The world’s biggest solar plant has come online, according to Chinese media. Covering 13,333 hectares (32,947 acres) in the desert of northwest Xinjiang and capable of powering a small country on its own, the facility was reportedly connected to the grid on Monday.Located in a desert area of Ürümqi, capital of the famously troubled Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwestern China, the 3.5-gigawatt-capacity plant is slated to generate about 6.09 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each year. That’s enough to single-handedly power a country like Cameroon or Laos, or fulfill the entire electrical demand of Vermont or Alaska.The installation comes amid a surge of investment into renewable energy in the country – one that the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently described as “extraordinary”. “In 2023, China commissioned as much solar PV as the entire world did in 2022,” the agency pointed out in its Renewables 2023 report back in January.That’s good news for anyone who likes not living in an uninhabitable post-climate-apocalypse world: currently, China is also far and away the largest contributor of carbon emissions from fossil fuels and industry. That’s largely driven by its huge population – per person, the US is worse for the environment – but it’s still enough to outstrip the entire rest of the developed world combined.Lately, though, there have been signs that China’s carbon emissions might have peaked. Levels fell for the first time in 14 months back in March according to an analysis by Carbon Brief, reports The Economist, and the same was likely true in April. While it’s still too early to call it for sure, experts have long been convinced that the country will at least meet its stated goal of an emissions peak no later than 2030.“By 2030 […] almost half of China’s electricity generation will come from renewable energy sources,” predicted the IEA. That’s largely driven by the country’s ever-accelerating development of wind and solar farms: indeed, even before the deployment of this new solar mega-plant, the two largest operational facilities were already located in western China.It’s a popular base for such projects. Sparsely populated, with ample sun and wind in the area, the Xinjiang region has become something of a hub for renewable energy production in the country – though it’s certainly not lost its reputation for the rich oil and mineral resources it also houses.Perhaps, though, it’ll be the renewable plants that finally win out. After all, China has repeatedly resolved to reach net-zero emissions by 2060 – a target which is impossible without strong investment in renewables. If the latest news and figures are to be believed, the country might just pull it off.“This major strategic decision [reaching net-zero] is made based on our sense of responsibility to build a community with a shared future for mankind,” President Xi said back in 2021, while attending a US-organized climate summit. “And our own need to secure sustainable development.”

For a one-cell organism with no nervous system, Lacrymaria olor is a pretty impressive predator. Extending a long, wiggling neck from its pear-shaped body, L. olor hunts down prey to chomp on in the ponds where it lives. Just how it manages this remained a bit of a mystery, but a pair of determined scientists have now completed a seven-year study proving it’s down to the first observed case of cellular “origami”.From the first viewing, associate professor of engineering Manu Prakash was enthralled by the antics of the single-celled protist L. olor. “There are some things in life you can watch and then never unwatch. It's … just … it's mesmerizing,” Prakash – who first observed the creature using the Foldscope paper microscope he helped develop – told the Stanford Report. This playfulness is central to Prakash’s approach to research, which he calls recreational biology, or “old-school science”.You can see the fascinating display for yourself in the video below. Despite having no nervous system, and so none of the usual ways of responding to its environment through complex behaviors, L. olor can extend its swan-like neck more than 30 times its original body length in just 30 seconds.  In human terms, that would be like a 1.8-meter-tall (6-foot-tall) person extending their head more than 60 meters (200 feet).       Many have observed this wondrous behavior, but until Prakash and graduate student Eliott Flaum launched an in-depth investigation, it was unclear how it happened. “We started with a puzzle. Ellie and I asked a very simple question: Where does this material come from? And where does it go?”Now, they have discovered the answer in a previously unknown geometric mechanism.“This is the first example of cellular origami," Prakash said. "We're thinking of calling it lacrygami."Specifically, L. olor is making use of curved-crease origami. Thin microtubules in a helical shape are wrapped up inside the cell’s membrane and encased in a delicate, curved shroud. Each L. olor cell has 15 of these which can coil and uncoil to project and retract the neck – think of an accordion being pulled out and in. Because the very fine membrane is folded into pleats, you can store “an infinite amount of material,” said Flaum. “Biology has figured this out.”Prakash and Flaum were able to observe all this cellular machinery using transmission electron microscopy.Even more incredible is the fact that one L. olor individual will perform this process flawlessly more than 20,000 times during its life. “L. olor is bound by its geometry to fold and unfold in this particular way,” Flaum explained.The point at which the folded membrane begins to unfold is known mathematically as a singularity. At this precise point, the structure is both folded and unfolded at the same time. Prakash and Flaum observed that the singularity in L. olor travels the exact same path every single time it extends and retracts its neck – all 20,000 of them – and in this way acts as a controller of the mechanism.It's this that makes L. olor so unique, even among organisms that are closely related to it. “This is the first time a geometric controller of behavior has been described in a living cell,” Prakash said.As a bioengineer, Prakash is already considering the possible applications of this discovery in bioinspired technologies, including microrobots and new ways of building structures in space. In a summary of their paper, Prakash and Flaum conclude: “The blueprints we have been looking for to bring agency and embedded control in microrobotics might be hidden in plain sight in the geometrical diversity of protists.”The study is published in Science. 

The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft is creating the most detailed map of the Milky Way. The position and motion of 1.5 billion stars are being measured, and that has revealed something pretty interesting. Some stars move in ways that can only be explained if they have come from a different galaxy. And it turns out that there were likely several collisions in our galaxy’s past.Galaxy mergers are a relatively common phenomenon in the universe. A small percentage of galaxies in the local universe are actively merging. A few years ago, Gaia provided evidence that our galaxy ate a smaller galaxy between 8 and 11 billion years ago – this object's now absorbed, but it got a name regardless: the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus.A merger leaves waves of stars, which the research team describe as wrinkles in the galaxy. But it seems that not all the wrinkles from the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger are the same. This new work argues that some of them come from a much more recent merger, one that took place just three billion years ago.“We get wrinklier as we age, but our work reveals that the opposite is true for the Milky Way. It’s a sort of cosmic Benjamin Button, getting less wrinkly over time,” lead author Thomas Donlon of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and University of Alabama, said in a statement. “By looking at how these wrinkles dissipate over time, we can trace when the Milky Way experienced its last big crash – and it turns out this happened billions of years later than we thought.”It is all in the motion of these stars. A galaxy getting cannibalized by ours means that it is coming into the Milky Way at high speed. The stars spread and get mixed up with the original population of our galaxy, but they still possess those high speeds. Their effect on the galaxy is not permanent; it smooths over after a long time. So seeing these effects, the wrinkles, being stronger from certain stars and not others suggests a history of multiple and even recent mergers.“For the wrinkles of stars to be as clear as they appear in Gaia data, they must have joined us less than three billion years ago – at least five billion years later than was previously thought,” added co-author Heidi Jo Newberg, also of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “New wrinkles of stars form each time the stars swing back and forth through the centre of the Milky Way. If they’d joined us eight billion years ago, there would be so many wrinkles right next to each other that we would no longer see them as separate features.”Gaia continues to provide new understanding of our home in the cosmos, helping astronomers work out the history of our galaxy – from the oldest building blocks to the possible latest additions. The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.  

Rank and file members of the Minneapolis Police Department continued to be shocked and saddened over the death of Officer Jamal Mitchell, who was shot to death in an ambush while responding to a call by himself on a mandatory overtime rotation. The salt in the wound for MPD officers has been being reminded that decision-makers in the area don't care much about the tragic situation and what caused it. Mustafa Mohamed, the suspect who was also killed during the incident, had a criminal history that goes back 20 years. He was not legally allowed to be in possession of a firearm due to a previous felony conviction. He also had been evading arrest for two years, according to KTSP. Another officer was injured in the gun battle with Mohamed. The city's response to Mitchell's death has been mixed. While many politicians have offered support and sympathy, others chose a different path. 'Most of us who work the streets in Minneapolis saw this coming, and the signs were already there for a long time.' City councilwoman Aisha Chughtai did not mention Mitchell's name in her statement and just blamed "gun violence" for the incident. She went on to say the "massive" police response to the shooting made the situation worse for locals who live in and around the crime scene. — (@) Gov. Tim Walz (D) likewise simply labeled the incident as gun violence in his first social media post. "We still have city council members that refuse to acknowledge the dangers of this job, or the bravery and sacrifice of Mitchell. Councilmember Chughtai is a perfect example of this," an MPD officer told Blaze News. The lack of support from local politicians is "expected, but this was a blatant slap in the face to Mitchell and his sacrifice." "I would argue most cops are used to it by now. They are trying to hijack this tragedy and make it about them [the politicians], as always," a second MPD officer explained. The officer acknowledged the "small number of city council members who have always been somewhat outspoken supporting the cops, however, the vast majority of the council hates us and have been outspoken about it."A third officer said even with the politicians who have responded correctly to Mitchell's death, with shock and outrage, "The glaring problem is why it’s shocking to them, because I don’t think they could have fathomed that this would happen. Most of us who work the streets in Minneapolis saw this coming, and the signs were already there for a long time."The third officer said it should not be surprising at all because "we have been screaming at our administration for years that our work conditions are unsafe."A request to reinforce precincts has gone unheeded for years. But even if that were to happen, "All of it is moot because the leadership city and statewide refused to acknowledge the 2,000-pound elephant in the room, which is that criminals are not afraid of prosecution."Officers who spoke to Blaze News brought up the recent case of Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty reluctantly dropping murder charges against a state trooper who shot an armed motorist trying to flee because it was within his use-of-force, which was backed up with new evidence. Moriarty still stood by her decision to charge the trooper, a decision that has police in her jurisdiction very concerned.Moriarty even went as far as to compare supporters of the trooper who protested outside the courthouse to protesters at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021."It terrifies cops, myself included, that she is in charge and does everything she can to charge cops," the second officer said."Nobody in the [Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party] will acknowledge that their own people are the cause of this and that their own ideologies are dangerous. Nobody in politics will stand up and say, 'We had a hand in this.' We just want accountability and for once to see someone actually talk about how cops are being targeted and law and order disparaged, without someone referencing the 'murder' of (the convicted felon) George Floyd," the third officer explained.The frustration at city leaders among MPD officers has been ever present since the BLM riots in 2020. Everything from the lack of preparedness to the riots to pursuing pro-crime policies that has resulted in a mass exodus of the force, the officers who remain have faced the uphill battle for over four years with no end in sight.The memorial service for Mitchell is set for next Tuesday at Maple Grove Senior High School. He leaves behind a fiancee and four children.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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