian uproar over judge's 10-second groping rule

Does it count as sexual harassment if an assault lasts less than 10 seconds?

Many young people in Italy are expressing outrage on social media, after a judge cleared a school caretaker of groping a teenager, because it did not last long enough.

The case involves a 17-year-old student at a Rome high school.

She described walking up a staircase to class with a friend, when she felt her trousers fall down, a hand touching her buttocks and grabbing her underwear.

"Love, you know I was joking," the man told her when she turned around.  

A Rome public prosecutor asked for a three-and-a-half year prison sentence but this week the caretaker was acquitted of sexual assault charges. According to the judge, what happened "does not constitute a crime" because it lasted less than 10 seconds.

That judge has more MAGA!! in him than any Trump judge! Go Italy!! Grab 'em by the pu$$y or whatever, but only for less than 10 seconds!

The gropee the groper groped

is not happy about having it grabbed

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Climate change bits: A NYT opinion piece cites a couple of facts worth consideration:

Forget About Hiding From Climate Chaos in America

LINCOLN, Vt. — The capital of Vermont — the state that often tops those “best states to move to avoid climate change” lists — was, until Tuesday afternoon, mostly underwater.

The receding water sloshing in our streets was ferried by storm tracks from fast-warming seas 1,000 miles south. The storm dumped four to nine inches of rain on towns up and down the Green Mountain State, where the ground was already saturated.

Left: Hey! I wanted to park there! (see parking meters)

Right: Kayaking fun in nature

For each degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere holds 7 percent more water vapor, driving the extreme precipitation events in New England that have increased by 55 percent since 1958, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

There is pulling ticks — which recently expanded their empire into my high, cold piece of Vermont, courtesy of warming winters — off my daughters almost weekly.

Our infrastructure wasn’t built for these extremes, for this pace of change. Neither were our prevailing risk models. Just two weeks ago, researchers from the First Street Foundation warned in a new study that the database that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to estimate the risk of extreme rainfall events is being outpaced by climate change and is in urgent need of updating. Americans can now expect to experience “once in a hundred year” rain events at 20-year intervals, on average. And the trend won’t stop there: That interval will keep shrinking, thanks to unchecked fossil fuel burning.

To be fair and balanced, or not, the global warming and climate science denier's response: You global warming people are just plain deplorable. See, I told you booboisie boobs that global warming blither was all just alarmism and malarkey. Just look at the great things going on here. The ticks are finding new habitats. Kayakers have new places in nature to kayak. Water vapor from the Caribbean falls out of the sky in Vermont. The guy living in the woods has a cozier winter. And even better than all of that, now everyone gets to experience fun weather events every 20 years instead of very 100 years. I believe and support Rick Scott's reasonable, carefully considered Republican plan to deal with the weather, not climate change:

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.*

Weather changes, no nutty policies, no hysteria. Calm down. Calmly protect profits. Jobs, jobs, jobs and more jobs, but calmly. MAGA!!, but calmly.

* Those three sentences constitute 100% of Scott's detailed plan to deal with global warming. That's deep, sophisticated thinking for sure. 

He's from Florida, so 

no surprise there

News bits: Anti-climate change paint invented!; Climate changing the ocean; Etc.

The NYT reports about a new white paint that is highly reflective of sunlight:

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, didn’t set out to make it into the Guinness World Records when he began trying to make a new type of paint. He had a loftier goal: to cool down buildings without torching the Earth.

In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

In 2021, Guinness declared it the whitest paint ever, and it’s since collected several awards. While the paint was originally envisioned for rooftops, manufacturers of clothes, shoes, cars, trucks and even spacecraft have come clamoring. Last year, Dr. Ruan and his team announced that they’d come up with a more lightweight version that could reflect heat from vehicles.

“We weren’t really trying to develop the world’s whitest paint,” Dr. Ruan said in an interview. “We wanted to help with climate change, and now it’s more of a crisis, and getting worse. We wanted to see if it was possible to help save energy while cooling down the Earth.”

This is really good news. Really good. The reflective, opaque white material is hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) nano particles, mostly tiny flat platelets. 

hBN platelet chemical structure

It is a low-toxicity, biocompatible compound used in drug delivery and tissue scaffolding to help regenerate damaged living tissue. Even better, the solvent for the reflective hBN is dimethylformamide or DMF. It appears to be a non-carcinogen and a fairly low toxicity solvent and apparently it does not bioaccumulate in the environment.

The original paint was thick (left) and required a layer 0.4 millimeters thick to achieve sub-ambient radiant cooling. The new formulation can achieve similar cooling with a layer just 0.15 millimeters thick, which is thin and light enough for its radiant cooling effects to be applied to vehicles like cars, trains and airplanes.

Image of the flat platelets of hBN

from 2022 research paper

This stuff is ~98% reflective!

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The NYT reports about ocean waters around Florida: 

How Hot Is the Sea Off Florida Right Now? 

Think 90s Fahrenheit

Researchers are recording ocean temperatures that pose severe risks to coral reefs and other marine life

Florida’s coral reefs are facing what could be an unprecedented threat from a marine heat wave that is warming the Gulf of Mexico, pushing water temperatures into the 90s Fahrenheit.

The biggest concern for coral isn’t just the current sea surface temperatures in the Florida Keys, even though they are the hottest on record. The daily average surface temperature off the Keys on Monday was just over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or 32.4 Celsius, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The real worry, scientists say, is that it’s only July. Corals typically experience the most heat stress in August and September.

This much worse than the bit about the white paint. 🥺

Qs: What should one say to a person who denies or downplays the reality of global warming, climate change and attendant environmental damage, e.g., species extinctions, and human damage, e.g., deaths from heat exposure? Just call them names, like idiot, jackass, stupid, flat out wrong and/or deluded? Or, try to respectfully reason with them by pointing out facts and hoping you don't get dismissed as a tyrannical socialist, alarmist liar? Or, try to see if there's any aspect of global warming that they think might be of some concern and work with that?

Should the onus of being respectful, reasonable and fact-grounded be on the reality believer, the reality denier, both or neither?

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The NYT reports about America's demagogic, authoritarian radical right's intention to ramp up culture wars beyond the ridiculous point they are already at:

Hard Right Presses Culture War Fights on 

Defense Bill, Imperiling Passage

Right-wing Republicans want to use the annual military budget and policy legislation, traditionally a bipartisan affair, as a tool to pick fights on abortion and other social issues

Hard-right House Republicans are pushing to use the yearly bill that sets the United States military budget and policy as an opportunity to pick fights with the Biden administration over abortion, race and transgender issues, imperiling its passage and the decades-old bipartisan consensus in Congress around backing the Pentagon.

Republican leaders have scheduled votes beginning on Wednesday on the $886 billion measure, but as of Tuesday evening, they had yet to dissuade their ultraconservative colleagues from efforts to load it up with politically charged provisions to combat what the G.O.P. calls “wokeness” in the military.

The GOP wants an anti-woke military. Great. The radicalized Republican Party has gone from ridiculous speed stupid politics to plaid ludicrous speed idiotic politics:

Plaid ludicrous speed idiocy = 

the idiotic but viciously authoritarian Republican Party

Sex or social media? The sacrifices we’re willing to make to stay online

 Catchy thread title that, but now that I have your attention.............

Your alarm clock goes off, it’s time to start your day. What’s the first thing you do? What about right before you go to bed? If your answer is scrolling social media, you’re not alone. People are spending increasing amounts of time on social media, with reports from 2023 suggesting an average worldwide usage of two and a half hours a day. (f*ck, seriously?)

With 4.8 billion social media users worldwide as of 2023, social media has become a mainstay in everyday life, particularly among younger generations. Some adolescents even describe feeling a sense of stress and poor emotional well-being when not online. So much so that terms like FOMO (fear of missing out) and Nomophobia (No Mobile Phone Phobia) have been popularized to explain the feelings and thoughts some people experience when disconnected from their smartphone or their social media.

As researchers who study societal relationships with these technologies, we began to wonder the lengths young adults might go to maintain their connection to social media. To answer this question, we conducted a study of 750 Canadians, aged 16-30 years old, who regularly use social media. We asked them about their social media usage patterns, their relationship with social media and the sacrifices they would be willing to make to remain on social media.

Our findings showed that smartphones were the most used method for accessing social media and approximately 95 per cent of participants had access to at least two social media accounts, with Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube among the most popular.

NOW FOR THE SCARY PARTS:

What trade-offs are young adults willing to make?

Respondents were asked to consider what they would be willing to sacrifice to maintain their social media presence. Trade-offs fell into the following categories: food/drink, hobbies, possessions, career, appearance, relationships, health and life.

When asked to make more serious trade-offs relating to their relationships, health, or life, fewer were willing to make the sacrifice. For example, fewer than five per cent of participants said they would be willing to contract a sexually transmitted infection, or be diagnosed with a life-threatening illness like cancer rather than give up social media.

However, nearly 10 out of every 100 participants did say they would accept being unable to have children, give up sex or give up one year of their life to maintain their social media connections. When asked to give up more years of life, almost five out of every 100 and three out of every 100 participants said they would give up five or 10 years of their life, respectively.

(Give up sex for social media? WTF?)

https://theconversation.com/sex-or-social-media-the-sacrifices-were-willing-to-make-to-stay-online-208270

While interesting, the above article doesn't suggest solutions? Legislation? Thought police? Public education? What are YOUR thoughts?

News bits: Biden corruption witness surfaces; The power of capitalism over the public interest; Etc.

House Republicans have been foaming at the mouth for months to get Joe Biden impeached and him and Hunter jailed. The Independent reports about the identity of a witness against both Bidens. House Republicans claimed the witness got "lost" somewhere: 

A “whistleblower” who has repeatedly accused the Bidens of corruption has been charged by the Justice Department with arms trafficking, acting as a foreign agent for China and violating Iran sanctions.

Gal Luft, who is a citizen of both the United States and Israel, is accused of paying a former adviser to Donald Trump on behalf of principals in China in 2016 without registering as a foreign agent.

Prosecutors say that Mr Luft pushed the former government employee, who is not named, to push policies that were favorable to China.

They also allege that he set up meetings between officials of Iran and a Chinese energy company to discuss oil deals, which would violate US sanctions.    

[T]the now-indicted think tank founder claims that there is no basis for the charges and has accused the Biden Administration of targeting him because he is one of the alleged whistleblowers who Republicans have held up as having evidence that President Joe Biden and his family are corrupt.

In a bizarre video first reported by the New York Post, Mr Luft claims his arrest in Cyprus was meant to stop him from appearing before the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee about alleged payments the Biden family allegedly received from Chinese intelligence-linked individuals.

Mr Luft, 57, was arrested in Cyprus in February on US charges but fled after being released on bail while awaiting extradition and is not currently in US custody.  

The fugitive also claimed that he offered evidence backing up his claims to the FBI in March 2019, and said it was never followed up on. .... Mr Luft also said he jumped bail and fled after his arrest because he did not believe he could receive a fair trial in New York.

Well, now we know why Luft got lost. He doesn't want to get tossed into the slammer for spying for China. One can see how this will play out with America's radical right authoritarians. They and Luft will accuse the DoJ of being weaponized. Luft will play the innocent, persecuted martyr card and the Republicans will play it up. That kind of crap is the new normal.

American politics: A never-ending clown show.

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: The NYT writes about parked choo-choo trains blocking public roads:  

Blocked Rail Crossings Snarl Towns, 

but Congress Won’t Act

The industry has used its muscle to prevent federal, state and local governments from penalizing companies that park freight trains across roads for hours or days

Freight trains frequently stop and block the roads of York, Ala., sometimes cutting off two neighborhoods for hours. Emergency services and health care workers can’t get in, and those trapped inside can’t get out.

“People’s livelihoods are in jeopardy because they can’t get to work on time,” said Amanda Brassfield, who has lived in one of the neighborhoods, Grant City, for 32 years and raised two daughters there. “It’s not fair.”

Residents have voiced these complaints for years to Norfolk Southern, which owns the tracks, and to regulators and members of Congress. But the problem has only gotten worse.

Freight trains frequently block roads nationwide, a phenomenon that local officials say has grown steadily worse in the last decade as railroads run longer trains and leave them parked on tracks at crossings.  

The problem has persisted despite numerous federal, state and local proposals and laws because the freight rail industry wields enormous political and legal power.  

Courts have thrown out several state laws seeking to punish rail companies for blocking traffic, ruling that only the federal government can regulate railway crossings. No federal laws or rules penalize railways for blocking crossings, and congressional proposals to address the issue have failed to overcome opposition from the rail industry.  

In a response to questions, the Association of American Railroads attributed blocked crossings to local governments, which, it said, had routed roads across railway tracks rather than over or under them, an approach that other industrialized countries had taken.

It's hard to have much sympathy for people who vote for Republican politicians. This is the face of the radical right Republican Party's brass knuckles capitalist wing. So here's a possible solution: Stop voting for Republicans or stop complaining because you got what you asked for.

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AI solving problems in biology and medicine: The NYT writes about an AI program designed to predict protein folding:

In 2020, Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold, an A.I. system that uses deep learning to solve one of the most important challenges in all of biology: the so-called protein-folding problem. The ability to predict the shape of proteins is essential for addressing numerous scientific challenges, from vaccine and drug development to curing genetic diseases. But in the 50-plus years since the protein-folding problem had been discovered, scientists had made frustratingly little progress.

Enter AlphaFold. By 2022, the system had identified 200 million protein shapes, nearly all the proteins known to humans. DeepMind is also currently building similar systems to accelerate efforts at nuclear fusion and has spun off Isomorphic Labs, a company developing A.I. tools for drug discovery.

I knew a guy who got a Nobel prize for doing early pioneering protein folding work, Chris Anfinsen. He was a super nice guy, not an egomaniac. He worked with folding and unfolding a protein called RNase A (ribonuclease A). That enzyme is a tough little bugger. It causes all kinds of heartburn for people who worked with RNA, including me once upon a time.

This is why intact RNA is so hard to  

prepare and work with in the lab