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Being a fascist is associated with memetic thinking, but this cognitive style can exist among anyone, including scientists and academic philosophers.

A person who illustrated very well that highly intelligent people can engage in this was James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA. Everything he did was from intuition, and it's why he was such a bigoted and stubborn person statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-…

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We can now take *1,500-color* images of galaxies! Here's a gorgeous nearby spiral to sculpt your interest.

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the…

[words by me; this issue is free for all!]

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This is a BFD - watch this story. If any other country were to steal the assets of another country, move the money into a Qatari bank account and claim to have disbursed them with no audit controls we would see IMF and potentially ICC involvement. nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/vene…
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

N. T. O. & Y.

@nazokiyoubinbou @helvick Yes! And Trump, for all his many (MANY) shortcomings, seems to get that.

It makes me morbidly curious if Reagan had said "yeah, we're selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contras" or if Nixon said "we broke into Watergate, so what?" if they'd have gotten the many (MANY) free passes that Trump has received from American society and the U.S. media.

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PRESS RELEASE:
A new study led by SETI Institute scientist Matija Ćuk suggests Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, formed from a collision between two older moons—and that this event may also be linked to the formation of Saturn’s iconic rings.

Read the full release: seti.org/news/saturns-moon-tit…

#space #science

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Long shot, but hopefully I get results. In the early 2000s, I read a Ugandan newspaper article about two Indian scientists trying to genetically engineer the anopheles mosquito. That set off alarm bells so I wrote a short story, which some universities in UK and Kenya teach in a course Applied African Science Fiction. I've looked for that article but can't find it. I guess it must have been via Reuters or AP or such a newswire.
Anyone think they can dig it up?

#science #scientist

in reply to Dilman Dila

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Is this close? From The Statesman (India), January 2, 2006: "Researchers have developed a strain of anopheles mosquito that has the DNA, or is genetically programmed, to generate SM1, and have that found there is a significant reduction in their capacity to transmit malaria."
in reply to Dilman Dila

the approach is called a •gene drive• & it's quite remarkable. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_dri…

The idea, in this case, being to eradicate malaria through introducing genetically modified mosquitoes which propagate their genes into the wild mosquito population & gradually eradicate the disease.

One of those things that, like antibiotics & vaccines, are lifesaving sci-fi that actually exists.

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The Chinese government intensified its repression in 2025 according to Human Rights Watch's annual report. It particularly targeted minority groups including Tibetans, Uyghurs and members of unofficial churches

"The Chinese government under Xi Jinping has amassed an increasingly disastrous human rights record, expanding and deepening its crackdown on fundamental freedoms"

hrw.org/news/2026/02/04/china-…

#China #CCP #HumanRights #HRW

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"First vaccine targeting SARS virus family enters human trials"

A new vaccine, GBP511 developed by UW Medicine, has entered clinical trials in Australia. It aims to protect against COVID-19 and related coronaviruses, including potential future threats, with trials led by South Korean pharmaceutical company SK Bioscience.

#COVID19

Source: ipd.uw.edu/2026/02/gbp511-vacc…

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On the border with Peru and Brazil, Bolivia recently added two new protected areas to stitch the western Amazon together. Created by municipal governments, the 7,300 km² of intact forest, rivers and floodplains will give jaguars, tapirs, river dolphins, giant otters and spider monkeys corridors to move around vast territories. Andes Amazon Fund andesamazonfund.org/news-blog/…
#ShareGoodNewsToo
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A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked
“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important.”
arstechnica.com/science/2026/0…
in reply to Ars Technica

quote from article:
"An American mechanical and chemical engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr. was a key player in the development of leaded gasoline (tetraethyl lead) because it was an excellent anti-knock agent, as well as the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) like freon. Midgley publicly defended the safety of tetraethyl lead (TEL), despite experiencing lead poisoning firsthand. He held a 1924 press conference during which he poured TEL on his hand and inhaled TEL vapor for 60 seconds, claiming no ill effects. It was probably just a coincidence that he later took a leave of absence from work because of lead poisoning. (Midgley’s life ended in tragedy: he was severely disabled by polio in 1940 and devised an elaborate rope-and-pulley system to get in and out of bed. That system ended up strangling him to death in 1944, and the coroner ruled it suicide.)"

Can't make this stuff up.

#LeadPoisoning #Environment #Pollution #PublicHealth

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This week Microsoft stock tanked -12% on revelations that 45% of its Azure customer backlog is OpenAI.

Oracle is now struggling to get loans to pay for its data center buildout to meet its $300B deal with OpenAI. They may need layoffs to come up with the money.

The underlying theme being bankers don’t believe OpenAI will have the money to pay these bills and it’s pulling down companies doing business with it.

cio.com/article/4125103/oracle…

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in reply to Ariaflame

Uber and tech

Sensitive content

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Europa is a moon of Jupiter with a liquid water ocean underneath its thick shell of ice. But *how* thick? Scientists have measured it using data from the Juno spacecraft, and the answer is: pretty damn thick.

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/eur…

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Coming attraction: Upasana Sarraju’s new book “Unruly: The Ig Nobel Prizes and the Science That Refuses to Behave” linkedin.com/posts/sanasarraju…

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in reply to Innerworld

YouTube educator, Cleo Abrams did a video on this as well as the actual options available to us to protect against asteroids, and found a new asteroid on camera

youtu.be/LOn-mmezykQ

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Oooo Department of Conservation have a Kākāpō cam :kakapo:

Kākāpō Cam: Rakiura the kākāpō – 2026 nest

youtube.com/live/BfGL7A2YgUY

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in reply to Raj Patel

When I worked at DOC last year we used to have a large TV screen on the wall with a Iive feed from the albatross colony at Taiaroa Head on the Otago Peninsula. We got really invested in the chicks and their progress. It was endlessly fascinating watching them. When they fledged in September we switched to the penguin colony down at Ōamaru. Wonderful. And now there is a kākāpō cam!

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5702631489 is an interesting number: 5702631489⁴ = 10575 50783 69274 13892 95697 10824 23634 08641.

It's the smallest number 𝑛 such that the decimal digits of 𝑛⁴ make up four copies of the digits of 𝑛.

And did you notice that 5702631489 uses every decimal digit?

Spotted in the new #OEIS sequence oeis.org/A391002, which lists numbers like this for each power.

#oeis

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Meet Veronika, the tool-using cow. Veronika uses sticks to scratch herself, using different orientations and motions, an example of multi-purpose tool use. This suggests scientists may have underestimated cows' cognitive abilities. arstechnica.com/science/2026/0…
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Oh look: #discord outsourced their age verification to some vendor. You know, the #ageverification that countries like the UK want to make mandatory for basically every online service. And the vendor had a data breach exposing photos of government IDs for 70,000 people.

Do you feel safer? How many children did we protect by exposing the IDs of these 70,000 (presumably) adults? Thanks for taking one for the team, you 70,000 canaries in the #privacy coal mine.

discord.com/press-releases/upd…

Unknown parent

Oh, jeeze that's enraging.

When I was working in the US, I heard a lot of stories about Comcast, none good.

What I hate is I was happy with NBTel, Fundy Cable and later Shaw Cable. They were bought out by Rogers or Bell Canada, the conglomerates with the worst customer satisfaction scores in the country.

The regulator just rubber stamped the deals without paying any attention to public feedback.

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Alabama uses Japanese American Internment era law to charge immigrants who don’t self-register


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Mass Extinction 445 Million Years Ago Paved the Way for Jawed Fishes to Take Over


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What's happening in the sky in 2026? I made a list of the events I'm personally looking forward to, including eclipses, spotting elusive Mercury, and watching the Moon occult (pass directly in front of) Venus and Jupiter!

scientificamerican.com/article…

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This month’s highlights range from careful scientific evaluation of speculation surrounding interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS to broader discussions of where life might exist beyond Earth, informed by SETI’s integrated approach to biosignatures and technosignatures.

Read the full stories: seti.org/news/seti-institute-i…

#space #science #news

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New Year’s Eve brought more than fireworks.

A rare meteor shower flared up in southern skies — debris from a comet, lighting up Earth’s atmosphere at cosmic speeds. 🌌

🔭 The Volantids were spotted again, just like they were in 2015 and 2020, hinting at a repeating pattern.

💥 Alongside it, observers from Australia, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, and South Africa saw an outburst of the kappa Volantid meteors, with over 300 flashes recorded.

Learn more: seti.org/news/volantid-meteors…

#space #science

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"On a long enough timeline, any surveillance tool you build will eventually be used by people you don’t like for reasons that you disagree with. A surveillance-industrial complex and a democratic society are fundamentally incompatible, regardless of your political party." eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/ice-…

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The best video essays of 2025


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Tanzania is rolling out a scheme to train and deploy 137,294 community health workers by 2028, aiming to close the gap created by previously informal, under-resourced care. Every worker will use the same tablet-based Unified Community System, ending years of fragmented reporting and enabling instant risk alerts, referrals and household-level education. Gavi gavi.org/vaccineswork/tanzania…
#ShareGoodNewsToo

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A 14-year-old boy has folded origami that can hold 10,000 times its weight. Miles Wu used the Miura-ori fold, which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision. He’d like to use his origami experiments to help improve pop-up emergency shelters, which currently are “sometimes strong,” sometimes “easily deployable,” and sometimes “can compact really small,” but rarely all three. sciencealert.com/14-year-old-w…
#ShareGoodNewsToo
in reply to swanksalot

@swanksalot Good! For more such news, I strong recommend signing up for the free FixTheNews newsletter, a dose of good news weekly in your inbox. It’s genuinely mood-transforming being reminded once a week that we really are getting a lot of victories globally (disease, civil rights, environment) even if the news in the Anglosphere is always dire.
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Australia has become a globally significant representative case for worst-case Indigenous rights-breaches when developing liquified fossil gas

abc.net.au/news/2025-12-09/can…

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Fascism Wrapped just dropped in NYC — and more cities are coming soon. Don’t use Spotify until they stop running recruitment ads for ICE: indivisible.org/cancel-spotify…
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Generative Clickbait, Brought to You by Google and Meta pxlnv.com/linklog/generative-c…

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On International Human Rights Day CHRD calls on the Chinese government to end its practice of long-term imprisonment of human rights defenders

CHRD is highlighting the cases of 10 human rights defenders who have been wrongfully imprisoned for more than 10 years

nchrd.org/2025/12/china-end-lo…

#China #HumanRights

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#PPOD: Is it an insect? A strange fossil? An otherworldly eye, or even a walnut? No, it’s an intriguing kind of martian butterfly spotted by ESA’s Mars Express. Insects aren’t commonplace on Mars, so it’s no surprise that this is no butterfly as we know it. It’s actually a kind of crater, formed as a space rock hurtled towards the Red Planet and collided with its red-brown surface. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

#space #science

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El Software Libre NO es un dogma.


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Mi canal de PeerTube: video.hardlimit.com/c/autumn64…

Sígueme en Mastodon: mast.lat/@autumn64
Mis demás redes sociales del Fediverso: autumn64.xyz/fediverse.html
Contacto (XMPP, Signal, E-mail): autumn64.xyz/contact.html

Donaciones voluntarias ;): autumn64.xyz/donate.html

Sala de chat SIGNAL: signal.group/#CjQKIAzCNT_pwYSh…
Sala de chat XMPP: conversations.im/j/comunidad-a…

Mi página web, en donde hago más cosas aparte de difundir el SL: https:/www.autumn64.xyz

Muchas gracias siempre!!!

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in reply to Mónica Gómez

@autumn64 Los de las "Nuevas Tecnologías Innecesarias" son un grupo muy cerrado y conservador, a mi me echaron del grupo de telegram por pensar diferente (como vos).
Por lo general cuando uno se va poniendo grande la mente se le empieza a cansar mas rápido y ya no quiere hacer el esfuerzo de aprender cosas nuevas, entonces he ahí donde viene la resistencia al cambio y uno empieza a tener un perfil mas conservador. Por suerte yo aun sigo con ganas de seguir avanzando y no estancarme.
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Asteroid Bennu carries all the ingredients for life as we know it


We knew from prior analyses that a distant asteroid sampled in 2020 carried all but one of the molecules needed to kick-start life, and researchers have just found the missing ingredient: sugar

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📣🎬 Calling all filmmakers & artists! Celebrate Public Domain Day in January 2026 by making a 2–3 min short film using public domain works from 1930 & earlier.

📆 Deadline: January 7, 2026
💰 First prize: $1,500
ℹ️ Details 👉 blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/20…

#publicdomain #contest #filmmaking

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KDE drops X11 too, New Office Suite, Arduino turns to crap - Linux Weekly News


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Uruguay leads Latin America in electric car sales

en.mercopress.com/2025/12/01/uruguay-leads-latin-america-in-electric-car-sales?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_content=main&utm_campaign=rss

Uruguay has cemented its position as the undisputed leader in Latin American electric vehicle (EV) adoption, achieving a remarkable market penetration of 27.97% in the third quarter of 2025, the Latin American Zero Emissions Observatory (ZEMO) reported.…

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