"The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching." Aristotle | Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this Wordpress website are the views and opinions of the content creator, Dr. Reggie Goodwin, and should not be construed as shared, or sourced from The Environmental Protection Agency, or any organizations with which they have cooperative, or business relationships.
The underground Onkalo repository in Finland is designed to safely and permanently store hazardous, radioactive waste. Credit: Posiva
Topics: Environment, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Power
Finland and the former Yugoslavia adopted nuclear energy only four years apart. In 1971 Finland began construction of its first nuclear plant, Loviisa, and the first of two planned reactors went into commercial operation in 1977. Yugoslavia started building the Krško plant in 1975. In the 1980s, both countries acknowledged the need for a long-term nuclear waste management strategy and started making plans for permanent disposal repositories.
Fast-forward four decades, and Finland is on the verge of becoming the world’s first country to achieve permanent deep geological disposal for spent nuclear fuel, the highly radioactive waste that contains uranium, plutonium, fission products, and other heavy elements. Meanwhile, the fate of the spent fuel generated at Krško, which is jointly owned by former Yugoslavian republics Croatia and Slovenia, is still very much unknown. Both countries have yet to get a handle on even low-level radioactive waste, including contaminated clothes and water filters, which is slowly overwhelming storage facilities and threatening to halt plant operations.
The US has long struggled to find a final resting place for its nuclear waste, to the point that it is now spending billions of dollars to reimburse plant operators for the costs of storing spent fuel. The dramatically different outcomes of Finland and Croatia’s lengthy searches for permanent nuclear waste solutions are reflections of the varied ways in which this long-standing worldwide problem is being tackled by the nations of the European Union. Whereas Finland, Sweden, and France are expected to open permanent underground spent-fuel repositories by the early 2030s, 12 other nuclear EU countries are far behind, planning to open deep geological disposal facilities sometime between the 2040s and the 2100s. According to a 2019 European Commission report on the implementation of its nuclear waste directive, only a few of those nations have made progress in selecting a site.
NANO 761: Introduction to Nano Energy, Lecture 4 – Lithium Ion Battery, Cathode to Anode, Spring 2018, JSNN
Topics: Battery, Climate Change, Green Tech, History, Nobel Laureate, Nobel Prize
John B. Goodenough, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin who is known around the world for the development of the lithium-ion battery, died Sunday at the age of 100. Goodenough was a dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor, and a brilliant yet humble inventor.
His discovery led to the wireless revolution and put electronic devices in the hands of people worldwide. In 2019, Goodenough made national and international headlines after being awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his battery work, an award many of his fans considered a long time coming, especially as he became the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize.
“John’s legacy as a brilliant scientist is immeasurable — his discoveries improved the lives of billions of people around the world,” said UT Austin President Jay Hartzell. “He was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career, and he never ceased searching for innovative energy-storage solutions. John’s work and commitment to our mission are the ultimate reflection of our aspiration as Longhorns — that what starts here changes the world — and he will be greatly missed among our UT community.”
Until the announcement of his selection as a Nobel laureate, Dr. Goodenough was relatively unknown beyond scientific and academic circles and the commercial titans who exploited his work. He achieved his laboratory breakthrough in 1980 at the University of Oxford, where he created a battery that has populated the planet with smartphones, laptop, and tablet computers, lifesaving medical devices like cardiac defibrillators, and clean, quiet plug-in vehicles, including many Teslas, that can be driven on long trips, lessen the impact of climate change and might someday replace gasoline-powered cars and trucks.
Like most modern technological advances, the powerful, lightweight, rechargeable lithium-ion battery is a product of incremental insights by scientists, lab technicians, and commercial interests over decades. But for those familiar with the battery’s story, Dr. Goodenough’s contribution is regarded as the crucial link in its development, a linchpin of chemistry, physics, and engineering on a molecular scale.
Before I met Professor Steve Wienberg, I had read my cousin Wilbur’s copy of “The First Three Minutes.” Little did I know that he would autograph it for me or that I would meet him, along with his former student (and my friend, Dr. Mark G. Raizen), at the National Society of Black Physicists in the fall of 2011 in Austin, Texas.
I never met John B. Goodenough, but I did study his theories in a class on battery nanomaterials at my graduate school. “Engineering on a molecular scale” is essentially what I studied in Nanoengineering, as batteries will only store charges longer and get better at the nanomaterials level. This is the way we will make the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner, more income-equitable options.
Ph.D. seemed so far away until the Hooding Ceremony. A few things about the tributes struck and moved me deeply:
He and his wife had no children, but Dr. Goodenough was enthusiastic about teaching, mentoring, and giving back. UT said he often donated any honorarium to the university.
He was from a home that, from the NY Times, was neglectful to him and indifferent.
He suffered from dyslexia and overcame it to achieve a Ph.D. in 1952 and a Nobel Prize at 97 in 2019. Everyone has their struggles, but for the love of science, he overcame them without excuses. A HUGE part of obtaining a degree in a STEM field is pure grit. Some of us quit too early from our dreams or debase our abilities before we even try.
The modern age we take for granted is possible because of humble spirits in laboratories, coding software, at dry erase boards full of equations who pushed a little further than any of their self-doubts. We are fortunate they pressed forward.
Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes – First recorded by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century and attributed to Bernard of Chartres. Also commonly known by the letters of Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
John B. Goodenough in 2017. Two years later, when he was 97 and still active in research at the University of Texas at Austin, he became the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history. Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
When X-rays (blue color) illuminate an iron atom (red ball at the center of the molecule), core-level electrons are excited. X-ray excited electrons are then tunneled to the detector tip (gray) via overlapping atomic/molecular orbitals, which provide elemental and chemical information about the iron atom. Credit: Saw-Wai Hla
A team of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and others, led by Ohio University Professor of Physics, and Argonne National Laboratory scientist, Saw Wai Hla, have taken the world’s first X-ray SIGNAL (or SIGNATURE) of just one atom. This groundbreaking achievement could revolutionize the way scientists detect materials.
Since its discovery by Roentgen in 1895, X-rays have been used everywhere, from medical examinations to security screenings in airports. Even Curiosity, NASA’s Mars rover, is equipped with an X-ray device to examine the material composition of the rocks on Mars. An important usage of X-rays in science is to identify the type of materials in a sample. Over the years, the quantity of materials in a sample required for X-ray detection has been greatly reduced thanks to the development of synchrotron X-rays sources and new instruments. To date, the smallest amount one can X-ray a sample is in an attogram, which is about 10,000 atoms or more. This is due to the X-ray signal produced by an atom being extremely weak, so conventional X-ray detectors cannot be used to detect it. According to Hla, it is a long-standing dream of scientists to X-ray just one atom, which is now being realized by the research team led by him.
“Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays, one cannot tell what they are made of. We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom-at-a-time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state,” explained Hla, who is also the director of the Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute at Ohio University. “Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to the ultimate limit of just one atom. This will have a great impact on environmental and medical sciences and maybe even find a cure that can have a huge impact on humankind. This discovery will transform the world.”
Their paper, published in the scientific journal Nature on May 31, 2023, and gracing the cover of the print version of the scientific journal on June 1, 2023, details how Hla and several other physicists and chemists, including Ph.D. students at OHIO, used a purpose-built synchrotron X-ray instrument at the XTIP beamline of Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory.
Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Science Fiction, Star Trek
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.
Magical thinking is the belief that one’s ideas, thoughts, actions, words, or use of symbols can influence the course of events in the material world. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s inner, personal experience and the external physical world. Examples include beliefs that the movement of the Sun, Moon, and wind or the occurrence of rain can be influenced by one’s thoughts or by the manipulation of some type of symbolic representation of these physical phenomena.
Testifying before Congress, Carl Sagan called out the mainstream media of his day as to why there was (and still is) a daily horoscope but not even a weekly science column. When the Nobel Prizes come out – I try to post them all: science categories, Economics, Literature, and Peace – you’re likely going to see more here than you will on traditional media. It is still now rare, as it was during Carl’s crusade for science literacy. I can remember when “A&E” and “TLC” were the acronyms for Arts & Entertainment and The Learning Channel, not the homes of Duck Dynasty or Honey Boo-Boo. Sagan would be woefully disappointed.
Which is more likely a problem that can be tackled and solved: climate change or warp drive? Granted, I’m a Trekkie from TOS days, The Animated Series (TAS), TNG, DS9, VOY, Enterprise, Discovery, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds. As much as I enjoy the storytelling, similar to Ali Baba, or Aladdin, I’m not interested in the physics of flying carpets, because that is a plot device, like inertia dampeners or Heisenberg compensators. Yes, there’s a lot of theoretical research on warp field mechanics since the 1994 paper by Miguel Alcubierre. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, the efforts will likely yield something close to 0.1 – 0.25c, which is pretty fast, leagues beyond our current rocket speeds. The reason Trek did a LOT of time travel is, superluminal speeds would permit it, and eventually, the Grandfather Paradox: A begets B, B begets C, but if C travels back in time and kills A, did C ever make the trip if he never existed (see: Causality)?
We will probably “boldly go” to the Asteroid Belt, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. With eight billion souls and climbing, we have a lot of physics problems to solve on Gaia.
However, exploration of our solar system cannot happen if, beyond sense, we allow the planet’s temperatures to continue to climb.
A.1 Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with the global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020. Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals (high confidence). {2.1, Figure 2.1, Figure 2.2}
A.1.1 Global surface temperature was 1.09°C [0.95 to 1.20] °C5 higher in 2011-2020 than 1850-19006, with larger increases over land (1.59 [1.34 to 1.83] °C) than over the ocean (0.88 [0.68 to 1.01] °C). Global surface temperature in the first two decades of the 21st century (2001-2020) was 0.99 [0.84 to 1.10] °C higher than 1850-1900. Global surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2000 years (high confidence). {2.1.1, Figure 2.1}
A.1.2 The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850-1900 to 2010-20197 is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C. Over this period, it is likely that well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs) contributed a warming of 1.0°C to 2.0°C8, and other human drivers (principally aerosols) contributed a cooling of 0.0°C to 0.8°C, natural drivers changed global surface temperature by –0.1°C to +0.1°C, and internal variability changed it by –0.2°C to +0.2°C. {2.1.1, Figure 2.1}
Our science focus should be here on Terra Firma and the pursuit of continuing human civilization. Without it, civilization, sustainability, and space travel is impossible.
Critical thinking will help us all survive. We will have to cooperate, make lasting changes, reduce income inequality; eliminate global poverty, remediate houseless citizens, and proceed forward, changing the very structure of our civilization, what we focus on as important and esteem as admirable. Billionaires are not superheroes, and beyond fantasy roles, have no function or analog in nature.
Magical thinking, believing that the climate crisis does not exist, hoarding resources while refusing to pay taxes in one’s home country and hiding it in shelters overseas from yours, whistling past the climate graveyard, won’t.
3D rendering of cyberpunk AI. Circuit board. Technology background. Central Computer Processors CPU and GPU concept. Motherboard digital chip. Tech science background.
Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel who died earlier this year, is famous for forecasting a continuous rise in the density of transistors that we can pack onto semiconductor chips. James McKenzie looks at how “Moore’s law” is still going strong after almost six decades but warns that further progress is becoming harder and ever more expensive to sustain.
But our ability to build such tiny, powerful chips shouldn’t surprise us. After all, the engineer Gordon Moore – who died on 24 March this year, aged 94 – famously predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors we can squeeze onto an integrated circuit ought to double yearly. Writing for the magazine Electronics (38 114), Moore reckoned that by 1975 it should be possible to fit a quarter of a million components onto a single silicon chip with an area of one square inch (6.25 cm2).
Moore’s prediction, which he later said was simply a “wild extrapolation”, held true, although, in 1975, he revised his forecast, predicting that chip densities would double every two years rather than every year. What thereafter became known as “Moore’s law” proved amazingly accurate, as the ability to pack ever more transistors into a tiny space underpinned the almost non-stop growth of the consumer electronics industry. In truth, it was never an established scientific “law” but more a description of how things had developed in the past as well as a roadmap that the semiconductor industry imposed on itself, driving future development.
Topics: Astronautics, ESA, History, NASA, Space Exploration, Spaceflight, Women in Science
The first female cosmonaut flew years before NASA put a man on the Moon and decades before any other country would send a woman into orbit.
On a drab Sunday in Moscow in November 1963, a dark-suited man stood beside his veiled bride, whose bashful smile betrayed the merest hint of nerves. Despite the extraordinarily lavish surroundings of the capital’s Wedding Palace, it might have been any normal wedding, but for one thing: Both groom and bride were cosmonauts, members of Russia’s elite spacefaring fraternity.
Two years earlier, that bride, Valentina Tereshkova, had been a factory seamstress and amateur parachutist with more than 100 jumps to her name when she’d volunteered for the cosmonaut program. Now, the 26-year-old, whom TIME magazine dubbed “a tough-looking Ingrid Bergman,” was among the most famous women in the world, an accolade she had earned just months ago by becoming the first female to leave the planet.
Sixty years on from her pioneering Vostok 6 mission, more than 70 women from around the globe have followed in Tereshkova’s footsteps, crossing that ethereal boundary between ground and space. Some have commanded space missions, helmed space stations, made spacewalks, spent more than a cumulative year of their lives in orbit, and even flown with a prosthesis. And women from Britain, Iran, and South Korea have become their countries’ first national astronauts, ahead of their male counterparts.
Figure 1 Overcoming scientific racism as a Community. (Top) This figure depicts the barriers Black scientists face in academia. (Bottom) The bottom part of the figure depicts Black scientists overcoming those challenges.
Topics: Civil Rights, Diversity, Diversity in Science, Women in Science
We are 52 Black scientists. Here, we establish the context of Juneteenth in STEMM and discuss the barriers Black scientists face, the struggles they endure, and the lack of recognition they receive. We review racism’s history in science and provide institutional-level solutions to reduce the burdens on Black scientists.
Introduction June 19, 1865, independence day, commonly referred to as Juneteenth, celebrates the freedom of the last large body of enslaved Black Americans following the American Civil War. Although the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared free those slaves residing in states in open rebellion against the United States, took effect more than 2 years prior, it was not until Union troops liberated Texas that more than 250,000 slaves gained their freedom. However, some in the United States remained enslaved through convict leasing and sharecropping. Following Juneteenth came the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877) in the United States, a tumultuous time when the North and South began reunification and ideologies of freedom and equality clashed, leading to the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution to protect the rights of Black peoples—defined here as people of ancestral African origin, including peoples of African American, African, Afro-Caribbean, and mixed ancestry—in the face of race riots, lynchings, and black codes (restrictive laws designed to limit the advancement of Black individuals to retain cheap labor), including Jim Crow laws. Black and White America developed along segregated and unequal paths. As segregation and intentional underinvestment occurred across education, many Black individuals did not learn to read or write, hampering career opportunities. Across the mid-to-late 1900s, the powerful civil rights movements led to the repeal of many segregationist laws. Even so, some of their effects remained unchanged: Black individuals still faced discrimination and unequal opportunities for education, and to this day, Black communities lack resources.
It took over 150 years for Juneteenth to be recognized as a federal holiday in the summer of 2021, following multiple police killings of Black individuals that gained media prominence in the preceding year. Juneteenth recognizes and celebrates freedom, civil rights, and the potential for the advancement of Black people in the United States. Yet, it also serves as a day of reflection and hopes that a nation might someday live up to its core founding principle—equality for all. Shortly after freeing Black Americans, the US state legislatures enacted harsh laws to curtail their progress; thus, as formal slavery declined, institutional slavery arose. These laws have had generational impacts: today, Black scientists continue to suffer institutional slavery, leading to lower pay, lesser access to resources, and fewer advancement opportunities. In addition to cultural erasure, undervalue, isolation, stereotype threat, and tokenism, Black scientists face many obstacles to attaining education and persisting in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). As the official correspondence from The White House states,“Juneteenth not only commemorates the past. It calls us to action today.” Juneteenth is a rallying call for all, but it is especially a call for action from scientists. Even though scientific innovation prospers from a richly diverse field, science has historically existed as a bastion for harboring racism.
In this commentary, we seek to explain some of the history of Black individuals in the United States. This includes the initial gap in and continued barriers to income attainment, which have inhibited their growth. We discuss the racist institutions that still exist in science, including lack of recognition for awards and disparities in funding rates. We also consider the toll that institutional racism takes on the mental health of Black individuals, which has unfortunately led to suicides. Finally, we note the double binds for those with intersectionality—e.g., those underrepresented by a combination of gender, sexual orientation, disability status, and race. Together, these limitations inhibit the progression of individuals through the elitist STEMM pipeline.1 Given the continued exclusion of Black scientists at different levels of STEMM training, it is important to recognize the relevance of Juneteenth as well as how it may contribute to future improvements. We offer steps that institutions and wider bodies should take to reduce the impact of racism in science (Figure 1). Importantly, we consider Juneteenth a growth pillar and propose steps to improve mentoring, institutional support, and training to reduce remaining institutional barriers.
Excited helium nuclei inflate like balloons, offering physicists a chance to study the strong nuclear force which binds the nucleus’s protons and neutrons. Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine
Topics: Modern Physics, Nobel Prize, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Steven Weinberg, Theoretical Physics
A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems.
To test the strong nuclear force, physicists turned to the helium-4 nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. When helium nuclei are excited, they grow like an inflating balloon until one of the protons pops off. Surprisingly, in a recent experiment, helium nuclei didn’t swell according to plan: They ballooned more than expected before they burst. A measurement describing that expansion, called the form factor, is twice as large as theoretical predictions.
“The theory should work,” said Sonia Bacca, a theoretical physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and an author of the paper describing the discrepancy, which was published in Physical Review Letters. “We’re puzzled.”
For many years, physicists didn’t understand how to use the strong force to understand the stickiness of protons and neutrons. One problem was the bizarre nature of the strong force — it grows stronger with increasing distance rather than slowly dying off. This feature prevented them from using their usual calculation tricks. When particle physicists want to understand a particular system, they typically parcel out a force into more manageable approximate contributions, order those contributions from most important to least important, then simply ignore the less important contributions. With the strong force, they couldn’t do that.
Then in 1990, Steven Weinbergfound a way to connect the world of quarks and gluons to sticky nuclei. The trick was to use an effective field theory — a theory that is only as detailed as it needs to be to describe nature at a particular size (or energy) scale. To describe the behavior of a nucleus, you don’t need to know about quarks and gluons. Instead, at these scales, a new effective force emerges — the strong nuclear force transmitted between nucleons by the exchange of pions.
From the Twilight Zone season 3, episode 8, “It’s a Good Life.” Billy Mumy plays an evil little boy who terrorizes his neighborhood with his magical powers for any slight. Here, he turned a man into a jack-in-the-box.
Jesse Pinkman: You don’t want a criminal lawyer… you want a “criminal” lawyer,
Jesse Pinkman: What, dude, wouldn’t take a bribe? [That] dude in there? Saul Goodman. we’re talking about?
Walter White: Yeah. “Morally outraged,” he said. Threatened to call the police.
Jesse Pinkman: Wait, and Badger is gonna spill?
Walter White: Like the Exxon Valdez.
Jesse Pinkman: So, what do we do about it?
Aaron Paul: Jesse Pinkman on “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” IMDB.
From the 2019 documentary, Where’s My Roy Cohn,: “Roy Cohn personified the dark arts of American politics, turning empty vessels into dangerous demagogues – from Joseph McCarthy to his final project, Donald J. Trump.” IMDB
In order to understand the mind of Donald Trump, one must acquaint themselves with the life and legacy of his mentor, Roy Cohn. He’s the notorious lawyer who tampered with evidence in order to ensure that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair, despite the fact that their shared status as dangerous Russian spies is still hotly debated. Cohn coaxed what was later alleged as a false testimony from Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, that affirmed her complicity in the eyes of the court. Has enough evidence subsequently come to light connecting her with Julius’ role as a recruiter of Russian spies, and have the nuclear secrets reportedly stolen by Julius been found to be of much value?
Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, Matt Fagerholm, Roger Ebert
David Frum said it succinctly: “The President is a Crook,” in this case, the former president tried to, and is still trying to foment an insurrection because he ran and lost in 2020. Then, and now, we have the choice between the man, the presidency, and the rule of law.
The Constitution is essentially a property document. Despite the genius we proffer to the founding fathers, they were humans in the eighteenth century. The citizens they were writing to were wealthy property owners like themselves, many of them attaining that wealth through the ownership and trade of human chattel. Their women didn’t have the right to vote until the suffrage movement produced the 19th Amendment, throwing the black women who worked on suffrage “under the bus.” My mother and sister didn’t get the full right of citizenship until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I was three years old.
The United States Constitution is a remarkable document written by men steeped in education but fallible. No document nor dogma can anticipate changes in the world and society. Barack Hussein Obama would have shocked them. They would have guffawed at a presidential candidacy of a Hillary Clinton.
Unless you’ve been on Mars or hiding under a rock, the twice-impeached president has now been twice indicted for criminal activity. After losing to E. Jean Carrol in a case accusing him of sexual assault, he doubled down on a CNN Town Hall, calling her a “whack job,” and she and her lawyer rightly sued again. The backlash and poor ratings afterward probably contributed to the firing of CNN’s former CEO, Chris Licht.
After getting his first indictment for paying off an adult film star and playboy centerfold, affairs he covered up while his third wife was pregnant with his fifth child, he strutted like a peacock. After being indicted for stealing classified information, he held a rally at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where arguably, one of his espionage crimes was recorded on tape.
What. is. WRONG. With. HIM? For that matter, what is wrong with our fellow citizens?
Mary Trump wrote “Too Much And Never Enough” about her malignant narcissist uncle. In chapter 3, titled “The Great I Am,” he was sent to military school in Newburg, New York, after getting aggressive with his mother and bullying issues at the age of thirteen.
“Finally, by 1959, Donald’s misbehavior—fighting, bullying, arguing with teachers—had gone too far,” Mary Trump writes.
Fred Trump was on the board of trustees for the Kew-Forest prep school that Donald Trump was attending.
“Fred didn’t mind Donald’s acting out, but it had become intrusive and time-consuming for him,” Mary Trump wrote. “When one of his fellow board members at Kew-Forest recommended sending Donald to New York Military Academy to rein him in, Fred went along with it.”
In the book, Mary Trump wrote that Trump’s mother, Mary Anne Trump, “didn’t fight for her son to stay home … a failure Donald couldn’t help but notice.”
“Over Donald’s objections, he was enrolled at NYMA,” she writes. “The other kids in the family referred to NYMA as a ‘reform school’—it wasn’t prestigious like St. Paul’s, which (older brother) Freddy had attended.”
“Nobody sent their sons to NYMA for a better education, and Donald understood it rightly as a punishment,” Mary Trump wrote.
The syndrome is characterized by “excessive, self-centered, and immature behavior.” It includes a lack of consideration for other people, recurrent temper tantrums, an inability to handle the delay of gratification, demands for having one’s own way, obstructiveness, and manipulation to get their way.Wikipedia
Professor William T. Kelley at the Wharton School of Business, let’s just say, didn’t think highly of the 45th president’s intellect (see Mystery 2). His fellow Wharton students spent their weekends in study groups. Young Trump went back to New York on weekends, tutored likely by criminals that Roy Cohn represented, inspired to create a fantasy world from the Godfather trilogy popular in his youth. John Gotti was the original “Teflon Don” until he, like Al Capone, was eventually caught. He practically struts like Marlon Brando.
“It’s not theirs. It’s mine!“ He is indicted on 37 counts, 31 for espionage. He is a criminal, but in a certain sense, he is the epoch of the spoiled brat grown-up physically. The indictment happened a day before his 77th birthday. He had issues getting lawyers in Florida, aided by his reputation of stiffing anyone who works for him and his childish stubbornness to not follow counsel: silence is golden, but he can’t shut up.
On the calendar, he’s a late-stage septuagenarian. Emotionally, he is a child. He is Billy Mumy with the magical power to manipulate an entire constituency that the GOP didn’t know they had. His wand is explicit bigotry and cruelty; his power is to give those who will follow him over the abyss cover and approval to be their worst selves. No one liked Mumy’s character portrayal, and other than fellow sociopaths, no one [really] likes him.
A political party following the machinations of an impulsive being is not sustainable. 2024 will mark 20 years since the GOP won both the electoral college and the popular vote. That can lead a party to desperation. And desperation leads to demagogues and violence.
In 1848, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that some molecules essential for life exist in mirror-image forms, much like our left and right hands. Today, we know biology chooses just one of these “chiral” forms: DNA, RNA, and their building blocks are all right-handed, whereas amino acids and proteins are all left-handed. Pasteur, who saw hints of this selectivity, or “homochirality,” thought magnetic fields might somehow explain it, but its origin has remained one of biology’s great mysteries. Now, it turns out Pasteur may have been onto something.
In three new papers, researchers suggest magnetic minerals common on early Earth could have caused key biomolecules to accumulate on their surface in just one mirror image form, setting off positive feedback that continued to favor the same form. “It’s a real breakthrough,” says Jack Szostak, an origin of life chemist at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the new work. “Homochirality is essential to get biology started, and this is [a possible]—and I would say very likely—solution.”
Chemical reactions are typically unbiased, yielding equal amounts of right- and left-handed molecules. But life requires selectivity: Only right-handed DNA, for example, has the correct twist to interact properly with other chiral molecules. To get [life], “you’ve got to break the mirror, or you can’t pull it off,” says Gerald Joyce, an origin of life chemist and president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Over the past century, researchers have proposed various mechanisms for skewing the first biomolecules, including cosmic rays and polarized light. Both can cause an initial bias favoring either right- or left-handed molecules, but they don’t directly explain how this initial bias was amplified to create the large reservoirs of chiral molecules likely needed to make the first cells. An explanation that creates an initial bias is a good start but “not sufficient,” says Dimitar Sasselov, a physicist at Harvard University and a leader of the new work.
Physics and Nano 
