Florida Man Arrested For 'Maliciously' Starting Palisades Fire In LA

As the LA Times reports, among the evidence collected by invesitgators was an image that Rinderknecht allegedly used ChatGPT to generate depicting a city on fire. He also allegedly asked ChatGPT, while calling 911, "Are you at fault if a fire is lift because of your cigarettes?"

Jeffrey Sachs Lays Out Possible Lab Origin of Covid

Still, both the overlap in the amino acid sequence and the fact that experts in the furin cleavage site of the ENaC-alpha and insertion of genetic material into bat coronaviruses work at the same university could be coincidental, as Harrison and Sachs acknowledge. Some virologists, though, say that the coincidence strains credulity.

“Could be,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote in an email to The Intercept when asked about the possibility that these things are both chance occurrences. “But the list of coincidences is getting verrrrrrrrrrry long.”

Ebright, a proponent of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and of investigating both natural-spillover and research-related-spillover, whom Harrison and Sachs thank “for helpful commentary on the manuscript,” spelled out some of the other Covid coincidences that he considers questionable, including its initial outbreak in a city that, well before 2019, had already been pegged as a biosafety risk. Ebright also noted Wuhan’s 1,000-mile distance from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic. And he pointed to the particular coding of the amino acids in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV2.

“The sequence encoding the FCS of the pandemic virus contained two consecutive CGG arginine codons,” Ebright explained in his email. (A codon, or a combination of three nucleotides, supplies the genetic code for a single amino acid, though most amino acids can be represented by multiple different codons. Each nucleotide is represented by a letter — for RNA, either A, C, U, or G.) “This codon usage is unusual for a natural bat SARS-related coronaviruses (for which fewer than 1 in 30 arginine codons are CGG) but is optimal for humans (for which most arginine codons are CGG codons).”

Still, Ebright said that at first he didn’t see the identical amino acid sequences as particularly suspicious. “I had known for more than a year that there was a perfect match to an eight-amino acid sequence present in human ENaC. What I had not known was that the sequence was known to be a functional furin cleavage site and that it was a sequence extensively studied at UNC,” he said. “The crucial point that the ENaC sequence was a known functional site, not just that there happens to be a match to a protein that happens to be in humans. … That suddenly turned it from what I thought to be largely irrelevant to being a logical and obvious choice to proceed.”

Early ‘lab-grown’ Covid virus found in sample lends weight to Wuhan theory (telegraph.co.uk)

An early version of Covid-19 that appears to have been grown in a laboratory has been discovered in samples from a Chinese biotechnology firm. The finding lends weight to claims that the virus may have started life as a lab experiment that accidentally leaked out. Bioinformatics experts from the University of Veterinary Medicine and Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, made the discovery by accident while examining genetic data from soil samples collected from Antarctica in late 2018 and early 2019.

The samples were sent to Sangon Biotech in Shanghai for sequencing in Dec 2019, where they became contaminated with a previously unknown variant of Covid-19. The variant has mutations that bridge the gap between bat coronavirus and the earliest Wuhan strain, so it may be an ancestral version of the virus. The samples also contain DNA from hamsters and monkeys, suggesting that the early virus may have been grown in animal cell lines. Viscount Ridley, author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, said: “The unique mutations hint at it being an ancestral variant. So if it was sequenced in say mid-December, before anybody had identified the virus in people and started trying to grow it in labs, then it points to secret samples in labs in 2019.”

Electric vehicles could fully recharge in under 5 minutes with new charging station cable design - Purdue University News

Though the prototype hasn’t been tested on EVs yet, Mudawar and his students demonstrated in the lab that their prototype accommodates a current of over 2,400 amperes – far beyond the 1,400-ampere minimum that would be needed to reduce charging times for large commercial EVs to five minutes. The most advanced chargers in the industry deliver only currents up to 520 amperes, and most chargers available to consumers support currents of less than 150 amperes.

Ok, now electric cars become viable in the USA.

The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago | The Guardian

When I started consulting for Exxon, I had already begun to understand that the Earth’s climate would be affected by carbon dioxide. There were only a small number of people in the world who were actively working on this problem because the global warming signal had not yet manifested itself in the data. So I was invited to join a research group at Exxon and one of my conditions to join was that we would publish our scientific research in peer-reviewed journals. It was a bunch of geeks trying to figure out how the planetary atmosphere works. We were doing very good work at Exxon. We had eight scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including a prediction of how much global warming from carbon dioxide buildup would be 40 years later. We made a prediction in 1980 of what the atmospheric warming would be from fossil fuel burning in 2020. We predicted that it would be about one degree celsius. And it is about one degree celsius. It never actually occurred to me that this was going to become a political problem. I thought: “We’ll do the analyses, we’ll write reports, the politicians of the world will see the reports and they’ll make the appropriate changes and transform our energy system somehow.” I’m a research scientist. In my field, if you discover something and it turns out to be valid, you’re a hero. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to convince people, even when they saw objective evidence of this happening.

Did the Coronavirus Escape From a Lab?

As Shi explained to Scientific American, late in December 2019, she heard from the director of the Wuhan Institute that there was an outbreak of a new disease in the city. Medical samples taken from hospital patients arrived at her lab for analysis. Shi determined that the new virus was related to SARS but even more closely related to a bat disease that her own team had found on a virus-hunting trip: the now-famous RaTG13. Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.” If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen.

From Bats to Human Lungs, the Evolution of a Coronavirus | The New Yorker

Analyses of the sars-CoV-2 genome indicate a single spillover event, meaning the virus jumped only once from an animal to a person, which makes it likely that the virus was circulating among people before December. Unless more information about the animals at the Wuhan market is released, the transmission chain may never be clear. There are, however, numerous possibilities. A bat hunter or a wildlife trafficker might have brought the virus to the market. Pangolins happen to carry a coronavirus, which they might have picked up from bats years ago, and which is, in one crucial part of its genome, virtually identical to sars-CoV-2. But no one has yet found evidence that pangolins were at the Wuhan market, or even that venders there trafficked pangolins. “We’ve created circumstances in our world somehow that allows for these viruses, which would otherwise not be known to cause any problems, to get into human populations,” Mark Denison, the director of pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Institute for Infection, Immunology, and Inflammation, told me. “And this one happened to say, ‘I really like it here.’”

Beyond Fracking: Oil-and-Gas Industry's Toxic Waste Is Radioactive - Rolling Stone

The levels of radium in Louisiana oil pipes had registered as much as 20,000 times the limits set by the EPA for topsoil at uranium-mill waste sites. Templet found that workers who were cleaning oil-field piping were being coated in radioactive dust and breathing it in. One man they tested had radioactivity all over his clothes, his car, his front steps, and even on his newborn baby. The industry was also spewing waste into coastal waterways, and radioactivity was shown to accumulate in oysters. Pipes still laden with radioactivity were donated by the industry and reused to build community playgrounds. Templet sent inspectors with Geiger counters across southern Louisiana. One witnessed a kid sitting on a fence made from piping so radioactive they were set to receive a full year’s radiation dose in an hour. “People thought getting these pipes for free from the oil industry was such a great deal,” says Templet, “but essentially the oil companies were just getting rid of their waste.”

How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster - Los Angeles Times

Three years after Castle Bravo, U.S. authorities encouraged Joseph, her family and her neighbors to return to Rongelap.

U.S. government documents from the time show that officials weighed the potential hazards of radiation exposure against “the current low morale of the natives” and a “risk of an onset of indolence.” Ultimately they decided to go forward with the resettlement so researchers could study the effects of lingering radiation on human beings.

“Data of this type has never been available,” Merrill Eisenbud, a U.S official with the Atomic Energy Commission, said at a January 1956 meeting of the agency’s Biology and Medicine Committee. “While it is true that these people do not live the way that Westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”

BBC - Future - The poisons released by melting Arctic ice

Around 10% of the carbon that does defrost will probably be released as CO2, amounting to 130-150 billion tonnes. That is equivalent to the current rate of total US emissions, every year until 2100. Melting permafrost effectively introduces a new country at number two on the highest emitters list, and one that isn’t accounted for in current IPCC models. “People talk about a carbon bomb,” says Natali. “In geological timescales this is not a slow release. It is a pool of carbon that is locked away and is not accounted for in the carbon budget to keep rises below two degrees (Celsius).”

Don’t Throw Away Your Cell Phone

Are companies engineering their products to break?

I spent four and a half years in mainland China and witnessed scientists paid by major corporations to make sure that the thing that you buy breaks within days or weeks of the warranty’s end. I watched as they intentionally inserted lower-quality capacitors rather than standard ones on the motherboard, because this one is going to last this exact amount of time and not a month more. My grandmother has her toaster that she got as a wedding gift. She’s 87 years old and still uses that toaster. Why at age 33, have I gone through seven toasters?

Nanogirl Michelle Dickinson: Is banning plastic bags bad for the environment? - NZ Herald

Surprisingly, although trees may seem more natural than crude oil, converting hardwood into paper requires a resource-heavy pulping process that uses large amounts of water, energy and chemicals, which can emit toxic and hazardous chemicals into air and water. This was confirmed in a report by the US Department of Energy.

Based on current calculations, the environmental impact of one single-use plastic bag equals five uses of a thicker LDPE plastic bag, four uses of a paper bag, 14 uses of a polypropylene non-woven bag (the reusable ones you can buy at the supermarket today) and 173 uses for a cotton reusable bag.

The global warming impact is not the only factor that determines how environmentally friendly each bag option is. Photos of turtles eating plastic bags are a strong advertisement for how littered our oceans are.

Government research studies in the US and Australia found that single-use plastic bags only account for around 1 per cent of the litter found. Closer to home, a Sustainable Coastlines Queen St drain survey found cigarette packaging, beverage bottles and food containers to be the biggest challenges when it comes to litter.

Wine Country fires: A deadly inferno’s first hours - San Francisco Chronicle

Firefighters estimate that at times, the flames raced 230 feet per second and, inconceivably, threw embers a full mile ahead of the fire front. It moved so fast that chickens, cats and other animals were charred where they stood, left standing like blackened statues.
The fires awed Bill Stewart, a UC Berkeley forestry professor.
“These fires are off the charts,” he said. “There just aren’t enough firefighters in the West to fight that much fire. ... Those trees, on fire, were pure ember machines that really kicked things into a new level. We’ll be studying this for years to come.”

Atlantic salmon from Cooke Aquaculture have escaped in the Pacific — Quartz

It’s unclear whether or not these Atlantic salmon will affect the Chinook salmon population. The concern is that the Atlantic salmon will outcompete Chinook salmon for food, breed with them to create hybrids, or spread diseases like sea lice.
“What my research showed is that they do escape, they do survive, they will ascend rivers, they will reproduce with each other and they will produce viable offspring that are competitively equal or superior to Pacific salmon,” John Volpe, an ecologist at the University of Victoria, told the Globe and Mail.

What Mass Extinctions Teach Us About Climate Change Today

Well, walk me through some of the other things you’re worrying about. Food seems like one part of the doomsday picture, but what else are you concerned about?
Well, heat.

I believe that there are going to be some places that become uninhabitable for humans.

How big a portion of the world’s surface do you think that kind of effect will hit?
Certainly Australia. Australia will be deemed uninhabitable. Already Australia — the outback produces not much in the way of crops. But there are kangaroos. I lived in Adelaide, and I’ve lived through some heat before, but we had 40 degrees centigrade [104F], and 42 [108F] and 43 [110F] for weeks on end. It really has an effect. You get depressed, you don’t want to go procreate because it’s too damn hot. You just can’t escape it.

Everywhere you go on the equator, there is some sort of drug — for the human population to try to get through the day. How do you get through living on the equator? It’s so damn miserable. So I think the equator will become uninhabitable. We don’t do well in heat.

Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting biodegradable solution to plastic pollution

"The caterpillars are not just eating the plastic without modifying its chemical make-up. We showed that the polymer chains in polyethylene plastic are actually broken by the wax worms," said Bombelli.
"The caterpillar produces something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut. The next steps for us will be to try and identify the molecular processes in this reaction and see if we can isolate the enzyme responsible."
As the molecular details of the process become known, the researchers say it could be used to devise a biotechnological solution on an industrial scale for managing polyethylene waste.

Trump in the White House: An Interview With Noam Chomsky

On November 8, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. The outcome placed total control of the government -- executive, Congress, the Supreme Court -- in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history.

Apart from the last phrase, all of this is uncontroversial. The last phrase may seem outlandish, even outrageous. But is it? The facts suggest otherwise. The Party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand.

Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces | Aeon Ideas

Yet almost every piece of plastic ever made remains in existence in some form, and their chemical traces are increasingly present in our bodies. It is ironic that the characteristic ‘new’ smell of PVC is the result of the unstable elements in the material decaying. Although ostensibly inert, like Chernobyl’s ‘undead’ isotopes, plastics are in fact intensely lively, leaching endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Single-use plastic might seem to disappear when I dispose of it, but it (and therefore I) will nonetheless continue to act on the environments in which it persists for millennia.

A Farewell to Ice by Peter Wadhams review – climate change writ large | Books | The Guardian

Wadhams puts this plainly. “There is no period in Earth’s history where the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2 is as great as it is today.” The asteroid that finished the dinosaurs blasted 4.5 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, “yet the CO2 rate rise [in the aftermath] was still an order of magnitude lower than the current rate”.

via J Barger

A programming language for living cells | MIT News

Users of the new programming language, however, need no special knowledge of genetic engineering.
“You could be completely naive as to how any of it works. That’s what’s really different about this,” Voigt says. “You could be a student in high school and go onto the Web-based server and type out the program you want, and it spits back the DNA sequence.”