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Mar 31, 2022

How to get a Cuban COVID jab in 1,000 easy steps

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

On Valentine’s Day 2022 in Havana, Cuba, I received the Soberana Plus booster shot, one of the island nation’s five homegrown COVID-19 vaccines. The jab had been a long time coming.

For the past year, I had been fixated on the idea of being injected with a made-in-Cuba coronavirus vaccine. While obviously not offering protection against the imperial machinations of my homeland and Cuba’s chief antagonist, the United States, the Cuban serums were at least being developed in the interest of global public health rather than pharmaceutical profit or “vaccine apartheid”, as World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described it.


The story of how I finally got my made-in-Cuba booster in Havana.

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Mar 31, 2022

Wingcopter drones to deliver spare parts to offshore wind farms

Posted by in category: drones

Wingcopter says it’s teaming up with German Airways to explore the use of drones in the delivery of spare parts to offshore wind farms. This development comes days after two Singapore-based firms announced their plans to produce offshore wind farm delivery drones that would operate at 90% lower costs than current methods that involve the use of boats or helicopters.

At the time of deployment, Wingcopter’s delivery drones would take off from the Rostock Airport, requiring to land with pinpoint accuracy on a moving ship. Wingcopter says it will work closely with German Airways to develop this technologically demanding feature.

Mar 31, 2022

GE begins testing industry’s first adaptive cycle engine for F-35

Posted by in categories: energy, engineering, military

The U.S. Air Force and General Electric (GE) have begun the Phase 2 testing of GE’s second XA100 adaptive cycle engine at the Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) in Tennessee.

The Phase 1 testing of this XA100 engine was completed in November 2021 in Evendale, Ohio. Developed by GE Edison Works advanced program unit, the XA100 is a three-stream adaptive cycle engine demonstrator that can direct air to the bypass third stream for increased fuel efficiency and cooling or to the core and fan streams for additional thrust and performance.

GE’s XA100 engine is uniquely designed to fit both the F-35A and F-35C without any structural modifications to either airframe, enabling better aircraft range, acceleration, and cooling power to accommodate next-generation mission systems, while also ensuring durability and enhanced readiness.

Mar 31, 2022

Lessons in Longevity from an 88-Year-Old Zipper Company

Posted by in category: life extension

How the Japanese manufacturer YKK has stayed at the top of its industry.

Mar 31, 2022

Signs of a housing bubble are brewing

Posted by in categories: finance, habitats

US home prices have soared to new heights and they keep on climbing, and some researchers and economists say they have seen signs of a housing bubble brewing.

Home prices are rising faster than market forces would indicate they should and are becoming “unhinged from fundamentals,” according to a new blog post written by researchers and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Until recently, the possibility of a bubble wasn’t widely supported. But after looking at housing markets across the US, the Fed researchers said new evidence is emerging.

Mar 31, 2022

Everyone is worried about gas prices, but diesel is driving inflation more than you think

Posted by in categories: economics, energy

Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the fuel that runs the global economy was in short supply.

Now some analysts say there could be spot shortages of diesel fuel and prices may stay elevated, even if oil and gasoline decline.

Those higher diesel fuel prices are also stoking inflation.

Mar 31, 2022

Guy Snaps Photo of Space Station So Detailed You Can See Spacewalking Astronauts on Exterior

Posted by in category: space

In a new photo of the International Space Station, you can actually make out two astronauts clambering on its exterior during a space walk.

Mar 31, 2022

Simple electrical circuit learns on its own—with no help from a computer

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

System sidesteps computing bottleneck in tuning artificial intelligence algorithms.


Closing Gaps in Geometrically Frustrated Symmetric Clusters: Local Equivalence between Discrete Curvature and Twist Transformations.

Mar 31, 2022

On the Emergence of Spacetime and Matter from Model Sets

Posted by in category: futurism

Closing Gaps in Geometrically Frustrated Symmetric Clusters: Local Equivalence between Discrete Curvature and Twist Transformations.

Mar 31, 2022

Information Could Be the 5th State of Matter, Proving We Live in a Simulation

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

If true, this idea could even help us understand all of the dark matter in our universe.


Trying to make sense of information is a universal daily experience. For physicist Melvin Vopson, this pursuit goes well beyond the mundane—he’s trying to prove that information has a physical presence. It’s a weighty task that could lead to new insights about how we can manage the future of information storage. It could also lead to a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.

Vopson, who studies information theory at University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, wants to use an experiment to confirm that elementary particles have measurable mass. It would involve a matter-antimatter annihilation process that would shoot a beam of positrons at electrons in a piece of metal. Positrons and electrons are both subatomic particles, with the same mass and magnitude of charge. However, positrons are positively charged, and electrons are negatively charged.

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