WEATHER WARS
China successfully modified the weather to create clear skies, researchers say

Joshua Hawkins

© Provided by BGR weather modification

Researchers at a Beijing university say China’s weather authorities successfully used weather modification to ensure clear skies during a major celebration this year.

The Chinese Communist party celebrated its centenary on July 1 with a major celebration. The celebration took place in Tiananmen Square and included tens of thousands of attendees. According to a research paper from Tsinghua University, the Chinese weather authorities used weather modification to ensure the sky was clear and lower air pollution.

Chinese government used weather modification to lower air pollution

© Provided by BGR

What if you could summon rain to a location or clear out dark rain clouds by using technology and science? Weather modification isn’t a new idea. In fact, the Chinese government has reportedly been working on modifying the weather since 2008. That’s when it hosted the Olympic Games. Based on a new paper from Tsinghua University researchers, it has now managed to create artificial rain and bring down air pollution.

The paper was published on November 26, in a Chinese peer-reviewed journal called Environment Science (via South China Morning Post). The research shows that the Chinese government used cloud-seeding techniques to force rainfall the evening before the celebration event. This rainfall lowered the amount of PM2.5 pollution by more than two-thirds. That helped improve the air quality at the time from “moderate” to “good”, the South China Morning Post reports.

According to the paper, the event included tens of thousands of people packed into the square. Weather modification attempts began the evening before, and when the event began at 8 a.m. it included overcast conditions. Following the ceremony, a massive downpour settled over the square.
Using cloud seeding to force rainfall

Cloud seeding is a weather-modification technique that has been around for years. There are several different methods that can be used, including the use of salts, electric charges, and even infrared laser pulses. The researchers at Tsinghua University believe that the Chinese government used cloud seeding to try to lower the levels of pollution in the air.

In the months leading up to the event, air pollution in the Beijing area had increased. While many of the factories around the area had production halted, the air circulation in the region was slower than normal. This meant that a large amount of the pollution created by people and the factories began to stagnate around the region.

By forcing rainfall in the hours before the event, the Chinese government was able to lower the levels of pollution. Unfortunately, the Chinese government has not shared any details about what type of cloud seeding it used. Nor has it shared any future plans for weather modification at this time.

The post China successfully modified the weather to create clear skies, researchers say appeared first on BGR.

WOO HOO YAHOOS

GOP senate candidates allege Facebook's Zuckerberg spent millions to 'buy the presidency' for Biden — but there's not much backing up the claim

Jon Ward
·Chief National Correspondent
Wed, December 8, 2021

Blake Masters, Mark Zuckerberg and J.D. Vance. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network via Flickr, George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Jeff Dean/AP)

Two high-profile Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate, both of them close to tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, are supporting an effort to merge former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election with accusations of meddling against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In Arizona, Senate candidate Blake Masters said voters should “elect people who will tell you the truth.”

But Masters has made a falsehood part of his candidacy. “I think Trump won in 2020,” he said in a recent video.

Masters and J.D. Vance, a Republican running for Senate in Ohio, are seeking together to repackage Trump’s deception in a new narrative. Both are backed by $10 million from Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and data mining company Palantir Technologies.

Masters co-wrote a book with Thiel and is COO of Thiel’s investment firm. Vance worked for Thiel after publishing “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestselling 2016 memoir, and raised money from Thiel to start a venture capital firm.

Masters at a “Rally to Protect Our Elections” in Phoenix on July 24. (Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network via Flickr)

Masters and Vance have jettisoned the wild and debunked allegations of outright fraud and moved on to a new conspiracy theory: that Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions to “buy the presidency for Joe Biden.”

It’s an allegation that has shown some purchase among the GOP’s pro-Trump grassroots. The Republican Party, which has historically been amenable to the interests of big business, is still in the throes of the former president’s trademark populism. And Trump still insists that the 2020 election was illegitimate, leading even his more sober-minded supporters to try and justify that thoroughly debunked idea.

Since the election, Trump and his allies have accused Big Tech — major Silicon Valley firms like Google, Twitter and Facebook — of intervening on Biden’s behalf. Conservatives have already alleged for years that these companies were actively trying to muzzle the right, and incidents like Twitter’s temporary blocking of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop have served as a rallying cry for these complaints.

But there is little discussion on the right of how disinformation and lies — terms that are sometimes abused — are artificially amplified in ways that divide friends, neighbors and families, bringing fame and fortune to those willing to play the demagogue.

Yet were it not for an early investment from Thiel, the Facebook we know today might not even exist. In 2004 he became the company’s first outside investor, giving Zuckerberg’s nascent behemoth a much-needed dose of capital and credibility. Even as he propels the candidacies of Masters and Vance — who are both seeking to blame Facebook’s CEO for buying the election — Thiel still sits on Facebook’s board of directors.

Thiel’s support of Masters and Vance has created an unusual dynamic where two first-time candidates, campaigning for federal office at opposite ends of the country, appear to be something like running mates.

Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. (John Lamparski/Getty Images)

“Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is going all-in to support two of his proteges’ campaigns for the US Senate — and his plan involves swanky California dinners with high-dollar donors,” read a New York Post story last month. “Rise of a megadonor: Thiel makes a play for the Senate,” blared a Politico headline in May.

Masters and Vance, for their part, don’t seem to mind being grouped together. In October, they outlined their allegations against Zuckerberg — and against Big Tech more broadly — in a New York Post article they authored together.

“Facebook — both the product and the wealth generated for its executives — was leveraged to elect a Democratic president,” Masters and Vance wrote. “At a minimum, the company’s leaders should be forced to answer for this before a congressional committee."

The pair essentially argued that Biden beat Trump in 2020 because Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $400 million of their personal fortune to help localities run elections during the pandemic, and that money helped too many Democrats vote.

The complaint is not that votes were stolen or added illegally. It’s that there were too many legal votes cast in places that lean Democratic and that Zuckerberg and Chan’s money was in fact funneled to places where it would turn out more Democratic voters and help Biden.

Zuckerberg and Chan, who donated much of the money to a group called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), deny the allegation. Ben Labolt, a spokesman for the couple, told Yahoo News that “nearly 2,500 election jurisdictions from 49 states applied for and received funds, including urban, suburban, rural, and exurban counties … and more Republican than Democratic jurisdictions applied for and received the funds.”

Election workers at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia process mail-in and absentee ballots on Nov. 3, 2020. (Matt Slocum/AP)

Unquestionably, examining the impact of so much money from a pair of individuals in any sphere related to the election is a legitimate endeavor. But so far, the conclusions about the impact of the Zuckerberg and Chan money go far beyond what any evidence shows, and are being dropped into an information environment already deeply poisoned by Trump’s relentless campaign of lies and baseless claims.

Neither the Masters nor the Vance campaign responded to a request for comment.

The anti-Zuckerberg message has been building for months on the right. Last year, the Capitol Research Center (CRC), a conservative nonprofit, began publishing a series of articles claiming that the money from Zuckerberg and Chan helped Biden win the election.

CTCL is a Chicago-based nonprofit founded in 2012 to advocate for election reform. Complaints about the Zuckerberg-Chan donations stem in part from the fact that top leaders at CTCL have worked for Democratic candidates or causes in the past, and that they have posted comments on social media indicating a dislike of Trump.

CRC, the conservative group, wrote that the money from CTCL “did not apparently violate any election laws” but that “many of its grants targeted key Democratic-leaning counties and cities in battleground states.”

“While CTCL sent grants to many counties that Republican incumbent Donald Trump won in these states, the largest grants went to Biden counties such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the greater Atlanta metropolitan area,” CRC wrote.

In other words, the donation spent more money on highly populated urban areas that are essential to Democratic fortunes in swing states, but that also require far greater sums of money to conduct elections.

However, if the argument is that Philadelphia helped Biden win Pennsylvania, a close look at vote totals doesn’t support that argument.

Trump did better in Philadelphia in 2020 than he did in 2016, winning 18 percent of the vote last year compared with just 15 percent in 2016. In a state decided by only 80,000 votes, the vote totals in Philadelphia made it closer for Trump, rather than for Biden.

Then-President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Erie International Airport in Pennsylvania on Oct. 20, 2020. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Biden won the state primarily because of his ability to do better than Hillary Clinton had four years prior in the suburban counties around Philadelphia.

Nonetheless, by this past summer, roughly a dozen Republican state legislatures had introduced or passed laws banning or restricting the ability of private money to flow into election administration. But CTCL has said that in many states there is a “systemic underfunding of elections” — a notion supported by nonpartisan election experts.

Meanwhile, it has become fashionable among Republicans to announce a ban on “Zuck Bucks” or “Zuckerbucks,” as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did in October.

Zuckerberg and Chan donated the money in September and October 2020 after election administrators from around the country and from both parties said the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic was going to require a special infusion of money to pay for everything that was needed.

The federal government allocated about $400 million through emergency funding in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a stimulus package signed into law by Trump in March 2020. But election administrators and outside experts said much more was needed.

Republicans in Congress blocked attempts to spend more money for election administration, and a few months later Zuckerberg and Chan donated their own personal funds. One investigation by American Public Media into the donations said the money was spent on “increased pay for poll workers, expanded early voting sites and extra equipment to more quickly process millions of mailed ballots.”

The Masters and Vance op-ed in the New York Post relies largely on accusations made by another researcher, a former economics professor at the University of Dallas named William Doyle. Doyle has alleged that Zuckerberg paid for a “takeover of government election operations” and that the tech CEO “bought” the 2020 election and “significantly increased Joe Biden’s vote margin in key swing states.”

Vance at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, in July. (Jeff Dean/AP)

Doyle is planning to publish more articles on the subject, and in late December or January he intends to issue his first actual report, J.P. Arlinghaus, a spokesman for Doyle, told Yahoo News. Arlinghaus and Doyle are part of the Caesar Rodney Institute for American Election Research, a nonprofit organization set up "specifically to study the 2020 election,” Arlinghaus said.

The one item Doyle has published so far claims that the 2020 election “wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought.” According to Arlinghaus, the semantic distinction distances his argument from those made by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, lawyer Sidney Powell or MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who have all made wild claims about supposed efforts to rig the vote total for Biden.

“Unlike some advocates whose claims seem made to attempt an overturning of the 2020 result but which have not yet had solidly sourced evidence, we are pursuing activities and spending that are publicly uncontested and known through public records,” Arlinghaus told Yahoo News.

Arlinghaus also said, “We aren’t making assertions we wish were true, but rather we are interested only in meticulous study of the evidence wherever it leads.”

Doyle’s op-ed complains that more of Zuckerberg and Chan’s money went to large cities than to rural areas, where Republicans tend to be much stronger.

But that’s not de facto evidence of partisan intent. Highly populated localities need more resources to run an election where there are far more voters.

A more substantive complaint is that in metro areas of swing states, more Democratic-leaning portions of those regions got Zuckerberg funding while more moderate metro areas, with higher numbers of Republican voters, did not. Doyle alleges this happened in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where of the four major counties, the two that Biden won — Dallas and Tarrant counties — got Zuckerberg grants through CTCL, and the two that Trump won — Denton and Collin counties — did not.

But CTCL has said it gave grants to any counties that requested them. And in addition, the two big Dallas-Fort Worth counties that Trump won — and that did not get Zuckerberg funding — nonetheless saw a bigger increase in voter turnout than the two counties that did get the money from Zuckerberg and Chan.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg at the Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in 2019 in Mountain View, Calif. (Peter Barreras/Invision/AP)

Trump carried the state of Texas with nearly 5.9 million votes, a substantial increase over the 4.7 million votes he won there in 2016.

The right-wing narrative is that without groups like CTCL, and others like the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which awarded about $65 million in grants — most of that from Zuckerberg and Chan — Democrats would have had less of a turnout boost while Republicans voted in higher numbers without any help.

“It is part of the overall election denial and the attempts to weaken American democracy by making just completely false claims about the election,” David Becker, CEIR’s executive director, said.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said that “even in the most challenging of environments, 2020 was Ohio’s most successful election ever” and that Zuckerberg and Chan’s money — allocated through CEIR grants — was “vital to achieving that mission.” Trump won Ohio by some 500,000 votes in 2020, an improvement on his 2016 showing.

Doyle also argued that the people at CTCL overseeing the disbursement of hundreds of millions of dollars to local election offices were “nominally non-partisan — but demonstrably ideological.” There is an entire page at the Caesar Rodney Institute website showcasing social media posts from three CTCL members that indicate their political views lean left.

Doyle’s website declares, “The 2020 General Election is not over and done with.”

The notion that Big Tech is in cahoots with the Democratic Party is widespread on the right. And it’s promoted by authors like the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, whose book “Rigged” provides much of the material for others in the right-wing media ecosphere.

In that book, Hemingway claims the Zuckerberg and Chan money had a partisan impact, but she also talks about mainstream media bias and decisions by social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to deplatform Trump and other Republicans. And she points to efforts to suppress the circulation of stories critical of Democrats, most notably the one involving Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But Hemingway, a former Trump critic turned stalwart defender, contends that what appeared to be nonpartisan efforts to help people vote during a pandemic were really a plot to defeat Trump.

The problem with this argument is that higher-turnout elections have not been shown to help either party, even as many partisans on both sides continue to insist that higher turnout helps Democrats.

In addition, apart from Trump, the GOP did exceptionally well in the 2020 election, which saw huge turnout among both Republicans and Democrats.

That dynamic continued in last month’s election in Virginia — where Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor with the most votes of any statewide official in the history of the commonwealth.

Pentagon UFO Rapid Response Teams Ordered Up by Congress



Travis Tritten
Tue, December 7, 2021, 

Teams of Pentagon and intelligence community experts would rapidly respond to military UFO sightings and conduct field investigations under newly unveiled defense legislation set to pass Congress.

Lawmakers also want scientific and technical experts to analyze data about the objects, or what the military calls unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, as well as any recovered materials or medical effects, according to the text of the annual defense authorization bill released Tuesday.

The bill requires all of the findings to be collected under a new joint UAP office and delivered to Congress in annual reports and biannual briefings to defense committees, marking the most significant UFO legislation ever passed in the U.S. following high-profile encounters with unknown objects reported by the Navy.


Read Next: The National Guard Is Stuck in the Middle of Political Infighting, and It's Getting Worse

"Protecting our national security interests means knowing who and what are flying in U.S. airspace," Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement to Military.com. "Right now, our system of tracking and identifying UAPs is scattered throughout the Department of Defense and other departments and agencies of the federal government."

The expansive measures come just two weeks after the Pentagon announced a new group aimed at collecting and analyzing UAP incidents, sending a clear message that Congress felt the department's response was inadequate.

The Navy confirmed the authenticity of three infra-red videos showing unknown objects recorded during training exercises off San Diego in 2004 and off the East Coast in 2015. Over the past four years, fighter jet pilots and crew members have publicly said they witnessed unexplainable maneuvering, including a "Tic Tac"-shaped object with no visible means of propulsion and a flying cube inside of a sphere.

Theories on UAP range from drones or unmanned aircraft built by China or Russia to extraterrestrial or interdimensional visitors.

The new legislation to collect and analyze data on such incidents was sponsored in separate bills by Gallego and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and was cosponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

In addition to the rapid response field investigators, Congress also wants the Pentagon and intelligence community to create a science plan to understand UAP that exceed the "known state of the art in science or technology."

The bill says the information could be used to justify requests for funding in the future to "replicate any such advanced characteristics and performance" -- or reverse-engineer the UAPs.

Incidents around nuclear facilities are also noted for special attention.

Congress has never before passed legislation on UFOs, and certainly nothing near the scope of the defense bill language, said Douglas Dean Johnson, a researcher who closely follows UAP-related developments in government, and who has reported extensively on the Gallego and Gillibrand proposals.

"I have looked, and I think you will not find anything. You will find cases where Congress engaged in discourse on the issue," Johnson said.

Famous UFO initiatives in the 1940s through the 1950s such as Project Blue Book, under the Air Force, and the Condon report, sparked during a congressional committee hearing, were done without any legislation.

Decades later, the military is set to embark on a new study of flying objects, but the defense bill makes clear it won't be on the Pentagon's own terms -- and that much of the findings will be shared with Congress.

In June, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks ordered the Pentagon to create its UAP group on the same day the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a long-awaited report about the military's encounters. That report found 80 incidents of unknown objects captured by multiple sensors and 18 sightings of objects that showed unusual flight characteristics.

The ODNI report concluded that UAP could pose a national security threat. "Additional rigorous analysis [sic] are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data," the report said.

The Pentagon said its new monitoring and analysis group, called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG, would be a more organized way to collect and analyze the reports.

"We'll be as transparent as we can, but no, I don't want to leave you with the impression that there'll be sort of a regular drumbeat of, you know, of some kind of report that gets posted on a website, you know, every couple months," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said when asked whether any UAP findings would be publicly released.

The group is run by Ronald Moultrie, the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security, and overseen by an executive council headed by Moultrie and Lt. Gen. James J. Mingus, director for operations for the Joint Staff.

-- Travis Tritten can be reached at travis.tritten@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Tritten.

Related: Air Force Veterans Who Are UFO True Believers Return to Newly Attentive Washington

 China's moon rover spots a mysterious cube-shaped object, and the internet is intrigued

Jordan Mendoza

Tue, December 7, 2021,

For the past two years, China's Yutu 2 rover has been roaming across the Von Karman crater on the far side of the moon. And on its journey, it spotted a mysterious cube-shaped object.

According to Space.com, the China National Space Administration keeps a log of each of the rover's lunar days, which is around 29 Earth days, according to NASA. On its 36th lunar day, the rover spotted a cube-shaped object on the horizon about 260 feet away. Andrew Jones, a Space.com reporter tracking China's space endeavors, said officials called it a "mystery house." Here is what the object looks like:

Photos of the object have gone viral on Twitter,

 and some users have come up with some interesting, 

and funny, theories on what it might be. 

On the other hand, some people were wondering

 if this cube-shaped object could mean something dangerous:

Though there is no actual answer for what the cube is,

 it probably isn't something that is going to destroy Earth. 

Jones said the most likely explanation is it's actually a large boulder 

that appeared after an impact event. 

But China officials are intrigued by the object, and Yutu 2 

will be traversing through the region and avoiding craters

 to get closer to it. It will take the rover two to three lunar days, 

or up to three months, to approach the object. Still, some are

 hoping for complete chaos.

Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:

 China's rover spots mysterious cube on moon

Electric Sky wins DARPA grant to work on focused power beaming system for drones


Alan Boyle
Tue, December 7, 2021,

Electric Sky will explore adapting its wireless charging architecture to power a swarm of drones. (U.S. Army CCDC Army Research Laboratory Illustration)

A startup called Electric Sky says it’s begun building its first Whisper Beam transmitter for providing tightly focused wireless power to drones in flight, thanks to a $225,000 award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Electric Sky will use the six-month Phase I award, granted through DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, to explore ways to adapt its wireless architecture to power a swarm of drones.

The first phase of the project calls for building and testing a lab-bench demonstration system that would operate at short distances. Those experiments are expected to supply data that can be used to upgrade the system for higher power and longer distances.

Electric Sky has offices in the Seattle area as well as in Midland, Texas. Its CEO is Robert Millman, who previously served as general counsel for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. Former XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason is the company’s co-founder, chief technologist and the inventor of the Whisper Beam system.

The company’s mission is to pioneer novel electric power and propulsion technologies for aircraft and flight vehicles of all sizes.

Electric Sky isn’t the only venture focusing on wireless power for drones. Seattle-based PowerLight Technologies, for instance, is working on a laser-based system that could power up unpiloted aerial vehicles as well as 5G base stations. But Electric Sky’s proprietary technology takes a different approach.

Laser and microwave beams typically start out strong but get weaker as they travel outward. In contrast, Whisper Beam’s transmissions start out weak but get stronger near the receiver.

“Whisper Beam technology is the electromagnetic equivalent of a whispering gallery,” Millman said in a news release. “In a whispering gallery a single listener across the room can hear the speaker but no one else can, not even people standing directly between the speaker and listener. The sound is too weak for them to hear.”

The radio waves sent out by Electric Sky’s transmitter self-focus at the receiver, enabling the drone to draw kilowatts of power in any kind of weather.

“It’s a myth that long-distance power transmission is impossible,” Greason said. “It’s just never been economical. This new method reduces the cost of the ground transmitter and the size of the vehicle’s onboard receiver.”

Greason said the beaming system could be used with any type of electric aircraft.

“Whisper Beam technology is particularly helpful in the power-hungry phases of takeoff and climb, enabling vehicle designers to meet other requirements to extend range, enhance flight safety, reduce peak loads on batteries, and shorten ground turnaround times,” he said.

More from GeekWire:

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WiBotic joins Astrobotic’s team to build wireless charging system for moon rovers

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Ursa Major raises $85M to disrupt the vertically integrated launch sector



Aria Alamalhodaei
Tue, December 7, 2021

The launch sector is getting crowded. Many of the biggest players are building their own rocket engines, but space startup Ursa Major is betting that many new launch providers would rather outsource the engine than build it in-house.

Six years after being founded by former SpaceX and Blue Origin propulsion engineer Joe Laurienti, the company is ready to scale up its ambitions, and it just closed its largest funding round to date to do so: an $85 million Series C led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, as well as participation from XN, Alsop Louie, Alpha Edison, Dolby Family Ventures, KCK, Space Capital, Explorer 1, Harpoon Ventures and others.

“A lot of what we're trying to bring to market is that next step,” Laurienti explained. “We want to evolve this industry into much faster life cycles.”

To get there, Ursa Major wants to rapidly manufacture engines -- as many as one per week in 2022, with two per week to follow. (Currently, it takes a single employee around five days to assemble an engine and up to a few weeks to get it ready to ship to customers.) The company has scored a handful of commercial customers, including Phantom Space and Stratolaunch, and R&D contracts with the government, though its engines have yet to see space.

“It made sense even six years ago that there was going to be a pretty complex ecosystem to launch because space was going to need so much accessibility,” Laurienti said. While the cost to launch has declined, the demand for space launch services is only expected to increase through the rest of the decade. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the global market size for launch will grow from $12.67 billion in 2019 to up to $26.16 billion by 2027.

But rocket engines are one of the most challenging pieces of equipment to develop; one only has to look to Blue Origin’s bumpy efforts to develop BE-4 engines for United Launch Alliance -- or Elon Musk’s letter to employees about a “Raptor production crisis” -- to see that engine development is no easy task.

The company has two products: the Hadley, a 5,000-pound thrust liquid oxygen and kerosene engine which is entering production now; and the Ripley, the next-gen engine that’s 10 times more powerful than Hadley with a 50,000-pound thrust. The company is booked to deliver more than 50 Hadley engines next year, with the Ripley coming into production in the next couple of years, Laurienti said.

He likened Ursa Major to a company like Intel, which is constantly innovating more powerful processors and outsourcing that expertise to brands like Dell and Lenovo. “We really like the notion that we are a technology development company, and the companies that are flying rockets today should not be flying the same engine that they architected for their rocket 10 years ago. That's the paradigm we see in vertical integration.”

The company has a facility in Colorado where it makes the engines, which are largely 3D-printed, and that’s collocated with the company’s three test stands where each engine is tested before it sees a customer. Ursa Major is planning on using the new capital to scale up its manufacturing operations and to begin development on additional engines.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Why sand mafias are forming and what science has to say about it

Mike Szydlowski

Columbia Daily Tribune
Wed, December 8, 2021

Great Sand Dunes National Park is in Colorado.

Who doesn’t love a movie where the good guys take out some big organized crime or mafia ring?

Most often we associate organized crime with illegal drugs, weapons or money laundering. However, have you ever seen a movie that has a sand mafia in it?

To be clear, have you ever seen a movie where there is an organized crime ring full of corruption, theft and murders while the bad guys smuggle bags of sand?

Probably not — but believe it or not, it’s happening in real life. Yes, the world now has sand mafias with the same kind of high-stakes drama and crime that we have come to know in more traditional organized crime groups. Let’s take a look at why this is happening.
Where sand starts

The process of weathering creates sand. Rocks break apart and continue to break apart into smaller and smaller bits. Eventually the bits are small enough to be called sand.

Wind and water create most of the sand on Earth. There seems to be an unlimited amount of this stuff, which reminds us how old the Earth is.

Sand is made from whatever rock broke apart. Different parts of the world have different kinds of sand. The typical white sand we think of is made from tiny bits of weathered coral. There are several black beaches in the world, and that comes from eroded basalt from volcanoes.

Hawaii also has a green beach and that sand is weathered from green olivine rock. There is a pink beach in the Bahamas, and that comes from bits of weathered red shells mixed in with the white sand. There is a red beach in Canada that is made from weathered sandstone.

And there are even a few purple beaches that get their color from eroding manganese garnet rock.
Disappearing sand

Now that you know how sand is made, it’s time to talk about the problem. We make so many things from sand. Of all the many tons of things we mine from the Earth, sand makes up 85% of the mass of mined materials.

It goes to make roads, bricks, buildings, glass and new beaches. Wait — what? But sand comes from beaches, right?

Some beaches naturally have sand, but many coastlines don’t and that sand is trucked in for the enjoyment of visitors. When the next big storm comes in, the sand washes away and the beaches have to be remade with tons more sand.

Some island countries even use sand to increase the size of their country. That takes a lot of sand. And finally, some of the coastal or island countries are buying tons of sand to try and combat the rising sea level due to climate change.

The United States alone purchases $8.6 billion worth of sand a year for construction and beach repairs.

Countries are simply running out of sand and they need it badly. Because of this, organized crime groups in India, Italy and other countries are illegally trading sand and making huge profits. The operation consists of bribing politicians, violent conflicts and even murder. The countries of Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia are all getting into heated conflicts … over sand.

You may think about the deserts full of what seems to be limitless sand and wonder what the problem is. The problem is that desert sand is created by wind erosion. Wind-created sand is very round. It is so round that it cannot hold up in construction or beach applications. Therefore, desert sand is not a usable resource for the applications countries are begging for.

So what is the solution? Nobody really knows. Sand has always been thought of as such a limitless resource that nobody has really considered what to do when it runs out. People are now starting to think about it, but they are way behind as the problem is already here and will get worse over time.

Next time you need to fill that sandbox with sand, expect the price to cost a bit more over the next few years. At least in this country we don’t have to buy it from the mafia — yet.

Mike Szydlowski is science coordinator for Columbia Public Schools.

So-Called “Stealth” Omicron Offshoot Identified By Scientists In Three Countries

 South Africa, Australia and Canada

Tom Tapp
Tue, December 7, 2021


Scientists have identified a new Covid-19 lineage responsible for a number of recent Covid cases in South Africa, Australia and Canada that displays “many of the defining mutations of B.1.1.529 (Omicron) [but does] not have the full set. These cases also have “a number of their own unique mutations,” according to analysis posted on information sharing platform GitHub. The platform is widely used by top researchers to share data and information related to Covid-19.

As a result of those similarities and differences with the original Omicron, which was first identified about two weeks ago, the new sequence is being called BA.2, while the original variant has been dubbed BA.1.

The new lineage is being called “stealth” Omicron by some scientists and news outlets because, while PCR tests do identify it as Covid, the mutations on BA.2 defy a shortcut used by scientists to identify a Covid case specifically as Omicron.

Why does that matter? It makes tracking the spread of Omicron more difficult at a time when surveillance of the new variant is critical to understanding it. Only seven cases of BA.2 have been identified thus far, reported the Guardian, the picture is still far from complete.

Per the Guardian: “To have two variants, BA.1 and BA.2, arise in quick succession with shared mutations is ‘worrying’ according to one researcher, and suggests public health surveillance ‘is missing a big piece of the puzzle.’ ”

It is also unclear exactly how or if the unique mutations in BA.2 will impact its transmissibility and virulence.

The original Omicron (now BA.1) has been identified in 19 states, according to CDC data and over 50 countries, said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Tuesday.

Scientists found a 2nd type of Omicron that's harder to track since tests struggle to distinguish it from other variants

Marianne Guenot
Wed, December 8, 2021

A healthcare worker conducts a COVID-19 test on a traveller at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg on November 28, 2021.

Phill Magakoe/AFP via Getty Images


Scientists have spotted a version of Omicron that appears harder to track.


BA.2, the new lineage, has been seen seven times across South Africa, Australia, and Canada.


Its genetics mean that it is harder to tell apart from other virus variants via a PCR test.

A new version of the Omicron coronavirus variant was designated on Tuesday that experts say will be harder to track because of its genetics.

The new lineage, called BA.2, has been spotted seven times so far across South Africa, Australia, and Canada.

BA.2 is genetically quite different from the original Omicron lineage, now called BA.1, which has been spreading across the world, said Francois Balloux, the director of the University College London Genetics Institute, per the Guardian.

Crucially, it doesn't have the characteristic S-gene dropout mutation which allows Omicron BA.1 to be easily identified via PCR test results, the main way the variant has been tracked so far.

That means that "the two lineages may behave differently," he said, The Guardian reported.

While the change will make tracking harder, it is "nothing to be scared of yet" said Vinod Scaria, a clinician and computational biologist at the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, in a tweet.

David Stuart, a professor of structural biology at Oxford University, agreed.

"I don't think there's any reason to think that the new outlier is any more of a threat than the form of Omicron that's knocking around at the moment in the UK," he said, per the Financial Times.

"But it is terribly early," he added.

PCR tests should still pick up this variant but might not be able to distinguish it from others

BA.2 carries "many of the defining mutations" of Omicron, according to Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who reviewed the mutations in a blog post.

But it also has dozens of mutations BA.1 doesn't have and dropped dozens that do appear on BA.1.

Most notably, BA.2 is lacking the specific mutation that scientists were using as a quick way to track Omicron: the 69/70del mutation on the S gene, as Insider previously reported.

PCR tests check for different markers to see if someone is carrying the coronavirus, one of which targets the S gene.

When someone with the BA.1 lineage of Omicron gets a PCR test, one of the markers won't work: this is called an S-gene dropout.

This was an easy way to separate Omicron from other variants currently circulating, most of which wouldn't cause this S-gene dropout.

But this likely won't be the case for the BA.2 lineage. That means scientists will have to depend on more time-consuming and less widespread sequencing to identify it.

For Emma Hodcroft, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Basel, that means that "there may be more Omicron than we think," per the Financial Times.

She told that outlet that "from the numbers we have right now, I don't think there's a very large hidden burden from BA.2."

In a tweet, Hodcroft emphasized that PCR tests should still work to detect whether someone has the coronavirus, even with this new lineage.

"This means we can't use this 'shortcut' to find possible Omicron cases for BA.2 only. However, the PCR test itself still works!" she said.

New data shows GSK-Vir drug works against all Omicron mutations


A GSK sign at the pharmaceuticals company's research centre in Stevenage, Britain

Tue, December 7, 2021

(Reuters) - British drugmaker GSK said on Tuesday its antibody-based COVID-19 therapy with U.S. partner Vir Biotechnology is effective against all mutations of the new Omicron coronavirus variant, citing new data from early-stage studies.

The data, yet to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, shows that the companies' treatment, sotrovimab, is effective against all 37 identified mutations to date in the spike protein, GSK said in a statement.

Last week, another pre-clinical data showed that the drug had worked against key mutations of the Omicron variant. Sotrovimab is designed to latch on to the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus, but Omicron has been found to have an unusually high number of mutations on that protein.


"These pre-clinical data demonstrate the potential for our monoclonal antibody to be effective against the latest variant, Omicron, plus all other variants of concern defined to date by the WHO," GSK Chief Scientific Officer Hal Barron said.

GSK and Vir have been engineering so-called pseudoviruses that feature major coronavirus mutations across all suspicious variants that have emerged so far, and have run lab tests on their vulnerability to sotrovimab treatment.

(Reporting by Pushkala Aripaka in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)

Omicron significantly reduces Covid antibodies generated by Pfizer vaccine, study finds

Joe Pinkstone
Tue, December 7, 2021

Health workers giving out Covid vaccines in Gaza on Tuesday - BLOOMBERG

People who have previously had Covid or been vaccinated have far less protection against omicron than they do for other variants, according to the first data of its kind.

Scientists from South Africa grew live samples of the omicron variant and performed lab experiments to see if, and how, omicron was affected by antibodies in blood samples from 12 people who had been vaccinated. Six of the people also had previously had Covid.

The world has been waiting for these neutralising studies to gauge how pre-existing immunity from both vaccination and prior infection will hold up against omicron.

The study shows how many antibodies are needed in order to stop the virus from replicating and is an early indicator of how effective the worrying new variant is at avoiding our immune system.

In reality, the picture is far more complex as human immune systems have other lines of defence that work in tandem with antibodies, such as T-cells.

The new study is the first to show how omicron compares to previous variants, such as beta and delta, on a level playing field and the preliminary data shows antibodies in blood samples are 41 times less effective for omicron than for the 2020 strain.

“This doesn't mean vaccines will be 40x less effective,” said Dr Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St Andrews who was not involved in the research.

However, it will be several weeks before real-world data is available and more nuanced evaluations are possible.

Before omicron emerged, beta was the variant which scientists had found was most adept at dodging antibodies.

In similar experiments, the team of academics found that beta triggered just a three-fold decrease in the number of neutralising antibodies.

Real-world studies subsequently showed that beta diminished the ability of vaccines to prevent infection by around 40 per cent.

“The results we present here with omicron show much more extensive escape,” the researchers of the new study write.

However, people who had been vaccinated and previously infected with the old coronavirus strain had higher antibody levels than in those who were just vaccinated.

“Previous infection, followed by vaccination or booster is likely to increase the neutralisation level and likely confer protection from severe disease in omicron infection,” the scientists say.

Dr Alex Sigal, one of the authors of the paper, said: “There is a very large drop in neutralisation of omicron by [Pfizer] immunity relative to ancestral virus.

“Omicron escape from [Pfizer vaccination] neutralisation is incomplete. Previous infection and vaccination still neutralises.”

Ash Otter, a research scientist working on the coronavirus for the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Twitter that the inferior protection was to be expected, given what we know about omicron’s myriad mutations.

“Key thing to stress is [that the] data is small, but [it] looks like we don't lose complete neutralisation in those with [three time] antigen exposures (eg infection and two doses).”

This, he added, increases confidence in the theory that boosters will be effective against omicron to some degree.

Dr Rupert Beale, head of the cell biology lab at the Francis Crick Institute, agreed, tweeting out: “It looks like three jabs could still be very useful.”

“Those who received two doses of vaccine still retained neutralisation,” said Dr Cevi.

“Hybrid immunity provides much better neutralisation, which means we could expect fairly good results in boosted individuals.”

The AP Interview: CDC chief says omicron mostly mild so far

By MIKE STOBBE

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, poses during an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2021, in Atlanta. More than 40 cases of the omicron variant have been reported in the U.S. so far, with most of them people who were vaccinated and nearly all of them suffering only mild illness, Walensky said Wednesday.

 ​(AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

ATLANTA (AP) — More than 40 people in the U.S. have been found to be infected with the omicron variant so far, and more than three-quarters of them had been vaccinated, the chief of the CDC said Wednesday. But she said nearly all of them were only mildly ill.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the data is very limited and the agency is working on a more detailed analysis of what the new mutant form of the coronavirus might hold for the U.S.

“What we generally know is the more mutations a variant has, the higher level you need your immunity to be. ... We want to make sure we bolster everybody’s immunity. And that’s really what motivated the decision to expand our guidance,” Walensky said, referencing the recent approval of boosters for all adults.

She said “the disease is mild” in almost all of the cases seen so far, with reported symptoms mainly cough, congestion and fatigue. One person was hospitalized, but no deaths have been reported, CDC officials said.

Some cases can become increasingly severe as days and weeks pass, and Walensky noted that the data is a very early, first glimpse of U.S. omicron infections. The earliest onset of symptoms of any of the first 40 or so cases was Nov. 15, according to the CDC.

The omicron variant was first identified in South Africa last month and has since been reported in 57 countries, according to the World Health Organization.

The first U.S. case was reported on Dec. 1. As of Wednesday afternoon, the CDC had recorded 43 cases in 19 states. Most were young adults. About a third of those patients had traveled internationally.

More than three-quarters of those patients had been vaccinated, and a third had boosters, Walensky said. Boosters take about two weeks to reach full effect, and some of the patients had received their most recent shot within that period, CDC officials said.

Fewer than 1% of the U.S. COVID-19 cases genetically sequenced last week were the omicron variant; the delta variant accounted for more than 99%.

Scientists are trying to better understand how easily it spreads. British officials said Wednesday that they think the omicron variant could become the dominant version of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom in as soon as a month.

The CDC has yet to make any projections on how the variant could affect the course of the pandemic in the U.S. Walensky said officials are gathering data but many factors could influence how the pandemic evolves.

“When I look to what the future holds, so much of that is definitely about the science, but it’s also about coming together as a community to do things that prevent disease in yourself and one another. And I think a lot of what our future holds depends on how we come together to do that,” she said.

The CDC is also trying to establish whether the omicron variant causes milder — or more severe — illness than other coronavirus types. The finding that nearly all of the cases so far are mild may be a reflection that this first look at U.S. omicron cases captured mainly vaccinated people, who are expected to have milder illnesses, CDC officials said.

Another key question is whether it is better at evading vaccines or the immunity people build from a bout with COVID-19.

This week, scientists in South Africa reported a small laboratory study that found antibodies created by vaccines were not as effective at preventing omicron infections as they were at stopping other versions of the coronavirus.

On Wednesday, vaccine manufacturer Pfizer said that while two doses may not be protective enough to prevent infection, lab tests showed a booster increased levels of virus-fighting antibodies by 25-fold.

Blood samples taken a month after a booster showed people harbored levels of omicron-neutralizing antibodies that were similar to amounts proven protective against earlier variants after two doses, the company said.

___

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

LSU's renowned FACES lab helps to identify everything from mummies to murder victims


Annalise Vidrine and Shelly Kleinpeter
Wed, December 8, 2021,

BATON ROUGE — “Can you get me the bone lady?”

Since the 1980s, law enforcement officials from across Louisiana have called LSU for help in identifying human remains and finding missing people. This earned Mary Manhein the reputation as “the bone lady.”

Given that interest, Manhein formed the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services Lab at LSU in 1990 to help law enforcement and coroner’s offices identify missing persons and human remains.

With cases ranging from mummies to murder victims, the FACES Lab provides invaluable services across the state using bones, DNA and other forensic methods to identify missing persons.

Mary Manhein founded and directed the FACES lab, assisting law enforcement in finding missing persons and human remains.

FACES was in the news again this October when Sabine Parish officials, building on the lab’s earlier work in identifying a dead man in a well, were able to recover more of the body and make an arrest for a murder that they believe occurred in 1984.

“They were a tremendous help all the way around,” said Detective Chris Abrahams of Sabine Parish, who worked with the lab’s experts on the case. “If they wouldn’t have brought the missing person case to our attention, we would’ve never put two and two together.”

By securing funding from the state and LSU, Manhein, now 77, helped the lab to build a national reputation in forensics. She also created the LA Repository for Unidentified and Missing Persons Information Program, the most comprehensive statewide database of its kind.

Manhein retired from the lab in 2015, and Dr. Ginesse Listi, who had worked with Manhein for years, succeeded her and has continued the work.

Dr. Ginesse Listi succeeded Mary Manhein as director of the LSU FACES Lab in 2015.

The repository lists 600 missing-persons cases in Louisiana. Experts estimate that 40,000 unidentified bodies are lying in morgues around the country.

“My heart has gone out to missing-person cases,” Manhein said. “It’s a great feeling to know that you help resolve things for families, but it’s not really closure. I’m giving back to families, which is what I always wanted to do.”

Manhein has written several books about her work as a forensic anthropologist with titles like “The Bone Lady,” “Trail of Bones,” and “Bone Remains.''
Every set of bones tells a story

In retirement, she also wrote her first young adult novel titled, “Claire Carter: The Mystery of the Bones in the Drainpipe,” about a young girl who works with a forensic anthropologist to solve mysteries.

The forensic anthropologists in the FACES lab are trained to handle many types of cases. Whether remains are found within days or decades, the lab can still solve cases. It all depends on the conditions of the bones.

The investigation in Sabine Parish has been called the “Man in the Well” case.

The Central Sabine Fire Department’s confined space entry team helped recover additional remains in the “Man in the Well” case.

The victim, Lester Rome, went missing in 1984. Two years later, a property owner there discovered the skeletal remains of a man in his water well.

The FACES lab examined the nearly 30-year-old remains in 2013 and made a possible connection to Rome. Shotgun pellets embedded in his pelvic area years before his disappearance helped the lab to make this connection.

Sabine Parish law enforcement recovered more remains from the well in October, allowing the coroner to officially identify the remains as Rome. Shortly after that, U.S. Marshals arrested a 74-year-old Mississippi man on a second-degree murder charge.

The FACES lab inspects skeletal remains to determine the victim’s age, race, height, cause of death and the time since death. Using bones and X-rays, the lab can also construct clay models and create computer renderings of what the victim looked like.

The FACES lab generated a facial reconstruction of Lester Rome, the man in the well who went missing in 1984.

Listi, the current lab director, said the rate of decomposition varies depending on heat, moisture and types of soil and that minerals can leach out of bones over time, sometimes leaving only a person’s teeth. She added that her team can take DNA samples from bones and teeth if no soft tissue remains.

Two skeletons were found in the sunken ruins of the USS Monitor, a Civil War ship that sank in 1862. Because they were so well preserved, the FACES lab created a clay model of what their faces may have looked like.

Every set of bones tells a story. The lab studies skeletons to identify traumas that may have happened immediately before death or years earlier. In some cases, the anthropologists were even able to study teeth to determine if the victims exercised regularly, if they ate a healthy diet or even if they smoked.

In 2010, the FACES lab determined that a skull found in Clayton, Louisiana, was not that of Joseph Edwards, a young Black man whom the FBI suspects was murdered in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan and Concordia Parish sheriff’s deputies.

More: 'Everybody lied': Almost 60 years later, family still seeks answers in disappearance of La. man

Edwards remains one of the many unsolved cases in the repository, and Manhein said she is still haunted by it.

“It bothered me that someone could take his life the same year as the civil rights law,” Manhein said. “Justice was denied and delayed.”
Solving cases beyond Louisiana

The FACES lab does not only work on missing people in Louisiana. In 2001, it examined the remains of a small child found in Kansas City, Missouri. The case grabbed national attention, and the remains were referred to as “Precious Doe.”

Manhein determined the gender and the age of the child and created a clay model of the child’s face.

The child was finally identified in 2005 after her grandfather saw an ad in the paper with the clay model sketch and alerted law enforcement that he believed it was a granddaughter he had not seen in years.

Using DNA, police confirmed the identity of Precious Doe as Erica Green. Her mother and stepfather were later convicted of her murder.

The FACES Lab also has solved historical mysteries. The Louisiana Arts & Sciences Museum and the lab worked together on mummified remains from the bank of the Nile River in Egypt from 300 BC.

Originally nicknamed “the Princess of Thebes,” the remains were believed to be a mummified priestess.

After months of research, the lab concluded that the 2,300-year-old princess mummy was actually a prince.

This mummy from the Ptolemaic period (305-30 B.C.) has been at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum since 1964.

The lab was also able to use his teeth to give the first age estimate for the mummy, who had died in his late 20s to early 30s. Using the skull X-rays and samples, the lab created an image of what the mummy would have looked like in his life.

The lab also discovered that the internal organs and brain had been left within the mummy, which was not standard mummification practice at the time. Since then, historians have used the lab’s findings to study why this was one of the only mummies buried in this manner.

“The work of the FACES lab is very important,” said Elizabeth Weinstein, former curator of the Louisiana Arts and Sciences Museum. “They provided a very valuable service to us and did it in a very professional and ethical way, which was important for everyone at the museum.”

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: LSU forensic science lab identifies missing persons, mummies, victims