Bodypaint

 

Japans Aircraft Carrier

When Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro returned from his trip to Japan, he fired off a tweet that touted his tour of that country's "Aircraft Carrier Izumo." It was a short comment that recognized an important new naval reality for the longtime ally.

Japan's pacifist constitution meant its naval forces have relied on ships carrying helicopters for self-defense, not fighter jets — and it avoided using the term aircraft carrier — since the end of World War II.

Del Toro, whether intentionally or not, gave a public US acknowledgment of a historic shift by Tokyo toward its past as a carrier power. Late in 2018, the Japanese announced plans to refit two helicopter carriers including the Izumo for U.S.-built F-35B Lightning II fighters, part of an increasingly urgent effort to counter growing Chinese sea power.

A Navy spokesman said, "The tweet does not signal a change in how the US officially recognizes the ship."

Japan has a self-defense force, what most outsiders would recognize as a military, but its constitution proclaims that "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained," meaning that it has historically avoided any military action or buildup considered offensive.

JS Izumo approaches the harbor at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, September 30, 2021. US Marine Corps/Lance Cpl. Darien Wright

"Governments have argued that Japan has the right to maintain capabilities and use the 'minimum necessary level of self-defense,'" explained Jeffrey Hornung, a scholar on Japan at Rand Corp. "Historically, anything that exceeds that is considered war potential, and therefore it violates the Constitution."   READ MORE...

Mirror

 

China's Satellite Dodges US Surveillance

A Chinese satellite has used a manoeuvre to avoid being followed by a spying US satellite, hinting at its capability in potential space warfare.

But some defence analysts said the scenario was not new and the incident should not be seen as escalating the rivalry between China and the United States in space.

“It is not difficult to monitor satellites,” said Chinese military commentator Song Zhongping. “The US, Russia and China are all able to monitor each other’s satellites in orbit. But the US will certainly plan its space infrastructure through monitoring the satellites of China and Russia.”

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Such monitoring and manoeuvring was not necessarily for a military purpose, he said.



In July, the Shijian 20, China’s heaviest and most advanced communication satellite, was approached in parallel by a US space surveillance satellite, USA 271. The Chinese satellite “rapidly” moved away, US military website Breaking Defence reported on Friday.

The Chinese detected the shadowing of the American satellite, the report said, citing information from space tracking company Commercial Space Operations Centre (ComSpOC).

“They start doing calibration manoeuvres and they’re very, very small manoeuvres, so it’s hard,” said Jim Cooper, the lead for space situational awareness at ComSpOC. “It’s about having the right system that can process and detect those small manoeuvres when you’re that close.”

The ComSpOC data also showed that in 2018, when another Chinese satellite, Tongxin Jishu Shiyan 3, took its position in geosynchronous orbit, the upper stage of the rocket that delivered the satellite had been loaded with extra fuel to enable it to stay parallel to it, to act as a decoy.

Cooper believed that was a tactic to fool an enemy’s network of space situational awareness, and to gain China several days of freedom during which it could “be off doing things that are potentially threatening” while the other country had lost track of where the Chinese satellite was.

Monitoring and manoeuvring the orbiting satellites is a necessity to avoid collisions, but the US has long been concerned about Chinese satellites’ capabilities in potential space warfare.  READ MORE...

Two Tegether

 

Piano

 

Boomer Wealth Surging

Many older Americans have reaped an unexpected pandemic bonanza, thanks to a combination of a stock market surge and rising home prices. That good fortune is evident in the St. Armands Circle shopping district in Sarasota, Fla., where visitors stroll past statues of Venus and Dionysus and lunch on Cuban sandwiches and sangria. The number of homes in the area selling for $3 million or more has shot up to 355 so far this year from a pre-pandemic 81 in 2019. And many of the buyers are of retirement age, says Drayton Saunders, president of Michael Saunders & Co., a real estate broker specializing in luxury properties.

A Covid-induced boom in early retirements is exacerbating America’s inequalities, especially along this stretch of the Gulf Coast. Sarasota and its environs are seeing an influx of cash-rich baby boomers and work-from-home professionals that’s pricing younger residents out of the housing market. Some also worry that a bigger senior population may worsen Florida’s historic difficulties in passing taxes for school and infrastructure projects. “They typically vote, and they may not vote for your schools unless their grandkids are in your schools,” says Jerry Parrish, chief economist of the Florida Chamber of Commerce’s research foundation.

Condo complexes facing Sarasota Bay.
PHOTOGRAPHER: ZACK WITTMAN/BLOOMBERG

By 2045 a quarter of Sarasota County will be 75 or older, and community activist Jon Thaxton wonders where the area will find enough care workers—often low-paid and with limited transportation—to staff all the luxury retirement homes “popping up like mushrooms after the rain.” An executive at the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, a civic advocacy group, he sees the coming crisis as a harbinger of a nationwide problem. “Our age demographic just happens to be 15 years ahead of the rest of the country,” Thaxton says. “We might be the canary in the coal mine.”

Homes under construction in Lakewood Ranch, Fla.
PHOTOGRAPHER: ZACK WITTMAN/BLOOMBERG

The obvious health toll notwithstanding, older Americans have largely prospered from government efforts to salve the economic pain Covid has caused. Boomers (born in 1946-64) accumulated more than $1.6 trillion in excess savings in the past two years, almost double what Generation X (born in 1965-80) put away, according to Federal Reserve data. Boomers also saw the biggest overall gain in wealth during the pandemic, with their combined wealth growing by $12.8 trillion, or about 23%. They edged out Generation X by about $100 billion, Fed figures show, but because that younger set has fewer people overall, it realized a larger per-capita wealth gain.  READ MORE...

Cat Junp

 

Unknown Ghost Ancestor

Desinova Cave, Russia

Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a 'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before.

Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn't alone. In a 2019 study analysing the complex mess of humanity's prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago.

"About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations", explained evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too – breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species.

Up until recently, these occasional sexual partners were thought to include Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter of which were unknown until 2010.

But in this study, a third ex from long ago was isolated in Eurasian DNA, thanks to deep learning algorithms sifting through a complex mass of ancient and modern human genetic code.

Using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference, the researchers found evidence of what they call a "third introgression" – a 'ghost' archaic population that modern humans interbred with during the African exodus.

"This population is either related to the Neanderthal-Denisova clade or diverged early from the Denisova lineage," the researchers wrote in their paper, meaning that it's possible this third population in humanity's sexual history was possibly a mix themselves of Neanderthals and Denisovans.  READ MORE...

Fire

 

Cause of Alzheimers

For the first time, researchers have used human data to quantify the speed
of different processes that lead to Alzheimer’s disease and found that it develops
in a very different way than previously thought. Their results could have
 important implications for the development of potential treatments.

The international team, led by the University of Cambridge, found that instead of starting from a single point in the brain and initiating a chain reaction that leads to the death of brain cells, Alzheimer’s disease reaches different regions of the brain early. How quickly the disease kills cells in these regions, through the production of toxic protein clusters, limits how quickly the disease progresses overall.

The researchers used post-mortem brain samples from Alzheimer’s patients, as well as PET scans from living patients, who ranged from those with mild cognitive impairment to those with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, to track the aggregation of tau, one of two key proteins implicated in the condition.

In Alzheimer’s disease, tau and another protein called amyloid-beta build up into tangles and plaques – known collectively as aggregates – causing brain cells to die and the brain to shrink. This results in memory loss, personality changes, and difficulty carrying out daily functions.

By combining five different datasets and applying them to the same mathematical model, the researchers observed that the mechanism controlling the rate of progression in Alzheimer’s disease is the replication of aggregates in individual regions of the brain, and not the spread of aggregates from one region to another.

The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, open up new ways of understanding the progress of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, and new ways that future treatments might be developed.

For many years, the processes within the brain which result in Alzheimer’s disease have been described using terms like ‘cascade’ and ‘chain reaction’. It is a difficult disease to study, since it develops over decades, and a definitive diagnosis can only be given after examining samples of brain tissue after death.

For years, researchers have relied largely on animal models to study the disease. Results from mice suggested that Alzheimer’s disease spreads quickly, as the toxic protein clusters colonize different parts of the brain.  READ MORE...

Drawings

 

How to Think

The new Republican govenor of Virginia said in his winning speech that he was going to change education in that he was going to teach students how to think...

Why is that important to me?

For the most part, my entire career of 45 years has revolved around education and for over 2 decades I taught students, including college students and employees of industry who were being sent by their employers to a training class...  and, employees knew how to think better than college students, in fact, college students did not even want to think at all...  at least in my classes.

My college students wanted me to tell them exactly what they needed to do, rather than trying to figure it out themselves...  MENTALLY LAZY...

What else has happened in education is the fact that college education has been watered-down so that everyone can pass the course...  making the course challenging for the ones that should be there and not challenging at all for the ones who should be there.  In other words, not everyone has the mental ability to be in college...

Pole Dancer

A New Force of Nature

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sparked worldwide excitement in March as particle physicists reported tantalizing evidence for new physics — potentially a new force of nature. Now, our new result, yet to be peer reviewed, from CERN’s gargantuan particle collider seems to be adding further support to the idea.

Our current best theory of particles and forces is known as the standard model, which describes everything we know about the physical stuff that makes up the world around us with unerring accuracy. The standard model is without doubt the most successful scientific theory ever written down and yet at the same time we know it must be incomplete.


Famously, it describes only three of the four fundamental forces – the electromagnetic force and strong and weak forces, leaving out gravity. It has no explanation for the dark matter that astronomy tells us dominates the universe, and cannot explain how matter survived during the big bang. Most physicists are therefore confident that there must be more cosmic ingredients yet to be discovered, and studying a variety of fundamental particles known as beauty quarks is a particularly promising way to get hints of what else might be out there.

Beauty quarks, sometimes called bottom quarks, are fundamental particles, which in turn make up bigger particles. There are six flavors of quarks that are dubbed up, down, strange, charm, beauty/bottom and truth/top. Up and down quarks, for example, make up the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.

The LHCb experiment at CERN. Credit: CERN

Beauty quarks are unstable, living on average just for about 1.5 trillionths of a second before decaying into other particles. The way beauty quarks decay can be strongly influenced by the existence of other fundamental particles or forces. When a beauty quark decays, it transforms into a set of lighter particles, such as electrons, through the influence of the weak force. One of the ways a new force of nature might make itself known to us is by subtly changing how often beauty quarks decay into different types of particles.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Moving Clouds

 

About Mars

The density of the oxygen on Mars is about 1/10,000th of what we have here on Earth. But Mars’ atmosphere does have a lot of carbon dioxide — about 500 times more CO2 than oxygen. 

If we want to harvest oxygen on Mars for use by future explorers or launch systems, a better way might be to pull some of it out of the CO2 and use that instead. That’s where MOXIE comes in.

MOXIE is a technology on NASA’s Perseverance rover, and it has proven for the very first time that we can extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere. 

It’s a technology demonstration so it only produces a small amount of oxygen. For future human exploration, we would need to send a scaled-up version, maybe 200 times larger than the current MOXIE.

If such a system landed on Mars, some of this would provide oxygen for the astronauts to breathe but most of it would be used as rocket propellant to get astronauts off the surface of Mars and back to Earth.

So, is there oxygen on Mars? Not much, but that’s okay because we can make it ourselves.

Puppets

 

Rice Alternatives

Rice is one of the staples of Indian cuisine. Some of us cannot imagine our daily food without the desi dal and chawal. But the issue with white rice, as per various health experts, is that white rice is a high caloric food. White rice is high in empty calories (simple carbs), making it less healthy option for people trying to lose weight or are diabetic. Unpolished rice has minerals but the polishing of the rice removes these nutrients making it only a source of simple carbohydrates. Therefore, health experts recommend less consumption of white rice and to replace it with healthier alternatives. We have found seven healthy white rice replacements that would make your daily diet healthier!

Here Are 7 Healthy White Rice Replacements That You May Add To Your Diet:

Dalia
Also known as bulgar or broken wheat, dalia is one the desi white replacement that you may try. It has a similar texture and flavour to rice when it is cooked. As per the USDA, dalia only contains 76 calories in 91 grams of serving - which is 25% per cent fewer calories as compared to rice.

Quinoa
This popular white rice replacement has been used to make Indian classics like kheer, upma and even chicken biryani. Quinoa is a flowering crop that is mainly grown for its edible seeds. This is the ideal rice replacement for people with gluten allergies as it is gluten-free! According to the book 'Healing Foods' by DK Publishing House, easily digestible quinoa is a complete source of protein and a good source of anti-inflammatory, monounsaturated and omega-3 fatty acids.

Barley
While many might associate barley with the creation of beer, this cereal is actually one of the oldest grains to be cultivated in the world! Barley has more proteins and fibre than white rice. It is packed with essential nutrients like Vitamin B, zinc, selenium, iron, magnesium and more.

TO FIND OUT ABOUT THE OTHER FOUR, CLICK HERE...

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