If Livestock Had ANY IDEA What's In Store For Them....,

newsweek  |  The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.

Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that "seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood," according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old.

The idea that aging and illness go hand and hand is, of course, nothing new. What's new is the newfound confidence of scientists that "aging" can be measured, reverse-engineered and controlled.

Until recently, "people working on diseases did not think that aging was modifiable," says Felipe Sierra, who recently retired as director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, a part of the NIH. "That is actually what many medical books say: The main risk factor for cardiovascular disease is aging, but we cannot change aging so let's talk about cholesterol and obesity. For Alzheimer's, aging is the main risk factor—but let's talk about the buildup in the brain of beta-amyloid proteins. Now that is beginning to change."

 

Pissants Must Eat Bugs: But For Us - The Blood Is The Life

medicalbag  |  Some say that Countess Elizabeth Báthory, considered by many to be the world’s worst female serial killer, was the true inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. After all, legend has it that she bathed in the blood of at least 650 servant girls she had tortured and killed. She was said to be so evil that villagers kept their daughters in hiding for fear that Elizabeth would take them. Her gruesome activities even earned her such names as “the Infamous Lady” and “the Blood Countess.” This is her story.

Erzsébet Báthory, more commonly known in the Western world as Elizabeth, was born in 1560 to one of the most powerful Protestant families in Hungary at the time. She was the daughter of Baron George Báthory and Baroness Anna Báthory, who were both Báthorys by birth. Possibly stemming from inbreeding within her family, it is said that from an early age Elizabeth suffered from seizures, loss of control, and fits of rage. As a child, she witnessed the brutal punishments handed out by her family’s officers on their estates; one anecdote describes a gypsy accused of theft who was sewn up in the belly of a dying horse and left to die. Her family tree certainly included some disturbed kin as well. One of her uncles taught her Satanism, and she learned about sadomasochism from her aunt.

Elizabeth was married by the time she was 15 years old to Count Ferenc Nádasdy, a soldier who would go on to lead the armies of Hungary against Ottoman forces threatening Central Europe. After her marriage, the countess became the mistress of the Nádasdy estate, where the couple earned a reputation as harsh masters. Building upon her own cruelty, it is believed that Ferenc showed her some of his own ways of punishing his servants. After 10 years, Elizabeth gave birth to 3 daughters and a son. 

Although the count participated in his wife’s torture activities, it wasn’t until the death of her husband in the early 1600s that Elizabeth’s true evil came to fruition. She eventually moved to one of her castles at Čachtice in northwest Hungary (now Slovakia) and began surrounding herself with a cohort of servants to help her with her torture practices. Legend has it that one day an attendant girl was brushing Elizabeth’s hair when she accidentally pulled too hard and it tugged on a snag in her hair. The countess erupted in anger, jumping up and striking the girl with the back of her hand. The strike was so hard that it made the girl bleed and some of that blood was left on Elizabeth’s hand. Later that night, Elizabeth noticed that the skin on her hand where the blood had been looked more youthful than she had seen it in many years. This gave her the idea that if such a small amount of blood could make her hand look so young, then more could restore youthfulness to her whole body. It’s said that this is when the madness began and Elizabeth started to bathe in the blood of virgin girls.  

Young women began to disappear from villages near and far, as well as children. Unhappy girls were lured to the castle with the prospect that they would find work there but were never seen again. When they arrived, they were locked up in a cellar as they awaited torture. Elizabeth carried out much of the torture herself, often beating the girls to death. Sometimes she would sew a girl’s mouth shut, force her to eat her own flesh, or burn her genitals. When she was too sick to get out of bed to beat them, Elizabeth would order her servants to bring up a girl to her quarters where she would bite their faces and shoulders. In other instances, she would stick needles underneath the girl’s fingertips before cutting off the fingers of those who tried to take them out. Soon Elizabeth began to run out of young women, because she had either already taken them, or the villagers had started to hide their daughters out of fear that she would take them. This is when the countess began to resort to noble girls, a decision that would ultimately lead to her demise.

Have Elites Acquired The Technology To Rule Without The Gentry?

michaelochurch  |   In a society like ours, the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than either has with the middle class. The upper and lower classes “live like animals”, but for very different reasons. The upper classes are empowered to engage their primal, base urges; the lower classes are pummeled with fear on a daily basis and regress to animalism not out of moral paucity but in order to survive. People in the lower class live lives that are consumed entirely by money, because they lack the means of a dignified life. Those in the upper class, likewise, experience a life dominated by money, because maintaining injustices favorable to oneself is hard work. So, even though the motivations are different (fear at the bottom, greed at the top) the lower and upper classes are united in what the middle class perceives as “crass materialism” and, therefore, have strikingly similar cultures. Their lives are run by that thing called “money” toward which the middle classes pretend– and it is very much pretend– to be ambivalent about. The middle classes are sheltered, until the cultural protection, on which their semi-privileged status depends, runs out.

The “middle-est” of the middle class is the Gentry. Here we’re talking about people who dislike pawnbrokers and stock traders alike, who appear to lead a society from the front while its real owners lead it from the shadows. This said, I have my doubts on the matter of there being one, singular Gentry. I would argue that corporate middle management, the clergy, the political establishments of both major U.S. political parties, TED-talk onanist “thought leaders” and media personalities, and even Instagram “influencers” could all be called Gentries; in no obvious or formal way do these groups have much to do with one another. Only in one thing are they united: by the middle 2010s it became clear that both the Elite (bourgeoisie) and Labor (self-aaware proletariat) were fed up with all these Gentries. Starting around 2013, an anti-Gentry hategasm consumed the United States, and as a member of said (former) Gentry I can’t say we didn’t deserve it.

Technology, I believe, is a major cause of this. Silicon Valley began as a 1970s Gentry paradise; by 2010, it had become a monument to Elite excess, arrogance, and malefaction. Modern technology has given today’s employers an oppressive power the Stasi and KGB only dreamt of. The American Gentry was a PR wing for capitalism when it needed to win hearts and minds; but with today’s technological weaponry, the rich no longer see a need to be well-liked by those they rule.

For a concrete example, compare the “old style” bureaucratic, paperwork corporation of the midcentury and the “new style” technological one, in which workers are tracked, often unawares, down to minutes. The old-style companies were hierarchical and feudalistic but, by giving middle managers the ability to protect their underlings, ran on a certain sense of reciprocated loyalty– a social contract, if you will– that no longer exists. The worker agreed not to undermine, humiliate, or sabotage his manager; the manager, in turn, agreed to represent the worker as an asset to the company even when said worker had a below-average year. All you had to do in the old-style company was be liked (or, at least, not be despised) by your boss. If your boss liked you, you got promoted. If your boss hated you, you got fired. If you were anywhere from about 3.00 to 6.99 on his emotional spectrum, you moved diagonally or laterally, your boss repping you as a 6.75/10 “in search of a better fit” so you moved along quickly and peaceably. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked better than what came afterward.

I’ve worked in the software industry long enough to know that software engineers are the most socially clueless people on earth. I’ve often heard them debate “the right” metrics to use to track software productivity. My advice to them is: Always fight metrics. Sabotage the readings, or blackmail a higher-up by catfishing as a 15-year-old girl, or call in a union that’ll drop a pipe on that shit. Always, always, always fight a metric that management wishes to impose on you, because while a metric can hurt you (by flagging you as a low performer) it will never help you. In the old-style company, automated surveillance was impossible and performance was largely inscrutable and only loyalty mattered– your career was based on your boss’s opinion of you. It only took one thing to get a promotion: be liked by your boss. In the new-style company, devised by management consultants and software peddlers with evil intentions, getting a promotion requires you to pass the metrics and be liked by your boss. In the old-style company, you could get fired if your boss really, really hated you. (As I said, if he merely disliked you, he’d rep you as a solid performer “in search of a better fit” so you could transfer peacefully, and you’d get to try again with a new boss.) In the new-style company, you can get fired because your boss hates you or because you fail the metrics. The “user story points” that product managers insist are not an individual performance measure (and absolutely are, by the way) are evidence that only the prosecution may use. This is terrible for workers. There are new ways to fail and get fired; the route to success is constricted by an increase in the number of targets that must be hit. The old-style hierarchical company, at least, had simple rules: be loyal to your boss. Having been a middle manager, I can also say that the new-style company is humiliating for us– we can’t protect our reports. You have to “demand accountability from” people, but you can’t really do anything to help them.

This, I think, gives us a metaphor for the American Gentry’s failure. Middle managers who cannot protect their subordinates from the company’s more evil instincts (such as the instinct to fire everyone and hire replacements 5 percent cheaper) have no reason to expect true loyalty. They become superfluous performance cops and taskmasters, and even if they are personally liked, their roles are justifiably hated (including by those who have to perform them.)

Neither Liberalism Or Egalitarianism Can Survive What Is Around That Signpost Up Ahead

interfluidity |  I think it makes perfect sense that liberalism has become a kind of upper-class creed. So long as it is, liberalism is in peril, and should be. There are illiberal currents on both the left and right that would exploit popular dissatisfaction to remake society in ways that I would very much dislike, whether by restoring a “traditional” hierarchy of implicit caste, or by granting diverse professionals even more prescriptive authority than they already have at the expense of liberty for the less enlightened. 

My strong preference is that we do neither of these things, and instead restore the broad appeal of liberalism by “leveling up”. We should ensure that everyone has the means to rely upon some mix of the market and the state to see to their material welfare, reducing the economic role of networks of personal reciprocity and history. This would render the good parts of liberalism more broadly and ethically accessible. 

Reducing economic stratification makes liberal proceduralism more credible pretty automatically. When economic and institutional power are dispersed and broadly shared, no one has a built-in edge, and aspirations of neutrality and fairness become plausible. Once we view society less through a lens of domination and oppression — because in a more materially equal society that will be a less credible lens — it will become possible to agree on a common, stable set of commercial and professional mores rather than extend deference to myriad communities’ evolving sensibilities. It will be practical for the broad public to learn and understand those common mores, and so not be excluded or set apart from professional communities by what come to seem like inscrutable courtly conventions.

There are undoubtedly tensions between liberalism and egalitarianism. But they are yin to one another’s yang. Opposites in a sense, they must be reconciled if either is to survive.

Getting Close To The Secrets Of Superconductivity

quantamagazine  |  For the last three years, electrons have been toying with physicists.

The game started in 2018 when the lab of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero announced the find of the decade: When the researchers stacked one flat sheet of carbon atoms on top of another, applied a “magic” 1.1-degree twist between them, then cooled the atomic wafers to nearly absolute zero, the sample became a perfect conduit of electrons.

How were the particles conspiring to slip flawlessly through the graphene sheets? The kaleidoscopic “moiré” pattern created by the skew angle seemed significant, but no one knew for sure. To find out, researchers started twisting and stacking every material they could get their hands on.

At first, the electrons played along. Experiment after experiment found that, in an array of flat materials, frigid temperatures brought plummeting electric resistance. A more profound understanding of the conditions necessary for ideal conduction felt close, and with it, a tantalizing step toward an electronics revolution.

“It seemed like superconductivity was everywhere,” said Matthew Yankowitz, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Washington, “no matter what system you looked at.”

But the electrons proved coy. As researchers inspected their samples more carefully, the instances of superconductivity vanished. In some materials, resistance wasn’t actually getting down to zero. In others, different tests offered conflicting results. Only in the original double-layered graphene did electrons regularly achieve a frictionless flow.

“We had this zoo of different twisted materials, and twisted bilayer graphene was the only one that was clearly a superconductor,” Yankowitz said.

Then in the past month, two papers published in the journals Nature and Science described a second related superconductor, a three-layer graphene sandwich with the “bread” sheets aligned and the filling sheet skewed by 1.56 degrees. The unmistakable electron-carrying prowess of twisted trilayer graphene confirms that the two-wafer system was not a fluke. “It was the first of a family of moiré superconductors,” said Jarillo-Herrero, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also led one of the new experiments, “and this one is the second member of the family.”

Importantly, this second sibling has helped to illuminate an underlying mechanism that could be what powers the superconductivity of these materials.

In the months after the 2018 discovery, one group of theorists began to puzzle over the mechanism that made bilayer graphene superconduct. They suspected that one particular geometric trait might allow electrons to swirl into exotic maelstroms that behave in an entirely novel manner. This mechanism, which is unlike any of the (few) known schemes responsible for superconductivity, would explain the superconductive success of bilayer graphene, as well as the failure of other materials. It also predicted that graphene’s trilayer sibling would superconduct as well.

 

Control Of The Most Powerful Politicians And Their Regulators Ensures Control By The Regulated

opendemocracy | From France to Australia to the US state of Maryland, the free press is waging a battle for survival against Facebook and Google. Besides being gushing firehoses of COVID-19 and election disinformation and QAnon conspiracies, another of Google and Facebook’s dangerous impacts is undermining the financial stability of media outlets all over the world. Where is the European Commission and the Biden administration in this fight? A lot is at stake, yet so far they have been quiet as church mice.

How do Google and Facebook threaten free press? These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60% of all online advertising in the US. With Amazon taking another 9%, that leaves a mere 30% of digital ad revenue to be split among thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising over half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country, including in Europe and the US.

Australia and Maryland

Australia’s situation is typical. Its competition commission found that, for every $100 spent by online advertisers in Australia, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook,

even as traditional advertising has declined. Various studies have found that the majority of people who access their news online don’t go to the original news source, instead they access it via Facebook’s and Google’s platforms which are cleverly designed to hold users’ attention. Many users rarely click through the links, instead they absorb the gist of the news from the platforms’ headlines and preview blurbs.

Consequently, Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources receiving it. Note that Facebook and Google could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites. But they don’t.

So Australia decided to fight this duopoly with some rules of its own. A new law will require large digital media companies to fairly compensate Australian media companies for re-packaging and monetizing their proprietary news content. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers, beginning with media magnet Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to pay them some compensation. But Facebook flexed its digital muscles by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days, preventing Aussie news publishers as well as everyday users, including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services, from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial ‘shot heard ‘round the world’. Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of ‘big tech authoritarianism’. Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the message of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

 

The Unrivaled Power Of Google's Coalition Of The Connected

newsweek |  In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.

Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, England, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.

But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.

In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior U.S. officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.

I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google's in-house "think/do tank."

I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking "Generation Y" ideas man at State under two U.S. administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties.

He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened "Condi's party-starter," channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into U.S. policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as "Public Diplomacy 2.0." On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as "terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran."

It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a "think/do tank" based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.

Later that year two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Describing what they called "coalitions of the connected," Schmidt and Cohen claimed that:

Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies.…

They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].

 

 

 

Mass Human Experimentation Yields: Genetic "Vaccine", Contact Tracing, Molecular Drug Discovery

theconversation |  DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only genetic code from a pathogen – rather than the entire virus or bacteria. Traditional vaccines take months, if not years, to develop. In contrast, once scientists get the genetic sequence of a new pathogen, they can design a DNA or mRNA vaccine in days, identify a lead candidate for clinical trials within weeks and have millions of doses manufactured within months. This is basically what happened with the coronavirus.

During the pandemic, researchers have taken full advantage of the proliferation of smartwatches, smart rings and other wearable health and wellness technology. These devices can measure a person’s temperature, heart rate, level of activity and other biometrics. With this information, researchers have been able to track and detect COVID-19 infections even before people notice they have any symptoms.

Proteins are the molecular machines that make your cells function. When proteins malfunction or are hijacked by a pathogen, you often get disease. Most drugs work by disrupting the action of one or several of these malfunctioning or hijacked proteins. So a logical way to look for new drugs to treat a specific disease is to study individual genes and proteins that are directly affected by that disease. For example, researchers know that the BRCA gene – a gene that protects your DNA from being damaged – is closely related to the development of breast and ovarian cancer. So a lot of work has focused on finding drugs that affect the function of the BRCA protein.

200 Highly Skilled People Are Literally Transforming Human Life On Earth And Beyond

wired |  I think I felt a visceral resistance at times to the notion that we could edit the human genome, especially in ways that would be inheritable. But that changed both for me and for Doudna as we met more and more people who are themselves afflicted by horrible genetic problems, or who have children who are suffering from them. And when our species got slammed by a deadly virus, it made me more open to the idea that we should use whatever talents we have in order to thrive and be healthy. So I’m now even more open to gene editing done for medical purposes, whether that’s sickle cell anemia, or Huntington’s, or Tay-Sachs, or even to increase our resistance to viruses and other pathogens and to cancer.

I still have worries. One is I don’t want gene editing to be something only the rich can afford and it leads to encoding inequalities into our societies. And, secondly, I want to make sure we don’t reduce the wonderful diversity that exists within the human species.

Do you have any ideas for how to do that?

I spend the last few chapters of my book wrestling with that question. And I hope not to preach, but to allow the reader to go hand in hand with me and Jennifer Doudna and figure out on their own what their hopes and fears are about this so-called brave new world we’re all stepping into together. I once had a mentor say there are two types of people who come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. He said, “For heaven's sake, be a storyteller, because the world’s got too many preachers.”

So by telling the tale of Crispr in all its scientific triumphs and rivalries and excitement, I hope to turn people on to the science. But I also want to make them more qualified to wrestle with one of the most important questions we’re going to face as a society over the next couple of decades: When we can program molecules the way we program microchips, what is it we want to do with this fire that we’ve snatched from the gods?

---

 

We Have The Technology: Now That "No Lives Matter" Let The Eugenic Games Begin!

corbettreport |  On November 10, 2020, Joe Biden announced the members of a coronavirus task force that would advise his transition team on setting COVID-19-related policies for the Biden administration. That task force included Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

JOE BIDEN: So that’s why today I’ve named the COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board comprised of distinguished public health experts to help our transition team translate the Biden-Harris COVID-19 plan into action. A blueprint that we can put in place as soon as Kamala and I are sworn into office on January 20th, 2021.

SOURCE: President-elect Biden Delivers Remarks on Coronavirus Pandemic

ANCHOR: We’ve learned that a doctor from our area is on the president-elect’s task force. Eyewitness News reporter Howard Monroe picks up the story.

THOMAS FARLEY: I know he’s a very bright, capable guy and i think that’s a great choice to represent doctors in general in addressing this epidemic.

HOWARD MONROE: Philadelphia health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley this morning on Eyewitness News. He praised president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team for picking Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to join his coronavirus task force. He is the chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

SOURCE: UPenn Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel To Serve On President-Elect Biden’s Coronavirus Task Force

That announcement meant very little to the general public, who likely only know Emanuel as a talking head on tv panel discussions or as the brother of former Obama chief of staff and ex-mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. But for those who have followed Ezekiel Emanuel’s career as a bioethicist and his history of advocating controversial reforms of the American health care system, his appointment was an ominous sign of things to come.

He has argued that the Hippocratic Oath is obsolete and that it leads to doctors believing that they should do everything they can for their patients rather than letting them die to focus on higher priorities. He has argued that people should choose to die at age 75 to spare society the burden of looking after them in old age. As a health policy advisor to the Obama administration he helped craft the Affordable Care Act, which fellow Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted was only passed thanks to the stupidity of the American public.

JONATHAN GRUBER: OK? Just like the people—transparency—lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical to getting the thing to pass.

SOURCE: 3 Jonathan Gruber Videos: Americans “Too Stupid to Understand” Obamacare

During the course of the deliberations over Obamacare, the issue of “death panels” arose. Although the term “death panel” was immediately lampooned by government apologists in the media, the essence of the argument was one that Emanuel has long advocated: appointing a body or council to ration health care, effectively condemning those deemed unworthy of medical attention to death.

ROB MASS: When I first heard about you it was in the context of an article you wrote right around the time that the Affordable Care Act was under consideration. And the article was entitled “Principles for the Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” I don’t know how many of you remember there was a lot of talk at the time about [how] this new Obamacare was going to create death panels. And he wrote an article which I thought should have been required reading for the entire country about how rationing medical care—you think that that’s going to start with with the Affordable Care Act? Medical care is rationed all the time and it must be rationed. Explain that.

EZEKIEL EMANUEL: So there are two kinds of “rationing,” you might say. One is absolute scarcity leading to rationing and that’s when we don’t simply don’t have enough of something and you have to choose between people. We do that with organs for transplantation. We don’t have enough. Some people will get it, other people won’t and, tragically, people will die. Similarly if we ever have a flu pandemic—not if but when we have a flu pandemic—we’re not going to have enough vaccine, we’re not going to have enough respirators, we’re not going to have enough hospital beds. We’re just going to have to choose between people.

SOURCE: Dr. Zeke Emanuel: Oncologist and Bioethicist

Tiny Bubbles Of Fat

bloomberg |  If messenger-RNA vaccines are the breakout medicine of the pandemic, then the tiny lipid spheres that bring them into people’s cells are the unsung heroes.

Lipids catapulted toward the top of the world’s health-care priority list because the potent vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Inc., as well as others still being developed by CureVac NV and Sanofi, can’t do their job without them. Messenger RNA, the genetic material at the heart of these vaccines, needs a protective shell composed of four different types of the fatty material -- collectively called a lipid nanoparticle -- so that it can successfully journey from factory to a person’s arm, and then get inside of human cells.

“This is an incredibly complex process,” said President Joe Biden, touring a Michigan factory last month alongside Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla, who vowed to produce more lipids -- along with mRNA -- at the facility as part of a push to double vaccine supplies. Biden marveled at the close collaboration between machine technicians, chemists and biologists who were “pioneering technologies that less than a year ago were little more than theories and aspirations.”

For Bob Langer, those aspirations stretch back a lot longer. As early as the 1970s, he was trying to prove you can capture and transport big, complex molecules like DNA and RNA inside tiny particles without destroying them.

“Everybody told me it was impossible,” he recalled during a phone interview. “I got my first nine grants rejected. Couldn’t get a faculty job.”

Turns out it was possible, and Langer wasn’t out of a job for long. Today, the professor has a chemical engineering lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology bearing his name, focused on the intersection of biotechnology and materials science. Following decades of development, Langer in 2010 co-founded Moderna, where he’s still on the board. That company -- like BioNTech and CureVac -- is developing mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases beyond just Covid, along with therapies for cancer and rare illnesses.

“I don’t think people realized just how important the delivery systems are to all kinds of medicines,” Langer said. “If you get more and more complex medicines, like RNA and DNA and things like that, you’ll see more and more work on delivery systems and more and more problems will be solved. Lipid nanoparticles are going to be a big piece of the arsenal.”

The Pais Effect

vice |  Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais is the man behind the patents and The War Zone has proven the man exists, at least on paper. Pais has worked for a number of different departments in the Navy, including the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAVAIR/NAWCAD) and the Strategic Systems Programs. (SSP) The SSP mission, according to its website, is to “provide credible and affordable strategic solutions to the warfighter.” It’s responsible for developing the technology behind the Trident class nuclear missiles launched from Submarines.

The patents all build on each other, but at their core is something Pais called the “Pais Effect.” This is the idea that, “controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields.” 

Essentially, Pais is claiming to use properly spun electromagnetic fields to contain a fusion reaction. That plasma fusion reaction he claims to have invented will revolutionize power consumption. Experts theorize that a functioning fusion reactor would lead to cheap and ubiquitous energy.

One of Pais and the Navy’s patents described what the propulsion system and fusion drive would be used for—a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft.” According to the patent, the craft could travel land, sea, and outer space at incredible speeds. Other patents invented by Pais and filed by the Navy include a “high temperature superconductor,” a “electromagnetic field generator,” and a “high frequency gravitational wave generator.”

It all sounds like science fiction, and the Navy has been skeptical too. Navy authorities called bullshit on Pais’ inventions and his patents went through a lengthy internal review at NAVAIR. The War Zone obtained emails about the bureaucratic fight between Pais and the Navy through a Freedom of Information Act Request and revealed that the mad scientist won. According to the patents, some of the technology is “operable.” That means the Navy is claiming some of Pais’ wild tech works and has been demonstrated to Navy officials.

The physics of what Pais is claiming are beyond theoretical and beyond the ken of the layman or lowly science reporter. But a paper about his compaction fusion reactor was accepted by the peer reviewed Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Plasma Science and published in its November 2019 issue. “The fact that my work on the design of a Compact Fusion Reactor was accepted for publication in such a prestigious journal as IEEE TPS, should speak volumes as to its importance and credibility - and should eliminate (or at least alleviate) all misconceptions you (or any other person) may have in regard to the veracity (or possibility) of my advanced physics concepts,” Pais told The War Zone in an email.

Pais continued to toot his own plasma horn. “Do realize that my work culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect (original physical concept),” he said. “Such high energy [electromagnetic] radiation can locally interact with the Vacuum Energy State (VES) - the VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence), in other words the fundamental structure (foundational framework), from which Everything else (Spacetime included) in our Quantum Reality, emerges. The Engineering of the Pais Effect can give rise to the Enablement of Macroscopic Quantum Coherence, which if you have closely been following my work, you understand the importance of.”

Rhythmodynamics: The Wave Structure Of Matter

 

rhythmodynamics |  What will, or what should be the energy of the future? What natural phenomena and processes will be at its bottom line? At what level of matter organization should one look for these phenomena and processes? These questions increasingly trouble the scientists engaged in exploring the new sources of energy, new means of its production.

 

Traditional means of energy production, for example, electricity, are known for their use of kinetic energy obtained from the wind, heated steam or pressure of falling water. In the first and second cases, it’s pressure difference which causes propulsion force, in the third case – it’s the force of gravitation. To obtain pressure difference artificially one has to use energy, burn fossil or nuclear fuel at power plants. Hydroelectric power stations require no fuel of course, as they are using a natural force of propulsion. Let’s examine the origin of this force and assess a possibility of designing its artificial analogy.

 

Little is known of the nature of the force of gravitation applied to experimental bodies. Lots of hypotheses exist, but the question remains: what mechanism creates propulsion force causing bodies to fall? What exactly causes the body to react by its free fall?

 

Note: experimental body, a body whose potential is too small to disturb the outside field.

1. If it’s the field which ‘catches’ body m and then ‘drags’ it toward the earth’s surface, what’s the mechanism of this?

2. Could the field be exerting its influence on body m if the body stayed unaffected by the field’s presence? If body m is to react, then why?

3. Is the cause of free fall entirely external, or there are some changes taking place inside the body?

4. What is to change inside the body so as make it move?

 

Rhythmodynamics views bodies as systems of interacting synchronous elements (oscillating experimental bodies) situated in a wave medium, the medium which has a propensity to carry periodic disturbances and propagate them with constant speed.

 

All principles are examined in the case of the least possible elementary system (fig.1) made up of two oscillating elements linked together by the standing wave.

 

 

 

Fig.1. The system has no reason to move in the wave medium because positions of the sources-oscillators and potential holes (nodes) coincide. The system is internally balanced.

 

The standing wave, being a disturbed state of the medium, plays the role of a common platform for the elements. Although this platform is floating in the wave medium, it’s also rigid, because the system’s elements, engaged in exchange of the wave energy, create potential holes and thereby fix each other there at a set distance.

 

The elementary system coming under pressure of internal or external factors may develop phase or frequency displacements which break wave synchronism and upset the existing balance.

Balance [equilibrium], a state created by the forces of a different vector cancelled out so that the system’s properties remain unaffected.

Dynamic balance [dynamic equilibrium], a process in which the controlled system develops in such a way which prevents significant deviation of the system from the set trajectory caused by the medium disturbances.

Field Resonance "Propulsion" Concept Redux (First Posted 3/15/12)

NASA | ABSTRACT - A new propulsion concept has been developed based on a proposed resonance between coherent, pulsed electromagnetic wave forms and gravitational wave forms (or space-time metrics). Using this concept, a spacecraft "propulsion" system potentially capable of galactic and inter-galactic travel without prohibitive "travel times" has been designed. The "propulsion" system utilizes recent research associated with magnetic field line merging, hydromagnetic wave effects, free-electron lasers, laser generation of megagauss fields, and special structural and containment metals. Research required to determine potential, field resonance characteristics and to evaluate various aspects of the spacecraft "propulsion" design is described.

ASSUMPTIONS
The field resonance "propulsion" concept has been developed utilizing recent research into causes of solar flares, magnetic substorms, black holes, quasars, and UFOs.
The concept is based on two assumptions:

(1) Space-time is a "projection" of a higher dimensional space in much the same way that a hologram is a projection or a subset of our space-time reality,
(2) A relationship exists between electromagnetic / hydromagnetic fields and gravitational fields - that is, Einstein's long sought for unified field theory can be developed. Mathematical relationships have been developed and theoretical concepts have been proposed to describe the causes and effects associated with the assumptions, but experimental data is required to develop the correct theoretical basis for the assumptions (Rachman and Dutheil, 1979). Specific research in a number of areas is needed and will be described later.

ASTROPHYSICAL RESEARCH
There does exist, however, some astrophysical data which tends to support these assumptions.

For example, astronomers have speculated that a relationship may exist between black holes and quasars (white holes). The energy and matter which leaves space-time in a black hole may reappear at a white hole at some distant space-time point.
For this transfer of energy from one space-time point to another to occur, some type of hyperspace or higher dimensional space (4th & 5th) is required. Assumption 2 may be the cause of the large amount of energy released in solar flairs.
In sunspot regions where solar flairs occur, the 2-3 thousand gauss magnetic fields are configured such that the positive and negative polarities are in close proximity with each other. Where the positive and negative magnetic field lines are nearly anti-parallel a process called magnetic field line merging can take place.

In this process the oppositely directed field lines break and re-connect expelling fields and plasma out from the sides. As a result magnetic energy is converted into kinetic energy.

The magnetic field line merging process has been proposed as the most likely explanation for solar flare eruptions. However, some flares can release energy which equals 10% of the suns' total output in a second. This large amount of energy is difficult to achieve with the magnetic field line merging concept.

Thus it may be that the configuration of the magnetic fields and associated hydromagnetic waves (oscillation of field lines) may induce a "resonance" with gravitational fields resulting in a release of gravitational as well as magnetic energy.

It is well known that the geometrical relationships of the magnetic fields (and thus the field gradients) are more important to the production of solar flairs than the magnitude of the field strength.

A strongly convoluted boundary between magnetic polarities results in a high probability for large and frequent flares. Another fact of interest is that hydromagnetic waves generated by solar flare have been observed to propagate across the chromospheric surface and trigger flares in other sun spot regions.

Alfven waves, which appear to be the dominant wave form involved, change only the geometry of the field lines. This effect also indicates that the initiation of solar flares definitely depends on geometrical relationships as do the properties of space-time and gravitational fields.

Magnetic field line merging has also been used to explain the interaction of the solar wind (and associated fields) with the Earth's magnetic fields at the magnetopause and the generation of magnetic substorms which often are triggered by solar flairs.

The magnetic fields line merging process is also an essential part of the field resonance "propulsion" concept.

 

 

Hyundai Motor Company Robots Dance Better Than You Do...,

theverge |   It’s not the first time Boston Dynamics has shown off its robots’ dancing skills: the company showcased a video of its Spot robot doing the Running Man to “Uptown Funk” in 2018. but the new video takes things to another level, with the Atlas robot tearing it up on the dance floor: smoothly running, jumping, shuffling, and twirling through different moves.

Things get even more incredible as more robots file out, prancing around in the kind of coordinated dance routine that puts my own, admittedly awful human dancing to shame. Compared to the jerky movements of the 2016 iteration of Atlas, the new model almost looks like a CGI creation. 

Boston Dynamics was recently purchased by Hyundai, which bought the robotics firm from SoftBank in a $1.1 billion deal. The company was originally founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it became known for its dog-like quadrupedal robots (most notably, the DARPA-funded BigDog, a precursor to the company’s first commercial robot, Spot.) It was bought by Alphabet’s X division in 2013, and then by Softbank in 2017.

While the Atlas and Handle robots featured here are still just research prototypes, Boston Dynamics has recently started selling the Spot model to any company for the considerable price of $74,500. But can you really put a price on creating your own personal legion of boogieing robot minions?

 

Do These Patents Describe Operable Technologies Or Are They Simply Weaponized Patents?

It's been a year since I touched on this subject, prolly time to hit it a lick and a promise again....,

thedrive |  The War Zone reported on a series of strange patent applications the U.S. Navy has filed over the last few years and questioned what their connections may be with the ongoing saga of Navy personnel reporting incidents involving unidentified objects in or near U.S. airspace. 

We have several active Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Navy to pursue more information related to the research that led to these patents. As those are being processed, we've continued to dig through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) Public Patent Application Information Retrieval database to get as much context for these patents as possible.

In doing so, we came across documents that seem to suggest, at least by the Navy's own claims, that two highly peculiar Navy patents, the room temperature superconductor (RTSC) and the high-energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG), may in fact already be in operation in some manner. The inventor of the Navy's most bizarre patent, the straight-out-of-science fiction-sounding hybrid aerospace/underwater craft, describes that craft as leveraging the same room temperature superconductor technology and high energy electromagnetic fields to enable its unbelievable speed and maneuverability. If those two technologies are already operable as the Navy claims, could this mean the hybrid craft may also already operable or close to operable? Or is this just more evidence that the whole exotic 'UFO' patent endeavor on the Navy's behalf is some sort of ruse or even gross mismanagement of resources?

Make sure to read our last feature on this bizarre topic to get up to speed on critical background information before continuing on. 

At the heart of these questions is the term “operable.” In most patent applications, applicants must assert proof of a patent’s or invention’s “enablement,” or the extent to which a patent is described in such a way that any person who is familiar with similar technologies or techniques would be able to understand it, and theoretically reproduce it.

However, in these patent documents, the inventor Salvatore Pais, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division's (NAWCAD) patent attorney Mark O. Glut, and the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise's Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Sheehy, all assert that these inventions are not only enabled, but operable. To help me understand what that term may mean in these contexts, I reached out to Peter Mlynek, a patent attorney. 

Mlynek informed me that the terms “operable” or “operability” are not common in patent applications, but that there is little doubt that the use of the term is meant to assert to the USPTO that these inventions actually work:

 

Has Jim Woodward Conquered Gravity And Built An Inertial Drive?

wired  |  Every spacecraft that has ever left Earth has relied on some type of propellant to get it to its destination. Typically a spacecraft moves by igniting its fuel in a combustion chamber and expelling hot gases. (Even more exotic forms of propulsion, such as ion thrusters, still require propellant.) That’s why humans have remained stuck so close to home. A spacecraft can only accelerate as long as it has fuel to burn or a planet to loop around for a gravitational assist. Those methods can’t even carry a vehicle all the way to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbor, in any reasonable amount of time. The fastest spacecraft ever built, the Parker Solar Probe, which will hit speeds over 400,000 miles per hour, would take thousands of years to get there.

Woodward’s MEGA drive is different. Instead of propellant, it relies on electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust. The stack of crystals, which store tiny amounts of energy, vibrates tens of thousands of times per second when zapped with electric current. Some of the vibrational frequencies harmonize as they roll through the device, and when the oscillations sync up in just the right way, the small drive lurches forward.

This might not sound like the secret to interstellar travel, but if that small lurch can be sustained, a spacecraft could theoretically produce thrust for as long as it had electric power. It wouldn’t accelerate quickly, but it could accelerate for a long time, gradually gaining in velocity until it was whipping its way across the galaxy. An onboard nuclear reactor could supply it with electric power for decades, long enough for an array of MEGA drives to reach velocities approaching the speed of light. If Woodward’s device works, it’d be the first propulsion system that could conceivably reach another solar system within the lifespan of an astronaut. How does it work? Ask Woodward and he’ll tell you his gizmo has merely tapped into the fabric of the universe and hitched a ride on gravity itself.

Sound impossible? A lot of theoretical physicists think so too. In fact, Woodward is certain most theoretical physicists think his propellantless thruster is nonsense. But in June, after two decades of halting progress, Woodward and Fearn made a minor change to the configuration of the thruster. Suddenly, the MEGA drive leapt to life. For the first time, Woodward seemed to have undeniable evidence that his impossible engine really worked. Then the pandemic hit.

On a clear night in March 1967, Woodward was stargazing on the rooftop of Pensión Santa Cruz, a hotel in the heart of Seville, in Spain. The 26-year-old physicist was struggling with his chosen profession and had taken a break from graduate work at New York University. He found himself drawn to fringe research topics, particularly those having to do with gravity, which he knew would make it hard to get a job. “It became clear to me simply by looking at the physics department around me that a bunch of people like that were unlikely to hire someone like me,” Woodward says. So he decided to try something else. He had picked up flamenco guitar as an undergrad and even performed in clubs in New York. Inspired by his aunt, a CIA officer who had learned to play the instrument while stationed in Madrid, he headed to Spain to pursue a career in it.

At the time, the space race was only a decade old and satellite spotting was a popular sport. As Woodward gazed up from atop his Spanish hotel, he saw a speck of light arcing across the sky and mentally calculated its path. But as he watched the satellite, it began deviating from its expected trajectory—first by a little and then by a lot.

Everything Woodward knew about satellites told him that what he was seeing should be impossible. It would take too much energy for a satellite to change its orbit like that, and most satellites weren’t able to shift more than a couple of degrees. And yet, he had just seen a satellite double back with his own eyes. He didn't conclude that engineers at NASA or in the Soviet Union must have secretly achieved a breakthrough in satellite propulsion. Instead, he believes he saw a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin. “Critters at least as clever as us had figured out how to get around spacetime far better than we are capable of doing,” Woodward says. That changed the question, he says, from if it was possible to how.

Never one to doubt the power of the human intellect, especially his own, Woodward reckoned he could build a similar interstellar propulsion system if he put his mind to it. “If somebody figured out how the hell to do something like that, they probably aren’t an awful lot smarter than I am,” Woodward recalls thinking at the time. “So I thought maybe I should devote a little time to trying to do that.” It was a project that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Woodward completed his master’s degree in physics at NYU in 1969, and he left to do a PhD in history at the University of Denver shortly after. His decision to pivot from physics to history was a pragmatic one. As a master’s student, he spent a lot of his time combing through old scientific journals in search of promising gravitational research that had been abandoned or hit a dead end so he could pick up the torch. “I was doing the history of science already, so I might as well get a degree in it,” Woodward says. “It was an obvious thing to do.” As an academic historian, he’d enjoy the job security that comes with uncontroversial research and still have the freedom to study fringe gravitational topics as an avocation. He accepted a position in the Cal State Fullerton history department in 1972.

An Intriguing Fourth Theory Of Everything

futurism  |  It’s not every day that we come across a paper that attempts to redefine reality.

But in a provocative preprint uploaded to arXiv this summer, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way — suggesting that we’re living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us. In other words, he wrote in the paper, it’s a “possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network.”

For years, physicists have attempted to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first posits that time is universal and absolute, while the latter argues that time is relative, linked to the fabric of space-time.

In his paper, Vanchurin argues that artificial neural networks can “exhibit approximate behaviors” of both universal theories. Since quantum mechanics “is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales,” he writes, “it is widely believed that on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it.”

“We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works,” reads the paper’s discussion. “With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong.”

The concept is so bold that most physicists and machine learning experts we reached out to declined to comment on the record, citing skepticism about the paper’s conclusions. But in a Q&A with Futurism, Vanchurin leaned into the controversy — and told us more about his idea.

Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics?

Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question.

The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well how the system further away from the equilibrium. Coincidence? May be, but as far as we know quantum and classical mechanics is exactly how the physical world works.

The second way is to start from physics. We know that quantum mechanics works pretty well on small scales and general relativity works pretty well on large scales, but so far we were not able to reconcile the two theories in a unified framework. This is known as the problem of quantum gravity. Clearly, we are missing something big, but to make matters worse we do not even know how to handle observers. This is known as the measurement problem in context of quantum mechanics and the measure problem in context of cosmology.

Then one might argue that there are not two, but three phenomena that need to be unified: quantum mechanics, general relativity and observers. 99% of physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is the main one and everything else should somehow emerge from it, but nobody knows exactly how that can be done. In this paper I consider another possibility that a microscopic neural network is the fundamental structure and everything else, i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers, emerges from it.

Is Neuralink Something You'd Willingly Sign Up For?

theverge |  Elon Musk has said that his secretive neurotech firm Neuralink will demonstrate a working “device,” presumably a brain-machine interface, at 6PM ET on Friday. Musk has spoken repeatedly about his belief that BMI devices are needed to help humans keep up with AI by supplementing our brainpower, but right now, his goal is much simpler: to create an implantable device that lets people control phones or computers with their mind.

Musk initially announced the August 28th “progress update” back in July, and has now offered more details on what will be shown. He says the update will include the unveiling of a second-generation robot designed to attach the company’s technology to the brain, and a demo of neurons “firing in real-time,” though it’s not clear exactly what is meant by this. 

Even compared to Musk’s other ventures like Tesla and SpaceX, Neuralink is ambitious. The company wants to connect to the brain using flexible electrodes thinner than a human hair that it calls “threads.” Current BMI devices use stiff electrodes for this job, which can cause damage. But inserting flexible electrodes is a much more delicate and challenging task, hence the company’s focus on building a “sewing machine” like robot to do the job.

 

These Devices Will Be Priceless Magical Artifacts After The Great Fall.....

techcrunch |  Pleasanton-based green energy startup NDB, Inc. has reached a key milestone today with the completion of two proof of concept tests of its nano diamond battery (NDB) . One of these tests took place at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the other at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, and both saw NDB’s battery tech manage a 40% charge, which is a big improvement over the 15% charge collection efficiency (effectively energy lossiness relative to maximum total possible charge) of standard commercial diamond.

NDB’s innovation is in creating a new, proprietary nano diamond treatment that allows for more efficient extraction of electric charge from the diamond used in the creation of the battery. Their goal is to ultimately commercialize a version of their battery that can self-charge for up to a maximum lifespan of 28,000 years, created from artificial diamond-encased carbon-14 nuclear waste.

This battery doesn’t generate any carbon emissions in operation, and only requires access to open air to work. And while they’re technically batteries, because they contain a charge which will eventually be expended, they provide their own charge for much longer than the lifetime of any specific device or individual user, making them effectively a charge-free solution.

NDB ultimately hopes to turn their battery into a viable source of power for just about anything that consumes it — including aircraft, EVs, trains and more, all the way down to smartphones, wearables and tiny industrial sensors. The company is currently now at work creating a prototype of its first commercial battery in order to make that available sometime later this year.

It has also just signed its first beta customers, who will actually be receiving and making use of those first prototypes. While it hasn’t named them specifically, it did say that one is “a leader in nuclear fuel cycle products and services,” and the other is “a leading global aerospace, defense and security manufacturing company.” Obviously, this kind of tech has appeal in just about every sector, but defense and power concerns are likely among the deepest-pocketed.