The New York Times published an article last year with the entire genome of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, with a breakdown of different sections to explain what protein the RNA codes for and what that protein does. Like you said it was amazing that it all fit within an [albeit long] newspaper article. It doesn't surprise me that the RNA for the vaccine, which only targets a single protein, is even smaller than that. Here's the NY Times article I was referring too:
Hopefully no one that handles beer kegs for a living is lifting full ones. They have special dollies for handling beer kegs, they even have special attachments for fork lifts for picking them up. I've never been to a brewery where anyone was picking up beer kegs by themselves.
I took a tour of the Celestial Seasonings tea company in Boulder, Colorado many years ago and they had a robot arm for loading pallets very much like this one, except it was fixed to the floor. It had the same suction type mechanism and would grab boxes off a conveyer and stack them on pallets to be shipped out. It was very efficient at it's job and definitely was the highlight of the tour for me, even if it wasn't intended to be. Boxes full of tea are not very heavy, but certainly weigh more than an empty box. The point being is the suction mechanism for picking up boxes has been around for a long time (20+ years?), is tried and tested, and in this very article claims it can handle boxes of up to 50 pounds.
I've helped with an IT project for several large dairies in the US (1,000+ cows each). Like you said the cows practically milk themselves. They walk by themselves into the milk barn, one person attaches the automatic milking machines to each cow as they walk into a stall. The milking machine automatically drops off the udders when the cow is done being milked and they walk back out to their pen on their own. I was told the cows like to be milked because it's uncomfortable for them when they are full of milk. Most dairies milk their cows 3 times a day around the clock. One of the dairies I've been to has a round milk barn with a rotating floor with about 100 milking stalls around the outside edge, so the guy attaching the milking machines to the cows doesn't even have to move. By the time the cows rotate all the way around the building they are done, the milking attachments drop off and the cows walk out the door on their own and go back to their pens to eat. I've shown up at these places a few times unannounced and spent 30 minutes walking around looking for a person (other than the guy in the milk barn) to let me into the office. Many times there's two people at the entire dairy: the guy in the milk barn and a guy driving a tractor that drops the feed for the cows along the sides of their pens. Each pen has artificial wood floors kind of like trex decking material and sprinklers in the roof of the pen that run automatically several times a day to wash away the poop which drains into holding ponds. The holding ponds have machinery just like a waste water treatment plant: the solids settle to the bottom of the ponds, and the water is used for corn crops that are fed back to the cows. The manure is dredged from the holding ponds, dried, and distributed on the fields with tractors to fertilize the corn. The majority of food fed to the cows is corn silage, which is the entire corn plants ground up and composted/fermented in large covered piles for a while to make it easier for the cows digest. This makes the whole setup fairly self sustaining. If they need to, the dairies will buy feed, but they try to minimize that because it increases their expenses. Most of these large dairies own thousands of acres around the dairy that is almost entirely dedicated to growing corn to feed the cows. After being to these kinds of setups it's clear to me that there's no way a small operation could compete. If they could replace those last two employees with machines, they would.
I think an increase in entropy is a great way to put it. More energy from the sun is being kept in the atmosphere (and the oceans), more energy is going to effect a complex system like the Earth's atmosphere in complex ways. More energy means changes in air currents and ocean currents that could have a significant impact on local weather patterns. More energy means larger more powerful storms. More energy means more moisture in the atmosphere which means potentially more rainfall/snowfall in some areas.
I think there are many other factors that effect this, including the culture itself. I just don't think France has the same culture of entrepreneurship that the US does. Places like Germany or Taiwan are probably better examples.
I've always thought UBI and Universal Health Care could be huge boons to the start-up economy. Loosing health insurance and all of their income has to be a major hurdle for many people taking the step to start their own business.
On track and field and running websites there is a lot more cynicism towards the rush of records that's taken place over the last year or so. Yes the new shoes probably help, but Covid has also made it difficult for drug testers to access athletes for random drug tests, many athletes have been able to take performance enhancing drugs with impunity over the last year.
Exactly this, the summer Olympics have gotten too big and too expensive to host in one city. The only reasonable path forward is to spread it out to multiple cities or even countries. Maybe the Olympics should be awarded by continent (sorry Australia). Things like building an artificial river for the whitewater course is a ridiculous waste of money. They can host events like that where a natural river can be used. There are Olympic caliber venues all over the world that could host an Olympic sport at any time with little modification, that should be taken into consideration when a city bids to host an Olympic event.
I fear the only way things will change is if the world refuses to bid on hosting these things. Then the IOC will have to get creative if they want to see their corrupt legacy continue.
I don't think we'll see individual brands take action unless there is significantly more consumer pressure in the west. For many manufacturers it could take years for them to create the manufacturing capacity somewhere else. This is a tricky situation, any military action has the potential to cause more death and suffering. Economic sanctions seem like the only reasonable path forward, but because of the entanglement of China with virtually everyone's economies it is likely to hurt the US and Europe as well. Is the west willing to suffer a severe recession to help the Uyghurs?
We've had a model 3 for 2 years, autopilot has gotten worse over time. It was actually decent when we first had our car, but with every update it's slowly gotten worse and worse. I think it's intentional to either get people to pay for the full self driving package or to keep people from trusting autopilot too much.
This is going to have a huge impact on colleges and universities in ~18 years. Imagine an 8% decrease in high school graduates in one year, on top of the already projected drop in high school graduates over the next 10 years. The decline in high school graduates over the next 10 years is largely due to the drop in birthrate during the 2008/9 economic crash and recession.
China will never take Taiwan with military force, at least not anytime soon. Any kind of military move against Taiwan would endanger the real value of Taiwan which is companies like TSMC. China will continue to work to increase it's political and economic power while weakening the US's and other western countries influence until such a time that they can take Taiwan with little or no force at all.
Tanks are a completely outdated military technology. Shoulder launched anti-tank missiles, anti-tank aircraft and now drones can all render large quantities of tanks scrap metal, especially the majority of old Russian tanks with WW2 era armor. There's a reason western countries have stopped investing in tanks and spend most of their military R&D budgets on airplanes and drones these days, air-superiority wins the day in modern conventional warfare.
I think both Rocket Lab and Relativity Space realize that even with 3d printing they can't compete on price without reusability. If SpaceX is even close to hitting their costs per launch with Starship/Superheavy they can undercut everyone, even to launch small satellites. SpaceX is shooting for $2 million per launch with Starship, that's cheaper than Electron today and Relativity Space's Terran 1 is planned to cost. Heck for small sats SpaceX could probably put them into orbit with just Starship and a kicker stage and not even have to fire up Superheavy.
Blue Origin should have iterated on New Shepard until it was an orbital rocket. They could have lengthened it, increased the diameter and added engines to make it a functional orbital rocket and potentially had an orbital capsule with a parachute recovery system to boot. They've spent a lot of time and money developing New Shepard just to throw it all away.
Relativity is claiming to be working on a fully reusable, Methalox burning, competitor to the Falcon 9. Of course Relativity has yet to put something into space so Rocket Lab seems better positioned but these companies are all competing for the same funding and launch contracts so they can’t sit back and let another company steal the lime light for long. Really exciting times in the space industry, the US could have four different companies making reusable rockets in the next 5-10 years.
The break through here is that they've found the memories are encapsulated in the diameter of the microtubules: “Past feeding events are embedded in the hierarchy of tube diameters, specifically in the arrangement of thick and thin tubes in the network.”
This article says that they've found that the slime mold's memories are stored in tubes that form intricate networks inside the cell. It's interesting because neurons have lots of microtubules and there have been some recent research showing that they may be more than just structural components of the neuron:
This is exactly why Richard Stallman created GNU and the GPL. He might seem like an idealist or even an extremist but he's been warning us about this very thing for decades now.
Higher Education is about to go through a brutal consolidation process, people have been predicting it for years. Even before Covid-19, small liberal arts schools were starting to close down. Demand for higher education is going to drop over the next decade because the number of graduating high schoolers in the US is about to drop and has already been dropping simply because the birth rate 20 years ago was lower. There are certainly other factors accelerating this trend such as fewer high school graduates going to college these days due to the increasing cost of tuition. In the end there will be a lot of schools fighting over a decreasing number of applicants and the top schools will be the ones likely to come out the winners.
The reality is no one is even close to SpaceX, SpaceX went from launching it's first orbital rocket, the Falcon 1 in 2008 to launching the first Dragon capsule into orbit on the Falcon 9 and recovering it in 2010. No launch company iterates or advances like that, no one. There simply is no Lyft to SpaceX's Uber.
The closest private competitor to SpaceX right now IMO is Rocket Lab. They are the only company that has an orbital rocket that has a path forward for reusing the first stage right now. Rocket Lab's rockets are already pretty cheap for launching small sats and when they start reusing their first stages they might be able to get their cost per Kg to orbit close to what SpaceX can offer right now. But Rocket Lab's rocket is tiny compared to the Falcon 9, even SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1 could put more payload into orbit than Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. It's not clear if Rocket Lab has any plans for making a bigger rocket.
Blue Origin is the only other company (besides the Chinese) that is currently building reusable first stages. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine also looks really promising and was designed from the beginning to be reusable. I think a lot of people are giving up on Blue Origin because they have yet to launch anything into orbit and they've been around longer than SpaceX. If Blue Origin does get it's New Glenn rocket off the ground and can recover and reuse the first stage they have a good chance of being cost competitive with the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy.
The reality though is if SpaceX is successful with their Starship/Superheavy project they will be so far ahead in the cost/reusability department it will take a competitor a decade or more to catch up. Keep in mind part of what makes Starship even possible is the Raptor engine which SpaceX started developing in 2009. It's likely SpaceX has spent hundreds of millions of dollars just developing the Raptor, the Air Force chipped in over $40 million to the Raptor program at one point and SpaceX has built over 30 Raptors already at a cost of about $1 million a piece.
The funny thing in this case is there was no reason for the CCP to cover this up. If they had just responded to the outbreak instead of trying to cover it up initially and been a little more open with the international community they would have been lauded for their handling of the situation.
This is the kind of behavior you see in organizations where the penalty for making mistakes is overly severe, the only recourse for people is to lie and cover-up the truth at all costs. This is how projects at some companies continue despite being way behind schedule and overbudget until eventually the weight of the truth brings everything crashing down.
It's interesting that the 3 things you give as an example have sky rocketed in cost not because of the 1%, but mostly due to government interference in the free market. Government backed loans have driven up the cost of education and housing. Local governments limiting housing construction have further driven up the cost in many areas. Government created monopolies like the AMA have driven up the cost of healthcare.
It seems like an oil peak for a company like Shell could occur whenever they want. It seems like they are basically admitting that they have stopped exploring for new oil reserves and they will no longer be investing in increasing production at their existing reserves. It certainly seems like they are looking to drive the price upwards while at the same time reducing their investment, all while getting to claim to be more green.
In my opinion hybrids are the worst of both worlds, resulting in excess expense and maintenance in the long run. We've had two Toyota Priuses in our family over the last 10 years, both of which had to have their battery packs replaced somewhere over 100k miles. The number of places around that refurbish hybrid battery packs or sells completely new ones tells me this is a common issue, an entire industry has built up around this problem. It cost us over $2,000 for each car which completely negated any money we might have saved on gas over the lifetime of the vehicle. On top of that another dirty little secret about Toyota's hybrid system is their Atkinson cycle engines like to burn oil as they get older, there are literally hundreds of threads on various Prius forums and sub-Reddits about the problem. I see it all the time when I'm behind Priuses at a stop light now: there's that little puff of smoke coming out of the tailpipe when the engine restarts. It is literally Toyota's dirty little secret. How can you have an environmentally friendly car that burns oil? Here's just one example of such a thread:
My wife drives a 2 year old Tesla Model 3 now and it's been completely maintenance free for 32k miles so far, we've barely even seen any degradation in the battery pack capacity. I will never buy another hybrid vehicle from Toyota and I can't recommend them to anyone else either. Toyota would do well to accelerate their transition to full BEV vehicles like VW and others are doing if they want to be able to still claim to be an environmentally responsible car company.