Tuesday, January 28
In The NEWS
Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> American Madison Keys upsets top seed Aryna Sabalenka to win her first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open (More) | World No. 1 Jannik Sinner beats Alexander Zverev to win his second straight Aussie Open title (More)
> DJ Unk, rapper best known for "Walk It Out" and "2 Step," dies at age 43 (More) | Rocker Marilyn Manson won't be charged with sexual assault following four-year investigation (More)
> Spotify signs multiyear deal with Universal Music Group to provide direct licenses for Spotify to stream UMG artists (More)
Science & Technology
> Researchers discover new way the microbiome of expecting mothers impacts their offspring's health; gut produces metabolites that help program stem cells during fetal development (More)
> Astronauts' eyesight weakens during long stays in microgravity environments, study finds; effect is temporary upon return to Earth but may have implications for eventual trips to Mars (More)
> Engineers develop 3D-printed ultralight material roughly five times stronger than titanium; process uses machine learning to produce strength-enhancing micro- and nanostructures (More)
Business & Markets
> US stock markets drop Friday (S&P 500 -0.3%, Dow -0.3%, Nasdaq -0.5%), but all three indexes post second straight week of gains (More) | Bank of Japan raises interest rates to highest level in 17 years (More)
> Sales of previously owned homes in the US fall to lowest level in nearly three decades; roughly 4.1 million such homes were sold last year, the lowest since 1995 (More)
> Trump administration reportedly negotiating TikTok deal that would give Oracle and a group of US investors control of the platform, with ByteDance retaining a minority stake (More) | Banks to sell up to $13B in debt from 2022 loan to Elon Musk to purchase Twitter (now X) (More)
Politics & World Affairs
> Senate confirms Army veteran, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary in 51-50 vote; Vice President JD Vance casts tiebreaking vote, three Republicans vote no (More) | Confirmation tracker (More) | More than a dozen inspectors general fired across major federal agencies (More)
> Hamas frees four female Israeli soldiers, Israel releases 200 Palestinian prisoners in second swap under negotiated ceasefire (More) | See updates on the war (More)
> Supreme Court agrees to hear arguments over whether a religious charter school in Oklahoma can receive public funding (More) | CIA releases assessment finding COVID-19 more likely to have originated from a Chinese lab; conclusion made with "low confidence" (More)
SOURCE: 1440 NEWS
Winter
We are now well into winter in most places and East TN is no exception... We have already had our first snow that stayed on the ground a few days and in a couple of days, we will jump up into the 50s and 60s for a couple of weeks before returning back down to the 30s and 40s.
East TN is great place to live because of the weather and it being mild during the winter months which last Jan-Feb-Mar. Not all of March is cold as it starts warming up half way through the month. And just when you think warm weather is back, April comes in being colder than normal.
We are protected by the Cumberland Plateau to our west and the Smoky Mountains to our east.
So, now that we are in our last few days our January, it is easy to smell warm weather coming in about 6 weeks, but if the 50s/60s hold true for two weeks, then we only have 30 more days of winter which is fine with me.
Other places are warmer and other places are colder most of the time which is why I like East TN as it is right in the middle and we get all four seasons but mainly spring, summer, and fall.
MIT Sets World Record
Researchers at MIT have developed two new control techniques that have enabled them to achieve a world-record single-qubit fidelity of 99.998 percent using a superconducting qubit called fluxonium.
This breakthrough marks a significant step towards the realization of practical quantum computing. Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, are highly susceptible to noise and control imperfections.
“This introduces errors into the quantum operations and ultimately limits the complexity and duration of a quantum algorithm,” said the researchers.
To overcome this challenge, the MIT team focused on improving qubit performance by mitigating counter-rotating errors that arise during fast quantum operations.
“Getting rid of these errors was a fun challenge for us,” said David Rower, PhD ’24, a recent physics postdoc at MIT. READ MORE...
Monday, January 27
Propaganda
From a young age, I remember my parents trying to teach me civility when communicating with others, especially those who were older than me, primarily out of respect.
Back then, our communications were mainly verbal face to face, or via a letter, post card or on the telephone. Today, we use cell phones, text messages, video chats, emails, and social media posts, along with short vid clips of one thing or another.
Most of the time our communications is NOT FACE TO FACE, it is written anonymously and we do not have any idea if we are talking with a male, female, adult, child, or some kind of programmed bot.
The communications we deal with today is rude, insulting, filled with profanities and is the farthest from civility that one can imagine. Instead of communicating with words, we communicate with memes. These memes are designed by use or are secured off the internet.
Most of the time, I would suspect about 95-99% of the time these memes are inaccurate, misleading, slanderous, and intentional lies, specifically designed to inappropriately influence the minds of people.
It is a war of who has the best propaganda with truth and honesty being completely irrelevant.
Goodby to Solar Panels
Windmills have been the emblem of the Netherlands since ancient times, a tradition that has not been lost to this day. Far from it, the country has become one of the leading wind energy nations in Europe. That said, it is not surprising that this new, smaller, more efficient and quieter wind turbine designed for domestic use comes from there. So, why do you need solar panel at home? You can have a silent wind turbine like this one.
The Netherlands reinvents windmills: an ultra-efficient silent wind turbine
It may be difficult, especially for younger generations, to think of the Netherlands as a heavy industrial powerhouse highly dependent on fossil fuels. However, until the 1970s, pollution due to large numbers of cars and emissions from natural gas and coal-fired power plants fueled a thriving chemical industry.
Air pollution, land scarcity due to its high population density and rising sea levels that threatened to flood its cities led to a sustained effort to decarbonize its economy and diversify its energy sources and industries. Today, the Netherlands is an emblem of innovation in sustainable technologies and policies.
For this transition, one of the key technologies was wind energy, in which today they are one of the main leaders, developing important innovations in this field. The most recent of these innovations is the LIAM F1 UWT, a small and quiet wind turbine for urban use with the capacity to generate between 300 and 2500 kWh, approximately half of the average household consumption. READ MORE...
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