And this is what makes them credible contenders for the top spot in Democratic politics

We didn't lose, ladies and gentlemen

‘Rep. Spartz accidentally carried an empty handgun in her suitcase’

There’s no country anywhere on Earth that’s entirely powered by renewable energy every day, but that’s soon to change. In a letter released on June 21 entitled “Brother Sun” Pope Francis announced his intention to transition Vatican City onto 100% renewable energy using solar panels. The apostolic letter issued “motu proprio,” or on his own […] The post The Vatican Goes Green: Pope Francis Announces New Suburban Solar Plant to Power Vatican City appeared first on Good News Network.

Books book recommendations The Wonderful Worlds of Aliette de Bodard Whether you’re new to her work or have been following her for years, there’s always something new to try By Jenny Hamilton | Published on July 2, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Apart from being one of the most inventive and interesting science fiction writers working, Aliette de Bodard also represents a stirring testament to the power and importance of SFF’s short fiction ecosystem. Her short stories and novellas have been published across a dizzying number of outlets, establishing universes of long standing whose development can be traced across decades. In her long-form work, she writes a lot of speculative murder mysteries that thoughtfully explore gradations of power, institutional failures, and the individual’s ability to make space for ethical choices within corrupt and corrupting systems. With the new novella Navigational Entanglements out later this month, it felt like the right moment to offer an intro to the rich SFF worlds of this fantastic author. Whether you’re new to her work or have been following her for years, there’s always something new to try! Standalones If you’re not sure you want to commit to a whole new world, there are some terrific standalone works to check out. The latest novella, Navigational Entanglements, is a standalone, wuxia-inspired, science fiction team-up murder mystery; and it was so fun and such a great time that I’m secretly hoping it ends up not being standalone but instead becomes part of a long-running series. Can you hear me, publishers? More of these, please! From the backlist, there’s plenty to love. Fireheart Tiger asks the reader to confront the lines between romance and obsession, conflict and abuse. My current favorite of the standalones is still In the Vanishers’ Palace, which is pretty unique among Beauty and the Beast retellings for its willingness to grapple with the problems of power that permeate that story. So that’s probably the one I’d put into the hands of a de Bodard newbie. (Navigational Entanglements is really nipping at its heels, however.) Xuya Universe If you are me, the backstory you need on the Xuya universe is “some ships are people.” I love a nonhuman protagonist, and Aliette de Bodard doesn’t flinch away from the logistical weirdnesses of embodiment and the myriad of ways human-people interact with ship-people. The amount of explanation provided in any given Xuya story, novella, or novel varies widely, but you don’t really need to understand the logistics in order to enjoy the stories. Yes, the ships can have sex. Yes, the ships can be the biological children of humans. Don’t worry about it! If you are my dear friend Whiskey Jenny, you may be constitutionally incapable of not worrying about it. This is where de Bodard has proved herself a true friend to the people. Her website contains a lengthy backstory for the Xuya universe that traces the world back to its original points of diversion from our real world’s history (China, not Europe, made first contact with the Americas and their people). There’s also a timeline of major world events, which pegs the various stories to the point in history. The Xuya universe is particularly fun because lots of room remains to explore different types of stories and futures that exist in various pockets of the Xuya world. For instance, the short story “Immersion” takes place in a very different bit of the universe than some of the stuff I’ll be recommending, which means that you get the chance to see other future societies, structured differently, with different concerns and different relationships to Earth’s countries. Part of the fun of this world is its expansiveness, and de Bodard makes full use of the vastness of space. Where to start (short-form): I’d recommend the novella The Tea Master and the Detective. The Sherlockian undertones and the mystery structure give this one a familiar net to catch you as you plunge into a highly unfamiliar world. It’s a good read, it’s a quick read, and it’ll give you a strong enough foundation with the worldbuilding to start having fun with the novels, novellas, and shorts that dabble in all sorts of subgenres and all corners of this universe. Where to start (long-form): Like many of Aliette de Bodard’s books, The Red Scholar’s Wake includes a murder mystery, but it’s primarily a romance between a pirate mindship called Rice Fish and a bot maker and scavenger called Xích Si. The Red Scholar’s Wake explores grief, mothering, political machinations, and how to find the lesser of an array of possible evils. If you’re curious about the logistics of mindships, this is also a great book for its exploration of the many ways a mindship can interface with humans, on terms of enmity as well as intimacy. A very good read. Read these if: You revel in worldbuilding. You don’t want to spend a ton of time with any one character. You would hop on a generation ship tomorrow if somebody offered you a seat on one. Dominion of the Fallen Paris lies in ruins after a massive war among the Great Houses that have long governed the city. House Silverspires, created by Lucifer Morningstar (you’ve heard of him!) and once the most powerful Great House in the city, lies in particular disarray, as Morningstar has been missing for decades. Fallen angels, alchemists, dragons, and witches vie for power, form fragile and ever-shifting alliances, and strive to prevent the total destruction of their Houses and their lives. Where to start (short-form): Oh, God, I want to say that you should start with the two “Dragons and Blades” novellas (Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murders and Of Charms, Ghosts, and Grievances), because they are so fun. Only, I fear that will do you a disservice, because there’s a pleasure in getting to know its protagonists gradually as you read through the main trilogy. My advice for this section is, therefore, twofold. If the main premise of this series sounds like something you would enjoy, try “Court of Birth, Court of Strength” (online here), wherein Asmodeus is asked for help. It’ll give you a good sense of the trilogy’s vibes and rules of engagement. If the main series doesn’t quite sound like your thing, for whatever reason, then start with Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murders. It’s just a really good time!  Where to start (long-form): Unlike most of de Bodard’s work, the main trilogy for this series really benefits by being read in order. The events of each book stand well on their own, but there’s character development and an expanding of the cast that just works better when you get to watch it grow. The first novel is The House of Shattered Wings, which tees up some of the major players for the trilogy and, crucially, introduces us to the fearsome Asmodeus. If for some reason you can’t get the books in order, de Bodard has—again with great kindness for the pitiful Jello brains of readers like me—written out guides to each of the first two books. Read these if: You think that Milton was of the devil’s party. You have watched more than five seasons of Supernatural. You like a good catacomb. Obsidian and Blood The Obsidian and Blood series follows the investigations of Acatl, a priest for the Dead in the Aztec (here called Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan. Any time there is a death in the city that seems to implicate the gods or the powers of the underworld, it’s Acatl’s responsibility to investigate, find out the truth, and propitiate the dark powers. These historical fantasies bring the Aztec Empire to vivid life, placing quotidian human dramas at the heart of epic political and religious struggle. The way to make a murder mystery hurt is to ensure that solving it brings more pain than leaving it alone would have. Acatl may wish to sidestep the burden of responsibility for telling the truth; but his strong moral compass and commitment to his god ensure that he never can. Where to start (short-form): Three short stories precede the trilogy of novels, and all of them are available to read on de Bodard’s website, where she’s also helpfully laid out the reading order. Of those, my favorite is “Safe, Child, Safe,” because it has a spooky child, a hairpin shift in sympathy, and a final line of dialogue from Acatl that’s absolutely killer. Where to start (long-form): Anywhere! These books are in many ways a classic murder mystery series, meaning that each of them is its own self-contained story. I advise starting with whichever book’s plot description sounds most appealing to you. My personal choice is Harbinger of the Storm, because it’s the most political machinations–forward, and I like political machinations; but there’s no bad choice to be made here. Read these if: You read your D’Aulaire’s to shreds as a kid and wished they had illustrated one for every place in the world. [end-mark] The post The Wonderful Worlds of Aliette de Bodard appeared first on Reactor.

Certain that bureaucrats know best, the modern administrative state has long labored to snuff out challenges to its actions. So, when Corner Post—a convenience store and truck stop in North Dakota—challenged a federal rule governing fees for debit-card transactions shortly after it opened for business, but years after the regulation had taken effect, the government argued that Corner Post had somehow shown up in court too late. Thankfully, the Supreme Court on Monday in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System had a different view of the matter. Every time someone swipes a debit card, the business involved must pay a fee to the bank to move money from the person’s account to the business’s. When debit card companies began to compete for banks’ business by raising these fees, Congress intervened with a law directing the Federal Reserve System to impose a cap on the fees and detailing the costs that the Fed’s Board of Governors was permitted to consider in determining that cap. When the Board proposed a cap of 12 cents per transaction, big banks balked—even though each transaction cost about 5 cents at the time. In response, the Board considered four costs not listed in the statute and revised the cap upwards to 21 cents per transaction. The Board also allowed an ad valorem factor of 0.05% of the transaction’s value, significantly raising the profits for banks—and the costs for businesses that accept debit cards. The Fed finalized the regulation in 2011. In March 2018, Corner Post opened for business and, like any other business, began accepting debit card payments. Three years later, Corner Post joined a lawsuit challenging the debit card fee cap based on the Board’s use of factors not permitted by statute. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, Corner Post had a right to seek judicial review of the Fed’s decision because it was a party “adversely affected or aggrieved by agency action.” But another statute, 28 U.S.C. § 2401(a), limits the time for filing civil lawsuits against the United States to “within six years after the right of action first accrues.” The government moved to dismiss Corner Post’s suit as untimely. Corner Post, the government argued, was harmed when the Board issued the final rule, meaning Corner Post should have sued no later than 2017—a year before it even was open for business. Because Corner Post could not otherwise challenge the rule, the government’s reading of Section 2401(a) would have left Corner Post without a remedy except to ask the Board to change the rule. Nevertheless, the district court granted the government’s motion and dismissed Corner Post’s case. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed, adopting the rule that a majority of other federal appellate courts also adopted: the clock for filing a lawsuit starts when an agency promulgates a regulation—even if the business, like Corner Post, doesn’t come into existence until after the deadline. The 8th Circuit’s decision deepened a split between the majority of courts and the 6th Circuit, which held the clock starts when the plaintiff is harmed, regardless of when the agency issued the relevant rule. Corner Post appealed and in a 6-3 opinion on Monday, the Supreme Court revived Corner Post’s lawsuit. Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained that a lawsuit that alleges an agency violated the Administrative Procedure Act by taking a final action (such as issuing a regulation) can be brought within six years of the plaintiff suffering a harm—even if that harm occurs more than six years after the agency took the challenged action. Definitions of the term “accrue” when Section 2401(a) was adopted demonstrate that the date that someone is harmed—not the date when the action is taken that causes the harm—starts the clock for filing a lawsuit. And when Congress wants the clock to start running at another date, Barrett noted, it explicitly says so. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred, writing separately to explain that Corner Post could obtain relief in this case because the Administrative Procedure Act allows vacatur. In other words, the Act allows someone who is not regulated, but is harmed—and thus can’t challenge the regulation any other way—to ask a court to hold unlawful and set aside an illegal agency action solely because the agency violated the Act when issuing the regulation. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented and argued that the majority’s reading “effectively” wiped out limits on when someone can challenge agency regulations. She also warned that a “tsunami” of lawsuits would be triggered by this case and the court’s decision Friday in Loper Bright (which rejected judicial deference to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes), and could “devastate the functioning of the Federal Government.” Corner Post might not be able to ride victorious into the sunset just yet. Its trip to the Supreme Court was just an effort to keep its case alive. But at the very least, the Supreme Court’s decision gives Corner Post the opportunity to challenge a legally flawed regulation. In the fight to rein in a rogue administrative state, that in itself is a victory. The post You Can Challenge Old Regulations Before the Government Sues You, Justices Rule appeared first on The Daily Signal.

That Was Quick: Trump Makes Immunity Claim to Throw Out Manhattan Conviction (Update)

Ants are pretty remarkable creatures. From navigating via Earth’s magnetic field to spraying acid at their enemies, these tiny colonies are capable of big things, both as a unit and on an individual level. Now, new research has found that ants can even perform surgery, amputating the limbs of their friends and saving their lives in the process.Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) treat other ants with leg injuries by first assessing the wound, cleaning it, and then deciding whether to perform an amputation. The same researchers that made this discovery had previously found that another ant species can treat wounds with antibiotics in their saliva; however, Florida carpenter ants do not possess the same gland as the other species, and so their treatment is entirely mechanical. “When we're talking about amputation behavior, this is literally the only case in which a sophisticated and systematic amputation of an individual by another member of its species occurs in the animal Kingdom,” said first author Erik Frank, a behavioral ecologist from the University of Würzburg, in a statement.             The team found that the ants would assess the injury and either simply clean the wound, or clean the wound followed by a full amputation, which could take as long as 40 minutes. In the study, injuries to the femur (upper leg) were always cleaned and then amputated, while injuries to the tibia (lower leg) only received cleaning and were never amputated. Moreover, the survival rate for ants with either injury was remarkably high.“Femur injuries, where they always amputate the leg, had a success rate around 90% or 95%. And for the tibia, where they did not amputate, it still achieved about the survival rate of 75%,” said Frank.It was suspected that the decision whether to clean or amputate the leg could be based on the risk of infection. By using a micro-CT scanner, the team discovered that the femur is made up of lots of muscle tissue and can pump blood or hemolymph around to the rest of the body. The tibia, by contrast, contains very little muscle tissue, and much less involvement in the blood movement. “In tibia injuries, the flow of the hemolymph was less impeded, meaning bacteria could enter the body faster. While in femur injuries the speed of the blood circulation in the leg was slowed down,” Frank explained.Because the blood flow in the femur was slowed down via the injury, the ants could spend the extra time it takes to remove the limb, and not risk the infection spreading. But in tibia injuries, the faster blood flow means there's not enough time for amputation without the infection spreading, so they clean more instead.“Thus, because they are unable to cut the leg sufficiently quickly to prevent the spread of harmful bacteria, ants try to limit the probability of lethal infection by spending more time cleaning the tibia wound,” remarked senior author and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne.This remarkable behavior shows that these Florida carpenter ants can find the location of the wounds of their nestmates and alter their treatment based on the location, thereby increasing the likelihood of survival for the injured ant. The team believes this is the first case of a non-human animal performing amputations in this way.“The fact that the ants are able to diagnose a wound, see if it's infected or sterile, and treat it accordingly over long periods of time by other individuals—the only medical system that can rival that would be the human one,” said Frank.The study is published in Current Biology.

If we one day want to explore the galaxy (let alone the rest of the universe) humanity has a speed issue. In late 2023, NASA's Parker Solar Probe achieved the highest speed ever achieved by a human-made object, clocking in at 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour.While impressive, that's only 0.059 percent of the speed of light. Visiting our closest neighbor Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light-years away, at these speeds would take around 7,700 years, making generational ships (or robotic probes) necessary to explore it or any other interesting star further away.Such large ships would require a lot of propellant to get us anywhere near the velocities we would need to reach the stars. Physicists have proposed various methods to do this using current physics, and more speculative ways such as warp drives, with the goal of accelerating a useful-sized spaceship to these speeds without expending a huge amount of fuel. One such idea is to create an artificial black hole, and then power the spaceship using the Hawking radiation emitted from the event horizon."A stellar-mass black hole forms when a star with more than 20 solar masses exhausts the nuclear fuel in its core and collapses under its own weight," NASA explains. "The collapse triggers a supernova explosion that blows off the star’s outer layers. But if the crushed core contains more than about three times the Sun’s mass, no known force can stop its collapse to a black hole."A black hole of that size – or a supermassive black hole – would be too large to usefully power a spaceship, which would have to drag the black hole along with it, requiring it to be of similar mass. Besides this, smaller black holes emit higher temperature and energy radiation, making them more useful for powering spacecraft.So how do we get a smaller black hole? Many physicists believe that primordial black holes could have formed in the first few seconds of the universe, when all the stuff that would go on to create the stars and galaxies was more tightly packed together."In that moment, pockets of hot material may have been dense enough to form black holes, potentially with masses ranging from 100,000 times less than a paperclip to 100,000 times more than the Sun’s," NASA explains. "Then as the universe quickly expanded and cooled, the conditions for forming black holes this way ended."We have never detected such a black hole, and it's still unclear if they exist at all, or at least in the numbers and size at which we might be able to detect them. So if we want a black hole to power a spaceship, we might need to create an artificial one.  In one paper from back in 2009 looking into the feasibility of black hole-powered starships, physicists noted that it would have to be powerful enough to accelerate itself to speeds approaching that of light in a reasonable timeframe, be small enough that we can get enough energy to make it, and large enough that we can focus the energy needed to make it. Doing the math, they found that such a black hole could plausibly be made, and fairly quickly at that. "We find that a black hole with a radius of a few attometers at least roughly meets the list of criteria," the team writes in their paper. "Such BHs would have mass of the order of 1,000,000 tonnes, and lifetimes ranging from decades to centuries. A high-efficiency square solar panel a few hundred km on each side, in a circular orbit about the sun at a distance of 1,000,000 km, would absorb enough energy in a year to produce one such BH."The idea – known as a kugelblitz – is that focusing enough energy into one tiny point would create a black hole (with mass and energy being equivalent). The team believes such a black hole could accelerate itself to relativistic speeds in a matter of decades.While collecting the energy needed (never mind focusing it to a precise point needed to create a black hole) would be a hell of a mission, creating a drive from it is even more logistically challenging. The team proposes that the black hole could be used as a power plant – surrounding it with collectors that accumulate the dense energy emitted from the horizon. Alternatively, the spaceship could generate thrust by directing gamma rays."We could add a thick layer of matter which would absorb the gamma rays, reradiate in optical frequencies, and focus the resulting light rays," the team writes. "An absorber which stops only gamma rays heading towards the front of the ship and allows the rest to escape out the back causes gamma rays to radiate from the ship asymmetrically. In this way, even the escaping non-absorbed gamma rays contribute some thrust."While a cool idea (and perhaps possible), recent papers have suggested they might be impossible thanks to quantum effects.    While it could be possible using primordial black holes, that would involve finding them first. Should they exist, that may be possible using the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman telescope. But don't hold your breath for finding one of the right size, and near enough to be useful for powering awesome black hole starships.The paper is posted to the pre-print server arXiv.

Dogger Bank Wind Farm, set to be the world’s largest offshore wind farm, could soon have another growth spurt. The owners of the giant North Sea wind farm have submitted plans to kick off another phase of development in a push that could provide a further 2 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to the project.Located off the east coast of England, the 3.6GW wind farm is currently under construction in the three build-out phases: Dogger Bank A, B, and C. The project won’t be completed for a few years, although Dogger Bank A started pumping clean energy in October 2023, marking a major milestone for the colossus.Now, its owners – Britain’s SSE Renewables and Norway’s Equinor – have submitted a Scoping Report to build a fourth array: Dogger Bank D. The proposed Dogger Bank D will effectively be an extension on the east side of Dogger Bank C, situated around 210 kilometers (130 miles) off the northeast coast of England. It's planned to hook up to a new 400-kilovolt substation back on the mainland in Yorkshire, where it will be used to power thousands of homes and more. To get the go-ahead, they’ll have to reach an agreement with The Crown Estate, who manage the land and seabed owned by the British monarch around England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. They also have to pass numerous environmental checks, plus face a public consultation on the proposals in Autumn 2024.          "The Scoping Report is an important milestone for Dogger Bank D and is a key part of the development of an offshore wind farm. The report lays out the scope of the project proposals and identifies key environmental factors," Rob Cussons, Project Director for Dogger Bank D at SSE Renewables, said in a statement. Even before this latest addition was mentioned, Dogger Bank Wind Farm was pitted to be “the world’s biggest wind farm.” Dogger Bank A, B, and C is set to have 277 wind turbines and, once operational, would be more than two and a half times the size of the largest offshore wind farm currently in operation. According to the latest Scoping Report, Dogger Bank could add a maximum of 122 turbines to that total. The site features turbines with a height of 260 meters (853 feet) and blades that are 107 meters (351 feet) long – which is pretty huge, although not quite as big as the turbines off the coast of China’s Fujian Province, which have blades measuring 123 meters (403 feet) long.As the world attempts to wean itself off fossil fuels, huge wind farms have sprouted up across many parts of the world in recent years. The largest in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center in the windswept Tehachapi Pass of California, boasting a capacity of about 1.55GW. However, the efforts of the US and Britain are dwarfed by one in China – the Gansu Wind Farm Project or Jiuquan Wind Power Base on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert – that has a planned capacity of 20GW.