#get some in-situ data and then we can talk

[casbitchh]

an astronomer just tried to tell me that the earth and moon could be classified as a binary system aka two planets orbiting each other. stabbing and killing, they are not a binary system they are the earth and her beautiful girlfriend the moon

[stitchlingbelle]

Watching Halo, Episode 5

Flashback time! Halsey and Keyes both on Eridanus II. Were they colonists? Stationed there? Why are they at the school? They just saw John, so clearly it’s too early to be school-shopping for Miranda’s sake. God, are they shopping for kids? Was Keyes in on it from the beginning? This school is supposed to be some idyllic Waldorf-style nature school, and I love that, but it is not OSHA-compliant.

Here in the present, they’ve set up a whole temporary base around the second artifact, which seems like an utterly terrible idea to me. Do you need this much crap to dig out one monumental rock and load it up? (I realize real scientists would want to study it in situ for 6000 years before moving on to step 2 and archeologists wouldn’t want to move it at all, but you have unstoppable aliens to deal with in this universe!) Also, was bringing Miranda out here a good idea? It seems contrary to giving her free rein while her mom is gone? I’m glad her dad’s on her side at least. John, you need to snap out of it, buddy.

Kwan and Soren stuck in the desert, bickering, when he handcuffs her and leaves her alone in the middle of the desert? Wtf, Soren?

Poor Miranda making good points and still getting sidelined by her mom and Adun the Creep. Kai is still the smartest person here. What DOES the Covenant want? I appreciate the shot of the little drone. It’s funny to think that those have gone from scifi to a toy people fly in their backyards in my lifetime. John the Master Chief spots Kai’s hair and knows what’s up instantly and is immediately an asshole about it. I adore Kai—she took one look at John removing his and instantly trusted it was a good idea, and more, it’s clear from her less-flat affect in ep1 that she’s always been closest to breaking free (even without a mystical connection to ancient alien tech). And she’s 100% dead on here, too- why the hell is she unfit, but he’s not? And good on Cortana for speaking up for her, too. John: “I can’t hear myself think.” Cortana: “I can and you’re not missing much.” HA.

I haven’t gotten into Makee’s alien politicking much, but it’s definitely interesting how they both seem to need her and yet distrust her at the same time. You raised her! But “corrupted/ going native” is a trope for a reason, I suppose. Or are there two camps of aliens here? Is she really the only being who can activate these things? Were there aliens who could do it but they’ve passed away, or is it a unique human ability? (Well, humans and whatever race created this stuff.) Where did the Covenant get its info about the tech to begin with? How accurate is what they think they know?

Kwan, meanwhile, is demonstrating her best feature—sheer determination. I cheered when she finally got free. But when is she going to go, stranded in the middle of the desert, presumably without supplies? (I mean, I assume she’s about to find the mystics, but that’s the meta-brain talking.)

Craaaaap, John’s confiding in Keyes, who immediately gives him a brush off with his “I’ll look into it personally” bs. Of course he goes straight to Parangosky and Halsey and backstabbing and manipulation ensue. They at least try to protect Miranda from all their dirty laundry, of course in a way calculated to piss her off. “Finally a parenting issue we can agree on”—what did that little jibe mean? It’s getting increasingly hard to picture Halsey as any kind of mother. Exactly what did she want to do with Miranda?

Using a laser on the artifact makes ALL HELL BREAK LOOSE, and then John just stops with a look? Is that what happened? Wtf. And of course the Covenant hear that. Great.

Just as I wonder what Miranda saw in the data, her dad walks in and takes her off the project. She immediately pegs that it’s his own dirty past that’s at stake, though how dirty I doubt she knows. Master Chief, who is at least somewhat less credulous than I gave him credit for, is getting suspicious as well. Aaaand apparently he believes in direct action, because he immediately heads over and touches the artifact. And finds out HALSEY KIDNAPPED HIM? WTF. (Is the plague story a coverup? Did she murder a whole colony to hide this???) Master Chief tries to kill her ass and I was hoping he’d manage it, but no, Cortana steps in. Rats.

A brief break back on Madrigal where Soren finds Kwan gone… and then she EMERGES FROM THE SAND AND TAKES HIM OUT. Go Kwan, that was so much smarter than just wandering the desert, well done!

The rest of the episode is the biggest battle yet. My notes just say “Oh crap OH CRAP” at the top. Seeing the ship crash was fantastic and a definite “You Are Ultra Screwed” moment. I of course laughed at Cortana giving Master Chief advice and him snapping “I know how the game is played, Cortana!” Yes, writers, you’re very cute. I once again question how many Spartans there are and why we only have four here? In this super important not-hardened base that the Covenant is actively looking for? Like, worth 100 marines each, that’s great, but getting separated and pinned down is still a problem! Especially in this area which is wide open with lousy cover!

Which of course is exactly what happens to Kai, which I choose to believe is why she went down, instead of her being overwhelmed by trauma like the Master Chief predicted while he’s just fine, just Heroically Angry. (That bit of writing annoyed me.) (Yes I know he blew it too, he just got to blow it in a way that’s very differently coded than she did.) Halsey gets her one good moment saving Miranda when I 100% expected her to leave her daughter to die. (I did think Miranda would live to be extremely screwed up about it, mind you.)

So the Covenant got away with the new artifact, crap. And they pull the exact same gambit with Makee as last time, and I have the exact same complaint. Human makeup and nice clothes and not a scratch? She does NOT look like she just escaped that ship during the chaos of battle after surviving durance vile! Like, I want a poster of her on my wall but I do NOT trust her.

[sociomi]

Choosing Which Slots Games to Play

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In many regards, it doesn't exactly make any difference which games you decide to play. The essential standard is basically similar in every one of them, and your decision of game is probably not going to emphatically affect your general possibilities winning some cash. There are not many things you should ponder while choosing what to play however, and we talk about these in this article.

Payout Rate

All space games have a normal payout rate. This rate shows how much cash a game will pay out after some time, corresponding to how much cash bet. For instance, an opening game with a payout pace of 90% will pay out $90 for each $100 bet. An opening game with a payout pace of 80% will pay out $80 for each $100 bet.

As you can see from this, it is to your greatest advantage to mess around that have a high payout rate. The higher the payout rate, the seriously playing time you will get for your cash by and large. Thusly, assuming your need is to bringing in certain that your cash endures as far as might be feasible, the payout rate is the absolute most significant variable you ought to consider. If it's not too much trouble, note, however, that you can't necessarily determine what the payout pace of a game is. Numerous club, live and on the web, make that data accessible - however not every one of them do.

It's likewise significant that a payout rate just applies over the long haul, and there is no assurance that a game will perform exactly in accordance with its payout rate during the time you play it. A game with a 90% payout doesn't pay out precisely $90 each time you bet $100; it midpoints out to that rate north of thousands of twist. Obviously, it is this deviation from the payout rate in the momentary that implies winning money is conceivable. Check out situs babayo4d.

Cost Per Twist

The expense per turn is certainly something you ought to consider while concluding which games to play. You typically have a decision about the amount to stake on each twist, as you can by and large pick the number of coins to play per line and how much each coin is worth. Notwithstanding, the scope of accessible stakes will change starting with one game then onto the next.

[college-girl199328]

It was a different Gianni Infantino, a more pensive and less alarmingly excited Gianni Infantino, who addressed Hall 1 at the Qatar National Convention Center on Friday morning.

This had been the scene of Infantino’s own defining moment just a month ago: his sacking of the temple, his Woodstock, his I Have a Very Peculiar Dream. Brusquely late, Infantino was all business this time. "I am happy to be here," he kicked off in a descending tone as though announcing the imminent execution of a colony of wasps. "Has this World Cup been a massive success?" he was asked from the floor. No, Gianni politely declined. It had, in fact, been "an incredible success."

Mainly, he talked about numbers: 3.27 million spectators, 1.7 million in the fan zone, a billion dollars in excess profits, and $11 billion in projected profits for next time.

He talked about love, joy, and human rights. Above all, Infantino was "very, very happy" at the progress of his World Cup. Put your hands together and rejoice, cheer, and be thankful. Rejoice, even though your name is death. Because the fact is that some numbers were missing from Infantino’s podium notes, some usefully vague numbers that feel as if they are now on their way to being buried in plain sight.

The total number of migrant worker deaths during the 12-year cycle of Qatar’s World Cup has oscillated from three to 6,500, from 400 to 37. The New York Times reported just before the tournament that Nepal had calculated 2,000 deaths, including 200 suicides, a genuinely heartbreaking detail, albeit one that must, as ever, be degraded by Qatar’s bizarre absence of hard data. It has been a World Cup haunted by these ghosts, with a sense of something just out of sight. And as Infantino plowed on at the Convention Center, there was another specter on stage: the outline of another oleaginous, bald Swiss on another stage, 12 years apart.

The fact is, death and suffering were the inevitable collateral damage to this project from the moment Sepp Blatter read out the word "Qatar" in that weirdly strangled upbeat tone, crowded on his own stage by glad-handing power brokers, and perhaps feeling, through the lineups and posed smiles, that shadow already at his back, just out of shot, scythe clanking happily. Do we have to say this again? Because what we have here is still an open case. The dots have not been joined. As Infantino drenched his audience in the familiar margarine of platitudes and half-truths, there was another sound in the hall, beneath the whirr of the cameras and the battering of keyboards. There it is, hiding in the silence: the sound of someone getting away with murder.

And this story will now move on. The last days of Qatar 2022 are the end of something, the final notes to a cycle that began 12 years ago, bringing with it corruption, death, criminality, and a building project as large as every other World Cup combined. Little wonder the eyes of the world are a little glazed by now. Qatar 2022 has become an insoluble puzzle, a place where certainties collapse like sandcastles on the tide line, where nobody is really ever responsible for anything, where words stretch and lose their meaning, like the signs on the Doha fences that say "Amazing" and "Together."

Infantino says this is the best World Cup ever. Mark Pougatch says the Ghanaians are colorful. Nasser al-Khalifa says to stop mixing sports and politics. The supreme delivery committee is rumored to be planning to change the tournament motto for the final weekend from "Now is All" to "All is Now," and the response was a tired shrug and a sense of, yeah, that seems about right. But there is still time for a moment of clarity. After 12 years of staring at this process, one thing is undeniably clear. In the end, FIFA is responsible for everything. We can talk about Qatari law. We can discuss the Gulf War, colonialism, the decline of the West, and all the other things that are bad in the world.

But the fact remains that FIFA had options in this situation. And Fifa chose death and suffering. Look back with a clear line of sight, and from the moment Fifa made its bid decision, there was only one route from there to here. Define corporate manslaughter. What does that crime look or feel like as a chain of events? It is another question that has not been asked enough.

At which point the wind chimes tinkle one last time, and we’re back in the drowned world of September 2010. It is worth remembering the details here. Three months before the bid vote, Fifa sent its Evaluation Committee, led by its chairman Harold Mayne-Nicholls of Chile, to assess Qatar’s fitness to host a World Cup. The evaluators were in Qatar from September 13 to 17, 2010, which doesn’t sound very long, even less so when a portion of it seems to have been spent playing football at the Aspire Academy. The report is fascinating. It acknowledges the extent of the work Qatar has left to do while simultaneously averting its gaze from exactly how this is supposed to happen.

"The accommodation plan heavily depends on significant construction." Significant development is planned for both the New Doha International Airport and the general transport infrastructure. The considerable number of infrastructure projects and the volume of temporary event-time services both imply significant human resource requirements. "Are we getting anywhere yet?" "Is a picture emerging?" Of the 64 accommodation solutions proposed, 54 do not yet exist. "Of the 64 sites proposed, 39 still need to be built." "The remaining 25 sites are targeted for renovation." FIFA's committee considered stadium construction "medium risk" and team facilities "high risk." This was all duly noted by Mayne-Nicholls and fed back to his executive committee, albeit without a moment’s digging into who exactly was going to build all this stuff in a tiny nation.

Not that any of this was a mystery. Five minutes on Google would have done the job for FIFA's experts. As early as 2006, Human Rights Watch published a report on kafala-type working conditions in the neighboring emirates called Building Towers, Cheating Workers. It notes the deliberately poor data on deaths and working conditions (sound familiar?). It records a Construction Week investigation that found 880 migrant workers had died in the UAE in 2004 alone and an Indian official who registered 971 death cases in 2005.

Two years before the bid vote, Amnesty International described similar poor working conditions in Qatar itself, including exploitation, non-payment of wages, and a lack of protection under the law. There are no secrets here. There is an entire library of this stuff. And yet Fifa still asked Qatar to build it a World Cup, the equivalent of handing the council digger to the town’s most careless cowboy builder and promising to look the other way while he builds a new school playground.

In his big opening speech, Infantino described Qatar as “a child” who needed help. OK. That’s fine. But why, Fifa, did you ask a child to build you a €220 billion World Cup?

At the time, Mayne-Nicholls seemed, according to the Garcia report, more interested in trying to get his son and nephew a gig at the Aspire Academy. But his report was also relatively damning, and he would go on to publicly criticize the Qatar decision. Fifa responded by banning him from football for seven years on some vague-looking charges, which were later overturned by a baffled court of arbitration for sport. This, then, was the framework for the decision. And so the touchpaper was lit. Doha tripled in size in a decade. Workers poured into the country, drawn either by higher wages or by their own poverty, depending on how you want to look at it.

Qatar recruited specifically from nations worst hit by climate change because, hey, desperation comes cheap. It set up what the New Yorker has described as "an ecosystem of plausible deniability," with subcontractors upon subcontractors, a wall of silence, a lack of reporting, a lack of representation, and the failure even to conduct proper autopsies on its dead. The reforms of the past few years suggest that Qatar has been willing to bend its rules just a little to get this thing done. And yet no pressure was exerted, no conditions were applied, and you haven't come back in 10 years when you’ve moved on a bit further. Instead, FIFA simply struck a match and turned its back on the process.

It is perhaps one reason there has been no progress on the compensation of workers. Even as Infantino was crowing over his excess profits on Friday morning, Amnesty International’s head of economic and social justice, Stephen Cockburn, was calling on FIFRA to finally move on the idea of a legacy fund.

Gianni Infantino announced that Fifa earned $7.5 billion from the 2022 World Cup cycle, which was more than $1 billion higher than expected. He also forecasted that FIFA would make over $11 billion over the next four years. Yet he offered nothing new to so many workers and their families, who continue to be denied compensation for stolen wages and lost lives. It has been suggested that part of Fifa’s reluctance to commit to this could be the fear of a potential admission of implied liability. Very few things are left to chance around here. At least, not the ones that matter.

And that chain of liability really does need to be tested. Fifa, with its oversight, its European address, and its teams of experts and evaluators, chose this path in full knowledge of the consequences. Fifa is a wealthy businessman. It can be called to account. It is perhaps a surprise that there hasn’t yet been a more concerted attempt to do so. Instead, other events will now swim into the foreground. As of Sunday evening, a news cycle will end. The cartel of ghouls and goons that drove us here, the Blatter-Blazer-Warner golden generation, will fade deeper into the past. Nobody will ever read the Garcia report or care about handbags and mystery Picassos.

They’re selling discount Messi T-shirts at the Al Sadd Lulu Savings Center. The strangest decade in the history of big corporate sports is coming to an end. And, as it stands, the true villains of this play are still out there, wiping the blood from their palms as they stride out center stage to preach about love and joy and spreading the message—all while hiding in plain sight.

[formslegal]

10 Common Myths About Moodle Development Consulting.

Moodle is the most widely used learning management system Moodle is one of the most flexible learning management systems. It has the largest number of active users and developers, thanks to its adaptability and extensive feature set. The worldwide user base is estimated to be over 68 million. There are currently 46,507 registered sites in 241 countries (Moodle.net).

Moodle is an open-source course management system Moodle is an incredibly successful open source project and has thousands of regular community contributors who continue to push its core functionality. Even with its high-end feature set, Moodle is completely free!

The largest number of Moodle registrations come from the United States With 7,061 registrations, the United States has the highest number of registrations for Moodle LMS in the world. The top 10 countries with 5,375 registrations were Spain, Brazil (3,240), the United Kingdom (2,527), Mexico (1,911), Germany (1,596), Colombia (1,394), Italy (1,368), Australia, (1,153) and the Russian Federation ( 1,130).

Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Learning Environment. The openly shared, open-source platform is known as Moodle really stands for Modular Object-Oriented Learning Environment, which describes how it got its uncommon-sounding title. Moodle is also a verb that indicates to simply drive through something, doing things as they occur to you, a pleasurable tinkering method that points to creativity and penetration. It may speak to how Moodle was actually formed.

Hire a Moodle development company

Moodle is surprisingly easy to use Despite its complicated-sounding name, Moodle software is relatively easy to use. The installation process is a bit technical, but once you’re up and running, you really need to have basic web browsing skills to take advantage of this LMS.

There are hundreds of Moodle plugins The functionality of the Moodle program can be advanced with the advantage of plugins, of which there are over 1,000. All plugins are supported in the Moodle Plugins list.

Change the look and feel of a Moodle site by installing graphical themes Want to customize the functionality of your Moodle site? Engrossed in improving the appearance and quality of a course? By taking advantage of Moodle themes, which can be downloaded directly from the Moodle download site, you can easily change the visual aspect of your courses.

Moodle can be used on mobile devices The mobile user support is exploding right now, so it’s satisfying to acknowledge that some Moodle themes are mobile-friendly and use responsive web design. The Moodle portable app can also be downloaded on most portable projects.

Moodle can run on a variety of systems Any system that supports PHP and databases can run Moodle, including Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, NetWare, FreeBSD, and even most web host providers.

Moodle Moodle is open-source software using a “freemium” payment model, which means you get the basics for free but have to pay for additional options. According to recent surveys, it is one of the most popular LMS, mostly used by institutions with between 1,000 and 2,000 full-time students.

One of the main disadvantages of this system is that it is very difficult to install and fix. There are many companies that can help with setting up and customizing the system, but their services are quite expensive. Moodle is perfectly suited for general educational goals, but to implement it, a company must have at least one qualified IT specialist, as well as a separate server and hardware. Moodle is already free, but the additional cost can be $10,000/year, not including IT department salaries.

Key Features of Moodle:

grade management Student Roster / Attendance Management evaluation implementation Discussion Forum lesson planner collaboration management, Moodle Consultent file exchange Internal Messaging, Live Chat, Wiki

Moodle provides specialized modules to create courses (Moodle Rooms) that can be used in situ or migrated to another LMS. The main problem with this system is that it requires additional time and effort to adapt and implement — up to 18–24 months. If you can allow such time-consuming projects without any harm to your company, then Moodle is an excellent solution for your business.

Blackboard Blackboard is an industry-leading LMS, which is comprehensive and flexible, but expensive. Detailed pricing information is not publicly available, but the cost depends on how many licenses you need. It already has a lot of schools and is considered a great value for money, especially for large institutions with lots of resources.

Blackboard Excellence in Curriculum Creation; A trainer can upload and manage all the materials he needs. However, if an additional practice or implementation assistance is required, it can be difficult to discover and hire a qualified blackboard professional.

Key Features of Blackboard:

Custom branding, fields, and functionality test engine Multiple Delivery Formats administrative reporting course catalog Data Import/Export grading individual plans student portal goal setting skill tracking The system lacks collaboration features and doesn’t excel at email integration, but offers self-paced instruction methods and resource management.

Conclusion

The Moodle platform is a great learning platform for teachers. Its flexibility and feature set allows for extensive customization and effective curriculum development. Its experience, as you just found out, is also kind of engaging. If you want a free Moodle instance, you can visit Moodle’s new cloud service, https://moodlecloud.com/en/.

If you want to take Moodle even further with the many plugins and themes contact creators to see how far you can go.

What is your moodle dream? The reason I keep discovering is that “we want to base our online engagement with a marketing company that has an antiquity and is expected to take our futures on a public shareware type product.”

What people fail to realize is that Moodle is in every way as commercial a product as Blackboard. This is accomplished by creating certified “Moodle Partners”. These partners provide all of the same services and assistance Blackboard provides to its customers through commercial agreements enforceable by law. The big difference, however, is that you don’t have to pay for a Moodle license so that the $100,000 budget Jack is talking about becomes 100% training, support, and customization. What we strive for the future of our company is that the money from eliminating the license fee can be used for additional faculty training, which we will be happy to deliver. This brings up some other benefits of Moodle that may or may not fit the Mythbuster documentation, but here is what they’re worth: Pros for Moodle 1) If you want to do something that hasn’t been done before, you can create a new module yourself. 2) License You must share your module with the Moodle community for free. A huge library of modules is already built like this. 3) If you don’t like the service or solution you get from the Moodle partner you are working with, you can simply buy from a different Moodle partner. Cons for Blackboard 1) Blackboard has its own roadmap that may or may not include the feature you were hoping for. 2) Blackboard does provide building blocks, but they are mostly commercially licensed whereas the Moodle modules are all free under the Moodle open source license. 3) If you don’t like the service or solution you get from Blackboard, there’s nothing you can do about it other than switch to WebCT (oh, wait, you can’t do that now!).

[qqterbaik]

Choosing the Best Sports Gambling Sites

Choosing the best sports gambling sites to position a sports bet with can take lots of research and SportsGambling4Fun.com has been doing lots of the legwork for you. Our goal is always to ensure you are playing with the best sports gambling sites possible. Being in the sports gambling industry for quite some time we've stumbled upon a quantity of quality sports gambling sites that we recommend.

Many of these sports gambling sites offer some sort of bonus for you yourself to do your betting online with them. They're not the outrageous bonuses that you could hear about, but are adequate to start you out. You have to be careful about sportsbooks that provide the unbelievable bonus deals because they could not manage to stay around for the long haul.

These recommended sports gambling sites have available management. The general manager or other management people are available for you yourself to talk to. They've enough clerks and supervisors working during the busy periods and the sportsbook online betting capability doesn't bog down near game time. The hours of operation are flexible. They're open seven days per week, 365 days annually, 24 hours a day.

Sports gambling is just a game of skill. The challenge is always to gather and analyze just as much information as you are able to about a game, weigh the probabilities of every team winning, and subsequently compare your opinion to the odds makers. Make the best judgment and you win.

Make the most of early season point spread and money line value prior to the odds makers have experienced a chance to catch up with which teams are hot and which teams are not. During the first section of a season, search for teams which can be playing definitely Situs Judi Online Terpercaya 2021  better or worse than expected to really get your best value. Many novice handicappers concentrate on what sort of team performed the previous year, but in this era of salary cap constraints and constant roster turnover, teams never perform at the same level in two consecutive years. Furthermore, teams that performed well the previous year are no more a great value because you are laying a much higher price together, especially at the start of another season. Start your handicapping analysis before the summer season starts so you'll be ready to take full advantage of the first couple weeks of the season.

In sports gambling, you have the main advantage of streamlining your research, which is something the sportsbooks are not at liberty to do. They should keep together with every sport and every game. The easiest way to win money at sports gambling is to produce a niche and abide by it closely. If you feel an expert on an inferior conference you have a great chance to beat your house since the sportsbook operators do not need enough time or resources to follow along with this conference the manner in which you can. There is a wealth of informative data on the Internet; it is merely your decision to find it and research it daily.

In summary, while luck might be a deciding factor in the results of any single game, and will inevitably opposed to you on occasion, it will stabilize in the long run. Being a regular winner in sports gambling is not about luck but whether you are ready to invest enough time and effort to become experienced in the sports games you bet on, whether you are able to weigh all of the factors in a very good, objective fashion, and whether you adopt a regular, disciplined, long-term approach to your sports gambling. Do every one of these and you will come out a winner. Remember, it's you against the odds maker, not the bookmaker.

[wildscienceblog]

My unpopular opinion about popular science topics: A new study says that SARS-CoV-2 RNA may integrate into the human genome - DON’T PANIC, this is likely not the case and even if it was, would probably lack clinical relevance :) -

For a few days now, there has been an ongoing heated discussion on Academic Twitter and other scientific outreach outlets regarding a bioRxiv preprint titled “SARS-CoV-2 RNA reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome” (Zhang et al. bioRxiv, 2020). The study proposes that the sustained viral RNA shedding and recurrence of PCR positive testing after recovery might be due to retrointegration (in simple terms this is the insertion of DNA sequences into a host genome mediated by an RNA intermediate, the enzymes reverse-transcriptase and endonuclease and chaperone proteins) of SARS-CoV-2 into the DNA of patients (i.e. their nuclear DNA). The senior author is the renowned scientist Rudolf Jaenisch who together with Beatrice Mintz, produced the first-ever transgenic mammals by injecting retroviral DNA into early mice embryos. He is a professor of biology at MIT and his lab based in the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research works on epigenetics and epigenome editing and transgenic models to understand neurological disorders and cancer and has recently included research on SARS-CoV-2. This research focus is shared by his co-authors, who also are postdoctoral researchers at his lab. The first author, Liguo Zhang studies epigenetics and nuclear organization in the nervous system and how their misregulation leads to diseases, followed by Alexsia Richards who is currently examining the tropism and transcriptional response to SARS-CoV-2, Andrew Khalil focuses on understanding the role of the adaptive immune system in regulating metabolism, Emile Wogram combines stem cell technologies, genome engineering, biochemistry, and proteomics to study microglial phagocytosis, and Haiting Ma is concerned with studying signaling pathways and epigenetics of stems cells differentiation and maturation into functional lineages. Richard A. Young also a professor of biology at MIT and a member of the Whitehouse Institute pioneer in the systems biology of gene control in health and disease also participated in this research.

Nevertheless, these findings are raising many eyebrows among the scientific community, especially under the current climate where an mRNA-based vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 is already approved in some countries and another one to be soon authorized (see here and here if you want to learn more of the current status on vaccines’ roll out). Scientists from fields ranging from immunology to cancer biology to the closest it gets to the topics being addressed in the polemic study, mobile elements, transposons, and endogenous viruses as well as clinical virology, have sharply criticized the soundness of their conclusions and are calling for the retraction of the preprint.

A major concern is the adequacy of the experimental assays used to support the hypothesis of retrotransposition events. Zhang et al. (bioRxiv, 2020) report to have found chimeric transcripts of fused viral and cellular sequences in published data of cultured cells and primary cells of patients. They overexpressed human LINE-1 or HIV-1 reverse transcriptase in cells which were then infected with SARS-CoV-2 and applied a single-molecule RNA-FISH (i.e. an in situ hybridization method that uses probes of multiple oligonucleotides to detect individual  RNA molecules inside of single cells https://sites.google.com/site/singlemoleculernafish/home?authuser=0) to confirm that viral sequences were integrated and detected their transcription in the nucleus of the cells overexpressing LINE-1. They also analyzed published data on LINE-1 expression in cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 and chimeric read abundance and found a correlation between these two. Furthermore, they suggest a molecular mechanism by which LINE-1 expression can be stimulated under SARS-CoV-2 infection via cytokines. However, Cedric Feschotte a professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in Cornell University with 20 years of experience studying mobile elements points out that these experimental approaches are insufficient to sustain an in vivo retrotransposition because they omit gold standard techniques such as isolating and reporting of “the sequence of the integrants along with flanking genomic regions (junction sequences spanning both viral and flanking DNA)” and fail to present hallmarks of the proposed LINE-1 dependent process (e.g. short direct repeats flanking integrant, integration at preferred L1 endonuclease cleavage site [TTTT/AA], polyA tail at the 3’ end or chimera with the 3’ end of endogenous L1/Alu). A generalized opinion among critics of Zhang et al. (bioRxiv, 2020) is that the chimeric reads are likely to be artifacts of library preparation or template-switching events and that their approach does not rule out these possibilities.

Aris Katzourakis, a professor of Evolution and Genomics at the University of Oxford whose research is centered in the study of ancient viruses and uses endogenous viral elements, including retroviruses tweeted: “ … genomic integration of coronaviral DNA is highly implausible, given there is not a single known genomic fossil of integrated coronaviruses in any know host genome that has ever been sequenced to date.” Which is a strong and educated argument (yet not a smoking gun) against the evidence presented by Zhang et al. (bioRxiv, 2020). Moreover, various academics argue that even if substantiated under experimental conditions, is a whole different thing to prove retrotransposition happening during natural infection with SARS-CoV-2. Clinical scientists draw attention that is definitely not unique to SARS-CoV-2 the persistency of viral debris in tissues of convalescent or recovered patients (even though its mechanism and clinical relevance remain subject to discussion e.g. see here). Altogether, they agree that its clinical relevance is far from proven and unlikely to exist.  

As dull as it is for me, I am merely a spectator here since, despite my keen curiosity for genetic mobile elements, I have very limited first-hand experience on these subjects. I do think that a take-home message is that probably many features described as novel or unique to SARS-CoV-2 (which sometimes alarm scientists and the general public alike) might be in fact more ubiquitous than the flood of SARS-CoV-2 scientific papers would have us believe. In my opinion, the reason being that the acuteness and the timing in terms of technology and communications of this pandemic have powered studies at scales that have not been possible to conduct in other disease outbreaks. In other words, we are looking too much, too close, and perhaps missing a bigger picture (I have seen a strikingly low number of papers building upon previous knowledge on other coronaviruses, especially at the clinical level). Whether or not SARS-CoV-2 integrates into our genomes and if so, whether this has clinical implications, is definitely something that cannot yet and should not be answered based on the findings by Zhang et al. (bioRxiv, 2020). It is also safe to say, that whereas the semantics can be confusing for the general public, even if retrotransposition is later proven to occur in vivo during natural infections, there is still a long shot from there to assert that this implies a direct risk for mRNA vaccines to integrate into our genomes because they are designed such that they do not interact with our DNA (they do not go inside the nucleus, you can read more about the different vaccines and their mechanisms here). Having said that, clinical usage of mRNA vaccines is new, and we will be confirming and learning more about how they (hopefully well!) work soon.

Lastly, I want to share that my motivation to write this piece was not so much the hot topic that SARS-CoV-2 is but rather the atmosphere that this paper as others in various fields which present (seemingly) premature conclusions and bold takes have triggered. This paper has the feature of being presented as a preprint. Preprints have the goal of allowing the scientific audience “to see, discuss, and comment on the findings immediately” before peer-review is completed. Therefore, while I find most critiques to this paper very compelling and I strongly agree that when a bias or unsubstantiated evidence is identified, this should be acknowledged and corrected, I consider a poor scientific practice to demand a retraction of a publication at a stage that has precisely the aim of calling for discussion. I am talking now of a number of papers I have seen being targeted by similar reactions. The intentions of authors cannot be, of course, inferred, so why not waiting for them to take part in the discussion before deploying what seems like attempts to bowdlerize rather than enriching, correcting, or helping improve. Has not this been the case of most wondrous and prodigious scientific findings and technological advances? In the past, findings that were about to change the world but too odd for their surrounding context (please let me be clear that I am not referring to any particular paper that I believe to have such potential, but rather to a general attitude towards outliers of the mainstream) were met by generalized disbelief and mockery. I thought that we have already moved away from the practices that discourage sharing surprising results. Of course, there is a thin line between sharing to prompt healthy discussions and incurring unethical practices, but where are going to end up if we try to ban everything that does not comply with our preconceptions? And even if claims end up being wrong, how are we supposed to ensure that they are corrected if we promote distrust and an unwelcoming arena. Is this a retrogression powered by a more than ever intolerant society? or it never left and is it just becoming evident as communications allow it? I think we should do better.

[sofiessketches]

NASASocial experience at JPL

This is a LONG one, so I’m gonna put it under a readmore! 

This was my first ever NASA Social, so I didn’t really know what to expect when I applied, what the chances were or what other sorts of people would be there. I was surprised I even got in, because compared to some of the other people I have very few followers, but I think there’s more to it than that! As Stephanie, the head of social media at JPL, said, “You were chosen for your insatiable curiosity, and for the stories you tell”. I really appreciate that the selection process was more about being a creator of SOMETHING that you truly care about.

I’ve been to JPL several times for tours and lectures, but it’s always exciting to come up to the front..there was a really long line, I’m assuming because of the event and also traditional media that was there to interview people.

Got my badge and headed in, and said good morning to the Curiosity model! (which I wish was as detailed as the real thing..I still love her tho. I’ve just been spoiled having gone on tours and doing a lot of research on Curiosity that I was able to spot what’s missing..)

Admiring how the light hits her..er..Chemcam

I never get tired of looking at this piece, but this was the first time I actually checked out the plaque next to it, which had a helpful diagram!

An installation displaying the information from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and GRACE Follow-on missions, which in the words of my friend Sirina, shows us how screwed we are, in a beautiful way! I also realized the reason the screens are this shape is because the spacecraft are shaped like that...!

JPL’s inspiring slogan in a beautiful geometric typeface B)

We got to the meeting/conference room, with portraits of all JPL’s past and present directors around. The last seat at the front table appeared to be taken by the Mars 2020 wheel, so I asked if I could sit there with the wheel, and my day was made! I have to admit this may have been the highlight of my day. One of the first JPL-specific drawings I did was a study of an image Curiosity had taken of her own wheels on Mars, and after that I read a lot about how the wheels worked and how the design was less than ideal..it makes me happy to see the next iteration and how it’ll work out!

No pointy grousers for the sharp Mars rocks to snag on here!!! Just this...veeeeery shallow S-curve.

Everyone hanging out and social media-ing before the event began, waiting for more people to get there. I happened to sit next to a couple people I had pre-stalked on Twitter from the list they made of participants!

LOSING MY MIND EVEN MORE THAT WE COULD TOUCH AND PICK UP THE WHEEL???!?!!? It was pretty light, since it was a 3D model and not made of actual aluminum.

Lookin cute together. This is Kevin Baird, an awesome photographer! The only patches we had in common were the NASA meatball (not even the same one, though) and the SOFIA patch, which was strangely almost in the same spot on both of our jackets.. (on the back left side)

Then Stephanie, JPL’s social media head, came and proposed to us with space grade aerogel, and of course we all said yes. 

After an introduction, Linda, another social media expert at JPL, brought over a top secret looking box, which she explained will have some cool graphics relating to Mars 2020 on the front and inside soon (excited to see that!!)

Inside were material samples of several components of Mars 2020, including the many layered thermal blanket, the ropes that will lower the rover onto the surface of Mars (which can hold the weight of 1 car EACH, and the rover will be suspended by 80 of them) as well as the parachute material (orange), which was remade for better strength and lightness. 

We also got to hold a replica of the sample cache tubes that Mars 2020 will be filling!

At 10:00, the event we were there for, the State of NASA, came on (a budget rollout explaining briefly how much money the government will be giving to NASA in 2021 and what it’s for) so we watched Jim Bridenstein in front of some incredible engines...

And I just..get excited when I see the rover on the screen ok..

There was a super cool internal view of how the Mars 2020 will be depositing sample caches! The video is below:

Anyway, the budget rollout declared 22 billion to NASA and 3.3 billion of that to the development of the human landing system, which will go toward landing humans and science on the moon for the Artemis program. You can read more here about this.

After that, Director Watkins and Dr Zurbuchen came to answer questions, and we learned a bit about Mars Sample Return, and the mission that will come before that but after Mars 2020, which will map icy areas in Mars’ poles. (Really looking forward to learning more about that!!) I gave Dr Zurbuchen some stickers I made and he gave me his card......!

Soon after, we headed to the Science building, to learn about MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) (I’ve noticed, the bigger the budget on these missions, the more effort they put into making the acronyms for everything sound cool) This technology demonstration is on Mars 2020 to prepare for larger scale carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion from Mars’ atmosphere for human use. This size of MOXIE creates only about enough oxygen to keep a small dog alive. Still impressive!!!

Wandered around the MOXIE lab a little and took a peek at the rest of what was on the walls and tables..

After that, we went to the Spacecraft Assembly Facility, where Mars 2020 was not, but that’s a good thing! I’m actually not sure which part is in the box there.. but soon after we left, it left too!

Teeny tiny Mars 2020 model hidden at the end of the viewing area...

Best.

At the indoor mars yard, a couple InSight engineers talked to us about how they use this area to test software before they send it to Mars. Here from left to right are the engineering models for Mars2020, InSight, and Curiosity.

Her name is Maggie!

One of my goals in life is to be able to stand in front of the arm and draw it until I understand what the hell is going on.

Also going to insert some pics I took last week because I was lucky enough to get a tour from my friend Sirina, where there were engineers inside working on the arm:

Next, we headed to the Mars Sample Return testbed!

It makes me excited to be in the rooms with dirt regolith inside.. also SmalBoSSE is the best acronym I’ve seen all day...

The “volleyball” that Mars 2020′s sample caches will eventually be stored in, to be fetched by another rover, launched into orbit around Mars and picked up to be sent back to Earth! 

More freaking out about rover wheels. This is a prototype of one that will be on the rover to pick up the samples; the wire is slightly deformable which is great for offroad Mars action.

The rover will be a joint effort between NASA and ESA.

I love seeing these posters with hints of other projects going on. So cool!!

Last stop (cry) was Mission Control, aka The Center of the Universe, where all the data the Deep Space Network gets from spacecraft comes in.

The view from inside from my previous tour!

*eyes emoji when I see Mars 2020*

The darkroom and Curiosity’s Ace’s desk, where they send commands to Curiosity at 10:30AM Mars time.

Spitzer’s end of mission from Monday (top) vs the day after it was decommissioned (bottom).

Center of the Universe!!!

Ouagh don’t step on it! Well you can..

It was sad to say goodbye to our excellent guides, but we’ll be keeping in touch!! ;)

I also got a bunch of awesome pictures taken of me, which I was surprised by, because usually I’m the last one people take pics of..! 

My jacket, which they posted on JPL’s instagram... gosh!!!!!!

And some stickers/new business card design (did I post this here yet??) I gave to everyone I met!

Displayed at Shannon Forrey’s desk!

This was a truly amazing experience, my first time attending one of these events, I learned so much and had such a great time surrounded by inspiring and talented people. Thank you again to everyone at JPL who made it possible and to all the scientists and engineers who took the time to share their work with us! I’ll never forget this day.

Also, I want to make some art based off what I learned, so keep an eye out for that in the upcoming weeks!

[lapeaudelamemoire]

Today: went to all my tutes, first week back at school since I got back from Singapore. Have one quiz and one 1250-word assignment due this Sunday, and another quiz that closes next Tuesday. At least I’m up to speed on it all now and can get down to studying (hmmm...).

Finished reading Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection. Read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele in the bath. Had a long soak in black, glittery galaxy rose-scented water, courtesy of my Lush bath bomb. Untangled my hair as best I could. Watched a couple Gene Tierney films, the first ‘old films’ I’ve seen in a while - The Mating Season (1951) and Rings on Her Fingers (1942). Really adored the former - Thelma Ritter was adorable in it. Made dinner. Went back to Memrise and did several topics in a Basque course or two.

I thought my life at 24 was going to be a lot more glamorous, or more outwardly successful somehow, than this. Or maybe what I mean is I think I imagined that I was going to feel more fulfilled, or happier, or something like that, more like I’d achieved or was near in the process of achieving something.

But I’m enjoying my third-year units this term. Qualitative research is something I can really get with and instinctively understand - all literary analysis and stories are this - and another unit in the psychology of stress, trauma, and resilience really lines up both where I’m at with my reading, and the trauma counselling class I did last term. This is my area; this is what I know. Finally something feels fulfilling, and like it’s engaging me, paying off [the waiting and slog].

I’ve left the windows open to air the room of its stagnant closedness, stuffed and unmoving, static and stale - almost tomb-like, albeit with a clear view out the window. Today I put myself out there a little bit. Today I smiled and talked and wrote some notes in my notebook during class and went through a piece of data coding it by colour and count, methodically, even saved it, stayed to finish it.

There’s a knot in my abdomen still tight, my muscles tense and twitchy like a rabbit’s, alert like the tell of prey animals. When you think about it like that the idea sold to us of the ‘hunter and the hunted’ or the ‘eat or be eaten’ comes to mind, and I look like the eaten trying to turn into an eater. The thing about why we need at least one other person is that the other person is a marker of ‘here, now, and not in your head alone’. A person is an active thing, living, breathing, a process, wave function in motion, in situ. I realised earlier today that it’s the extra pair of hands I need, tapping on my body, something other than myself actively engaging with me. The other person is the anchor. The other person is an actively anchoring point, the cone bobbing in the sea.

I can’t get back the years, so I have to make the time I have fuller. I gorge, then lay overfull, sickly glutted, or paralysed, overrun with inertia. Maybe I’ll count that year as one of the years I fucked up. Don’t we all say that we should do it while we’re young, while we’re in our twenties? A reset, bone check, welcome to the next level a new decade in your life?

Maybe the messier it is the more surface area I cover; even if it’s all just scribbles. Damn, I sure hope so.

[leiascully]

Fic:  Between A Rock And A Hard Place (Part 5/5)

Timeline: Season 10 (replaces My Struggle in the All The Choices We’ve Made ‘verse - Visitor + Resident + etc.) Rating: PG Characters:  Mulder, Scully, Tad O’Malley, Sveta (established MSR) Content warning:  canon-typical body horror (mentions of abduction, forced pregnancy, etc.) A/N:  I’m collecting all the related stories that go with Visitor/Resident under the title “All The Choices We’ve Made”, because it felt right at the time.  This story is an alternate My Struggle that reflects M&S’ growth/change in the ATCWM ‘verse. I’m weaving canon dialogue into the stories in an attempt to keep the reframing plausibly in line with canon.  

Part One  |  Part Two  |  Part Three  |  Part Four  |   AO3

It's not a surprise the next day when they emerge from the Hoover Building, where they've been supervising the setup of all of the new computers, to see Tad O'Malley's gleaming black limo.  The door opens.  They get in.  

"Glad we caught you, agents," O'Malley says with a grin.  

"We're not hard to track down," Mulder says.  

"It's the chip in my neck," Scully says dryly, and Mulder isn't sure he's ever heard her joke about it before.  But maybe she's spitting into the wind too, reminded of how whoever is behind all this has tampered with her at a molecular level.  He admits it is easy to direct (or misdirect) that frustration at Tad O'Malley.  

"Hi," Sveta says, waving at them from across the car.  O'Malley hasn't brought out the champagne this time, but she's clutching a bottle of Perrier.  

Mulder leans back against the leather seat.  The car certainly is plush.  The perks of selling out, he imagines.  

"I didn't think you'd come, Agent Scully," O'Malley says.  "After all, your work is so important.  So I took the liberty of coming to you."  He opens a small fridge concealed under the seat.  "Perrier?"

"Thank you," Scully says, accepting a bottle.  "What are you doing here, Mr. O'Malley?"

"Exposing a global conspiracy that's crushing the soul of America," O'Malley declares.  "Agent Mulder knows what I'm talking about."

"You're ready to make a move?" Mulder asks.

"The Truth Squad with Tad O'Malley with a world exclusive," O'Malley tells him.  "The story to end all stories."  

"Why don't you give us a preview?" Scully says, settling into her seat.  

O'Malley leaned forward.  "We begin with a war.  The Civil War.  The United States splits in two.  A new government forms.  They mint their own currency.  They make their own laws."

"They perpetuate the enslavement and genocide of millions of people," Scully murmurs.  

"That enslavement creates the haves and the have-nots.  And the halves begin to believe, to truly believe, that they are above the law.  That they can meddle with the fates and lives of people they start to consider subhuman: black, white, Native American, and everyone else.  An experimental program to create a better person through a variety of methods, including surgical intervention and selective breeding."

Sveta shivers.  Scully looks at her compassionately.  She reaches for Sveta's hand.  

O'Malley doesn't seem to notice their discomfort.  "The shadow government continues to exist after the war.  The genetic engineering of a superior human continues in the shadows of the shadow.  And they have other secrets."

"It all sounds like a ghost story," Scully says in that even voice that immediately sends Mulder into full alert.  "Designed to scare children."

"Children should be afraid," O'Malley tells her.  

"Everyone should," Mulder says, and he sees the shiver in her eyelid that means she's trying not to roll her eyes at him.  "It's a conspiracy bigger and more secret than the Manhattan Project, with tentacles reaching back into the very roots of America."

"The metaphor is mixed," Scully says.

"All the more apt," Mulder tells her.  "The Civil War set the stage and World War I gave us access to new technologies, but it wasn't until victories in Europe and Japan that the drama really ratcheted up for the rest of the world."

"Political and economic conditions became perfect for execution of the larger plan," O'Malley declared.  "The success of the program in the former Confederate states had spread to the re-United States.  Agents of the conspiracy, swearing their allegiance to President Grant, had infiltrated the highest levels of government.  World War I and World War II had weakened the European powers that might have held the US in check.  As it was, they were delighted to accept the offer of help from the United States, and if it came with a price, they were happy to pay it.  Their scientists began working with our scientists.  The project stretched those insidious tentacles to grasp the entire globe."

Mulder grins.  This is his wheelhouse.  Even as much as he's been jerked around and lost his faith, it's still exhilarating to put together the pieces of the puzzle he worked at for half his life.  "Paper Clip.  Experiments in the aftermath of the atomic bombings.  The crash at Roswell leading to cannibalized alien technology and cannibalized alien corpses, all resources that furthered the project."

O'Malley breaks in.  "The bomb was the latest threat of extinction, but not the first.  The energy of the explosions acted as transducers, creating wormholes that drew in alien ships just like the one that crashed at Roswell, ships that ran using electro-gravitic propulsion.  Sacrificing those alien lives with their extraterrestrial biology and their advanced technology delayed our self-immolation on the altar of democracy."

"World leaders signed secret memos directing scientific stuff of alien technology and biochemistry," Mulder puts in.  "All in the name of furthering the project, creating a new species that could survive alien invasion or whatever else might wipe us out.  Classified studies were done at military installations, extracting alien tissue.  S4, Groom Lake, Wright Patterson, and Dulce: all part of a network of black sites where tests were conducted using advanced alien technology recovered from the ships."  He glances at Sveta.  She has one hand over her mouth.  "Tests including human hybridization through gene editing and forced implantation of the resulting embryos in unsuspecting human subjects."  He swallows and tries not to look at Scully, but can't help meeting her eyes.  "Embryos with extraterrestrial DNA."  

Sveta gasps.  "Why do such a thing and lie about it?  Our own government?"

"Aliens aside," Scully says, "the American government has conducted experiments on unsuspecting populations as a matter of policy.  The Tuskegee Syphilis Study lasted for years beyond the point where they could have cured the patients.  The scientists in charge chose not to inform their subjects because they were African-American.  They let them die horrible, preventable deaths, claiming it was all in the name of science.  Genetic material was extracted from a sample of a tumor taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks and used without her consent or her family's.  Other people have been sterilized against their will, or stolen from their families.  I doubt we'll ever understand the full extent of the violence done to the indigenous peoples of the Americas."  She exhales loudly.  "While I cannot substantiate all of Agent Mulder's claims, I have found evidence of anomalous genetic material being implanted or otherwise introduced into the DNA of numerous subjects, including myself.  And you."

"What are they trying to do?" Sveta asks.

"That's the missing piece," Mulder tells her.  "We've learned so much, but some part of this eludes us."

"But it's not hard to imagine," O'Malley breaks in.  "A government hiding, no, hoarding alien technology for seventy years, at the potential expense of all human life and the future of the planet.  A government inside the government, secretly preparing for more than a hundred years for the long-awaited event."

"The takeover of America," Mulder says, feeling sick to his stomach.

"And then the world itself," O'Malley says with an almost religious fervor.  "By any means necessary, however violent or cruel.  Severe drought brought on by weather wars conducted secretly using aerial contaminants distributed via chemtrails and high-altitude electromagnetic waves.  Perpetual war waged overseas, a drain on our resources and our energy engineered by politicians to create problem-reaction-solution scenarios to distract, enrage, and enslave American citizens at home with tools like the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, and pure old-fashioned jingoism, abridging the Constitution and its promised freedoms in the name of national security.  Every dissident, every minority: a terrorist in situ.  Vietnam, but this time they're doing it right."

"Militarize the police forces," Mulder says slowly.  "Martial law.  FEMA building prison camps.  Mercenaries fighting under our flag, but not under our orders."

"The corporate takeover of food and agriculture," O'Malley says smugly.  "It's already begun.  Monsanto.  Dicamba.  They've got pharmaceuticals and healthcare in their pocket too.  An insurrection of men and women with clandestine agendas to dull, sicken, terrify, and control a populace already consumed by consumerism."

Mulder leans over to Scully.  "I didn't really like Wall-E," he whispers.  She shakes her head at him.

"A government that taps your phone, collects your data, and monitors your whereabouts with impunity," O'Malley says with a flourish.  "A government preparing to use that data against you when it strikes and the final takeover begins."

Mulder nods slowly.  There is a seed of truth in O'Malley's conspiracy-addled rant.  He's been seeking it long enough to know it when he sees it.  The nation is poised on a precipice.  All the rest of it is lies, smoke and mirrors, a way to turn the paranoid and the credulous into easy money.  But somewhere, under eighty mattress-thick layers of right-wing garbage, is a pea-sized truth, and he's the princess shifting uncomfortably.  

"The takeover of America?" Scully asks.

O'Malley leans forward.  "By a well-oiled and well-armed multinational group of elites that will cull, kill, and subjugate."

"Happening as we sit here in this car," Scully says.

"It's happening all around us," O'Malley tells her.

"It's been happening for years," Mulder murmurs.  "The other shoe waiting to drop."

"It'll probably start on a Friday," O'Malley says.  "The banks will announce a security action necessitating that their computers go offline all weekend."

"Digital money will disappear," he says.

Sveta looks startled.  "They can just steal your money?"  Scully squeezes her hand.

"While the banks are vulnerable,  they'll detonate strategic electromagnetic pulse bombs to knock out major grids.  Traffic lights, security systems, everything: gone.  Hospitals will be on backup generators indefinitely.  It will seem like an attack on America by terrorists or Russia."

"Or a simulated alien invasion featuring alien replica vehicles already in use," Mulder murmurs.  

"An alien invasion of the U.S.?" Scully says.

"The Russians tried it in '47," Mulder reminds her.  "Or they took credit for it, anyway."

"They'll take more than credit this time," O'Malley says.  "This goes worldwide.  Everything that has happened for the past seventy years has been engineered by this global conspiracy, these shadow players.  The structures they've built are designed to crumble, tearing America apart at the seams.  They'll build a new world on the ruins of our current one.  It will happen soon, and it will happen fast."  

Scully shakes her head.  "You can't say these things," she tells O'Malley.

"I'm gonna say them tomorrow," O'Malley says with an almost religious fervor in his voice.  

Scully frowns.  "It's fearmongering, isolationist techno-paranoia so bogus and dangerous and stupid that it borders on treason.  Saying these things would be incredibly irresponsible."  

"I hate to say this, Scully, but if this is true, it would be irresponsible not to say it," Mulder says reluctantly.  

"If it's the truth," Sveta says, "you have to say it."  

"It's not the truth," Scully says.

O'Malley grins that smarmy grin.  "Agent Scully, with all due respect, I don't think you know what the truth is."

"The only thing I don't know is where you're taking us," Scully says, ice in her voice.  "Except on a wild goose chase."

"It's lunchtime," O'Malley says.  "I thought you might want something to eat."  

It's clear from the look Scully gives him that there is a long, long list of people she would rather have lunch with before she deigned to have lunch with Tad O'Malley.  In fact, it might be approaching seven billion people long.  

"I think what Agent Scully is trying to convey is that we've got to decline your invitation," Mulder says.

"You believe me," O'Malley says to Mulder with certainty.

Mulder looks at Scully.  She looks back at him, her eyes tight just at the corners.  "I might have, back in the day.  My doctor says paranoia is bad for me."  

O'Malley sits back, disappointed.  Scully's shoulders loosen.  She glances at him and there's something between approval and gratitude in her eyes.  He smiles at her.  

There's a pinging noise.  Scully checks her email on her phone.  Her brow creases.  She scrolls through something, then flicks back to the top and reads through it again.  "This is strange."

"What?"  Mulder leans over.  

"Sveta, the lab retested your samples.  A new tech was running the machines, and a number of test results were compromised.  In fact, they retested your samples twice to be sure.  Your DNA shows no anomalies."  Scully looks up.  "Whatever's been done to you, it had nothing to do with this project."

"Nothing?" Sveta and O'Malley ask at the same time.

"That can't be right," O'Malley says.  "Retest her."  

"I don't want to be tested again," Sveta says.  

"You're my evidence," O'Malley tells her angrily.  "You have to."

"She doesn't have to do anything," Scully tells him.  "She's under our protection now."

"We'll see about that," O'Malley says.  He presses a button.  The driver pulls over.  He opens the door.  "Goodbye, agents.  Goodbye, Sveta."

"What will you do?" Sveta asks him as she climbs out of the car.  

"I'll do what I do," O'Malley says.  "I'll tell the truth."

The car door slams shut.

Truth Squad with Tad O'Malley the next day is a runaway hit: high ratings, viral content, memes, gifs, and a media uproar.  "I promised you the truth today, but that truth has come under assault," O'Malley says, looking into the camera, and they roll footage of Sveta confessing to reporters, accusing him of telling lies.

"I am so sorry if I misled anyone," she says tearfully, wringing her hands in front of her.

"They get her?" Mulder asks.

"She should be safe," Scully tells him.  "They'll work on relocating her."

"Material witness?" Mulder asks.  "That's a bit of a stretch."

"It won't be by the time all of this is over," Scully says grimly.  "I went to the hospital to collect the samples and had our labs run them again."

"And?" Mulder says.

"Sveta and I share a lot," Scully says.  "Including anomalous genetic material."

"O'Malley must be furious," Mulder says, propping his hands on his hips as he thinks.

"Rumor is they're going to pull the plug," Scully says.  "No more truth, no more Squad."

"To his followers, that'll feel like a sign," Mulder says.  "A shot fired across their bows."

Scully shrugs.  "Damned if you do, damned if you don't.  Either we embolden a liar, or we enrage his base."    

"Politics have never been our strong suit," Mulder says.  "You know, there's something called the Venus Syndrome."

"The plant, the planet, or something else I'm afraid to ask about?" Scully asks.

"The planet," Mulder says.  "It's a runaway global warming scenario that leads us to the brink of the Sixth Extinction.  Those with the means will prepare to move off the planet into space, which will have already been weaponized against the poor, huddled masses of humanity that haven't been exterminated by the über-violent fascist elites.  If you believe in that kind of thing."

"Honestly, these days it sounds almost plausible," Scully tells him, leaning on one of the desks.  Whoever has funded the untimely revival of the X-Files has been generous: they have two normal desks and four standing desks scattered around the office.  It's much too flexible a workspace for two people.  

Their phones go off almost in unison.  They both reach for them.

"Skinner," Scully says.

"Skinner," Mulder confirms.  He reads the message:  Situation critical.  Need to see you both ASAP.  

They look at each other.  

"Scully, are you ready for this?" Mulder asks.

"I don't know there's a choice," she says, but she sounds fierce and proud.

There are wheels turning somewhere.  He can almost hear the gears of the world grinding.  They won't get caught in the teeth this time, won't get torn apart.  Whoever is behind everything they've been through will be exposed, finally and totally, brought to light.  They'll have to open the wound to clean it out, but that's all right.  They've finally learned how to heal.  He opens the door for her and they stride toward the elevator together.

[nmranalyzer]

“Probe” into NMR

What is NMR

Speaking of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the first reaction of many people is the examination we usually do in the hospital-magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Due to the lack of certain scientific knowledge, many of them believe that MRI has radiation and is harmful to the body. This is called nuclear color change. It is said that precisely because of this, medical experts in the United States during the Cold War renamed magnetic resonance imaging as magnetic resonance imaging to eliminate ordinary people’s fear of nuclear.

The above mentioned are the common views of people on MRI in daily life, basically staying at the cognitive level of health care. In fact, NMR itself contains very rich content, in addition to related experimental techniques, there are systematic and complete theories. It should be said that since the early physicists such as Rabi, Purcell and Bloch discovered the NMR phenomenon, NMR has been developed from an early emerging experimental technology to a cross-physics and chemistry through the joint efforts of countless scientists around the world. , Materials, biomedicine, electronics and other multi-disciplinary cross-disciplines with important influence. In its short decades of development, the Nobel Prize has been associated with it five times, and it has been reflected in physics, chemistry and biomedicine. According to related statistics, among the scientific and technological articles published worldwide each year, the article on NMR is the most, ranking first.

All these fully show that MRI has a strong academic vitality. At the same time, as an experimental technique, its scope of application is wide: from macroscopic objects to microscopic atomic and molecular states, NMR has become an indispensable “a pair of eyes” for us to observe and study substances. In addition, in view of the good two-way interactive relationship between MRI in basic research and applied research, its development will undoubtedly have a good demonstration role for the development of other disciplines.

What does NMR mean for scientific research and technical personnel

Specifically, for a nuclear magnetic detector, NMR may be a map. For this reason, they may only need to understand the operation steps of the instrument, simple maintenance, software use, and sample preparation process. It may also require the ability to parse the map. For organic chemists, in addition to the knowledge mentioned above, they must also master the knowledge of organic chemistry such as purification of organic compounds, organic reactions, and the role of some nuclear magnetic methods to help them better explain. The structure of organic compounds and understanding the mechanism of organic chemical reactions. Only in this way can we say that this organic chemist really has mastered NMR.

Of course, the above researchers only regard NMR as a characterization method similar to infrared and ultraviolet. For an NMR instrument engineer, NMR is a sophisticated and expensive large instrument. For this reason, they need to master more about the principle of the instrument itself and the electronic knowledge of electronic devices, so that the instrument can be in a relatively good state of use and ensure that it does not go wrong. More powerful engineers, they will customize nuclear magnetic instruments and related components (such as probes) according to customer needs. Of course, for those who specifically use NMR for research in the fields of catalysis, batteries, medicine, polymers, biology, and other related fields, NMR is an important scientific research tool in their hands. Their task is to continuously develop new nuclear magnetic methods or use existing methods to study matter and discover new phenomena.

These researchers are generally called NMR spectroscopy. The NMR we talk about basically refers to NMR spectroscopy. In general, NMR spectroscopy can be divided into two major directions of theoretical and methodological research and application: the former mainly includes the development of nuclear magnetic detection technology and pulse sequence, as well as the calculation and simulation of NMR spectra and the development of related software, which involves The essence of the principle of NMR-quantum mechanics. Therefore, mastering good knowledge of quantum mechanics and mathematics is indispensable, and it is best to have a certain knowledge of computer language. The latter is to use the existing nuclear magnetic pulse sequence and technology to study the structure, reaction mechanism and dynamics of substances such as catalysts, polymers, biological macromolecules, energy storage materials, organic substances and drug molecules, and discover new experimental phenomena from them. In order to make better use of NMR, it is necessary to understand the principles of relevant pulse sequences and methods and have knowledge in the corresponding fields.

Of course, some need to develop new experimental devices (such as in-situ and combined devices) to better study substances and related reaction processes. In addition, according to the type of spectrometer used, each direction can be divided into two branches: solid nuclear magnetic and liquid nuclear magnetic.

What is the research object of NMR, can any substance be tested?

It should be said that current NMR instruments can detect substances in any state. The most common are liquids and solids. Of course, liquid crystals, colloids and even gases between liquids and solids can be directly detected. But the premise is that the nuclear spin quantum number of the detected material element’s nucleus is not zero (most elements in the periodic table of the element meet this condition), which involves NMR research object-nuclear spin. Of course, this is only theoretical. Whether it can be tested on an instrument and whether an NMR spectrum with a good signal-to-noise ratio can be obtained. It also needs to pay attention to whether the Rama frequency of the nuclei of the tested element is within the specified frequency range of the instrument Inside, whether the natural abundance and relative sensitivity of the nucleus are high can be obtained from the NMR periodic table on the Internet. In addition, some instruments such as liquid NMR also require that the measured substance should not contain paramagnetic substances as much as possible.

What important information can we get from NMR?

To put it simply, an NMR experiment mainly obtains basic information by analyzing data such as peak position, peak shape, peak intensity, and relaxation time. This information can be obtained from the two aspects of “static” and “dynamic” mentioned earlier. For example, from the perspective of “static”, whether it is liquid or solid nuclear magnetic, the peak position generally refers to the chemical shift, which is an important basis for qualitative confirmation of the composition and type of substance. It is just that in liquid nuclear magnetic field, we generally see the information of the functional groups of organic substances. At the same time, combined with the two-dimensional spectrum, we can get the structure and spatial conformation information of the entire organic substance. In addition, for liquid nuclear magnetic, the peak shape should be concerned with the number of peak splits and the distance between the splits, from which the value of the J coupling constant can be obtained, which is also helpful for the judgment of the material structure. In addition, from the peak splitting situation, we can also indirectly know whether the magnetic field shimming is good or bad.

The information obtained by the peak position and peak shape in solid-state NMR is more abundant, and different information can be obtained by combining different disciplines and research directions. Here, in addition to the peak shape, the peak shape needs to pay attention to the linear shape and peak width of the peak. From the data of these peak shapes, NMR interaction parameters such as chemical shift anisotropy, dipole-dipole coupling constant, quadrupole coupling constant, etc. can be obtained indirectly to obtain substances such as bond length, bond angle, and spatial distribution of chemical bonds Important structural information. Of course, the difference between these chemical shifts and the peak shape is also due to the different bonding mode of the atoms and the chemical environment (for example, the surface and bulk phases, the free material and the adsorbed material, and the different spatial arrangements of the atoms of different crystal types). These nuclei The amount of NMR interaction caused by different Hamiltonian.

In addition, in order to prove the reasonableness of the spectrum judgment, it is necessary to use multi-dimensional nuclear magnetic and nuclear magnetic experiments of a variety of related nuclei, computational simulation of nuclear magnetic spectrum and other related characterization techniques to further confirm. As for the peak intensity, whether it is liquid or solid nuclear magnetic, it can be used to qualitatively compare the relative amount of a certain component or to quantitatively calculate the content of a certain component or substance by adding a certain amount of standard material.

From the perspective of “dynamic”, NMR is a very useful and important technical means to study molecular dynamics. Through variable temperature experiments, two-dimensional exchange experiments, cross-polarization and other methods to study the spectral line shape, peak width and peak intensity changes and nuclear magnetic relaxation time, etc., NMR can study molecules on the order of picoseconds to tens of seconds Movement, such as molecular vibration, rotation, diffusion, and chemical exchange. Here are two more classic examples. For example, in liquid NMR, it is found that the speed of the chemical exchange rate often affects the change in line shape. In solid NMR, the movement of molecules can be studied by analyzing the line change of 2H spectrum at different temperatures Happening.

Through further study of these molecular movements, we can not only obtain physical parameters such as activation energy, reaction rate and diffusion coefficient, but also re-understand the relevant properties of substances and some reaction processes from a macro perspective, such as the crystal form transformation of drug molecules , The glass transition process of polymers and the movement of some gas and liquid molecules in porous materials. So as to help us better design materials with unique properties.

As for why we can use the change of NMR spectrum to detect the movement process of molecules, the fundamental reason is that the movement process of these molecules affects the nuclear spin Hamiltonian of the nucleus, thus causing changes in the spectrum such as line shape, peak width and peak intensity. . The specific degree of influence depends on the relative size of the time scale of these motions and the NMR interaction. It’s like how fast a camera can capture some details of movement, it depends on the relationship between shooting speed and movement speed

(source:https://www.nmranalyzer.com/probe-into-nmr.html)

[3deinc]

The Age of Additive Manufacturing

Technology is one of the defining elements of human history.

The Stone Age was marked by the development of the first tools: hammer stones and hand axes. The Space Age began with the launch of Sputnik 1. Most recently, the rise of the digital computer ushered in the Information Age or—following the archaeological convention—the Silicon Age.

Forecasting the next technological era is difficult, but from a manufacturing perspective it looks like the fourth industrial revolution—a.k.a. Industry 4.0—will involve the synthesis of automation, big data, deep learning, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and 3D printing.

Each of these technologies has the potential to revolutionize the way we make things on an industrial scale, but different industries are adopting them at different rates.

Industrial robots, for example, are a favorite of the automotive industry, which accounts for half of all industrial robot sales. In contrast, automakers tend to be wary of additive manufacturing, due in large part to extended cycle times and higher costs per part.

That’s why the biggest adopters of additive technology to date have been the aerospace, medical and power generation industries. All three can reap enormous benefits from the capabilities additive technologies provide, and will gladly bear the higher costs and longer lead times to get them.

  “When we make a small improvement in efficiency, it has significant financial benefits for our customers,” explained Paul Browning, president and CEO of

Mitsubishi-Hitachi Power Systems Americas (MHPS-AMER)

, which was founded as the result of business integration of power systems by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and Hitachi Ltd.

“To give you some numbers: if we improve the fuel efficiency of a product by one percentage point, over the lifetime of the product it saves the customer more money than the product costs, he continued. “So, for example, the largest gas turbines we sell are about $50 million [USD] each, and a one percent improvement in efficiency saves our customers about $100 million. That’s part of the reason why we’re early adopters of additive manufacturing—it creates so much value for our customers.”

 had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Browning and discuss MHPS-AMER’s investments in additive manufacturing and the benefits it provides in further detail.

You’ve talked about a transition from the Silicon Age to the Additive Age. What’s been the catalyst for this transition?

I’m a metallurgist by training, so I’d been thinking of this time as the Silicon Age, given the impact the transistor has had, but I came to realize that the silicon age was enabled by additive manufacturing.

To make a silicon chip, you grow a single crystal one layer at a time through a controlled solidification process. If you’re a metallurgist, you call it “epitaxial crystallization,” but it’s basically an additive process. We’re now getting into 3D printing, but that’s just the newest form of additive manufacturing.

What can you tell us about the additive technologies MHPS-AMER is using to make its gas turbine blades?

A gas turbine has three major sections: a compressor where the air is sucked into the front end and compressed; a combustion chamber where the compressed air is combined with natural gas and ignited; and the turbine section where that ball of hot gas passes a turbine and causes it to spin. 

 The turbine blade is either grown into a single crystal, just like the silicon wafer, or it’s directionally solidified, which means there’s more than one crystal but they’re all oriented in the same direction. That makes the blade stronger, since the weak points are the boundaries between those crystals.

So, we start with a seed crystal that has the right orientation, then solidify metal on top of that. As the metal goes from liquid to solid in a very controlled fashion—one layer at a time—we solidify the next layer of atoms and they adopt the same crystal orientation as that seed crystal.

Eventually, you end up with a cast blade about a foot tall where every atom is oriented the way you want it to be.

This technology was originally developed for aircraft engines—for much smaller components. But our power plants use very large turbines, and obviously it’s harder to create a single crystal blade in a large format compared to a smaller one.

Previously, the same part would have been cast in a way that’s called “equiaxed,” which means it has a large number of grains that all have a random orientation. With our method, all the grains have the same orientation, which improves the strength of the blade at very high temperatures.

The reason we do this in such a specialized way is that the gasses flowing past the turbine blade are 1,600C, which is hotter than the melting point of the blade. It’s internally cooled, but the temperature of the metal still gets up to 1,200-1,300C. At those temperatures, you need a very specialized alloy made with a sophisticated solidification process to be sure all the atoms are arranged with the right orientation.

The casting process that gives you that directional solidification is a form of additive manufacturing, because you’re growing the blade one layer of atoms at a time.

We also put a ceramic coating over top of the metallic blade, deposited one layer at a time using robots and a process called “plasma spraying.” That ceramic coating acts as a thermal barrier, insulating the metal from those hot gasses.

How much post-processing is required once you’ve cast the blades?

The blade is cast pretty much as a net shape; the only thing we have to do is some machining at the root.

 You can put the ceramic coating on the older blades that were made without additive processes, but the way the technologies were developed, the directionally solidified blade came first and the ceramic coating came later.

There’s nothing that prevents you from putting that coating on equiaxed blades—and we do that sometimes—but generally it’s used in combination with directionally solidified or single-crystal components.

This is much slower, since you have to control the way the material solidifies to get that single crystal orientation. But we think about this in terms of the temperature capability of the part when it’s done, and by using this advanced solidification technique we get about 200C of additional temperature capability, and the thermal coating adds another 150C on top of that. In our business, 350C is worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the lifetime of the power plant. It gives you much better fuel efficiency, so your fuel costs are much lower, and it means lower emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.Did your investments in additive technology require additional investments in safety measures or training?The plasma spray booths were a different animal for us, and anytime we do anything different there’s obviously safety training involved, so there is some specialized safety training for those folks. But the real training is for our design engineers. 

 Most people who become design engineers think about materials having properties that are the same in all directions, but when we use this process to create a part where we’ve purposely oriented all the atoms in the same direction, it gives the material very different properties in one direction than in other directions.

So, you have to train your design engineers on how to design with that material. That was a big part of implementing this, and it’s not just training your people—you have to develop design tools that allow your engineers to work with materials that have very different properties.

What can you tell us about qualifying parts made with additive manufacturing?

One of the things we do involves an x-ray process that ensures the orientation of the crystals in the direction we planned for it to be. In a normal alloy, you don’t have to worry about that; but for these, we have to check to make sure we got the crystallographic orientation that we wanted. That’s one big difference with additive.

These are what we think of as mature additive technologies in our industry. Even though this is pretty high-tech stuff, we’ve been doing it for decades. What we’re doing nowadays is actually 3D printing, not of these parts, but other parts that in the past we would have cast in a traditional casting process. Now we have a process where we can use metallic powders and laser sintering to print parts one layer at a time and build up complex 3D structures with internal cooling passageways.

There are some things that you just can’t manufacture using traditional methods, keeping in mind that the biggest challenge on these is the internal cooling passageways. It’s hard to manufacture those using traditional techniques. This gives our design engineers a whole new level of freedom, where they can design pretty much anything they want. Anything that can be printed, we can now produce. The big challenge is making sure that, in this laser sintered powder system, that we’re getting the same mechanical properties that we would have gotten from a traditional casting process.

During the laser sintering process, there’s a lot of in situ monitoring of temperatures and dimensions. Once we’ve manufactured the part, there’s also destructive testing for mechanical properties and dimensional criteria, among other things.

What do you take to be the biggest barrier to adopting additive manufacturing?

The biggest barrier is, very simply, cost. In the aerospace and power generation industries, there are some very specialized components that cost thousands of dollars per part to produce. These are also products that have a huge impact on the performance of the machines we sell. So, they cost thousands of dollars to produce and have millions of dollars of value to our customers.

For these kinds of applications, we can afford to spend a lot of money to get exactly what we want. A small improvement in performance is worth a lot to our customers. So, I think it makes sense that we’re the pioneers in implementing and commercializing these additive technologies.

But as the cost of these technologies, particularly 3D printing, is falling rapidly, I think you’ll start to see it become more of a mainstream technology that gets adopted by the more cost-conscious industries, like automotive.

There are some small start-up companies that can handle 3D printing in plastics, but 3D printing in metal is a much more technologically challenging application. It was certainly pioneered by companies with the kind of in-house research capabilities that smaller companies just don’t have. But I do think that metallic 3D printing is now to a point where we’re starting to see mid-size companies in our supply chain make investments in that equipment. I think, over time, you’re going to see it become more and more mainstream for small and large companies.

There are some components on our machines that we will probably never transition over to additive manufacturing, just because there’s no huge benefit and the cost position is probably never going to be significantly advantageous. But, over time, we expect more and more of the components we manufacture will be done with additive technologies.

Do you have any advice to new adopters of metal additive technologies?

My biggest piece of advice to new adopters is to hire a good metallurgist. The biggest challenge of metal additive is getting the metallurgy right. Printing something that looks like what you want it to look like is actually not that hard, but printing something that performs the way you want it to perform—that’s the real challenge. In the metallic space, all of the challenges are in materials engineering.

Qualifying the parts is important, but it’s getting the properties right and being able to verify that they’re right that’s the biggest challenge.

[lexitakesonnasa]

7/12/17

So far it has been a pretty busy work week. It has been a little bit frustrating because we have had so many lectures and I feel like I am not getting as much time to work on my research project as I’d like, but we’re all doing the best we can to make the most of the time that we have here. On Monday we had a regular work day, and I wrote my first script in MATLAB from scratch. It wasn’t a very intense script, but I am excited that I am getting the hang of a new programming language! With that script I started playing with in situ data from various stations in the Santa Barbara Channel from the Plumes and Blooms database. I will also be working with NASA satellite data of the Santa Barbara Channel, but we ran into a bit of a roadblock with processing it because my SARP computer is slow running scripts. Monday was also National Piña Colada Day, so at night the oceans group made drinks which were pretty good, as well as cookies which we epically failed at making. Regardless, it was fun because we had a few people over from some of the other groups and watched Moana together. 

On Tuesday we had an atmospheric lecture in the morning from Dr. Matthew Johnson from NASA Ames, and continued working on our projects afterwords. After work I went to the gym with Nikki, and then I played in a 4 on 4 pickup basketball game with some other SARPians. My team lost pretty badly (I’m terrible at basketball) but it was a lot of fun. After that I went over to the Land House to listen to Keegan give a presentation about hike options for this coming weekend. We decided on the hike called Mount San Jacinto, which is about an hour and a half away and going to take us around 6 hours to hike. 

Today we had a long Remote Sensing lecture in the morning given by the land group mentor David. It was really interesting to me in the beginning because he talked about the physics of remote sensing, but by the time hour 3 and 4 came around I had no attention span left which was unfortunate. We then went home for lunch, and afterwards I was able to have my first video chat conference with Dr. Kudela about my project. He answered some of the questions Henry and I had and gave us some good ideas to use moving forward. After a few conference calls we went back to campus to listen to a lecture from Dr. Blake (the WAS group leader). He is a super entertaining guy and talked to us about the work that his mentor was able to accomplish. His mentor Dr. Rowland and his scientific work on the ozone hole was doubted for a long time, but he ultimately won a Nobel Prize for his work. Dr. Rowland’s wife gave the Nobel Prize medal to Dr. Blake after her husband’s death, and he is going to show it to us one day. After the lecture Nikki, Keegan, and hopped in the car to go surfing with Henry. We went to Doheny beach again, and this was my second time going out on the board. I was the last one to surf today, so I went out when it was getting dark and high tide. There was also a hurricane recently so we were getting some of the aftermath waves from that so it was intense. Long story short I got thrown around A LOT, but it was still a ton of fun. I only rode a few waves in (on my stomach still) because most of the time I was just trying to survive the crash zone, and I had little energy left to put into trying to stand. Henry came out without his board to help me out, so he had a great time laughing at me wipe out so much. He also pushed me a lot to go out deeper and take on the big waves, so I’m getting more confident using the surfboard and that I will be ok even if I do wipe out. My goal is to be able to stand comfortably on the board by the end of the summer, if not soon!

[expertcertifiers]

ISO 22301 Certification in Nigeria

New Post has been published on https://www.expertcertifier.com/iso-22301-certification-in-nigeria/

ISO 22301 Certification in Nigeria

“Expert Certifier is a catalyst for business and process excellence, your business and process excellence is guaranteed through ISO certification with Expert Certifier in Nigeria“

Up your business, talk to our Expert Certifier  masters who are available for you to coach and on how to get your business and process certified with ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001,ISO 22000,ISO 27001,ISO 20000-1 and HACCP.

  What is ISO 22301?

ISO 22301 certification in Nigeria is that the International Standard for Business Continuity Management Systems. It defines the Organization’s strategic and tactical capability to plan for and answer incidents and business disruptions so as to continue business operations at a suitable pre-defined level.

It is an undeniable fact that the majority organizations will, at some point, be faced with having to reply to an event which can disrupt or threaten the day-to-day operations of their business. A successful Business Continuity Management (BCM) programme, established to reply to any potential disruption, is important for all organizations.

Ensuring a holistic BCMS is in situ won’t only help the organization get over disasters, it’ll also prevent the reputational damage which will arise from any operational outages, missed deadlines, upset customers, or direct loss. Business Continuity Management involves the recovery or continuation of business activities within the event of any business disruption.

The overall BCM programme is predicted to be managed through activities like determining the scope, risk evaluation, business continuity strategy, business continuity objectives, development planning, training, exercises, testing, reviewing and continual development. might be an organisation has never experienced a significant incident, establishing a BCMS, built on ISO 22301, helps to define key business processes and therefore the disruption that would result from any threats.

“The ISO 22301 is suitable to be used in businesses of all sizes across all sectors, because it will help protect the organization against the threats specific to its business. These could include natural disaster, information technology failure, staff illness, terrorist threat or an interruption in supply chain. ISO 22301 will provide you with a framework for assessing critical suppliers and their associated risks, assessing current business practices and planning contingency measures. When incidents happen, the organization are going to be prepared and ready to respond effectively. it’ll even be ready to reduce downtime having identified alternative arrangements. With ISO 22301, organizations won’t only significantly help reduce the risks to their businesses, but also will assistance will help achieve operational resilience.”

What is ISO 22301 Consulting?

An organization achieving ISO 22301 certification implies it’s recovery and restoration capability for each outage scenario, be it technology, site, vendor, people/skill or the opposite dependency. we’ve a seven phase approach that starts with understanding your business and continuity objectives. this is often often followed by Business Impact Analysis (BIA), and Risk Assessment (RA) to figure out your minimum business continuity objectives.

Each of our ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management System consulting in Benin assignment involves the transfer of knowledge, skills, documented plans, and testing of each of those plans. We create two-layer plans that has restoration of minimum also as full restoration.

We have implemented ISO 22301 for several Companies covering multiple locations, Financial Institutions, and Insurance Companies. Each of them are successfully ISO 22301 certified.

What makes us unique is our involvement within the engagement that ensures your business is capable of successful recovery. Our methodologies of understanding a business, business impact analysis, risk assessment, continuity strategies (focus on outage rather than events), individual restoration plans, Disaster Recovery Plans, rigorous testing, and 0 defect ISO 22301 certification – each of these features contribute to a much better return of your business continuity investment.

What are the ISO 22301:2019 Certification Requirements in Lagos

The standard is split into 10 following clauses. For ISO 22301:2019  Certification only Clause 4 to 10 is applicable

Clause 1- Scope

Clause 2- Normative References

Clauses 3 Terms and definitions

Clause 4- Context of Organizations

Clause 5- Leadership

Clause 6- Planning

Clause 7- Support

Clause 8- Operation

Clause 9- Performance Monitoring

Clause 10- Improvement

We bring our greatest experience in delivery ISO 22301 Consulting Certification in Nigeria.

PHASE I- Understanding the business objectives, and business continuity objectives.

PHASE II- Business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment.

PHASE III -clinical trial – Management Strategy for recovery

PHASE IV- Documenting and communication individual plans.

PHASE V – Testing each of the Individual Plans.

PHASE VI – Internal Audit.

PHASE VII- This has two stages Stage a. Documentation Audit, and b- Implementation Verification

The Importance of Business Continuity Management System in  Nigeria

ISO 22301 in Lagos establishing business continuity management policy and objectives.

Implement and control and measures for the operating managing organization capacity to disruptive incidents.

Business Continuity Management System in Ibadan Effectiveness monitoring and reviewing the performance

Improving supported objective measure.

Disruption of a corporation happens at any moment and still increase the worldwide . Imperative organization have an idea in situ to reply resume business also as possible. ISO 22301 implementation in Benin ( BCMS) through protect the organization occurred by cyber threats.

Advantages of an ISO 22301 Certification in Nigeria:

Having an ISO 22301 Certification Process in Nigeria provide many benefits and communications to the clients that the confident within the policies, Procedure, and Process place at the organization to guard against business disruption.

1.Transparency : insight into every area of the organization for the method information security practice.

improvement strategies: The ISO 22301 Consultancy in Nigeria will provide with an understanding of area vulnerability movement and to form change enhancement of (BCMS)

Reduced downtime : ISO 22301 Registration in Calabar if a security incident or data breach to the organization business continuity process to scale back downtime operations.

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Call of Duty: Warzone declassified

When we look back at a console generation for its greatest hits, it’s invariably the first-party titles that dominate – but sometimes multi-platform technologies emerge that are truly exceptional, and the fact they need to accommodate four very different consoles plus myriad PC hardware configurations only adds to the scale of the achievement. Today, Season Four of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare arrives – and I’d suggest that the IW8 engine from Infinity Ward is one of the most impressive accomplishments of the generation.

Modern Warfare 2019 is the most complete COD package of the modern era. We’ve reported before on the key technologies that make it stand apart – an engine that renders in both visible, invisible and thermal spectrums (!) while also supporting volumetrics on every light source. IW8 shifts to a physically-based materials system, bringing COD into line with the most advanced engines in the business, and offering a beautiful level of realism from every authored asset in the game. Geometry is also massively improved, delivering an unprecedented level of detail to the Call of Duty franchise. All of this is achieved in a title targeting 60 frames per second.

IW8 also revamps the background streaming system, using a hybrid tile-based approach, opening the door to bigger, more detailed worlds. It’s the reason why the campaign is more detailed, but it’s also how Infinity Ward delivered the vast Ground War mode of the launch code – but battle royale takes this to another level, as I discovered when visiting Infinity Ward’s tech hub in Poland at the end of February. I spent the day with Principal Rendering Engineer Michal Drobot, who is also the studio head of the Polish arm of the developer.

To begin with, it’s true to say that Treyarch presented the first COD battle royale, using its own engine to deliver 2018’s Blackout – but aside from some initial tech sharing based on the Black Ops dev’s super terrain technology, Warzone was built independently. And what’s fascinating about it is that a whole slew of new techniques were deployed to make battle royale possible – but all of these systems integrate with the other game modes too. The optimisations that make Warzone possible feed back into every other mode, improving performance.

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Call of Duty Modern Warfare’s engine upgrades for battle royale revealed and explained with exclusive behind-the-scenes information and debug code access.

Infinity War’s objectives for Warzone were ambitious. The aim was to create a battle royale map that had the same level of fidelity and detail as the core multiplayer maps – and that’s precisely what’s been delivered. The multiplayer maps are the battle royale map. When the locations are authored, they are done so within the overall canvas of the Warzone map. This makes Warzone the largest map in the history of the Call of Duty franchise. Its basic structure is derived from satellite data – it’s shrunk down to a certain extent but its geography mirrors the landmarks of a real city, with the downtown section alone comprising of six districts. A Ground War map takes around four to five months to successfully execute and there are seven of them contained within the single Warzone map, along with other major multiplayer maps – and that’s before we factor in the connective areas of the map between these major blocks.

There’s also continuity too. If you’ve been playing Modern Warfare across its seasons, you’ll note that there’s been a consistent narrative emerging that spans across game modes – so the upshot of this is is that not only are the multiplayer maps contained within Warzone, if the content changes as we move between seasons, that should be reflected across all modes. I also like the way that the Infinity Ward taps into their own heritage – Modern Warfare 2019 is a reboot, but there are nods to the old continuity. The TV studio in Warzone is a remake of the map found in Call of Duty 4, the original Modern Warfare. The gulag essentially the same structure we saw in Modern Warfare 2 and its recent remaster.

Making all of this possible is the process of technology evolution within the IW8 engine. The hybrid tile streaming system that Modern Warfare 2019 shipped with has radically evolved. The fundamental idea is still the same: tiles or chunks are loaded into RAM based on an algorithm that determines the priority of data most likely to be needed as you look around the terrain and move through it. In the video above, you’ll see the debug tools Infinity Ward uses to visualise the streaming system. Environmental ‘chunks’ can be sub-divided into four smaller chunks, and they’re three levels deep. Streaming begins with what Infinity Ward calls transients, the foundations if you like, and on top of that is loose loading for meshes and textures.

The streaming system relies on three LOD levels. Click on the thumbnail here for a closer look.

Accommodating Ground War and Warzone’s needs for extreme visibility across big maps, the refined IW8 engine has a fascinating level of detail systems. LOD0 is, as you might expect, the full detail model authored by Infinity Ward’s artists. Further out, you get LOD1 – meshes and textures are distilled down and simplified into a single block. I got the chance to see the various LODs at close-range in a way that they were never meant to be seen, and it’s interesting how well LOD1 holds up. I also saw a LOD1 chunk in situ within the game, and again, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference at the range it was rendered at (which was closer to the player than I expected). The final level of detail is LOD2, which takes four LOD1 chunks and simplifies them again, collapsing them into a single chunk.

Also key to level of detail are the use of imposters. Elements like trees can be pretty difficult and costly to render and at range, you’re potentially paying a heavy cost for rendering something that’s really small and may only occupy a few pixels on-screen. Imposters are used fairly commonly now (Fortnite is a good example) and the idea is straightforward enough. When an object is far enough from the viewer, there’s no need to render a 3D model at all. You can use a 2D billboard – a flat texture, a single triangle – instead. Typically, each object has 36 billboard variations, designed to represent the 3D model viewed from various angles. Trees are the obvious example for the use of imposters but other elements get the billboard treatment too – vehicles, for example.

Streaming, memory management and accurately predicting what data is going to be needed and when is essential in making the larger scale Call of Duty work. It satisfies the design objectives in allowing artists to equal core multiplayer map quality and to run the game at 60 frames per second. The entire approach also allows Call of Duty to do things in battle royale that is competitors are struggling to match. For example, Warfare has internal access to pretty much every building there is and not only that, these interiors were properly modelled too, in a world where some titles use procedural generation to fill empty spaces with what looks like random clutter.

A debug view of Warzone in motion. On the bottom left, you can see the tile-based streaming system and a legend describing what’s happening in system memory on a per-chunk basis..

The latest Call of Duty engine does use procedural generation, however, mostly for incidental detail on the terrain: foliage, rocks and other random items. In fact, pretty much anything that doesn’t impact collision detection is procedurally generated and the nature of what you get depends on the surrounding biome. This is procedural generation and not random generation, so the same seed variable is used for all players on all systems. In practise what this means is that the nature of the environment is identical to all players on all systems, something we verified by capturing crossplay Warzone on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, while spectating the same player. Procedural generation adds to processing time of course, but the bigger win comes from a reduction in the storage footprint: Infinity Ward reckons it saves around five to six gigabytes of data.

More instrumental to actual performance is the new shadow map caching system, which required a fundamental revamp, as shadow rendering is essentially incompatible with the chunk-based streaming system. Imagine the sun quite low in the sky, with light hitting a tall skyscraper. In theory, its shadow could cast across the entire map, way beyond the single chunk the building resides in. At the basic level, the new caching system brings in the most efficient shadow map based on the view frustum, with a level of detail system used.

Wavelet compression technology, used in video compression, is used to reduce the footprint of shadowmaps versus standard birmaps. In terms of what is actually streamed in and when, the new set-up is an efficient caching system with building blocks similar to those found in actual an actual physical CPU. Infinity Ward talks about building is own prefetcher and predictor – the same language used by Intel and AMD processor architects.

The shadow cascade streaming system is vastly more efficient and prevents larger scale game modes from becoming CPU-limited.

It’s all very clever but what fundamental difference does it make? Going back to the launch of Modern Warfare 2019, the closest thing we had to battle royale was Ground War, and there the tech team discovered that for pretty much the first time in COD history, they were CPU-limited. The new shadow caching system wasn’t devised solely for use by Warzone, it wasn’t a battle royale-specific piece of tech, it’s an optimisation in the truest sense of the word – taking something that already exists and making it better, meaning that it’s rolled out to all areas of Modern Warfare 2019. CPU-bound limitations in Ground War are therefore eliminated. A revamped shadow caching system is also in place for other shadows – those which are not cast by the sun. Especially for indoor locations illuminated with spot light, this system also caches in shadows. There are 64 slots of prefiltered shadow maps here with eight shadow updates per frame. Again, similar to the main system, it’s not something that runs on a per frame basis – and it doesn’t really need to.

Back in the day, Call of Duty shipped with two physical executables – one for the campaign, the other for multiplayer with both presumably optimised accordingly. A core change in philosophy has seen this approach binned in favour of a unified codebase that brings together all technology into a single package – but ongoing optimisation means that all parts of the game cumulatively benefit. The Pine level, for example, launched on PlayStation 4 Pro not quite hitting its performance target. It still maintained 60 frames per second, but it had to lean into the dynamic resolution scaler to reduce pixel count and ensure full frame-rate.

Multiplayer maps are authored within the battle royale map and always have been. It ensures continuity of content across the whole game – and despite the larger scale, Warzone is as detailed as core MP.

Foliage rendering has significantly improved since launch, so there’s an improvement in resolution. In fact although you won’t feel it in terms of frame-rate in this specific case, render times generally are improved by 10 to 20 per cent. Similarly, optimisation across the board with each new title update has also seen progressive improvements to overall performance. On a content level, Infinity Ward has targeted the multiplayer maps as a priority for improved performance because that’s the area of the game most players are accessing but the knock-on effect is that systems in campaign run faster too.

Speaking to Infinity Ward, I made a startling discovery. When you stand back and look at the four console platforms, there is a lot of commonality between them. All of them use the same core AMD Jaguar CPU technology and they all feature AMD’s GCN graphics architecture. While this may be more straightforward than the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 set-up of the last generation, the tech team estimate that around 30 per cent of their time is spent addressing multi-platform development issues. Interestingly, Infinity Ward ranks PS4 Pro as the most challenging of the four current-gen consoles that Call of Duty is available for.

Put simply, the expectation from the user base is for 4K video output, but Sony only gifts developers an extra 512MB of RAM to play with. Meanwhile, the boost on Xbox One X is four gigabytes in total – eight times as much. This opens the door to higher resolution, but also gives the streaming system much more room to stretch its legs. Theoretically, this should result in less pop-in and less aggressive LODs over longer distances – but head-to-head video doesn’t provide much in the way of a noticeable advantage.

Warzone performance sees Xbox One X deliver more pixels with a slightly lower level of performance – but the gap has tightened since battle royale launched.

With consoles targeting 60 frames per second, Call of Duty has to cram the rendering for each frame into around 16ms, and this broken up into two distinct phases. First of all, the basics of the scene are calculated and lit – a process that takes around seven milliseconds. The next seven milliseconds is spent on basically everything else: volumetrics and post-processing, for example. Around 1.5 to 2.5 milliseconds is spent on temporal upsampling – integrating visual data from prior frames into the current one. The more detail rich a scene is, the heavier the cost in rendering terms. Asynchronous compute is used on all systems, including PC. It’s more heavily optimised on consoles though, providing performance uplifts of around 20 to 30 per cent in the expensive scenes. Systems like volumetrics and particles can run asynchronously.

All of this technology comes together to make Warzone possible – and even factoring out IW8’s application in campaign and core multiplayer, its deployment for battle royale alone sees a radical improvement in technology, visual fidelity and performance over other genre entries. Compare and contrast with the fortunes of PUBG that launched late in 2017 and it’s fascinating to see how colossal the improvement is in every regard in less than 2.5 years. Back in May 2019, I first visited Infinity Ward to get a breakdown on the technological leap delivered by IW8, and it was clear that this engine was designed to straddle the generations and to allow Infinity Ward and other COD studios to transition more seamlessly to PS5 and Xbox Series X. What we didn’t know was what hardware the developers would have access to.

While Infinity Ward itself wasn’t sharing specifics, it’s easy to see how the existing systems could transition across to next generation hardware. Extra graphics power means denser visuals, obviously, but the concept of the streaming systems we’ve discussed here backed up by a storage speed multiplier of 40x or 100x (depending on the console) opens the door to the kind of visual quality that exceeds the campaign being made possible in multiplayer. The streaming system also fits hand-in-glove with the fact that PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X do not deliver what we would typically consider to be a generational leap in memory allocation. Modern Warfare 2019 also saw some tentative experimentation with ray tracing support, which may be invaluable research when dealing with the hardware RT functionality baked into the new consoles.

In the meantime, it’s all about Season Four of Modern Warfare and the debut of a specific mode may put into practise a theoretical scenario I put forward to the developer: what if all of the battle royale players grouped together and one player stepped back to get all of the others into view – would the system be able to cope? According to the studio, they’ve witnessed legitimate scenarios where 50 to 100 players could be seen on-screen. Looking from one big city area to another via sniper scope, apparently up to 120 players could be observed. Season Four’s new 50 vs 50 mode should really allow us to stress test the massively multiplayer aspect of this remarkable engine in a way that Ground War never could – and we’ll be fascinated to see how it holds up.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/call-of-duty-warzone-declassified/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=call-of-duty-warzone-declassified

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Microsoft announced last month that its new Microsoft 365 subscription service (formerly Office 365) would offer some family-oriented features, like a new Microsoft Family Safety app that combines screen time data across multiple platforms and provides tracking information. Microsoft announced more details about the Microsoft Family Safety app service yesterday, and there’s now a beta program you can try out.

Microsoft Family Safety has many equivalent features as existing group management tools from Google and Apple, but Microsoft’s application can gather data from Android, iOS, Windows, and Xbox devices. Parents can see screen time data across all a child’s devices, set deadlines surely apps/games, and configure web filters for Microsoft Edge (though only on Windows/Xbox). Family members also can see where everyone else is currently located on a map.

Microsoft Family Safety App

Let’s take a closer look as some of the features you can try in the preview of Family Safety:

Activity reporting

Get information about your family’s activity so you’ll have a conversation about what your kids do online and on their devices. View screen time, top websites visited, and terms kids are checking out online. Receive an email summary hebdomadally to assist facilitate a dialogue on healthy digital choices and start developing good habits from an early age.

Screen time limits

Set screen deadlines across Windows and Xbox devices. Or if your kids are going to be on devices longer for things like online learning, you’ll set limits on specific apps or games instead. Now once you say just one hour of a game, that means one hour of that game—whether that’s being played on a Windows PC, Xbox, or Android phone. And if they run out of screen time, they will invite more. you’ve got the selection to feature longer or not supported what’s right for your family.

Content controls

Create a secure space for your kids to explore online. Set healthy boundaries with web and search filters to dam mature content and set browsing to kid-friendly websites on Microsoft Edge. Get notified when your kids want to download a more mature app or game from the Microsoft Stores with age limits, keeping you within the know and helping to avoid surprises Family Safety provides you with the tools to start talking about the sort of content that’s right for your kids.

Location sharing

Stay connected even when you’re apart. See loved ones on a map with location sharing. Plus, save places they visit the foremost, like home, work, or school, to understand where relations are at glance. With stay-at-home orders and restrictions on mobility currently in situ, it’s important to understand where your loved ones are once they aren’t at home—for example, if your teenager got side-tracked while running to the grocery and ended up at a friend’s house. And as we revisit to a replacement normal, staying connected with your loved ones is going to be even more important.

Microsoft says there is “limited availability” for the public beta on Android and iOS, but those of you who have already set up a Microsoft family group can get started by completing this survey.

The app was not found in the store.

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