"Deep State" in The United States

In the United States, the term "deep state" is used to describe a conspiracy theory which suggests that collusion and cronyism exist within the US political system and constitutes a hidden government within the legitimately elected government. Some people believe that there is "a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process", whereas others consider the deep state to encompass corruption that is particularly prevalent amongst career politicians and civil servants.

The term was originally coined to refer to a similar relatively invisible state apparatus in Turkey "composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary, and organized crime" and similar alleged networks in other countries including Egypt, Ukraine, Spain, Colombia, Italy, and Israel, and many others.

Following the disclosure of documents released by WikiLeaks, the term was adopted by people who alleged that the information points to a deep-state conspiracy that seeks to delegitimize democracy and the policy goals of "the people.”

Definition of Deep State

According to the journalist Robert Worth, "The expression deep state had originated in Turkey in the 1990s, where the military colluded with drug traffickers and hit men to wage a dirty war against Kurdish insurgents". The term "deep state" is likely a translation from the Turkish derin devlet (literally: "deep state" or "deep polity").

In The Concealment of the State, Professor Jason Royce Lindsey argues that even without a conspiratorial agenda, the term deep state is useful for understanding aspects of the national security 

establishment in developed countries, with emphasis on the United States. Lindsey writes that the deep state draws power from the national security and intelligence communities, a realm where secrecy is a source of power.^:35-36 Alfred W. McCoy states that the increase in the power of the U.S. intelligence community since the September 11 attacks "has built a fourth branch of the U.S. government" that is "in many ways autonomous from the executive, and increasingly so."

In a Foreign Affairs journal article and subsequent expansion in a law review, UCLA Law professor Jon D. Michaels rejects "the premise of an American deep state” in a defense of what he terms the 'administrative state' against Trump's attempts to “deconstruct" it. Michaels argues that the concept of the 'deep state' is more relevant to developing governments such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey, "where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives" than the United States "where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent".

According to David Gergen, quoted in Time magazine, the term has been appropriated by Steve Bannon and Breitbart News and other supporters of the Trump Administration in order to delegitimize the critics of the current presidency. The 'deep state' theory has been dismissed by authors for The New York Times and New York Observer. University of Miami Professor Joseph Uscinski says, "The concept has always been very popular among conspiracy theorists, whether they call it a deep state or something else."

Former NSA leaker Edward Snowden has used the term generally to refer to the influence of civil servants over elected officials: "the deep state is not just the intelligence agencies, it is really a way of referring to the career bureaucracy of government. These are officials who sit in powerful positions, who don't leave when presidents do, who watch presidents come and go ... they influence policy, they influence presidents."

In an opinion piece by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, he said the "deep state" is an "elastic label – depending on the occasion" and its "story conforms to the intricate grammar of those conspiracy narratives". He also contrasted the change in the "twin bogeys of conservative rhetoric", from bureaucratic "meddlesome bunglers" of "big government" to "conniving ideologues" who "orchestrates complex schemes".

According to political scientist George Friedman, the Deep State has been in place since 1871 and continues beneath the federal government, controlling and frequently reshaping policies; in this view the U.S. civil service was created to limit the power of the president. Prior to 1871, the president could select federal employees, all of whom served at the pleasure of the president. This is no longer the case.

On March 20, 2018, Senator Rand Paul said "Absolutely there is a deep state because the deep state is that the intelligence communities do not have oversight." He continued, "There is no skeptic" [emphasis in original] among the four Republican and four Democratic Senators "who are supposedly" providing oversight, so that the intelligence communities, "with their enormous power ... have become a deep state." On December 4, 2018, Paul, in commenting on the CIA Director briefing only those eight Senators rather than the entire Senate, added "The deep state wants to keep everyone in the dark. This is just ridiculous!" On December 10, 2018, he said "The very definition of a 'deep state’ is when the very people, congressional leaders – people who are elected by the people – are not allowed to hear the intelligence."

Writing in a piece for the Moyers & Company website, John Light asserts that the term deep state "has been used for decades abroad to describe any network of entrenched government officials who function independently from elected politicians and work toward their own ends," but during the era of Trump the term has been twisted to mean "a sub rosa part of the liberal establishment, that crowd resistant to the reality TV star’s insurgent candidacy all along."

Michael Crowley, senior foreign affairs correspondent for Politico, wrote "Beneath the politics of convenience is the reality that a large segment of the United States government really does operate without much transparency or public scrutiny, and has abused its awesome powers in myriad ways.

Deep State and U.S. Politics

The term "deep state" has been associated with the "military–industrial complex" by several of the authors on the subject. Potential risks from the military–industrial complex were raised in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Stephen F. Cohen in his book War with Russia? (released November 27, 2018), claims that "At least one U.S.–Soviet summit seems to have been sabotaged. The third Eisenhower–Khrushchev meeting, scheduled for Paris in 1960, was aborted by the Soviet shoot-down of a US U-2 spy plane sent, some think, by 'deep state' foes of detente."

Mike Lofgren has claimed the military-industrial complex is the private part of the deep state. However, Marc Ambinder has suggested that a myth about the "deep state" is that it functions as one entity; in reality, he states, "the deep state contains multitudes, and they are often at odds with one another."

Tufts University professor Michael J. Glennon claimed that President Barack Obama did not succeed in resisting and/or changing what he calls the "double government"; the defense and national security network. Mike Lofgren felt Obama was pushed into the Afghanistan "surge" in 2009. Another major campaign promise Obama made was the closure of Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, which he was unable to accomplish. This has been attributed indirectly to the influence of a deep state.

President Donald Trump's supporters use the term to refer to allegations that intelligence officers and executive branch officials guide policy through leaking or other internal means. According to a July 2017 report by the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, "the Trump administration was being hit by national security leaks 'on a nearly daily basis' and at a far higher rate than its predecessors encountered".

Trump and Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, have both made allegations about a deep state which they believe is interfering with the president's agenda. In 2018, describing the deep state as an "entrenched bureaucracy", Trump accused the United States Department of Justice "of being part of the 'deep state'" in a statement advocating the prosecution of Huma Abedin. Some Trump allies and right-wing media outlets have alleged that former president Barack Obama is coordinating a deep state resistance to Trump. While the belief in a deep state is popular among Trump supporters, critics maintain that it has no basis in reality, arguing that the sources of the leaks frustrating the Trump administration lack the organizational depth of deep states in other countries. Critics also warned that use of the term in the U.S. could undermine confidence in vital institutions and be used to justify suppressing dissent.

The Washington Post's long-time conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, said of the belief in a Deep State:

I don’t believe in the tooth fairy, the Knights Templar, Bilderberg, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vast right wing conspiracy, or, for that matter, a vast left wing conspiracy. Are there in the U.S. government individual bureaucrats that are Democratic holdovers that would love nothing more than to damage Trump? Yeah, of course there are. Is there a concealed web of conspirators, malevolent permanent hidden shadow government? Rubbish. And I would add that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone without the help of Ted Cruz’s father.

Rolling Stone magazine, which reported Krauthammer's comment, summarizes the Deep State concept this way: "Is there actually a deep state? If you mean entrenched bureaucracy, then of course there is. If you mean a government-wide conspiracy, then the answer is almost certainly no.  Salon magazine traces Donald Trump's belief in a Deep State to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars, who, it says, "believes that the government — aka the "deep state" — has orchestrated attacks and events throughout history. This includes the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the massacre at Sandy Hook (he claims that many of the parents were actors), the Boston Marathon attack, and on and on," including believing that the 9/11 attack was "executed by the United States government." The magazine also points to Trump's long-time ally, Roger Stone, as an influence. 

Stone has written several books which center of conspiracy theories, and blames Lyndon Johnson for the death of President John F. Kennedy, and that Ted Cruz's father was involved in that assassination.

In an article for The New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky quoted Newt Gingrich as using the term in the context of the Robert Mueller investigation in July 2018, quoting Gingrich stating: "[Mueller is] ... the tip of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency". Gingrich then added to the statement that: "The brazen redefinition of Mueller's task tells you how arrogant the deep state is and how confident it is it can get away with anything".

Professor of international relations at Harvard University, Stephen Walt, has written: "There's no secret conspiracy or deep state running U.S. foreign policy; to the extent that there is a bipartisan foreign-policy elite, it is hiding in plain sight."

The term has also been used in comments on the "deep state"-like influence allegedly wielded by career military officers such as H. R. McMaster, John Kelly and James Mattis in the Trump administration. The anthropologist C. August Elliott described this state of affairs as the emergence of a 'shallow state': "an America where public servants now function as tugboats guiding the President's very leaky ship through the shallows and away from a potential shipwreck".

On September 5, 2018, The New York Times  published an anonymous op-ed titled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" written by a "senior official in the Trump Administration". In the essay, the official was critical of President Trump and claimed "that many of the senior officials in [Trump's] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations". House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy described this as evidence of the deep state at work, and David Bossie wrote an op-ed at Fox News claiming this was the deep state "working against the will of the American people". However, there was some doubt as to the actual importance of the anonymous author with some estimating hundreds or thousands of possible positions could be considered "senior officials" and the inherent paradox of exposing the existence of such a group.

Polls

According to a poll of Americans in April 2017, about half (48%) thought there was a "deep state" (meaning "military, intelligence and government officials who try to secretly manipulate government"), while about a third (35%) of all participants thought it was a conspiracy theory and the remainder (17%) had no opinion. Of those who believe a "deep state" exists, more than half (58%) said it was a major problem, a net of 28% of those surveyed.

A March 2018 poll found most respondents (63%) were unfamiliar with the term "deep state", but a majority believe that a deep state likely exists in the United States when described as "a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy". Three-fourths (74%) of the respondents say that they believe this type of group definitely (27%) or probably (47%) exists in the federal government.

                       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_States

What Is Quantum Computing?

What is “quantum computing”?


What is Google’s Quantum Supremacy Claim?


Click on this link to an excellent IEEE Spectrum article that explains good answers to these vital questions.  And remember, computers were invented  first and foremost to crack coded security 
messages.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/how-googles-quantum-supremacy-plays-into-quantum-computings-long-game  

Weird Worms in California Lake

Otherworldly Worms with Three Sexes Discovered in Mono Lake

September 26, 2019 -- Caltech scientists have discovered a new species of worm thriving in the extreme environment of Mono Lake. This new species, temporarily dubbed Auanema sp., has three different sexes, can survive 500 times the lethal human dose of arsenic, and carries its young inside its body like a kangaroo.

Mono Lake, located in the Eastern Sierras of California, is three times as salty as the ocean and has an alkaline pH of 10. Before this study, only two other species (other than bacteria and algae) were known to live in the lake—brine shrimp and diving flies. In this new work, the team discovered eight more species, all belonging to a class of microscopic worms called nematodes, thriving in and around Mono Lake.

The work was done primarily in the laboratory of Paul Sternberg, Bren Professor of Biology. A paper describing the research appears online on September 26 in the journal Current Biology.

The Sternberg laboratory has had a long interest in nematodes, particularly Caenorhabditis elegans, which uses only 300 neurons to exhibit complex behaviors, such as sleeping, learning, smelling, and moving. That simplicity makes it a useful model organism with which to study fundamental neuroscience questions. Importantly, C. elegans can easily thrive in the laboratory under normal room temperatures and pressures.

As nematodes are considered the most abundant type of animal on the planet, former Sternberg lab graduate students Pei-Yin Shih (PhD '19) and James Siho Lee (PhD '19) thought they might find them in the harsh environment of Mono Lake. The eight species they found are diverse, ranging from benign microbe-grazers to parasites and predators. Importantly, all are resilient to the arsenic-laden conditions in the lake and are thus considered extremophiles—organisms that thrive in conditions unsuitable for most life forms.

The new worm exists in three different sexes: hermaphrodites, females, and males. The hermaphrodites can produce offspring by themselves, but the females and males need to mate in order to produce their young. The females and males are often produced early in the reproductive cycle of the mother, followed by the hermaphrodites.

"One potential explanation for this three-sex life cycle is that the females and males could help maintain genetic diversity through sexual recombination, while the hermaphrodites could disperse into new environments and establish new populations there—since they can grow a population by themselves," says Lee.

When comparing the new Auanema species to sister species in the same genus, the researchers found that the similar species also demonstrated high arsenic resistance, even though they do not live in environments with high arsenic levels. In another surprising discovery, Auanema sp. itself was found to be able to thrive in the laboratory under normal, non-extreme conditions. Only a few known extremophiles in the world can be studied in a laboratory setting.

This suggests that nematodes may have a genetic predisposition for resiliency and flexibility in adapting to harsh and benign environments alike.

"Extremophiles can teach us so much about innovative strategies for dealing with stress," says Shih.   "Our study shows we still have much to learn about how these 1000-celled animals have mastered survival in extreme environments."

The researchers plan to determine if there are particular biochemical and genetic factors that enable nematodes' success and to sequence the genome of Auanema sp. to look for genes that may enable arsenic resistance. Arsenic-contaminated drinking water is a major global health concern; understanding how eukaryotes like nematodes deal with arsenic will help answer questions about  how the toxin moves through and affects cells and bodies.

But beyond human health, studying extreme species like the nematodes of Mono Lake contributes to a bigger, global picture of the planet, says Lee.

"It's tremendously important that we appreciate and develop a curiosity for biodiversity," he adds, noting that the team had to receive special permits for their field work at the lake. "The next innovation for biotechnology could be out there in the wild. A new biodegradable sunscreen, for example, was discovered from extremophilic bacteria and algae. We have to protect and responsibly utilize wildlife."

 https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/otherworldly-worms-three-sexes-discovered-mono-lake

Impeachment Inquiry Against Donald Trump

An impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump was initiated on September 24, 2019, by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, in a televised speech. The inquiry was announced in the wake of an anonymous whistleblower report that alleged abuse of power, and then cover-up, by Donald Trump during his presidency.

From May to August 2019, President of the United States Donald Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani repeatedly pressed the Government of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. A Ukranian advisor on September 25, 2019 stated that Trump would only talk with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky if they discussed a future investigation of the Bidens.  Trump placed a hold on military aid to Ukraine at the same time. Trump was shown to had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to launch two investigations during a July 2019 phone call, including an investigation into the actions of former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The whistleblower also accused the White House of attempting to cover up the contents of this phone call.  In response to the report, the Trump administration released a transcript of this phone call, which confirmed that Trump had asked Zelensky to "look into" the Biden controversy. The whistleblower report also implicated Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr as part of a more widespread pressure campaign directed towards the Ukrainian government. Two individuals close to Trump told The New York Times that the alleged behavior was typical of President Trump's dealings with foreign leaders

Efforts to impeach Donald Trump have been made by various people and groups who assert that President Donald Trump has engaged in impeachable activity during his presidency. Talk of impeachment began before Trump took office. Formal efforts were initiated by Representatives Al Green and Brad Sherman, both Democrats (D), in 2017, the first year of his presidency. A December 2017 resolution of impeachment failed in the then Republican-led House by a 58–364 margin.

Democrats gained control of the House following the 2018 elections and launched multiple investigations into Trump's actions and finances. On January 17, 2019, new accusations involving Trump surfaced, claiming he instructed his long-time lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie under oath surrounding Trump's involvement with the Russian government to erect a Trump Tower in Moscow. 

This also sparked calls for an investigation and for the president to "resign or be impeached" should such claims be proven genuine.

The Mueller Report, released on April 18, 2019, reached no conclusion about whether Trump had committed criminal obstruction of justice. Mueller strongly hinted that it was up to Congress to make such a determination. Congressional support for an impeachment inquiry increased as a result. 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially resisted calls for impeachment. In May 2019, she indicated that Trump's continued actions, which she characterized as obstruction of justice and refusal to honor congressional subpoenas, might make an impeachment inquiry necessary. An increasing number of House Democrats and then-Republican Representative Justin Amash (Michigan) were requesting such an inquiry.

A majority of House members support the initiation of an impeachment inquiry against Trump. As of September 27, 2019, this includes at least 225 Democrats, 1 Republican and 1 independent, Representative Amash from Michigan, who left the Republican Party on July 4, 2019, in the wake of his protests regarding the lack of holding Trump accountable. Amash became a leading supporter of impeachment after the whistleblower report was released, stating that the call script was a "devastating indictment of the president." After further allegations of misconduct came to light in the days afterwards, Nevada representative Mark Amodei became the first Republican in the House of Representatives to support an impeachment inquiry, while Charlie Baker and Phil Scott became the first  [incumbent] Republican governors to support impeachment proceedings.

Trump-Ukraine Controversy

From May to August 2019, President Trump and his personal attorney pressed the Ukrainian government to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden. The whistleblower report centered around one instance of such pressure that occurred in a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, in which Trump mentioned two possible investigations that he hoped to see Ukraine launch. One of these would concern allegations that connected the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 United States presidential election campaign to Ukranian actors. The other investigation concerned Joe Biden, former U.S. Vice President and a candidate for the 2020 presidential election, and the Ukrainian business dealings of his son Hunter Biden. The whistleblower report accused the White House of attempting to hide the official transcript of the phone call. At the time of the inquiry, Biden was the leading candidate in Democratic Party primary polling, according to poll aggregators, making him Trump's most likely 2020 election opponent.

In July 2019, Trump placed a hold on military aid to Ukraine, while "providing no explanation". He lifted this hold in September of that year. Prominent Democrats, including Senators Robert Menendez and Chris Murphy, suggested that this hold may have been intended to implicitly or explicitly pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Hunter Biden.

On September 22, 2019, shortly after the whistleblower's allegations became public, Trump acknowledged that he had discussed Joe Biden during a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. Trump stated that "The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating [sic] to the corruption already in Ukraine". On September 25, the White House released part of a transcript of Trump's conversation with Zelensky following a promise to do so the previous day; on the same day, the whistleblower complaint was released to Congress.

Trump denied that his hold on military aid for Ukraine was linked to the Ukrainian government's refusal to investigate the Hunter Biden controversy, while also saying that withholding aid for this reason would have been ethically acceptable if he had done it. On September 26, 2019, Trump accused the whistleblower of being a "spy" and guilty of treason, before noting that treason is punishable by death.

Two people close to Donald Trump told The New York Times that the behavior in the scandal was "typical" of his "dealings on the phone with world leaders": "Engage in flattery, discuss mutual cooperation, and bring up a [personal] favor that then could be delegated to another person on Mr. Trump's team." In an interview, Giuliani defended Trump, calling the president's request of the Ukrainian president "perfectly appropriate", while also indicating that he himself may have made a similar request to Ukrainian officials. Giuliani had been accused of participating in the Ukranian pressure campaign in the whistleblower's report.

Inquiry

On the evening of September 24, 2019, Pelosi announced that six committees of the House of Representatives would undertake a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump. Pelosi accused Trump of betraying his oath of office, U.S. national security, and the integrity of the country's elections. The six committees charged with the task are the committees on Financial Services, the Judiciary, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, Oversight and Reform, and Ways and Means.

Joseph Maguire, the acting Director of National Intelligence who delayed the whistleblower complaint from reaching Congress, testified in front of the House Intelligence Committee on September 26, 2019. Maguire defended his decision not to immediately forward the whistleblower complaint to congress and explained that he consulted the White House Counsel and the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department but was unable to determine if the document was protected by executive privilege. Democrats on the committee questioned his actions, arguing that the law demands that he "shall" forward such complaints to the committee. Maguire countered that the situation was unique since the complaint involves communications of the president. Members of the Intelligence Committee also asked the director why he chose to consult with White House lawyers when he was not required to do so by law, to which he responded that he believed "it would be prudent to have another opinion."

                 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_inquiry_against_Donald_Trump

'Blackest Black' Material Developed

Made from carbon nanotubes, the new coating is 10 times darker than other very black materials

Massachusetts Institute of Technology – September 13, 2019 -- With apologies to "Spinal Tap," it appears that black can, indeed, get more black.

MIT engineers report today that they have cooked up a material that is 10 times blacker than anything that has previously been reported. The material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, or CNTs -- microscopic filaments of carbon, like a fuzzy forest of tiny trees, that the team grew on a surface of chlorine-etched aluminum foil. The foil captures more than 99.96 percent of any incoming light, making it the blackest material on record.

The researchers have published their findings today in the journal ACS-Applied Materials and Interfaces. They are also showcasing the cloak-like material as part of a new exhibit today at the New York Stock Exchange, titled "The Redemption of Vanity."

The artwork, a collaboration between Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and his group, and MIT artist-in-residence Diemut Strebe, features a 16.78-carat natural yellow diamond, estimated to be worth $2 million, which the team coated with the new, ultrablack CNT material. The effect is arresting: The gem, normally brilliantly faceted, appears as a flat, black void.

Wardle says the CNT material, aside from making an artistic statement, may also be of practical use, for instance in optical blinders that reduce unwanted glare, to help space telescopes spot orbiting exoplanets.

"There are optical and space science applications for very black materials, and of course, artists have been interested in black, going back well before the Renaissance," Wardle says. "Our material is 10 times blacker than anything that's ever been reported, but I think the blackest black is a constantly moving target. Someone will find a blacker material, and eventually we'll understand all the underlying mechanisms, and will be able to properly engineer the ultimate black."

Wardle's co-author on the paper is former MIT postdoc Kehang Cui, now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Into the void

Wardle and Cui didn't intend to engineer an ultrablack material. Instead, they were experimenting with ways to grow carbon nanotubes on electrically conducting materials such as aluminum, to boost their electrical and thermal properties.

But in attempting to grow CNTs on aluminum, Cui ran up against a barrier, literally: an ever-present layer of oxide that coats aluminum when it is exposed to air. This oxide layer acts as an insulator, blocking rather than conducting electricity and heat. As he cast about for ways to remove aluminum's oxide layer, Cui found a solution in salt, or sodium chloride.

At the time, Wardle's group was using salt and other pantry products, such as baking soda and detergent, to grow carbon nanotubes. In their tests with salt, Cui noticed that chloride ions were eating away at aluminum's surface and dissolving its oxide layer.

"This etching process is common for many metals," Cui says. "For instance, ships suffer from corrosion of chlorine-based ocean water. Now we're using this process to our advantage."

Cui found that if he soaked aluminum foil in saltwater, he could remove the oxide layer. He then transferred the foil to an oxygen-free environment to prevent reoxidation, and finally, placed the etched aluminum in an oven, where the group carried out techniques to grow carbon nanotubes via a process called chemical vapor deposition.

By removing the oxide layer, the researchers were able to grow carbon nanotubes on aluminum, at much lower temperatures than they otherwise would, by about 100 degrees Celsius. They also saw that the combination of CNTs on aluminum significantly enhanced the material's thermal and electrical properties -- a finding that they expected.

What surprised them was the material's color.

"I remember noticing how black it was before growing carbon nanotubes on it, and then after growth, it looked even darker," Cui recalls. "So I thought I should measure the optical reflectance of the sample.

"Our group does not usually focus on optical properties of materials, but this work was going on at the same time as our art-science collaborations with Diemut, so art influenced science in this case," says Wardle.

Wardle and Cui, who have applied for a patent on the technology, are making the new CNT process freely available to any artist to use for a noncommercial art project.

"Built to take abuse"

Cui measured the amount of light reflected by the material, not just from directly overhead, but also from every other possible angle. The results showed that the material absorbed greater than 99.995 percent of incoming light, from every angle. In essence, if the material contained bumps or ridges, or features of any kind, no matter what angle it was viewed from, these features would be invisible, obscured in a void of black.

The researchers aren't entirely sure of the mechanism contributing to the material's opacity, but they suspect that it may have something to do with the combination of etched aluminum, which is somewhat blackened, with the carbon nanotubes. Scientists believe that forests of carbon nanotubes can trap and convert most incoming light to heat, reflecting very little of it back out as light, thereby giving CNTs a particularly black shade.

 

"CNT forests of different varieties are known to be extremely black, but there is a lack of mechanistic  understanding as to why this material is the blackest. That needs further study," Wardle says.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190913080742.htm

MSU Seeks Better A.I.

Michigan State University – September 20, 2019 -Since "2001: A Space Odyssey," people have wondered: could machines like HAL 9000 eventually exist that can process information with human-like intelligence?

Researchers at Michigan State University say that true, human-level intelligence remains a long way off, but their new paper published in The American Naturalist explores how computers could begin to evolve learning in the same way as natural organisms did -- with implications for many fields, including artificial intelligence.

"We know that all organisms are capable of some form of learning, we just weren't sure how those abilities first evolved. Now we can watch these major evolutionary events unfold before us in a virtual world," said Anselmo Pontes, MSU computer science researcher and lead author. 

"Understanding how learning behavior evolved helps us figure out how it works and provides insights to other fields such as neuroscience, education, psychology, animal behavior, and even AI. It also supplies clues to how our brains work and could even lead to robots that learn from experiences as effectively as humans do."

According to Fred Dyer, MSU integrative biology professor and co-author, these findings have the potential for huge implications.

"We're untangling the story of how our own cognition came to be and how that can shape the future," Dyer said. "Understanding our own origins can lead us to developing robots that can watch and learn rather than being programmed for each individual task."

The results are the first demonstration that shows the evolution of associative learning in an artificial organism without a brain. Here is a video showing the process.

"Our inspiration was the way animals learn landmarks and use them to navigate their environments," Pontes said. "For example, in laboratory experiments, honeybees learn to associate certain colors or shapes with directions and navigate complex mazes."

Since the evolution of learning cannot be observed through fossils -- and would take more than a lifetime to watch in nature -- the MSU interdisciplinary team composed of biologists and computer scientists used a digital evolution program that allowed them to observe tens of thousands of generations of evolution in just a few hours, a feat unachievable with living systems.

In this case, organisms evolved to learn and use environmental signals to help them navigate the environment and find food.

"Learning is crucial to most behaviors, but we couldn't directly observe how learning got started in the first place from our purely instinctual ancestors," Dyer said. "We built in various selection pressures that we thought might play a role and watched what happened in the computer."

While the environment was simulated, the evolution was real. The programs that controlled the digital organism were subject to genetic variation from mutation, inheritance and competitive selection. Organisms were tasked to follow a trail alongside signals that -- if interpreted correctly -- pointed where the path went next.

In the beginning of the simulation, organisms were "blank slates," incapable of sensing, moving or learning. Every time an organism reproduced, its descendants could suffer mutations that changed their behavior. Most mutations were lethal. Some did nothing. But the rare traits that allowed an organism to better follow the trail resulted in the organism collecting more resources, reproducing more often and, thus, gaining share in the population.

Over the generations, organisms evolved more and more complex behaviors. First came simple movements allowing them to stumble into food. Next was the ability to sense and distinguish different types of signals, followed by the reflexive ability to correct errors, such as trying an incorrect path, backing up and trying another.

A few organisms evolved the ability to learn by association. If one of these organisms made a wrong turn it would correct the error, but it would also learn from that mistake and associate the specific signal it saw with the direction it now knew it should have gone. From then on, it would navigate the entire trail without any further mistakes. Some organisms could even relearn when tricked by switching signals mid-trail.

"Evolution in nature might take too long to study," Pontes said, "but evolution is just an algorithm, so it can be replicated in a computer. We were not just able to see how certain environments fostered the evolution of learning, but we saw populations evolve through the same behavioral phases that previous scientists speculated should happen but didn't have the technology to see."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190920124641.htm

Artificial Intelligence Bringing Changes

Hewlett Packard Enterprise paid for an article from PriceWaterhouseCoopers about the coming effects of AI in the near future.  Here is the article that was developed:


https://apnews.com/sponsored/?prx_t=80kFAk2Y8AniAPA&&ntv_fpc=715a87c2-9185-4b68-8f1c-15ff14425b64

Global Animal Drug Resistance Rising Fast

By Peter Ruegg

ETH Zurich – September 19, 2019 -- An international team of researchers led by ETH has shown that antimicrobial-resistant infections are rapidly increasing in animals in low and middle income countries. They produced the first global [map] of resistance rates, and [they] identified regions where interventions are urgently needed.

The world is experiencing unprecedented economic growth in low- and middle-income countries. An increasing number of people in India, China, Latin America and Africa have become wealthier, and this is reflected in their consumption of meat and dairy products. In Africa, meat consumption has risen by more than half; in Asia and Latin America it is up by two-thirds.

To meet this growing demand, animal husbandry has been intensified, with among other things, an increased reliance on the use of antimicrobials. Farmers use antimicrobials to treat and prevent infections for animals raised in crowded conditions but these drugs are also used to increase weight gain, and thus improve profitability.

This excessive and indiscriminate use of antimicrobials has serious consequences: the proportion of bacteria resistant to antimicrobials is rapidly increasing around the world. Drugs are losing their efficacy, with important consequences for the health of animals but also potentially for humans.

Mapping resistance hotspots

Low- and middle income countries have limited surveillance capacities to track antimicrobial use and resistance on farms. Antimicrobial use is typically less regulated and documented there than in wealthy industrialized countries with established surveillance systems.  

The team of researchers led by Thomas Van Boeckel, SNF Assistant Professor of Health Geography and Policy at ETH Zurich, has recently published a map of antimicrobial resistance in animals in low- and middle-income countries in the journal Science.

The team assembled a large literature database and found out where, and in which animals species resistance occurred for the common foodborne bacteria Salmonella, E. coli, Campylobacter and Staphylococcus.

According to this study, the regions associated with high rates of antimicrobial resistance in animals are northeast China, northeast India, southern Brazil, Iran and Turkey. In these countries, the bacteria listed above are now resistant to a large number of drug that are used not only in animals but also in human medicine. An important finding of the study is that so far, few resistance hotspots have emerged in Africa with the exception of Nigeria and the surroundings of Johannesburg.

The highest resistance rates were associated with the antimicrobials most frequently used in animals: tetracyclines, sulphonamides, penicillins and quinolones. In certain regions, these compounds have almost completely lost their efficacy to treat infections.

Alarming trend in multi-drug resistance

The researchers introduced a new index to track the evolution of resistance to multiple drugs: the proportion of drugs tested in each region with resistance rates higher than 50%. Globally, this index has almost tripled for chicken and pigs over the last 20 years. Currently, one third of drugs fail 50% of the time in chicken and one quarter of drug fail in 50% of the time in pigs.

“This alarming trend shows that the drugs used in animal farming are rapidly losing their efficacy,” Van Boeckel says. This will affect the sustainability of the animal industry and potentially the health of consumers.

It is of particular concern that antimicrobial resistance is rising in developing and emerging countries because this is where meat consumption is growing the fastest, while access to veterinary antimicrobials remains largely unregulated. “Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem. There is little point in making considerable efforts to reduce it on one side of the world if it is increasing dramatically on the other side,” the ETH researcher says.

Input from thousands of studies

For their current study, the team of researchers from ETH, Princeton University and the Free University of Brussels gathered thousands of publications as well as unpublished veterinary reports from around the world. The researchers used this database to produce the maps of antimicrobial resistance.

However, the maps do not cover the entire research area; there are large gaps in particular in South America, which researchers attribute to a lack of publicly available data. “There are hardly any official figures or data from large parts of South America,” says co-author and ETH postdoctoral fellow Joao Pires. He said this surprised him, as much more data is available from some African countries , despite resources for conducting surveys being more limited than in South America.

Open-access web platform

The team has created an open-access web platform resistancebank.org to share their findings and gaher additional data on resistance in animals. For example, veterinarians and state-authorities can upload data on resistance in their region to the platform and share it with other people who are interested.

Van Boeckel hopes that scientists from countries with more limited resources for whom publishing cost in academic journal can be a barrier will be able to share their findings and get recognition for their work on the platform. “In this way, we can ensure that the data is not just stuffed away in a  drawer” he says, “because there are many relevant findings lying dormant, especially in Africa or India, that would complete the global picture of resistance that we try to draw in this first assessment. The platform could also help donors to identify the regions most affected by resistance in order to be able to finance specific interventions.

As meat production continues to rise, the web platform could help target interventions against AMR and assist a transition to more sustainable farming practices in low- and middle-income countries.       “The rich countries of the Global North, where antimicrobials have been used since the 1950s, should help make the transition a success,” says Van Boeckel.

The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Branco Weiss                 Fellowship.

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/09/antimicrobial-resistances-on-the-rise.html

US/Canada Bird Populations Down

Nearly 30% of birds in U.S., Canada have vanished since 1970

By Gustave Axelson, editorial director at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology


Cornell University, September 19, 2019 -- If you were alive in 1970, more than 1 in 4 birds in the U.S. and Canada have disappeared within your lifetime.


According to research published Sept. 19 by the journal Science, the total breeding bird population in the continental U.S. and Canada has dropped by 29 percent since that year.


“We were astounded by this result … the loss of billions of birds,” said the study’s lead author, Ken Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a leader of research and planning on joint initiatives by the Lab and the American Bird Conservancy.


Rosenberg led a research team of scientists from seven institutions from the U.S. and Canada in the analysis of 529 bird species. The team analyzed the most robust synthesis of long-term-monitoring population surveys ever assembled for a group of wildlife species; it also analyzed radar imagery.

Rosenberg said the results of this study point to something bigger than birds.


“It’s a strong signal that our human-altered landscapes are losing their ability to support birdlife,” he said. “And that is an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.”


All told, the U.S. and Canadian continental avifauna population is down by 2.9 billion breeding adult birds, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by more than 50 percent, or another 700 million birds.


Habitat loss, said the authors, is likely to be the driving factor in these declines.


“These numbers are staggering,” said Arvind Panjabi, study co-author and avian conservation scientist at the Colorado-based Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. 


So-called common birds – the species many people see every day – represent the greatest losses of birdlife in the study. More than 90 percent of the losses come from 12 avian families, including sparrows, blackbirds, warblers and finches. The losses include favorite species seen at bird feeders, such as dark-eyed juncos (little gray snowbirds that show up in backyards in winter, down by 160 million) and white-throated sparrows (down by 90 million).


Meadowlarks are down from coast to coast – a 70 million decline for Eastern meadowlark, and 60 million for Western meadowlark. The continental red-winged blackbird population has declined by 92 million birds.

Losses Among Birds by Family

Thrushes                      -10%

Swallows                     -22%

Finches                        -37%

Wood-Warblers           -38%

Sparrows                     -38%

Blackbirds                   -44%

Larks                           -67%




“We want to keep common birds common, and we’re not even doing that,” said Peter Marra, a study co-author who contributed to the analysis in his former position as director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Marra is now director of the Georgetown Environment Initiative.


“Put that into the context of the other declines that we’re seeing, from insects to amphibians, and it suggests that there’s an ecosystem collapse that should be troubling to everybody,” Marra said. “It’s telling us that our environment is not healthy. Not for birds, and probably also not for humans.”


The population models underlying the study are based on standardized bird-survey datasets built by people counting birds they see, such as the USGS Breeding Bird Survey, which began in 1966, and Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count, which goes back more than a century.


“We have finally managed to come up with a way to estimate the number of birds in North America, to get to a point where we trust the math. And it turns out, over less than a single human lifetime, we’ve lost almost a third of our birds,” said Adam Smith, study co-author and biostatistician for Environment and Climate Change Canada. “As ecologists, we had a sense there might be something going on. But even ecologists didn’t fully anticipate the scale of this loss.”


The research also looked at the archives of radar imagery from more than 140 National Weather Service-operated NEXRAD (next-generation radar) weather stations across the United States. Birds appear on radar scans during spring nights, when they migrate high in the air. Adriaan Dokter, a Cornell Lab of Ornithology information science research associate, measured the total biomass of birds passing over U.S. airspace during nighttime spring migration and saw that the decline in birds was visible on radar.


“The amount of ‘bird biomass’ flying over our heads has decreased by about 14% since 2007,” Dokter said, adding that the rate of decline over the past decade is similar to the decline depicted in the population models over the last half-century. According to his analysis, the declines were steepest in the eastern half of the country.


There are a few bright spots for birds. Among the population models, raptor populations – hawks, eagles and other birds of prey – have tripled since 1970. The study’s authors said that uptick is attributable to government regulations that banned the harmful pesticide DDT and made shooting raptors illegal.


Waterfowl populations have grown 50% in the past 50 years. The scientists said that’s due to dedicated programs such as the North American Waterfowl Management Plan and its billions of dollars invested into wetlands conservation and international collaboration, as well as the establishment of a federal no-net-loss wetlands policy.


Rosenberg, a faculty fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, said the success in wetlands conservation for waterfowl may provide a blueprint for turning around the steep declines among grassland birds. Even if 30% of North America’s birds are lost, there are still 70% left to spur a recovery if conservation measures can be implemented. But conservation action must come soon, he said.


“I don’t think any of these really major declines are hopeless at this point,” Rosenberg said. “But that may not be true 10 years from now.”


      http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/nearly-30-birds-us-canada-have-vanished-1970

Political Analyst Cokie Roberts Dies

“Cokie” Roberts, a female television and radio journalist, covered Congress for National Public Radio and for the ABC Television Network for decades.  Her parents were important members of the House of Representatives, and she herself gave deep interviews often full of understanding and respect.  She died on September 17^th.

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Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne "Cokie" Roberts (née Boggs; December 27, 1943 – September 17, 2019) was an American journalist and bestselling author. Her career included decades as a political reporter and analyst for National Public Radio and ABC News, with prominent positions on Morning Edition, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, World News Tonight, and This Week.

Roberts, along with her husband, Steve, wrote a weekly column syndicated by United Media in newspapers around the United States. She served on the boards of several non-profit organizations such as the Kaiser Family Foundation and was appointed by President George W. Bush to his Council on Service and Civic Participation.

Childhood and Education

Roberts was born on December 27, 1943, in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received the nickname Cokie from her brother, Tommy, who, as a child, could not pronounce her given name, Corinne.

Her parents were Lindy Boggs and Hale Boggs, each of whom served for decades as Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Louisiana; Lindy succeeded Hale after his plane disappeared over Alaska in 1972.  Cokie was their third child. Her sister, Barbara, became mayor of Princeton, New Jersey and a candidate for the United States Senate. Her brother, Tommy, became a prominent attorney and lobbyist in Washington, D.C..

She attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in New Orleans, Louisiana, and then graduated from the Stone Ridge School, an all-girls school outside Washington, D.C., in 1960. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1964, where she received a BA in Political Science.

Career

Roberts' first job in journalism was at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., where she was host of its weekly public affairs program Meeting of the Minds. After moving with Steve to New York City, she found work in 1967 as a reporter for Cowles Communications. She worked briefly as a producer for WNEW-TV before Steve's journalism career relocated them to Los Angeles, where she worked for Altman Productions, then for KNBC-TV as producer of the children's program Serendipity, which won a 1971 Los Angeles Area Emmy Award. She also moved with her husband to Greece, where she was a stringer for CBS News in Athens.

Roberts began working for National Public Radio (NPR) in 1978, where she was the congressional correspondent for more than ten years. Because of her early involvement in the network as a female journalist at a time when women were not often involved in journalism at the highest levels, she has been called one of the "founding mothers of NPR".  Roberts was a contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the evening television news program The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her coverage of the Iran-Contra Affair for that program won her the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 1988. From 1981 to 1984, in addition to her work at NPR, she also cohosted The Lawmakers, a weekly public television program on Congress. In 1994, The New York Times credited her, along with NPR's Linda Wertheimer and Nina Totenberg with transforming male-dominated Washington D.C. political journalism.

Roberts went to work for ABC News in 1988 as a political correspondent for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, continuing to serve part-time as a political commentator at NPR.

While working in Guatemala in 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico, was abducted, raped, and tortured by members of a government-backed death squad, who believed she was a subversive. During a subsequent interview, Roberts contested Ortiz's claim that an American was among her captors. (The United States provided significant military aid to Guatemala at the time.) Roberts implied that Ortiz was lying about the entire episode, although Ortiz later won a lawsuit against a Guatemalan general she accused in the case. It was later revealed that the law firm of Roberts' brother, Tommy, called Patton Boggs, was paid by the Guatemalan government to promote a more positive image of the regime, which was widely criticized internationally for human rights abuses.

Starting in 1992, Roberts served as a senior news analyst and commentator for NPR, primarily on the daily news program Morning Edition. Roberts was the co-anchor of the ABC News' Sunday morning broadcast, This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts from 1996 to 2002, while serving as the chief congressional analyst for ABC News. She covered politics, Congress, and public policy, reporting for World News Tonight and other ABC News broadcasts. Her final assignment with NPR was a series of segments on Morning Edition titled "Ask Cokie", in which she answered questions submitted by listeners about subjects usually related to U.S. politics.

Her Personal Life

Roberts was married to Steve, a professor and fellow journalist, from 1966 until her death. They met in summer 1962, when she was 18 and he was 19. They resided in Bethesda, Maryland. They had two children. Their daughter, Rebecca, is a journalist and was one of the hosts of POTUS '08 on XM Radio.

In 2002, Roberts was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was successfully treated at the time but died from complications of the disease in Washington, D.C., on September 17, 2019.

                                                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cokie_Roberts

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Nina Totenberg, also a veteran of National Public Radio, gave a eulogy of Roberts that is available at:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761597458/the-personification-of-human-decency-nina-totenberg-remembers-cokie-roberts