Greed, Ignorance, And Obscenity Has Killed American Popular Music

theatlantic  |  Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music. The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Police.

I encountered this phenomenon myself recently at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on “Message in a Bottle” (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under 30 but every song was more than 40 years old. I asked my server: “Why are you playing this old music?” She looked at me in surprise before answering: “Oh, I like these songs.”

Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing the hits of decades past instead. Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now even new songs that become bona fide hits can pass unnoticed by much of the population.

Only songs released in the past 18 months get classified as “new” in the MRC database, so people could conceivably be listening to a lot of two-year-old songs, rather than 60-year-old ones. But I doubt these old playlists consist of songs from the year before last. Even if they did, that fact would still represent a repudiation of the pop-culture industry, which is almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.

Every week I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, band managers, and other professionals who want to hype the newest new thing. Their livelihoods depend on it. The entire business model of the music industry is built on promoting new songs. As a music writer, I’m expected to do the same, as are radio stations, retailers, DJs, nightclub owners, editors, playlist curators, and everyone else with skin in the game. Yet all the evidence indicates that few listeners are paying attention.

Consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction, because the cultural response was little more than a yawn. I follow thousands of music professionals on social media, and I didn’t encounter a single expression of annoyance or regret that the biggest annual event in new music had been put on hold. That’s ominous.

Can you imagine how angry fans would be if the Super Bowl or NBA Finals were delayed? People would riot in the streets. But the Grammy Awards go missing in action, and hardly anyone notices.

Both Dystopian And Utopian Visions Of The Metaverse Are A LOOONG Way From Realization...,

technologyreview |  The first person to write about the “metaverse” was Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, but the concept of alternative electronic realms, including the “cyberspace” of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, was already well established.

In contrast to what we typically think of as the internet, a metaverse is a 3D immersive environment shared by multiple users, in which you can interact with others via avatars. A metaverse can, with the support of the right technology, feel like real life, with all the usual elements of work, play, trade, friendship, love—a world of its own.

Perhaps the best-known prototype metaverse is the online virtual world Second Life, whose very name implies an alternate existence. Other games might also be said to be metaverses in their own right: World of Warcraft, Everquest, Fortnite, Animal Crossing. Each of these offers its own version of an immersive world, although they don’t quite have the ability to completely take over your senses. Most users experience these games from the outside looking in: screens front and center, with speakers on the sides. Actions are mediated by a keyboard, mouse, trackpad, or game controller instead of players’ hands and feet.

Technology is starting to change that. High-density screens, virtual-­reality goggles and glasses, surround sound, and spatial audio are putting more genuinely immersive experiences within reach. Cameras are gaining 3D capabilities, and single microphones are giving way to microphone arrays that capture sound with better depth and position. Augmented reality, which overlays virtual objects onto a video feed of the real world, provides a bridge between purely virtual and analog or real experiences. There is progress toward adding a sense of touch, too, in the form of multi­touch screens, haptic technologies, control gloves, and other wearables. Wraparound environments like Industrial Light and Magic’s Stagecraft are within reach only to certain industries for now but may see wider use as technology follows the typical curve of adoption and commoditization.

A Metaverse Presupposes Ubiquitous Cinematographic Pixelation....,

technologyreview | The computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith cofounded both Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division and Pixar Animation Studios. For those achievements alone, he is one of the most important technological innovators in cinema since at least the end of the Second World War. But Smith is not a Hollywood guy, and his intriguing, foundational new book A Biography of the Pixel is not a Tinseltown book. There are only the slightest morsels of gossip (Steve Jobs was a difficult man to work with—confirmed!), and the only marquee celebrity who appears in Smith’s story with any frequency is George Lucas. Smith isn’t interested in fame. He’s chasing more profound themes, arguing in effect that the great project he was part of—the invention and development of computer graphics—is far more important than anything that ever happened in Hollywood.

Smith is what used to be called a “graybeard” in computer programming circles. He’s from that generation of engineers and coders who watched the digital age rise from the swamps of secret military projects and the space program to conquer the world. He has spoken machine language. He marveled at the first crude graphics to exhibit motion on green-and-black screens. And he was among the first to demonstrate the newfound ability of a stylus to trace a smooth curve of digital “paint.”

In A Biography of the Pixel, Smith’s aim is to set down clearly the trajectory of two important, intertwined stories. The first story is the development of computer images, from origin to digital ubiquity. There are, in Smith’s telling, many names, places, and breakthroughs missing from the record, and he has taken on the job of adding them back in with an engineer’s eye for precision. The second story, unfolding in parallel, is about the impact of those images—a transformative force Smith calls “Digital Light.” It encompasses basically everything we experience through screens, and he argues convincingly that it is among the most important innovations in human communication since the first simple depictions of daily life were etched on the walls of caves.

The humble pixel

As Smith demonstrates repeatedly, far too much credit has been allowed to slide to the supposed wizardry of individual geniuses. The reality is a muddy, overlapping history of groups of inventors, working by turns in competition and in collaboration, often ad hoc and under considerable commercial or political pressure. 

Thomas Edison and France’s Lumière brothers, for example, were great promoters and exploiters of early film technology. Both exhibited full systems circa 1895 and were happy to claim full credit, but neither built the first complete system of camera, film, and projector all (or even mostly) on their own. The real answer to the question of who invented movies, Smith writes, is a “briar patch” of competing lineages, with parts of the system developed by erstwhile partners of Edison’s and similar parts by a handful of French inventors who worked with the Lumières. 

Among the crucial figures relegated to history’s dustbin were William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (an odd European aristocrat who designed and built the first movie camera for Edison) and Georges Demenÿ (whose design was copied without credit by the Lumières). Smith shows perhaps too much of his exhaustive work in rescuing these convoluted origin stories—there are similarly tangled muddles at every major stage in the development of computers and graphics—but his effort to set the historical record straight is admirable. 

The main drawback of all this wrangling with the egos and avarice of several generations of forceful men (they are, alas, virtually all men) is that it sometimes distracts Smith’s focus from his larger theme, which is that the dawn of Digital Light represents such a rare shift in how people live that it deserves to be described as epochal. 

Digital Light, in Smith’s simplest definition, is “any picture composed of pixels.” But that technical phrase understates the full import of the “vast new realm of imagination” that has been created by its rise. That realm encompasses Pixar movies, yes, but also video games, smartphone apps, laptop operating systems, goofy GIFs traded via social media, deadly serious MRI images reviewed by oncologists, the touch screens at the local grocery store, and the digital models used to plan Mars missions that then send back yet more Digital Light in the form of jaw-dropping images of the Red Planet’s surface. 

Winter Siege Allgemeine Impfpflicht - ISRIB And SIRT6 - But Not For You Pissants....,

consentfactory |  So, GloboCap has crossed the Rubicon. The final phase of its transformation of society into a pathologized-totalitarian dystopia, where mandatory genetic-therapy injections and digital compliance papers are commonplace, is now officially underway.

On November 19, 2021, the government of New Normal Austria decreed that, as of February, experimental mRNA injections will be mandatory for the entire population. This decree comes in the midst of Austria’s official persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” i.e., political dissidents and other persons of conscience who refuse to convert to the new official ideology and submit to a series of mRNA injections, purportedly to combat a virus that causes mild-to-moderate flu-like symptoms (or no symptoms of any kind at all) in about 95% of the infected and the overall infection fatality rate of which is approximately 0.1% to 0.5%.

Austria is just the tip of the New Normal spear. Prominent New-Normal fascists in Germany, like Der Führer of Bavaria, Markus Söder, and Minister of Propaganda Karl Lauterbach, are already calling for an allgemeine Impfpflicht (i.e., “compulsory vaccination requirement”), which should not come as a surprise to anyone. The Germans are not going sit idly by and let the Austrians publicly out-fascist them, are they? They have a reputation to uphold, after all! Italy will probably be next to join in, unless Lithuania or Australia beats them to the punch.

But, seriously, this is just the beginning of the Winter Siege I wrote about recently. The plan seems to be to New-Normalize Europe first — generally speaking, Europeans are more docile, respectful of all authority, and not very well armed — and then use it as leverage to force the new pathologized totalitarianism on the USA, and the UK, and the rest of the world.

I do not believe this plan will succeed. Despite the most intensive propaganda campaign in the history of propaganda campaigns, there remain enough of us who steadfastly refuse to accept the “New Normal” as our new reality.

And a lot of us are angry, extremely angry … militantly, explosively angry.

One Unadvertised Scheme - AMONG MANY - For Shaking Down "Middle-Class" Peasants

@seangotcher #housing ♬ San Tropez - Illect Recordings

msn |  In a video that’s garnered more than 2.4 million views on TikTok, Nevada real-estate agent Sean Gotcher criticizes the “iBuying” business model, in which companies buy and sell homes for a profit. In the video, he proposes that a nameless company has a website where many people search for homes “when they’re bored,” and he says that same company “uses that information to go into that ZIP code and start purchasing houses.”

In other words, he’s suggesting that companies such as Zillow are using the data they glean from people’s perusal of home listings on their sites to make decisions about which houses to buy as iBuyers.

Gotcher later argues that the company will buy 30 homes at one price, and then purchase a 31st home at a higher price. “What that just did is create a new comp,” Gotcher says, referring to comparable prices on nearby properties, which appraisers use to determine the value of a home for sale. He then says the company can turn around and sell the other homes at that new, higher price.

In subsequent videos, Gotcher takes on Zillow and Redfin more directly, criticizing their respective business practices.

“I’m happy to see the conversation that’s occurring at every printer in every real estate office about data storage, mixed with buying power and recognizable marketing is finally happening outside our office doors so more can participate in the discussion,” Gotcher, who works for Level Up Real Estate in Henderson, Nev., told MarketWatch in an email.

The video subsequently garnered even more attention on Twitter when a person with the username Gladvillain shared it after learning that the user’s mother had sold her home to Zillow. Many users claimed that Zillow was purchasing “all of the homes,” and said they planned to boycott the platform.

Both Zillow and Redfin contradicted the video’s claims. “The internet has empowered millions of consumers with more information, transparency and tools in real estate to help them make smarter real estate decisions, many provided by Zillow for more than a decade,” a Zillow spokesperson told MarketWatch in an email. “Unfortunately, the internet can also sometimes be a source of misinformation and falsehoods — as is this case.”

A Redfin spokesperson added that the company doesn’t “have the share to manipulate the market nor do we have any desire to, because intentionally overpaying for homes would be a terrible business model.”

Real-estate experts debunked many of the points made in the viral video, and argued that other forces are to blame for the country’s competitive, pricey housing market.

“If you could rig the residential housing market that easily, the Realtors would have done it long ago,” said Gilles Duranton, a real-estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

 

 

COVID-19 ERASED The Regulatory And Trial-Related Hurdles To IMMENSE PROFIT

unlimitedhangout |  How did Moderna know that COVID-19 would create those conditions months before anyone else, and why did they later claim that their vaccine being tested in NIH trials was different than their commercial candidate? 

In late 2019, the biopharmaceutical company Moderna was facing a series of challenges that not only threatened its ability to ever take a product to market, and thus turn a profit, but its very existence as a company. There were multiple warning signs that Moderna was essentially another Theranos-style fraud, with many of these signs growing in frequency and severity as the decade drew to a close. Part I of this three-part series explored the disastrous circumstances in which Moderna found itself at that time, with the company’s salvation hinging on the hope of a divine miracle, a “Hail Mary” save of sorts, as stated by one former Moderna employee. 

While the COVID-19 crisis that emerged in the first part of 2020 can hardly be described as an act of benevolent divine intervention for most, it certainly can be seen that way from Moderna’s perspective. Key issues for the company, including seemingly insurmountable regulatory hurdles and its inability to advance beyond animal trials with its most promising—and profitable—products, were conveniently wiped away, and not a moment too soon. Since January 2020, the value of Moderna’s stock—which had embarked on a steady decline since its IPO—grew from $18.89 per share to its current value of $339.57 per share, thanks to the success of its COVID-19 vaccine.

Yet, how exactly was Moderna’s “Hail Mary” moment realized, and what were the forces and events that ensured it would make it through the FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) process? In examining that question, it becomes quickly apparent that Moderna’s journey of saving grace involved much more than just cutting corners in animal and human trials and federal regulations. Indeed, if we are to believe Moderna executives, it involved supplying formulations for some trial studies that were not the same as their COVID-19 vaccine commercial candidate, despite the data resulting from the former being used to sell Moderna’s vaccine to the public and federal health authorities. Such data was also selectively released at times to align with preplanned stock trades by Moderna executives, turning many of Moderna’s highest-ranking employees into millionaires, and even billionaires, while the COVID-19 crisis meant economic calamity for most Americans. 

Not only that, but—as Part II of this three-part series will show, Moderna and a handful of its collaborators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) seemed to know that Moderna’s miracle had arrived—well before anyone else knew or could have known. Was it really a coincidental mix of “foresight” and “serendipity” that led Moderna and the NIH to plan to develop a COVID-19 vaccine days before the viral sequence was even published and months before a vaccine was even considered necessary for a still unknown disease? If so, why would Moderna—a company clearly on the brink—throw everything into and gamble the entire company on a vaccine project that had no demonstrated need at the time?

Big Pharma's RNA Therapeutics Race - Temporariness Is A Feature Not A Bug...,

c&en  | For small biotech companies hoping to strike a deal with larger drug developers, there’s no greater destination than the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. In early January 2020, leaders from the start-up Shape Therapeutics made the annual pilgrimage to this mecca of biotechnology networking in San Francisco to make a pitch: What if you could edit someone’s genetic code without ever touching their DNA?

The biotech industry is awash in companies using tools like CRISPR gene editing to fix or turn off problematic DNA. If gene editing works, it could provide a one-and-done cure. But some researchers are worried that if CRISPR slips up and cuts DNA at the wrong site, the damage could also be permanent. “Targeting DNA has a lot of all-or-nothing consequences,” says David Huss, head of research at Shape.

At the conference, Huss explained to potential partners that Shape’s solution was to edit RNA instead of DNA. Our cells constantly produce short-lived RNA molecules that convert the DNA code into functional proteins. Incredibly, our bodies have already evolved an ingenious tool for editing RNA: an enzyme called ADAR—adenosine deaminase acting on RNA. The enzyme converts select adenosine (A) bases, one of four letters that compose the messenger RNA (mRNA) code, into another base that the cell interprets as guanosine (G). Shape was founded in 2018 on the basis of academic work showing that synthetic molecules called guide RNAs could recruit ADAR and direct it to make these A-to-G edits at precise sites.

Scientists estimate that A-to-G editing could fix mutations responsible for nearly 50% of genetic diseases. “We have a tool that can be applied to so many diseases that we couldn’t possibly do them all ourselves,” Huss says. When Shape executives pitched their RNA-editing technology to the Big Pharma company Roche, the two teams clicked, says Sylke Poehling, head of therapeutic modalities at Roche.

The Future Is Already Here - It's Just Not Evenly Distributed...,

Fukuyama Our Posthuman Future (A Neoconservative Speculation On Biotechnology Governance)

Guardian |  With Fukuyama's move into this territory, it may be that bioethicists are going to be upstaged by political economists. His question is clear: do we really want this post-human future, full of bioengineered cyborgs? Should we just retreat behind the mantra - originated by physicists who worked on the hydrogen bomb - that science is progress, and cannot and will not be halted? Most US free marketeers writing in this area take this view, in contrast to the European tradition of regulating in the public interest. So the major surprise of Fukuyama's book is that, in the field of human biotechnology at least, he favours regulation.

He begins by summarising what he sees as the current state of play in the science and technology of genetic and brain sciences, in terms of their capacity to extend healthy human life, to understand the roots of human behaviour (intelligence, aggression, sexual orientation), and to control and change that behaviour with drugs (Prozac, Ritalin and so on). Although refreshingly sceptical about the claims made for the power and scope of such drugs, he rightly argues that at the least they are harbingers of increasingly effective new generations of psychochemicals.

He is on less firm ground when dealing with genetic claims, where he accepts at face value the rather suspect evidence for so-called "smart" or "aggressive" mice engineered by adding or removing DNA from their genomes. And sometimes he is way off course, as when he repeats the once-fashionable 19th-century nostrum that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" - ie, that a human foetus relives its evolutionary history in the nine months prior to birth. But for his purposes, such errors in biological understanding aren't important, and his assessment of the direction in which such work is heading seems about right.

That some of us are sceptical about its feasibility should not prevent us from looking hard at its potential consequences. We should be warned by the example of Sir Ernest Rutherford, who knew more about the structure of atoms in the early decades of the past century than anyone else, but still insisted that the prospect of atomic power was "moonshine".

So what should we do about it? The middle section of the book centres on two classical philosophical problems viewed from within this new context: human rights and human nature. The discourse of rights has become very murky in recent years, in part, according to Fukuyama, because of the rejection of naturalism. Naturalism would claim that there is an intrinsic universal human nature, and that therefore ethics, and as a consequence human "rights", can be derived from it.

These assumptions together constitute what has been called the naturalistic fallacy. Critics point out that human nature can be expressed only within the diverse and historically contingent societies that humans create, and therefore cannot be understood a priori. There is no "nature" outside social context, and within the limits of evolved human biology the societies that we have created are extraordinarily diverse.

In any event, as philosophers from Hume onwards have pointed out, one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". Evolutionary psychologists reject the first criticism, and despite their protestations that they wouldn't dream of doing so, happily spend their time deriving multiple oughts from diverse ises. Fukuyama accepts their claims to universalism in order to build his case that the naturalistic fallacy is itself fallacious. Hence, he argues, there is a human nature on which human rights can be based. And insofar as human biotechnology threatens to interfere with that human nature, it is essential that it be regulated. Sound conclusion, faulty premises.

So, finally, to the tough question: how to bell this particular cat. Most biotech is done in the US, and outside federal laboratories it is largely unregulated. But the situation is paradoxical, as US conservative religious views on, for instance, stem-cell research clash with an otherwise deregulatory agenda. (Legislation to ban so-called therapeutic cloning is currently before Congress, at the same time as the US withdraws from the Kyoto and Start treaties and weakens environmental protection.)

Getting Out Of The "Tried And True Egg-Growing Of Vaccines" By Hijacking Your RNA!

 

A Lifetime Of Booster Shots (Immunity As A Service)

juliusruechel  |  If a plumber with a lifetime of experience were to tell you that water runs uphill, you would know he is lying and that the lie is not accidental. It is a lie with a purpose. If you can also demonstrate that the plumber knows in advance that the product he is promoting with that lie is snake oil, you have evidence for a deliberate con. And once you understand what's really inside that bottle of snake oil, you will begin to understand the purpose of the con.

One of the most common reasons given for mass COVID vaccinations is the idea that if we reach herd immunity through vaccination, we can starve the virus out of existence and get our lives back. It's the COVID-Zero strtegy or some variant of it.

By now it is abundantly clear from the epidemiological data that the vaccinated are able to both catch and spread the disease. Clearly vaccination isn't going to make this virus disappear. Only a mind that has lost its grasp on reality can fail to see how ridiculous all this has become. 

But a tour through pre-COVID science demonstrates that, from day one, long before you and I had even heard of this virus, it was 100% inevitable and 100% predictable that these vaccines would never be capable of eradicating this coronavirus and would never lead to any kind of lasting herd immunity. Even worse, lockdowns and mass vaccination have created a dangerous set of circumstances that interferes with our immune system's ability to protect us against other respiratory viruses. They also risk driving the evolution of this virus towards mutations that are more dangerous to both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated alike. Lockdowns, mass vaccinations, and mass booster shots were never capable of delivering on any of the promises that were made to the public. 

And yet, vaccination has been successfully used to control measles and even to eradicate smallpox. So, why not COVID? Immunity is immunity, and a virus is a virus is a virus, right? Wrong! Reality is far more complicated... and more interesting.

This Deep Dive exposes why, from day one, the promise of COVID-Zero can only ever have been a deliberately dishonest shell game designed to prey on a lack of public understanding of how our immune systems work and on how most respiratory viruses differ from other viruses that we routinely vaccinate against. We have been sold a fantasy designed to rope us into a pharmaceutical dependency as a deceitful trade-off for access to our lives. Variant by variant. For as long as the public is willing to go along for the ride. 

Exposing this story does not require incriminating emails or whistleblower testimony. The story tells itself by diving into the long-established science that every single virologist, immunologist, evolutionary biologist, vaccine developer, and public health official had access to long before COVID began. As is so often the case, the devil is hidden in the details. As this story unfolds it will become clear that the one-two punch of lockdowns and the promise of vaccines as an exit strategy began as a cynical marketing ploy to coerce us into a never-ending regimen of annual booster shots intentionally designed to replace the natural "antivirus security updates" against respiratory viruses that come from hugs and handshakes and from children laughing together at school. We are being played for fools. 

This is not to say that there aren't plenty of other opportunists taking advantage of this crisis to pursue other agendas and to tip society into a full-blown police state. One thing quickly morphs into another. But this essay demonstrates that never-ending boosters were the initial motive for this global social-engineering shell game ― the subscription-based business model, adapted for the pharmaceutical industry. "Immunity as a service". 

So, let's dive into the fascinating world of immune systems, viruses, and vaccines, layer by layer, to dispel the myths and false expectations that have been created by deceitful public health officials, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and media manipulators. What emerges as the lies are peeled apart is both surprising and more than a little alarming.

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” - Sherlock Homes” ― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Authoriteh's Restive About What You Peasants Get Up To With Synthetic Biology

FT  |  Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material. “This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish. For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.

In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.

Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.

Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”

At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.

These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.

In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
 

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch - Nerds Done Nerded Up An RNA Editing CRISPR CAS-7-11

phys.org  |  Researchers at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have discovered a bacterial enzyme that they say could expand scientists' CRISPR toolkit, making it easy to cut and edit RNA with the kind of precision that, until now, has only been available for DNA editing. The enzyme, called Cas7-11, modifies RNA targets without harming cells, suggesting that in addition to being a valuable research tool, it provides a fertile platform for therapeutic applications.

"This new enzyme is like the Cas9 of RNA," says McGovern Fellow Omar Abudayyeh, referring to the DNA-cutting CRISPR enzyme that has revolutionized modern biology by making DNA editing fast, inexpensive, and exact. "It creates two precise cuts and doesn't destroy the cell in the process, like other enzymes," he adds.

Up until now, only one other family of RNA-targeting enzymes, Cas13, has extensively been developed for RNA targeting applications. However, when Cas13 recognizes its target, it shreds any RNAs in the cell, destroying the cell along the way. Like Cas9, Cas7-11 is part of a programmable system; it can be directed at specific RNA targets using a CRISPR guide. Abudayyeh, McGovern Fellow Jonathan Gootenberg, and their colleagues discovered Cas7-11 through a deep exploration of the CRISPR systems found in the microbial world. Their findings were recently reported in the journal Nature.

Exploring natural diversity

Like other CRISPR proteins, Cas7-11 is used by bacteria as a defense mechanism against viruses. After encountering a new virus, bacteria that employ the CRISPR system keep a record of the infection in the form of a small snippet of the pathogen's genetic material. Should that virus reappear, the CRISPR system is activated, guided by a small piece of RNA to destroy the viral genome and eliminate the infection.

These ancient immune systems are widespread and diverse, with different bacteria deploying different proteins to counter their viral invaders.

"Some target DNA, some target RNA. Some are very efficient in cleaving the target but have some toxicity, and others do not. They introduce different types of cuts, they can differ in specificity—and so on," says Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and Koonin have been scouring genome sequences to learn about the natural diversity of CRISPR systems—and to mine them for potential tools. The idea, Abudayyeh says, is to take advantage of the work that evolution has already done in engineering protein machines.

"We don't know what we'll find," Abudayyeh says, "but let's just explore and see what's out there."

A LOOOOONG Ways To Go Sonny Boy, But At Least He's Barking In The Vicinity Of A Tree!

medium |  One of the clear indicators of non-equilibrium processes that scientists have studied in single celled organisms is a loss of what is called detailed balance. Detailed balance is simply the sense that time is neither running forwards or backwards. In other words, a process is just as likely to move from one state in phase space to another as back again.

Thus, the trajectories through phase space that exemplify non-equilibria are those that are distinctly future oriented. They have a memory of past, and they are irreversible or nearly so. And these are also what life depends upon.

Life is able to keep non-equilibrium processes in check however. When it gets out of control, you get cancer, unconstrained growth and out of control metabolic properties. It is as if life is trying to ride a bike down a steep path and cancer is when the bike starts to careen out of control down the slope. Because an out of control process will lead to complete disorder eventually, a tangled mess at the bottom where equilibrium, i.e., death, occurs, life must maintain itself at the brink between chaos and order, between a fast decent to one equilibrium and a stand still at another.

Despite all its vast array, perhaps this definition of life as non-equilibrium processes that maintain high probability trajectories in phase space while maintaining order for a long time will provide, if not a definition, at least a measure of how alive something is. Certainly passing on genetic encoding might be included for it is another measure of persistence.

Such an achievement might also have applications. It could provide us insight into how to build technology that is more “alive” and thus able to repair itself and stop from degrading in hostile environments. This could be useful for biotechnology including medical implants. It could also have applications for space based technologies, especially those that are designed to visit distant planets and act autonomously in unknown environments. The future may not be one of steel and glass and obviously artificial machines but one where biology meets technology and technology borrows the best of what it means to be alive in order to sustain itself. What a fascinating world that would be.

Directed Energy Is The Only Credible Answer To The WMD DuJour - The Drone Swarm

thedrive |  The Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base has released a new analysis of the Department of Defense’s investments into directed energy technologies, or DE. The report, titled “Directed Energy Futures 2060,” makes predictions about what the state of DE weapons and applications will be 40 years from now and offers a range of scenarios in which the United States might find itself either leading the field in DE or lagging behind peer-state adversaries. In examining the current state of the art of this relatively new class of weapons, the authors claim that the world has reached a “tipping point” in which directed energy is now critical to successful military operations.

One of the document’s most eyebrow-raising predictions is that a “force field” could be created by “a sufficiently large fleet or constellation of high-altitude DEW systems” that could provide a "missile defense umbrella, as part of a layered defense system, if such concepts prove affordable and necessary.” The report cites several existing examples of what it calls “force fields,” including the Active Denial System, or “pain ray,” as well as non-kinetic counter-drone systems, and potentially counter-missile systems, that use high-power microwaves to disable or destroy their targets. Most intriguingly, the press release claims that “the concept of a DE weapon creating a localized force field may be just on the horizon.”

In a press release accompanying the document, AFRL’s Directed Energy Deputy Chief Scientist Jeremy Murray-Krezan adds that current directed energy technology is “not quite Star Wars," but adds that the AFRL is "getting close.” The document describes advances occurring both in the private sector and the Department of Defense that are driving the size and weight of DE systems down while increasing power, making the kinds of weapons dreamed about in science fiction seem more like reality. The authors describe the concept in more detail:

The “holy grail” from a military utility perspective is a DE weapon system effective enough, favorable from a SWAP perspective, and affordable enough to provide a nuclear/missile umbrella. Although a concept often associated with science fiction, in fact ground and ship-based DE defense systems effectively act like point-localized force fields against small and relatively soft targets today. Airborne and space-based DE platforms could achieve a greater area defense and multipoint defenses, for a broader coverage missile umbrella.

“By 2060 we can predict that DE systems will become more effective, and this idea of a force field includes methods to destroy other threats too,” Murray-Krezan said in the press release. “Eventually there may be potential to achieve the penultimate goal of a Nuclear or ballistic missile umbrella. It’s fun to think about what that might be in 2060, but we don't want to speculate too much.”

The Pentagon Been Done Had Total Information Awareness Of Everything Entering Or Exiting Airspace

nationalinterest |  The Pentagon is massively fast-tracking its Next-Generation Interceptor program to deploy a missile defense technology capable of tracking and destroying a new sphere of enemy threats to include high-speed, precision-guided intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and hypersonic weapons potentially traveling through space. 

Mobile ICBM launchers, nuclear weapons traveling at hypersonic speeds, multiple precision-guided re-entry vehicles and multiple missiles attack at once, each with several separating warheads are all very serious threats the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and industry are working quickly to counter through a series of innovations, science and technology efforts, new weapons development such as a Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI) initiative aimed at deploying a new missile defense weapon by the end of the decade.

Intended to introduce paradigm-changing technologies, the emerging NGI is being engineered to destroy multiple ICBMs at one time while also distinguishing actual ICBMs from debris, decoys or enemy countermeasures. This requires a new measure of seeker discernment able to discriminate actual threats from decoys or track multiple threats at once.

The initial thinking was that the new NGI will emerge by the end of the decade, and it now appears the MDA is working with a Raytheon-Northrop Grumman NGI team to see if the timeframe can be accelerated and possibly be ready by as early as 2028. Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Missiles & Defense are slated to provide the interceptor booster, kill vehicle, ground systems, fire control and engagement coordination for the country’s Ground Midcourse Defense (GMD) system.

Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill said the Pentagon’s number one requirement with the NGI is “speed and schedule,” adding “we’ll be testing a little bit earlier.” 

While a lot of detail about the technological configuration and components of the emerging NGI are likely not available for security reasons, the Pentagon’s request to industry did mention the possibility of engineering a single interceptor able to carry multiple kill vehicles.

“It is a really complex threat set and there is a lot of complex technology coming forward,” Hill said. 

Northrop Grumman has partnered with Raytheon on an NGI development program to optimize innovations and technical progress from each company through programs such as Northrop’s Ground Based Strategic Deterrent ICBM and Raytheon’s Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor, both of which harness breakthrough technologies in the areas of sensing discrimination, targeting precision, range and functional reliability.

 

In 2021 - Engineering In Secret Amounts To Bone-In-The-Nose Engineering...,

ieee |  When your job involves working on sensitive information, products and projects, how do you talk about it, not just at work, but also at conferences, when mentoring or recruiting, or at dinner and social events?

“When information about what you are doing is privileged—classified—you can’t talk about it,” says Dennisa Thomas, senior surety systems engineer at Sandia National Laboratories “But you can talk about the general understanding or expertise you have gained from certain systems and materials projects, and how you can transfer that knowledge and those skills to other spaces.”

One definition of surety, according to Thomas, is “a level of confidence that a component or system will operate exactly as intended, both under expected and unexpected circumstances.” This includes not just Sandia’s mandate to keep the United States’ nuclear stockpiles safe, secure, and effective, but now also tackling complex national security problems including homeland security, transportation, energy, and cyber-, chemical and biological defense.

For example, reports Thomas—who has worked on hundreds of components and systems—“I worked with the team that put the first Sandia-designed telemetry transmitter into production. I’m currently working on qualifying two fusing/firing assemblies for production.”

Thomas got into surety “by picking opportunities,” she says. “North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCA&T), where I got my B.S. in electrical engineering, has a large career fair twice a year.... During my first year, I was offered an internship with the NSA, where I learned about some of the communications systems and work they do for the military.

“And at another career fair, somebody from Sandia spoke with me, telling me about their Masters Fellowship Program, which gives graduating seniors a chance to attend graduate school to achieve their master’s degree in an area of focus that Sandia is interested in. I went to Florida State University for my M.S. in electrical and electronics engineering and then in 2015 came back to Sandia full time.”

Surety appealed to Thomas because “you get to see how the pieces and teams all fit together.” For those interested in the field, even outside government work, “Learn about failure analysis,” says Thomas. “For electrical engineering, math and science is a given. Having a strong foundation in circuit analysis and electronics is important. And statistics is important—if we can’t interpret the data that’s collected, it’s not as helpful.”

Poor Caitlin Johnstone - All The Physicists Were Human - And One Of Them DID Have A Secret

caitlinjohnstone  |  In the summer of 1950, four nuclear physicists were walking to lunch from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Their names were Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi.

One of them was not human.

On the walk the four discussed science, because science is what they always discussed. It's what they lived, it's what they thought about, it's what they ate, slept and breathed. On this particular occasion they discussed the recent spate of reports about flying saucers, and whether or not an alien civilization could hypothetically have discovered how to travel faster than the speed of light.

Once they arrived at the Fuller Lodge for their meal their intense conversation was interrupted by the mundane activities of finding seats and ordering their food. After a brief pause, Fermi's thick Italian accent broke the silence with a question that would later become famous.

"But where is everybody?" he asked loudly.

The way he phrased it caused the other three to burst out laughing; they immediately understood that he was asking, in his own inimitable way, why no signs of extraterrestrial life had been discovered.

They listened with rapt attention as Fermi's luminous mind rapidly dissected the sheer mathematical improbability of humanity being the only intelligent life in this galaxy, let alone the entire universe, given the sheer number of stars and the likelihood that at least a small percentage of them would have habitable planets capable of giving rise to life. This question, and the peculiar exclamation with which it was first expressed, would go on to be known as the Fermi paradox.

The scientists joyfully batted around ideas with the Italian "pope of physics", then finished their meal, returned to the laboratory, and they each went their separate ways.

Fermi worked late, as such rare geniuses often do. Out there in the world with small talk, politics, family and teenaged children, it was difficult to really feel at ease. But in the world of scientific adventure, discoveries and breakthroughs, he always felt in command.

The sunlight had long gone and the lab had gone still, and Fermi was scribbling away in his office, when there was a knock at the door. It gave Fermi a start; nobody ever interrupted him at this hour, that's what he liked about it.

"What is it?" he asked in irritation.

The door opened. It was York.

"Hi," York said.

"York," Fermi replied.

"Can I come in?"

"Yes, yes come in."

York closed the door.

"So," he said. "Do you want to know?"

"Want to know what?"

"Do you want an answer to the question you asked at lunch?"

Fermi just stared.

Paradise Within Reach - But Billions Of Y'all Gotta Go, Gotta Go, Gotta Go!!!

NYTimes |  As medical and social advances mitigate diseases of old age and prolong life, the number of exceptionally long-lived people is increasing sharply. The United Nations estimates that there were about 95,000 centenarians in 1990 and more than 450,000 in 2015. By 2100, there will be 25 million. Although the proportion of people who live beyond their 110th birthday is far smaller, this once-fabled milestone is also increasingly common in many wealthy nations. The first validated cases of such “supercentenarians” emerged in the 1960s. Since then, their global numbers have multiplied by a factor of at least 10, though no one knows precisely how many there are. In Japan alone, the population of supercentenarians grew to 146 from 22 between 2005 and 2015, a nearly sevenfold increase. 

Given these statistics, you might expect that the record for longest life span would be increasing, too. Yet nearly a quarter-century after Calment’s death, no one is known to have matched, let alone surpassed, her 122 years. The closest was an American named Sarah Knauss, who died at age 119, two years after Calment. The oldest living person is Kane Tanaka, 118, who resides in Fukuoka, Japan. Very few people make it past 115. (A few researchers have even questioned whether Calment really lived as long as she claimed, though most accept her record as legitimate based on the weight of biographical evidence.)

As the global population approaches eight billion, and science discovers increasingly promising ways to slow or reverse aging in the lab, the question of human longevity’s potential limits is more urgent than ever. When their work is examined closely, it’s clear that longevity scientists hold a wide range of nuanced perspectives on the future of humanity. Historically, however — and somewhat flippantly, according to many researchers — their outlooks have been divided into two broad camps, which some journalists and researchers call the pessimists and the optimists. Those in the first group view life span as a candle wick that can burn for only so long. They generally think that we are rapidly approaching, or have already reached, a ceiling on life span, and that we will not witness anyone older than Calment anytime soon.

In contrast, the optimists see life span as a supremely, maybe even infinitely elastic band. They anticipate considerable gains in life expectancy around the world, increasing numbers of extraordinarily long-lived people — and eventually, supercentenarians who outlive Calment, pushing the record to 125, 150, 200 and beyond. Though unresolved, the long-running debate has already inspired a much deeper understanding of what defines and constrains life span — and of the interventions that may one day significantly extend it.

The theoretical limits on the length of a human life have vexed scientists and philosophers for thousands of years, but for most of history their discussions were largely based on musings and personal observations. In 1825, however, the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz published a new mathematical model of mortality, which demonstrated that the risk of death increased exponentially with age. Were that risk to continue accelerating throughout life, people would eventually reach a point at which they had essentially no chance of surviving to the next year. In other words, they would hit an effective limit on life span.

Instead, Gompertz observed that as people entered old age, the risk of death plateaued. “The limit to the possible duration of life is a subject not likely ever to be determined,” he wrote, “even should it exist.” Since then, using new data and more sophisticated mathematics, other scientists around the world have uncovered further evidence of accelerating death rates followed by mortality plateaus not only in humans but also in numerous other species, including rats, mice, shrimp, nematodes, fruit flies and beetles.

In 2016, an especially provocative study in the prestigious research journal Nature strongly implied that the authors had found the limit to the human life span. Jan Vijg, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and two colleagues analyzed decades’ worth of mortality data from several countries and concluded that although the highest reported age at death in these countries increased rapidly between the 1970s and 1990s, it had failed to rise since then, stagnating at an average of 114.9 years. Human life span, it seemed, had arrived at its limit. Although some individuals, like Jeanne Calment, might reach staggering ages, they were outliers, not indicators of a continual lengthening of life.

There Is Nothing Like Spending A Ton On Wunderwaffen

The Research and Technology Protection Program wants everyone to know that aliens ARE real. The UFO’s on FLIR are totally NOT a subsurface maritime-launched UAV. The US DOESN'T have those, but if they did, the Navy might want to introduce them without breaking the law on special access programs. Hypothetically, such limited hangouts could force adversaries to re-think their combat doctrine, potentially delaying future offensives in the South China Sea.  There is nothing like spending a ton on wunderwaffen to plant a kernel of doubt in your adversaries, and convince yourself that conflict is anything but a crapshoot.

This Is A Fool's Errand - But That's Not Going To Stop Them From Trying

robbreport |  It might be an exaggeration to say BioViva CEO Liz Parrish believes death is optional, but for her, Asprey’s goal of living to 180 shows a distinct lack of ambition. “If you can reach homeostasis in the body,” Parrish says, “where it’s regenerating itself just a little bit faster than it’s degrading, then what do you die of? An accident or natural disaster, probably. There’s no expiration date at 90 or 100 years old.”

Tall, blond and fit, Parrish cuts a strikingly youthful figure at 49—one that might convince you to order whatever she’s having. But, like Asprey, she has received criticism from the longevity research community for becoming “patient zero” in her own experimental drug trial, aimed at halting aging at the cellular level. In 2015, Parrish underwent telomerase and follistatin gene therapies in Bogotá, Colombia. The procedures involved receiving around a hundred injections of a cocktail of genes and a virus modified to deliver those new genes into her body’s cells. The objective was to prevent age-related muscle loss and lengthen her telomeres: the “caps” at the end of our chromosomes. Scientists have identified their unraveling as not only a marker of aging but also a potential cause of age-related decline.

Parrish told the media about her clandestine experiment and has published periodic updates on her condition in the five years since, and she reports that she has indeed increased her muscle mass and lengthened her telomeres. Parrish’s punk-rock approach stems from her conviction that the medical-research community—both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and researchers who aren’t business-minded—is moving too slowly, with too much red tape, when it comes to advancing aging therapeutics. But gene therapy is a relatively new area of medicine that brings with it a host of new risks, including cancer, severe immune reactions and infections caused by the viral vector used to deliver the drug.

Parrish downplays such worries. “There may be risks,” she tells Robb Report. “But the known risk is that you’re 100 percent likely to die. So you have to decide for yourself if the potential benefit outweighs that.”

Humans have always aspired to find the fountain of youth, so people might be skeptical about the fact that anti-aging technologies are working now,” says British investor and businessman Jim Mellon. “But the fact is that this is finally happening, and we need to seize the moment.” Mellon cofounded Juvenescence, a three-year-old pharmaceutical company that’s investing in multiple technologies simultaneously to increase the odds of bringing winning products to market.

Mellon, 63, has made his fortune betting on well-timed investment opportunities, and he predicts that a new “stock-market mania” for life extension is just around the corner. “This is like the internet dial-up phase of longevity biotech,” he enthuses. “If you’d invested in the internet in the very early days, you’d be one of the richest people on the planet. We’re at that stage now, so the opportunity for investors is huge.” According to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, he’s not wrong: The market for technologies to increase human life span is projected to grow sixfold to $610 billion in just the next five years.