China's Winning Global Arms Race

China is building up its armed forces at a rapid pace.

Its advances in missile technology, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence have triggered serious concern among many Western observers, who believe a profound shift in the global balance of military power is under way.

President Xi Jinping has ordered China's armed forces to modernise by 2035. They should, he says, become a "world-class" military power, capable of "fighting and winning wars" by 2049.

It is a huge undertaking, but the country is on target.

Spending big
China has been criticised by some international experts for a "lack of transparency" over how much it spends on defence, and an "inconsistent reporting of figures".  Beijing does publish official spending data, but Western estimates of China's financial support for its armed forces are often significantly higher. 

 It is widely believed that China currently spends more on its armed forces than any country except the US.  The growth of China's military budget has outpaced its overall economic growth for at least a decade, according to the Center for Strategic and Interockholnational Studies in Washington.

Boosting the nuclear stockpile
In November, the US Department of Defense predicted that China was set to quadruple its nuclear stockpile by the end of the current decade. China, it said, "likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030".

Chinese state media called the claim "wild and biased speculation", adding that nuclear forces were kept at a "minimum level".

However, experts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, who publish annual assessments of global stockpiles, say China has been increasing the number of its warheads over recent years.  READ MORE...

Whales

 

Comeback for Turkish Lira

GETTY IMAGES,President Tayyip Erdogan built his reputation on strengthening Turkey's economy


The Turkish lira has seen a second day of dramatic gains after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unveiled a new plan aimed at strengthening the currency.


In Tuesday trading, it rose as much as 15%, after soaring 25% on Monday.


The gains came after Mr Erdogan pledged to compensate savers for currency moves that have eroded the value of bank deposits held in lira.


The currency had fallen to record lows as the rise in the country's cost of living hit 21.7%.


But at one point on Tuesday, it firmed to just over 11 to the dollar before falling back slightly.

Why currency crash does not worry Turkey's Erdogan


Despite the price rises, Mr Erdogan has pushed the central bank to keep cutting interest rates.



Last week, it reduced borrowing costs to from 15% to 14% on Thursday. It was the fourth cut in as many months.


Normally, central banks raise rates to combat rising prices, but Mr Erdogan has called such tools "the mother and father of all evil".


The president and his allies argue that lower interest rates give a boost to Turkish exports, investment and jobs. But many economists say the rate cuts are reckless.  READ MORE...

It's Like a Ball

 

Denmark Rents Prisons From Kosovo

AFPImage,Denmark will be renting 300 cells at Gjilan prison in Kosovo


Kosovo has agreed to rent 300 prison cells to Denmark to ease overcrowding in the Scandinavian country's jails.


Denmark will pay an annual fee of €15m (£12.8m) for an initial period of five years, and will also help fund green energy in the country.


The rented cells are meant to house convicted criminals from non-EU countries due to be deported from Denmark after their sentences.  Danish laws would apply to any prisoners in the rented cells.  Kosovo has between 700 and 800 unused prison spaces.


The two governments signed a "political declaration" of intent on Monday which will run for an initial period of five years, a joint statement said.


EPAImage,The agreement signed on Monday runs initially for five years


The Balkan state unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008.


In total, Kosovo is due to receive a total of €210m over the next 10 years for renting the prison in Gjilan, some 50km (30 miles) from the capital, Pristina, from 2023. Danish ministers were due to visit the jail on Tuesday.


"[The agreement] will create space in our prisons and ease the pressure on our prison officers at the same time as it also sends a clear signal to third-country nationals sentenced to deportation: Your future does not lie in Denmark, and you must therefore not serve time here," Danish Justice Minister Nick Haekkerup said in a statement.  READ MORE...

Nightmare

 

Power

Sea Level Changes Destroyed Societies

Archaeologists have linked rising and lowering sea levels in the Atlantic Ocean to the ebbs and flows of ancient civilizations in southern Brazil.

The findings, which incorporate several lines of past archaeological evidence, suggest even large, resilient, and cooperative coastal communities can easily go out with the tide.

When analyzing and dating a series of prehistoric shell 'mountains', known as sambaquis in the local language, researchers noticed some significant changes in southwestern Brazil about 2,500 years ago.

At this time, the size and frequency of sambaqui sites suddenly began to decrease, possibly indicating the dissolution of what were, for millennia, dense and stable shellfish-eating populations.

Other research in the area has also identified a rapid reduction in sambaquis around this time, but some researchers think these changes mostly occurred from the rise of ceramics and crops. The use of this new technology meant populations didn't need to rely as much on fish or mollusks, leading to a reduction in shell piles.

However, the new study found the decline of shell middens started before the introduction of pottery. So why, then, were sambaqui practices abandoned?

The answer might have to do with an extreme, retreating tide. By reassessing human and animal remains from Babitonga Bay – home to Brazil's largest concentration of sambaquis – researchers have put forward a new timeline.

According to more than 400 radiocarbon dates, the spread of ceramics in Babitonga probably started around 1,200 years ago.  READ MORE...

Season's Curious

 

Changing the World

Neanderthals left an impact on their environment, having cleared part of a forest in Germany either through their fire use or tool production 125,000 years ago.

This is the conclusion of archaeologists led from Leiden University, who studied an archaeological site called Neumark-Nord some 20 miles west of Leipzig.

Evidence from pollen deposits indicates the flora at the lakeside site changed from closed forest to open vegetation for some 2,000 years of Neanderthal occupation.

The findings, the team said, highlight how modern humans are not the first member of the Homo genus to have exerted a significant influence on their environment.

Neanderthals left an impact on their environment, having cleared part of a forest in Germany — either through their fire use or tool production — 125,000 years ago. Pictured: in this documentary reconstructions, Neanderthals by a lake can been seen using fire and tools

This is the conclusion of archaeologists led from Leiden University, who studied an archaeological site called Neumark-Nord (pictured) some 20 miles west of Leipzig

NEANDERTHALS AT NEUMARK-NORD
Evidence of Neanderthal activity at Neumark-Nord was first uncovered in 1985, with the site the subject of numerous excavations since.

The hominins are believed to have occupied the lakeside site year-round for some two millennia.

Finds at the site, Dr Roebroeks told the Wall Street Journal, have included 'tens and thousands of stone artefacts, hundreds of thousands of bone fragments [and] the remains of many hundreds of butchered animals.'

Archaeologists have also uncovered abundant traces of fire usage at the site, including charcoal as well as the burnt remains of seeds and wood.

Despite the Neanderthals' significant impact at Neumark-Nord, the ancient lakeside would have been far from what we might recognise as a village settlement.

In fact, Dr Roebroeks explained, the hominins there may have been less mobile but would have still remained hunter–gathers who travelled from place-to-place during the Last Interglacial period.

During the Eemian period (also known as the 'Last Interglacial' and which spanned from 130,000–115,000 years ago) the area around Leipzig was dotted with small lakes left behind after the retreat of the glaciers from the northern European plain.

The withdrawal of the ice sheets also let hominins return to these lands that they had previously abandoned, with excavations at Neumark-Nord since the mid-1980s having turned up evidence of around 2,000 years' worth of Neanderthal occupation.  READ MORE...

Snow Road

 

A Warp Bubble is Made

A properly constructed Alcubierre warp bubble. As space constricts in front of the vessel and expands behind, the ship is theoretically pushed forward at speeds faster than light.   Image: LSI, White, et al.

Space is vast. Really, really vast. So vast, in fact, that it would take Voyager 1, the furthest man-made object from earth, more than 73 millenia to reach the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, at its current speed of over 38,000 mph, if it were headed that way to begin with. In short, if we're ever going to find a way to explore beyond our own solar system, we need to find a way to bend the laws of physics to make faster-than-light travel possible.

A team of scientists working with DARPA, including warp drive pioneer Dr. Harold G "Sonny" White, may have just taken us one step closer to that reality with the announcement that they've discovered a space-warping bubble, the fundamental thing needed for the faster-than-light travel of the Star Trek universe.

Before we jump ahead to romantic visions of space travel, Dr. White said, we need to think about what we could do with a microscale warp bubble, like the one his team discovered, before even dreaming of what it could be in the future. Dr. White is passionate about space travel, but says we need to start simple. "there may be lots of other things along the way before we ever get there that could have some really interesting implications," he said.

What is a warp bubble?

This is a pretty complicated notion that involves a ton of math, but at its most basic level, a warp bubble is a bit of space that's contracted in the front and expanded in the back. The contraction/expansion theoretically pushes the bubble, and its contents, forward at speeds surpassing the speed of light without ever violating the laws of physics: You're not technically traveling faster than light, you're surfing a bubble of condensed space.  READ MORE...

Snoopy's Christmas House

VIdeo

Cades Cove Tennessee

Driving along the edges of East Tennessee’s lakes, there are signs that things are not always as they have been.

Decaying grain silos rise up inexplicably from the water. In other places, ancient roads and trails lead down to lakebeds without turning.

In the days before the Tennessee Valley Authority, Tennessee’s rivers ran wild and free. They were dangerous, frequently jumping the banks and damaging crops and farms and livestock. They could be deadly.

The TVA came along and in the words of Ulysses Everett McGill, “Hydroelectric up the whole dern state” or at least the valley.  READ MORE...

Lava

 

US Nuclear Waste Dump

The federal government has more than $44 billion collected from energy customers since the 1980s specifically to be spent on a permanent nuclear waste disposal in the United States.

Currently, nuclear waste is mostly stored in dry casks on the locations of current and former nuclear power plants around the country.

On Nov. 30, the Office of Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy took a preliminary step towards establishing an interim repository for nuclear waste. Some see this as a reason for optimism, others as kicking the can down the road.

This undated image obtained 22 February, 2004 shows the entrance to the Yucca Mountain 

nuclear waste repository located in Nye County, Nevada, about 100 miles northwest of 

Las Vegas.AFP | AFP | Getty Images

The federal government has a fund of $44.3 billion earmarked for spending on a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility in the United States.

It began collecting money from energy customers for the fund in the 1980s, and the money is now earning about $1.4 billion in interest each year.

But plans to build a site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, were scuttled by state and federal politics, and there’s been a lack of political will to find other solutions. The result is that the U.S. does not have the infrastructure to dispose of radioactive nuclear waste in a deep geologic repository, where it can slowly lose its radioactivity over the course of thousands of years without causing harm.

However, with the effects of climate change becoming more obvious, investors and some political activists are renewing interest in nuclear as a source of energy that does not emit climate-warming carbon dioxide. That is forcing proponents to confront the thorny problem of waste again.

How Nevada became the nexus of the waste story
Congress established the Nuclear Waste Fund in 1982, requiring anyone who was getting some of their electricity from nuclear energy to pay a small amount of money to deal with the waste.

From 1982 through 1987, the Department of Energy explored nine sites for permanent waste disposal, and eventually whittled that list down to three. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the first choice, with sites in Washington and Texas rounding out the top of the list. Some members of Congress were concerned that analyzing multiple sites would cost too much, and so in 1987, Congress amended its 1982 law to focus all of its attention on Yucca Mountain.  READ MORE...

Christmas Dog

 

Earth's Black Box

(Image credit: Shutterstock)


Every commercial flight you have ever taken has been recorded. 

Every tug on the yoke and every adjustment of the throttle has been dutifully logged by a little recording device tucked away in the tail of the aircraft. 

It's the infamous "black box" that search and rescue crews scan the crash site for any time an aviation incident occurs. 

Its observations are a clear account of how the whole thing went down.

Next year, our planet will get one of these disaster recorders as well.

Called Earth's Black Box, the project is meant to painstakingly record every step on the way to our planet's demise.  READ MORE...

Santa's Deer

 

Two Glasses

Washing Rice

THERE ARE TWO TYPES of people in this world: Those who wash and those who do not wash their rice. Whether you belong to the former or the latter, the choice has a far more menacing consequence than just starchy grains.

Our world is ultra-convenient, and our food choices reflect this — dried pasta goes directly in boiling water, a can of black beans goes straight into chili. Rice enthusiasts, however, tend to insist the grain needs a little extra human touch. Specifically, rinsing the rice under cold water until the water runs clear. Rinsing rice can add significant time to your meal prep. In perhaps the most iconic love letter to rice in film, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro’s apprentice spends an hour preparing rice — starting with a solid rinse — for a plate of nigiri.

Some swear the rinse is what gives cooked rice its fluffy texture (not sure how sticky rice slots in here). But the stakes are far higher than guaranteeing a finished culinary masterpiece: Unwashed rice may be toxic.

WASHING RICE: THE NUTRITIONAL FACTS
Rice accounts for 20 percent of all the energy humans eat worldwide, according to one report. This is far more than wheat and maize, the key ingredients in bread and cornflour. Each grain of rice contains vital nutrients:

• Dietary fiber
• B vitamins like thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin: These keep your cells and organs running smoothly
• Carbohydrates

Because rice feeds billions every day, scientists have investigated how different preparation methods affect the finished product, especially its nutritional qualities. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.S., washing rice before it is cooked may send valuable protein down the drain, as well as other water-soluble nutrients. But washing doesn’t strip the grain of nutritional value entirely.

It may, however, help rid rice of toxic arsenic, a poisonous compound, according to Manoj Menon, an environmental soil scientist at the University of Sheffield.

In turn, scientists discovered that tweaking how you cook rice can help retain these nutrients.  READ MORE...

Big Tongue

 

Universe Expanding Faster Than Expected

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy Markarian 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth. In 2006, astronomers saw a certain kind of supernova explode in this galaxy, providing researchers with some of the data nee...IMAGE BY ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, A. RIESS ET AL.

The latest measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope suggest the universe is expanding faster than scientists' models predict—a hint that some unknown ingredient could be at work in the cosmos.

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.

Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.

“The universe seems to throw a lot of surprises at us, and that’s a good thing, because it helps us learn,” says Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the latest effort to test the anomaly.

The conundrum is known as the Hubble tension, after astronomer Edwin Hubble. In 1929 he observed that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it recedes—an observation that helped pave the way toward our current notion of the universe starting with the big bang and expanding ever since.

Researchers have tried to measure the universe’s current rate of expansion in two primary ways: by measuring distances to nearby stars, and by mapping a faint glow dating back to the infant universe. These dual approaches provide a way to test our understanding of the universe across more than 13 billion years of cosmic history. The research has also uncovered some key cosmic ingredients, such as “dark energy,” the mysterious force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

But these two methods disagree on the universe’s current expansion rate by about 8 percent. That difference might not sound like much, but if this discrepancy is real, it means the universe is now expanding faster than even dark energy can explain—implying some breakdown in our accounting of the cosmos.  READ MORE...

Cats

 

Tardigrades and Quantum Entanglement

Quantum life: an electron microscope image of a tardigrade. (Courtesy: Elham Schokraie et al/PloS ONE 7(9): e45682/CC BY 2.5)

Tardigrades are tiny organisms that can survive extreme environments including being chilled to near absolute zero. At these temperatures quantum effects such as entanglement become dominant, so perhaps it is not surprising that a team of physicists has used a chilled tardigrade to create an entangled qubit.

According to a preprint on the arXiv server, the team cooled a tardigrade to below 10 mK and then used it as the dielectric in a capacitor that itself was part of a superconducting transmon qubit. The team says that it then entangled the qubit – tardigrade and all – with another superconducting qubit. The team then warmed up the tardigrade and brought it back to life.

To me, the big question is whether the tardigrade was alive when it was entangled. My curiosity harks back to the now outdated idea that living organisms are “too warm and wet” to partake in quantum processes. Today, scientists believe that some biological processes such as magnetic navigation and perhaps even photosynthesis rely on quantum effects such as entanglement. So perhaps it is possible that the creature was alive and entangled at the same time.

In the preprint, the researchers say that the entangled tardigrade was in a latent state of life called cryptobiosis. They say they have shown that it is “possible to do a quantum and hence a chemical study of a system, without destroying its ability to function biologically”.  READ MORE...

Fire

So What About Christmas

Gift giving at Christmas is a Christian tradition that is widely practiced around the world. ... To Christians, the gifts given at Christmas are symbolic of the tributes made to the baby Jesus by the Three Wise Men after his birth during the story of the Nativity...


So, here is my concern...

What about all those non-believers of any kind of religion, religious beliefs, and/or philosophies...  why do they continuee to give gifts to each other on Christmas Day as if they were CHRISTIANS?

Several of the people I know including members of my immediate family (brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.) have told me that they are ATHEISTS but when it comes to Christmas, they buy and distribute gifts as if they were CHRISTIANS and not ATHEISTS at all.

I don't spend much time thinking about this hypocrisy during the rest of the year, only around the Christmas Season...  but if these people are going to subconsciously or consciously contradict their sworn beliefs during the Christmas Season, how easy will it be for them to contradict their beliefs during the rest of the year?

Obviously, this is a rhetorical question...

The Baseball Bat

CNN Host is Puzzled

 

In a Post piece headlined, "The puzzle of Joe Biden’s unpopularity," Zakaria claimed Biden's low approval rating wasn't actually his fault, but that he was instead "paying the price" for being president during "complicated times."

"I find President Biden’s unpopularity puzzling. He is rounding out his first year in the White House with the lowest end of first-year approval ratings of any elected president in modern times with the exception of Donald Trump. Why?" Zakaria wrote.

He described Biden as "a genial, likable person," and noted that some of his policies were popular amongst Americans with even some Republican support, but also claimed that the country was doing "reasonably well" economically, despite record inflation, nationwide supply chain challenges and a labor shortage.  IF YOU WANT TO READ MORE THEN CLICK ON...READ MORE...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-host-admits-puzzled-biden-unpopularity