If you could travel anywhere in the galaxy, where would you go?

Meet the Navis III: An imaginary ship that will take you anywhere in the Milky Way. Its maiden voyage will send you on a tour of the wildest planets humanity has yet discovered: worlds that defy belief, from planetary oases to scorching hot gas giants with clouds made of metal. This interstellar journey will give us a glimpse into how deep nature’s imagination goes…. and blaze a path for future pioneers, who might one day plant their flags on landscapes we can hardly imagine.



Amazing vid, fantastic imagination!

Have you heard about Worldcoin? If not, buckle up, you're in for more madness!


Worldcoin

The technocrat, meglomaniac entrepreneur behind it for world enslavement with a little help from iris-scanning Orbs:


Sam Altman


“We see people waiting multiple hours to receive their Worldcoin and entrepreneurs building whole businesses around the Orb. This excitement and the resulting metrics make us optimistic that Worldcoin can soon connect the first billion users in one global network,” says Sam Altman, Co-Founder of Worldcoin and Former President of Y-Combinator.

I guess it makes sense when you know you’ll be shortly unleashing an artificial intelligence that will imitate people and try to get around robot identifying protocols any way it can.


Introducing World ID and SDK

Quote:Opening the Orb: A look inside Worldcoin’s biometric imaging device

We’ll now take you through some of the most important engineering details of the Orb, as well as how the imaging system works. For security purposes, we will only explicitly leave out tamper detection mechanisms that are meant to catch intrusion attempts.

Removing the Shell

When removing the shell, the mainboard, optical system and cooling system become visible. Most of the optical system is hidden in an enclosure that, together with the shell, forms a dust- and water-resistant environment to enable long-term use even in challenging environments.

What you see is a device that has been refined through multiple prototype and design for manufacturing (DFM) iterations.



Mechanics

Once the shell is removed, the Orb can be divided into four core parts:

    Front: The optical system
    Middle: The mainboard separates the device into two hemispheres (note: its inclination is exactly 23.5°, equivalent to the inclination of the rotational axis of the earth)
    Back: The main computing unit as well as the active cooling system
    Bottom: An exchangeable battery




Battery

No battery we tried would last for a full day on a single charge. So we built a custom exchangeable battery based on 18650 Li-Ion cells—the same form factor as the cells used in a Tesla Model S. The battery consists of 8 cells with 3.7V nominal voltage in a 4S2P configuration (14.8V) with a capacity of close to 100Wh, which is a limit imposed by regulations related to logistics. Now there’s no limit to Orb uptime.



How the Optical System Works

Our early field tests taught us that the verification experience needed to be even simpler than we had anticipated.

To do this, we first experimented with many approaches featuring mirrors that allowed people to use their reflection to align with the Orbs imaging system. However, designs that worked well in the lab quickly broke down in the real world.

We ended up building a two-camera system featuring a wide angle camera and a telephoto camera with an adjustable ~5° field of view by means of a 2D gimbal. This increased the spatial volume in which a signup can be successfully completed by several orders of magnitude, from a tiny box of 20x10x5mm for each eye to a large cone.



The wide angle camera captures the scene, and a neural network predicts the location of both eyes. Through geometrical inference, we steer the field of view of the telephoto camera to the location of an eye to capture a high resolution image of the iris, which is further processed by the Orb into a unique identifier.

The lens  is optimized for the near infrared spectrum and has an integrated custom liquid lens which allows for neural network controlled millisecond-autofocus. It is paired with a global shutter sensor to capture high resolution, distortion free images.



The camera and the corresponding pulsed infrared illumination are synchronized to minimize motion blur and suppress the influence of sunlight. This way, the Orb creates lab environment conditions for imaging, no matter its location. Needless to say, the infrared illumination is compliant with eye safe standards (such as EN 62471:2008).

Image quality was the one thing we never compromised no matter how difficult it was. In terms of resolution the Orb is orders of magnitude above the industry standard. This provides the basis for the lowest error rates possible to, in turn, maximize the inclusivity of the system.

[The back of the mainboard]


The mainboard acts as a custom carrier board for the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX SoM powering the Orb. Apart from the Jetson, the other major “plugged-in” component is a 250GB M.2 SSD. The SSD can be used to buffer images for voluntary data custody and image data collection. Images are irreversibly encrypted with a public key from the server such that, in the unlikely event of a compromised Orb, no data would be exposed. The contribution of data is optional and data deletion can be requested at any point in time through the app.

Further, a STM32 microcontroller controls time-critical peripherals, sequences power, and boots the Jetson. The Orb is equipped with Wi-Fi 6 and optional LTE to enable seamless connectivity as well as a GPS module to locate the Orb and prevent misuse. Finally, a 12 bit liquid lens driver allows for controlling the focus of the telephoto lens with a precision of 0.4mm.

The most densely packed PCB of the Orb is the front PCB. It mainly consists of LEDs. The outermost RGB LEDs power the “UX LED ring.” Further inside, there are 79 near infrared LEDs of different wavelengths. The Orb uses 740nm, 850nm and 940nm LEDs to capture a multispectral image of the iris to make the uniqueness algorithm more accurate and detect fraud.

Manufacturing of the latest generation of Orbs is already well underway in Germany, as well as their distribution to new Worldcoin Operators in cities around the world. In fact, they’ve already helped Worldcoin pass more than one million sign-ups—an important milestone on the way to providing universal access to the global economy.

My team's analysis of the Gimbal UAP case -

Well at least it is a start.. https://lists.youmaker.com/links/wzUR7dX...V1uipFu15A

Quote:House Passes Parents Bill of Rights Act

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) holds the gavel after he was elected on the 15th ballot at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 7, 2023. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

By Joseph Lord
March 24, 2023Updated: March 24, 2023
biggersmaller
Print

0:008:51






The U.S. House of Representatives on March 24 passed H.R. 5, the Parents Bill of Rights Act.
The bill passed the lower chamber in a 213–208 party-line vote.
Republicans easily defeated a Democrat measure to recommit the legislation to committee.
H.R. 5, the fulfillment of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) long-promised “parental bill of rights,” would do several things, each with the overarching goal of ensuring that parents know what’s going on in their children’s classrooms.
The bill comes after COVID-19 restrictions led many parents to receive a better glimpse into their children’s education, as they were learning at home via their computers. Many parents learned in this setting about the far-left ideology being pushed in the classroom.
In turn, parents across the nation began showing up to school board meetings to protest the curriculum.
Later, Attorney General Merrick Garland was caught in an Oct. 4, 2021, memo offering federal resources and legal aid to states days after the National School Boards Association wrote a letter to President Joe Biden saying the country’s “public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat” from these parents and called verbal confrontations and other incidents at local school board meetings across the country “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Since that memo came to light, McCarthy has vowed to deliver legislation to ensure that parents’ control over their children’s education is legally protected.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, made the issue his campaign’s primary concern. Voters rewarded Youngkin by giving him a wide-margin victory over his Democrat rival in the blue-leaning Dominion State.
The main component of the bill would require schools to publicly disclose the contents of their curriculum and library materials to parents. Currently, many schools teaching radical ideology do so without the parents’ knowledge.
Additionally, the bill would establish the right of parents to see their kids’ schools’ expenditures.
“Public schools are paid for by taxpayer dollars,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said of the measure during a House Rules Committee hearing on the bill. “Mothers and fathers deserve financial transparency and to see how their money is being used.”
The bill would also ensure that parents are notified of, and give consent to, any medical procedure performed on their child on school grounds.
A similar provision would require that parents be notified of any violent activity on school grounds.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said that the bill would establish new “checks and balances” for parents over their children’s education.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) called the bill “a basic concept but a powerful statement.”
During floor debate on the bill, Foxx accused education bureaucrats and school district employees of “pushing progressive politics in the classroom while keeping parents in the dark.”
“Parents will finally be empowered to examine classroom curricula and protect the safety and privacy of their children without fear of being targeted by the federal government.
Democrats spoke against the bill.
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), who led Democrat opposition to the bill, dismissed the legislation as the “Politics Over Parents Act.”
Scott said the bill was part of a GOP plot “to allow a vocal minority to impose their beliefs on all parents.”
Protecting Parents Who Speak Out
One of the Republicans’ key goals in crafting the bill was to ensure that parents who speak out against what is being taught to their children do not face retribution from local, state, or federal authorities.
“No longer will [parents] have their speech denied, or feel threatened for expressing their concerns at school board meetings,” Foxx said.
The comment was in reference to a late-2021 controversy in which Attorney General Merrick Garland offered federal resources and guidance to local law enforcement to target parents who attended school board meetings.
In 2021, the United States saw a deluge of concerned parents coming to school board meetings to speak out against left-wing ideology in the classroom.
Many parents came to their school board to speak out against critical race theory (CRT), a highly contentious left-wing theory that holds that white people are inherently “privileged” and that non-white people are inherently oppressed. Critics of CRT note that it has its origins in the political thought of Karl Marx, the ideological founder of communism; the theory has also been criticized as racist for its efforts to reduce the individual to a member of a group on the basis of their skin color.
In his remarks against the bill, Scott suggested that CRT was “an accurate recounting of our nation’s history,” and that the legislation would “punish librarians” who pushed CRT.
Other parents came to school board meetings to speak out against fringe left-wing notions of sex and gender. Many left-wing activists claim that gender is a social construct and that a person can change their gender based on their feelings.
One parent, Terry Newsome of Chicago, who spoke out against allowing “Gender Queer” in his kids’ school library in 2021, was later placed on a terror watch-list with no warning or further explanation.
In an Oct. 4, 2021, memo Garland sent to U.S. attorneys across the nation, the attorney general offered to help local law enforcers to round up and file charges against parents who spoke out.
Republicans took the memo as a sign that the administration was prepared to target parents for protected First Amendment activity. Since then, they have vowed to deliver a “parents’ bill of rights” to protect against such abuses if they took back the House.
During his questioning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) explicitly referenced the Oct. 4 memo as part of the reason for the bill’s existence.
‘Book Banning’
Allegations of “book banning” took up a large portion of the debates over the legislation.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of state legislatures and school districts have prohibited certain books with overtly sexual or racial themes from certain schools or age levels.
For instance, many school districts and states have barred the book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe from school libraries. The book, delivered in the form of a graphic novel, recounts the experience of a minor female who believes she is male; during an especially graphic part of the story, the main character is depicted engaging in oral sex with another biological female who identifies as male.
Another such book, “Flamer” by Mike Curato, traces the homosexual experiences of a minor boy at summer camp with another minor boy.
Though these and other controversial works remain protected by the First Amendment and can be purchased in stores or online, they are inaccessible from many school libraries due to their highly-sexual content.
Nevertheless, Democrats have insisted that restricting children’s access to these and other books is tantamount to censorship.
“State Republicans are going on a book banning spree that would make the Chinese Communist Party blush,” House Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said later.
Twenty-five states have passed such laws.
McGovern depicted this as “Republican legislators telling students what they are, and are not, allowed to learn.”
“That allows one racist or homophobic person to tell an entire class, an entire school, what they can and can’t read,” he added.
During later questioning at the Rules Committee hearing, Scott admitted that nothing in the bill would ban books. But he suggested that if libraries were forced to disclose their inventory, more books would be banned.
As part of the bill, school libraries would be required to publish the full list of books in their library, and to update those lists in a timely fashion when they purchase new materials.
Scott painted a portrait of right-wing organizations mounting crusades to have certain books removed from school libraries: “This bill will make the logistics of that easy.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) responded to this argument later in the hearing, citing “Flamer.”
“If libraries have to publish their lists, yeah, some things might be removed,” Roy said. “[Flamer] should be removed. But it’ll be debated. It’ll be discussed.”

I'm creating this thread as a repository for information I happen to run across on the internet concerning how to squeak by when times are tough or money is tight... like during a depression or economic downturn.

The Appalachians are no stranger to hard times. When white folks first settled here, they mostly just brought a rifle and some shootin' fixin's, an ax or tomahawk (or both if they wanted to be ostentatious), a belt knife that doubled as an everything knife, and maybe a fistful of seed corm.

A lot of folks in those days claimed virgin territory based on "tomahawk improvements". What that meant was that you wandered around until you found a likely piece of turf you wanted to claim, marked the corners of it by blazing trees at the corners with your tomahawk,and then erecting a half-face lean-to or a brush arbor, threw a handful of corn seed into the ground to show you were "farming", and then left it there to grow while you went off to the land office to register your claim, which could take a couple months of travel.

Those settlers learned a lot from the Indians, and it was hard to tell one from the other just going by lifewways. They lived on game from the forest in combination with corn, beans, squash, greens and whatever wild fruit they could locate. They dressed themselves in the skins of the game they ate.

That's the way it was for the next 100 or 150 years here.

Over time, stock was added to their reportoire to decrease the need to go out hunting their dinner, and more folks started dressing in wool and linen as their farming inventory increased.. Cotton never caught on here because the climate precluded them from growing their own.

As time rolled onward, the coal companies moved in and provided "gainful employment", but the net result of that was that the locals depended more on a paycheck and manufactured stuff brought in by the coal companies to stock the company store, and less on self-reliance.

That's how it was during the Great Depression around here, although farther north where my Dear Old Dad was from, and where mineral wealth had not yet been found to be exploited by outsiders, the "coal boom" was not felt. Nor did their lives change up there much from their ancestor's way of life. During the Depression, there was apparently plenty of stuff to buy, but no money to buy it with, Folks had to get creative in their cooking to make whatever they could get stretch farther. Hunting came back into vogue, but there was little time for it for folks here working in the mines, and ammunition was hard to get. Even in my day, my dad still counted my shells when I went out hunting, and when I returned, and there had better be a game item for each expenditure of powder, or there was hell to pay.

Around here, in coal country, gardens were still raised, but they were tended mostly by the women and children, since all the men were sequestered away in a hole in the ground and steadily digging the walls away that supported to roof for most of the day. It also fell to the kids, mostly the older sons, to do the hunting.

You never know when times like that might come back again, economics being a fickle bitch when she's run by knotheads and idiots.

Some of the ways food was stretched during the Depression - and I've eaten most of this stuff, especially the corn bread and the potato cakes.



Good advice from Australia on 6 things to pack your garden with for high returns to keep you from starving. I can live without the cabbage, but to each his own. Corn comes in a staggering number of varieties, but at least one sort of flint corn or dent corn should be included - it grinds better to make corn meal and flour.



Not many folks grow gardens here any more, and most of those that do are older folks. Younger folks have again become too dependent on the outside world, and if that world ever lets them down (as it has done to every single one of their ancestors), they'll either starve or face a steep learning curve, having to learn farming that they should have payed attention to earlier..

.

Over in the Giza's Babylon's Banksters Dept...

Quote:The Glitch Ex Machina Once Again, This Time At Wells Fargo

March 24, 2023 / Joseph P. Farrell

Since everyone's attention appears to be focused on the meltdown at SillyCON Valley Bank, you might want to pay attention to this story spotted and shared by V.T.  Indeed, I suspect that those people entertaining the hypothesis that the meltdown was in part being driven by certain factions within Mr. Globalooney's cabal to create a climate of opinion for ushering in Central Bank Digital Currencies is true.  Such a "currency", it will be argued, would give central banksters the moment-by-moment surveillance capability to ensure that such banks do not indulge in such risky behavior in the future, and that this is an essential step to "safeguard and stabilize" the system...

... except, of course, that we've heard all this nonsense from central banksters before. Just recall the American financial crisis of the early 1900s, and the secretive meeting at Jekyll Island that gave us the likes of the Federal Reserve, which is neither Federal, nor a Reserve, but it "sounded nice" and was a name the banksters could sell to the American public via their progressive lackey in the White House, Woodrow Wilson. That may sound like a bit of an over-simplification of what happened, and perhaps it is, but not by  much and within a few tolerable decimal points and margins of error.  Those same people also gave you the income tax, World War One (funny how the Fed came into existence conveniently a little over a year before that war began), and a bloated and burgeoning federal government that has bombed, burned, bloated, bragged, and defrauded its way into the unresponsive monster that it is now, incapable of winning any war, or trust.

Well, if you're tempted by the idea of central bank digital currencies, you need to stop and ponder this story, and its implications for a financial system determined to go "all in" on central bank digital currencies:

Quote:Wells Fargo Glitch Causes Customers’ Money to Disappear, Leaving Negative Balances

Now one wonders just what Wells Fargo was doing with that money during this miraculous glitch ex machina. This is an old banksters' trick: use the period of the float to make money off of other people's money. It's that period between when a deposit is made at a bank, and the deposit clears at that bank. It's the period that banks tell you "these funds will not be available for three days." What they're not telling you is that oftentimes, in today's digital age, a deposit oftentimes clears in a matter of seconds, leave the bank free to play with your money for those three days.

Now add a central bank digital currency to this process. Your deposit may not clear for several days, the number of days to be determined by how good - or bad - a little boy or girl you've been in supporting whatever narradigm or policy or behavior that they, the banksters, want supported.  Or suppose, just as you're about to make that digital payment at the automated checkout line for your weekly allowed ration of climate-affirming synthetic meat, the system is taken down by the ET Mothership (see last Wednesday's blog). The doors to the "grocery compound" immediately lock, the account is frozen, the cashier-robot yanks your purchases away from you to be restocked on the shelf, and you go hungry. (The cashier-robot wasn't affected by the ET Mothership's hack... you get the idea...)
In short, let us be frank, and honest: there is absolutely nothing about this system that they want to put into place, that is safe, secure, stabilizing, or even human.  Nothing whatsoever.

So quit feeding it.

Quit using a debit card for every transaction.

Use cash, and deal only with those businesses and institutions that accept it.

Your freedom, and your privacy, are at stake. Once the digital system is in place, the only thing that can bring it down, is a massive system-wide catastrophe. A glitch ex machina that brings down the whole machina, because too many were too lazy to see that the machine they were helping to build was not a machine at all, but just a prison.

See you on the flip side...

Open catch-all thread for DARPA projects/programs of interest and boldly go where unreal horrors out of sic-fi novels and super-brain polymaths could only think up, the Imagineers of War, to include silly amusement R&D and for the love of DARPA acronyms. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (formerly ARPA; created in 1957 after the the Sputnik revelation -co-founded by Jeff Bezos' paternal grand daddy) as some of you may know spans an extremely broad spectrum of advanced technology endeavors from all facets of exoteric & esoteric science, aviation, Bio-metrics, vaccines for Muslims, surveillance, computers, nanotechnology, satellites, weather manipulation, space, weapons & war machines, Virtual, electro-magnetics, brain tech, special meta materials manufacturing, maritime, cyber & social media influence/meme warfare to elaborate ARGs, everything & anything concerning National Security, you name it they have a stake in it, often clandestine like a double-edge sword and sometimes covertly funded via their many front companies & Orgs...and sometimes their tech advances are knowingly & unknowingly unleashed onto the sheeple consumer; for better or worse.

I mean what's not to like, LOL.



Starting off with their most recent R&D is The DARPA BRACE program aims to prolong the serviceability of DoD structures & airfield pavements by integrating a self-repair capability into existing concrete.

Quote:Concrete in Disrepair? DARPA May Help You BRACE It

BRACE program teams aim to introduce self-repair capabilities to defense concrete installations

Recent years have seen an emergence of so-called living materials, or materials that have the properties of living things. The DARPA Bio-inspired Restoration of Aged Concrete Edifices (BRACE) program aims to prolong the serviceability of Department of Defense structures and airfield pavements by integrating a self-repair capability into existing concrete. The central hypothesis of BRACE is that concrete can be infused with self-repair capabilities typically found in living organisms, drawing inspiration from vascular systems found in humans and vast networks of filamentous fungi that can span acres of land similar in scale to concrete buildings. Such systems could provide a network of transportation for healing within the depths of the material to repair cracks before they reach the surface and before they cause failure.

DARPA has selected program performers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Battelle Memorial Institute to meet program goals. Each performer has proposed unique approaches to provide concrete with a network of “vasculature” integrated within the depths of the material, which can be used not only for crack repair but also for diagnosing the root causes of deterioration before they result in catastrophic damage. All teams will work toward operationalizing the vasculature, which requires applying and maintaining its function, developing novel testbeds, and predicting long-term performance through modeling.


“More than ever, we are seeing how our ability to understand and engineer biology can be leveraged for applications far beyond human health and disease, especially in the field of materials science,” noted Dr. Matthew J. Pava, BRACE program manager. “BRACE will attempt to push the limits of what is possible for engineering biological technologies to safely function and preserve our legacy concrete, and in doing so, we likely will learn about new possibilities for engineering biology and materials that we have not yet conceived.”

The 4.5-year research effort includes a Strategic Track for long-term solutions geared towards big, heavy structures such as missile silos and naval piers, and a Tactical Track for improving rapid airfield damage repair in expeditionary settings.

“Although BRACE is initially focused on military use-cases, if successful, technologies developed on BRACE eventually could have general utility for the massive amount of concrete that exists in civil infrastructure such as roads, highways, bridges, and buildings,” added Pava.

BRACE performers will engage with U.S. government and defense stakeholders, as well as appropriate regulatory authorities. Safety is paramount, and all research will be subject to regular review by both an independent laboratory and regulatory agencies to ensure BRACE technologies do not pose a threat to human or structural health. In addition, teams are required to collaborate with ethical, legal, and societal implications experts and ensure the research addresses any related concerns. Performers will be required to conform to regulatory requirements from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before any of their technologies are used outside of the controlled laboratory environment, such as on test structures in the field during the final phase of the program.

Quote:Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office
Publication Date: January 6, 2023

The ancient Romans were masters of engineering, constructing vast networks of roads, aqueducts, ports, and massive buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Many of these structures were built with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and was dedicated in 128 C.E., is still intact, and some ancient Roman aqueducts still deliver water to Rome today. Meanwhile, many modern concrete structures have crumbled after a few decades.

Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secret of this ultradurable ancient construction material, particularly in structures that endured especially harsh conditions, such as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or those constructed in seismically active locations.

Now, a team of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has made progress in this field, discovering ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated several key self-healing functionalities. The findings are published today in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, former doctoral student Linda Seymour ’14, PhD ’21, and four others.

For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix. “Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features,” says Masic. “These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”

Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability. “The idea that the presence of these lime clasts was simply attributed to low quality control always bothered me,” says Masic. “If the Romans put so much effort into making an outstanding construction material, following all of the detailed recipes that had been optimized over the course of many centuries, why would they put so little effort into ensuring the production of a well-mixed final product? There has to be more to this story.”

Upon further characterization of these lime clasts, using high-resolution multiscale imaging and chemical mapping techniques pioneered in Masic’s research lab, the researchers gained new insights into the potential functionality of these lime clasts.

Historically, it had been assumed that when lime was incorporated into Roman concrete, it was first combined with water to form a highly reactive paste-like material, in a process known as slaking. But this process alone could not account for the presence of the lime clasts. Masic wondered: “Was it possible that the Romans might have actually directly used lime in its more reactive form, known as quicklime?”

Studying samples of this ancient concrete, he and his team determined that the white inclusions were, indeed, made out of various forms of calcium carbonate. And spectroscopic examination provided clues that these had been formed at extreme temperatures, as would be expected from the exothermic reaction produced by using quicklime instead of, or in addition to, the slaked lime in the mixture. Hot mixing, the team has now concluded, was actually the key to the super-durable nature.

“The benefits of hot mixing are twofold,” Masic says. “First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction.”

During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality. As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread. Previous support for this hypothesis was found through the examination of other Roman concrete samples that exhibited calcite-filled cracks.

To prove that this was indeed the mechanism responsible for the durability of the Roman concrete, the team produced samples of hot-mixed concrete that incorporated both ancient and modern formulations, deliberately cracked them, and then ran water through the cracks. Sure enough: Within two weeks the cracks had completely healed and the water could no longer flow. An identical chunk of concrete made without quicklime never healed, and the water just kept flowing through the sample. As a result of these successful tests, the team is working to commercialize this modified cement material.

“It’s exciting to think about how these more durable concrete formulations could expand not only the service life of these materials, but also how it could improve the durability of 3D-printed concrete formulations,” says Masic.

Through the extended functional lifespan and the development of lighter-weight concrete forms, he hopes that these efforts could help reduce the environmental impact of cement production, which currently accounts for about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Along with other new formulations, such as concrete that can actually absorb carbon dioxide from the air, another current research focus of the Masic lab, these improvements could help to reduce concrete’s global climate impact.

The research team included Janille Maragh at MIT, Paolo Sabatini at DMAT in Italy, Michel Di Tommaso at the Instituto Meccanica dei Materiali in Switzerland, and James Weaver at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The work was carried out with the assistance of the Archeological Museum of Priverno in Italy.

Quote:REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala., Sept. 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Javelin™ Joint Venture team, a partnership of Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) and Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), successfully fired Javelin missiles from a Kongsberg remote launcher mounted on a Titan unmanned ground vehicle built by QinetiQ North America and Milrem Robotics. The demonstrations, conducted at the U.S. Army Redstone Test Center, Alabama, validated the integration of the weapon station, missile and vehicle.

Raytheon

I have some music I found on CD at a garage sale. It was Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, and they did the song "Dreadful Wind and Rain". I liked it, old timey country-folk type music and last night when it played on my computer on my media player that randomly selected it, I actually listened to the lyrics.

Man, what a messed up story in this ballad. It has a very long history going back to the mid 1600s in Northern Europe and has a number of versions. Jerry Garcia, Billy Strings and a lot of bands have played versions of this song, but those two guys do probably the most common version. Two other versions are known as "Twa Sisters" or "The Two Sisters" and also "The Cruel Sister". They are quite different but definitely the same story.

Here is a summary from Wikipedia . . .

Quote:Two sisters go down by a body of water, sometimes a river and sometimes the sea. The older one pushes the younger in and refuses to pull her out again; generally the lyrics explicitly state her intent to drown her younger sister. Her motive, when included in the lyrics, is sexual jealousy – in some variants, the sisters are being two-timed by a suitor; in others, the elder sister's affections are not encouraged by the young man. In a few versions, a third sister is mentioned, but plays no significant role in events. In most versions, the older sister is described as dark, while the younger sister is fair.

When the murdered girl's body floats ashore, someone makes a musical instrument out of it, generally a harp or a fiddle, with a frame of bone and the girl's "long yellow hair" (or "golden hair") for strings. The instrument then plays itself and sings about the murder. In some versions, this occurs after the musician has taken it to the family's household, so that the elder sister is publicly revealed (sometimes at her wedding to the murdered girl's suitor) as the murderess.

The variant titled "The Two Sisters" typically omits the haunted instrument entirely, ending instead with an unrelated person (often a miller) robbing the murdered girl's corpse, sometimes being executed for it, and the elder sister sometimes going unpunished, or sometimes boiled in lead.

I will post this for those who listen to audio books. The Author Dean M. Cole and read by R.C. Bray is quite good IMO at weaving a story ... A little to much touchy feely in some cases but still a good listen.https://youtu.be/0HaVECRtUQ0  Bad space aliens show up and do some serious Earth butt kicking until .....

The cost of this stuff is unbelievable IMO. They are talking about only 200 6th generation fighters as the cost (like the F-22 before it) is prohibitive expensive. Presently we have less than 180 F-22s flyable..

Loyal wing man drones and a bunch of new weapons etc etc are supposedly the add-ons for the 6th generation fighters... If I were an adversary of the USA and had the missile technology that even junk countries like N. Korea seems to have these days I would hit the bases where any of these supposedly game changing weapons are stored. I am still of the belief that quantity has has its own quality when fighting a war even though the machine gun stopped the human wave attacks that some countries tried to use...