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Holographic microscopy has been made a reality that can create 3-D images of living cells, almost in real time, and track their reaction to various stimuli without the use of contrast dyes or fluorophores.

The resolution is less than 100 nanometers using a low-intensity laser that scans the sample, numerous images extracted by holography are captured by a digital camera, assembled by a computer and "deconvoluted" in order to eliminate noise.

As a comparison the diameter of the DNA helix is 2 nanometer and a myoglobin protein is 4.5 nanometer in diameter.

DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2012.329 "Marker-free phase nanoscopy"

(from 2012 but interesting as it enables researchers to essentially "debug" cells..!)

A California family that used the seat their 18-year old son didn't use because he left with an earlier flight. Made use of it for their child instead were forced off the Delta Air Lines plane and threatened with jail after refusing to give it up on the crowded flight. The Delta (DEL) share price has taken a -0.86% dip today.

View all the raw glory or do it with some commentary.

In other news don't use the bathroom, ask for water, or be autistic.

Last time it was United Abuses.

After years of warnings, mobile network hackers have exploited SS7 flaws to drain bank accounts. SS7 is a set of telephony signaling protocols developed in 1975, to handle the public switched telephone network (PSTN), SMS etc. The attackers first spammed malware to victims computers, which collected the bank account balance, login details and passwords for their accounts, along with their mobile number. Then they purchased access to a rogue telecommunications provider and set up a redirect for the victim's mobile phone number to a handset controlled by the attackers. Next, usually in the middle of the night attackers logged into their online bank accounts and transferred money out. When the transaction numbers were sent they were routed to the criminals, who then finalized the transaction.

So any security that depend on PSTN-SS7 security is proven to be crap.

The FBI translator who went rogue and married an ISIS terrorist

He was Denis Cuspert, a German rapper turned ISIS pitchman, whose growing influence as an online recruiter for violent jihadists had put him on the radar of counter-terrorism authorities on two continents.

In Germany, Cuspert went by the rap name Deso Dogg. In Syria, he was known as Abu Talha al-Almani. He praised Osama bin Laden in a song, threatened former President Barack Obama with a throat-cutting gesture and appeared in propaganda videos, including one in which he was holding a freshly severed human head.

Within weeks of marrying Cuspert, Greene, 38, seemed to realize she had made a terrible mistake. She fled back to the US, where she was immediately arrested and agreed to cooperate with authorities. She pleaded guilty to making false statements involving international terrorism and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. She was released last summer.

FBI employee married ISIS fighter she was asked to investigate

Prosecutors describe her actions as deserving of "severe punishment," but she was sentenced to just two years in prison. According to an analysis by Fordham University, Americans who are prosecuted for ISIS-related cases received on average 13.5 years in prison.

Quick! WRITE THE SCRIPT! Call Lionsgate!

Unblur!

I have set up my raspberry pi with a plex server, and can stream shows from it to my laptop (will try to get it on the Roku when i get a chance).

My question is:
Does anyone know a good powered USB hub to run (stream from) 4 external hard drives from a raspberry pi 3 (i didn't know the raspberry pi would only run from certain hubs).

So:
1. Must have enough power to run at least 3 external hard drives for streaming from all 3 (power all 3 at once, but only stream from one at at time (but from more than one at a time would be cool)

2. Must be raspberry pi3 compatible

3. Profit???

Further to my rant about the speed of current versions of Firefox, I'd like to add one about LibreOffice. At the same time I upgraded Firefox, I upgraded from LibreOffice 4.0.x to 5.2.x and the difference was spectacular.

Now, I have to wait while I watch the buttons on the GUI being repainted.

I think I'll change to Siag Office. Bah!

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II/Fusion_Enabled_Pluto_Orbiter_and_Lander

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/fusion-enabled-pluto-orbiter-and-lander.html

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) concept provides game-changing propulsion and power capabilities that would revolutionize interplanetary travel. DFD is based on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor under development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The mission context we are proposing is delivery of a Pluto orbiter with a lander. DFD provides high thrust to allow for reasonable transit times to Pluto while delivering substantial mass to orbit: 1000 kg delivered in 4 years. Since DFD provides power as well as propulsion in one integrated device, it will also provide as much as 1 MW of power to the payloads upon arrival. This enables high-bandwidth communication, powering of the lander from orbit, and radically expanded options for instrument design. The data acquired by New Horizons’ recent Pluto flyby is just a tiny fraction of the scientific data that could be generated from an orbiter and lander. Engine modeling accomplished during Phase I has shown that we can expect 2.5 to 5 N of thrust per megawatt of fusion power, with an Isp of about 10,000 seconds and 200 kW available as electrical power. We have evaluated the components of the Pluto trajectory including an Earth departure spiral, constant thrust planar transfer, and Pluto insertion using these thrust and Isp levels, and confirmed the plausibility of the proposed mission. In fact, the mission can depart from LEO with about the mass we originally estimated for an interplanetary insertion, widening the range of available launch vehicles and reducing the cost.

Planet Nine in 10-15 years instead of 100:

John Brophy at NASA Jet propulsion laboratory combines a near term 100 megawatt laser beamed power system to enable an ion drive with 70 megawatts of power and 58000 ISP.

They propose a new power/propulsion architecture to enable missions such as a 12-yr flight time to 500 AU—the distance at which solar gravity lensing can be used to image exoplanets—with a conventional (i.e., New Horizons sized) spacecraft. This architecture would also enable orbiter missions to Pluto with the same sized spacecraft in just 3.6 years. Significantly, this same architecture could deliver an 80-metric-ton payload to Jupiter orbit in one year, opening the possibility of human missions to Jupiter. These are just a few examples of high-impact missions that simply cannot be performed today due to limitations in current technology.

Fictions of fascism: what twentieth century dystopia can (and can't) teach us about Trump by John Gray

Dystopian novels of the 1930s and 1940s feel topical once again – but how much do they tell us about Trump and today’s populist upheavals?

A 20th century novelist pictured a Nazi diplomat ruminating over the grand objectives of the regime he served:
"D“Don’t you realise that what we are doing is a real revolution and more internationalist in its effects than the storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace in Petrograd? . . . Wipe out those ridiculous winding boundaries . . . wipe out . . . the influence of the churches, of overseas capital, of any philosophy, religion, ethical or aesthetical system

of the past . . . There are no more impossibilities for man now. For the first time we are attacking the biological structure of the race. We have started to breed a new species of Homo sapiens. We are weeding out its streaks of bad heredity. We have practically finished the task of exterminating or sterilising the gypsies in Europe; the liquidation of the Jews will be completed in a year or two . . . We are the first to make use of the hypodermic syringe, the lancet and the sterilising apparatus in our revolution.”

The writer was Arthur Koestler, and the book Arrival and Departure (Vintage Classics), first published in 1943. We are living in a time when many believe we are seeing a resurgence of fascism, yet so far Koestler’s semi-autobiographical novel has been neglected. This is a pity, as he did not invent the type of Nazi whose terrifying visions he put into the mouth of Bernard, the fictional diplomat. Travelling across Europe as a journalist and undercover communist in the 1930s, Koestler must have encountered many who shared this view of the world – one that departs in a number of ways from the view of fascism that most modern liberals have today.

Under the impact of the rise of Donald Trump and with the growing strength of European anti-immigrant parties, fascism is equated nowadays with extreme versions of nationalism. However, as Koestler shows, many Nazis and fascists regarded nation states as relics that would be subsumed into a new, pan-European order – a project that was revived by Oswald Mosley after the Second World War under the rubric “Europe a Nation”.

Fascism is now being seen as an ideology of irrationalism that was hostile to science and reason. But while some fascists preached “thinking with the blood”, others, like Koestler’s diplomat, gloried in the new powers conferred by modern science. As the historian Lewis Bernstein Namier wrote in 1958: “Hitler and the Third Reich were the gruesome and incongruous consummation of an age which, as none other, believed in progress and felt assured it was being achieved.”

In some ways interwar fascism was a parody of the progressive thinking of the time. In Spain and Portugal, the Balkans and Vichy France, many fascists wanted to roll back the modern world – a project that appealed to figures such as T S Eliot and G K Chesterton, who hankered after the cultural homogeneity of medieval Christendom. Yet many others were at one with Koestler’s diplomat in believing that modern technology opened up the prospect of remaking humankind on a “more advanced” model.

Such views were not confined to the far right. The “evolutionary humanist” Julian Huxley, for many years a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, advocated “preventing the deterioration of quality in racial stock” throughout the 1920s into the early 1930s. “Racial science” was not a Nazi aberration.

Attitudes that many have seen as defining features of fascism can appear at many points on the political spectrum. Anti-Semitism has been a feature of fascist movements everywhere, and hatred of Jews was the core of Nazism. But anti-Semitic attitudes are not the exclusive property of the far right. After its foundation, the state of Israel was attacked by the left under the banner of anti-colonialism. Clearly, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are analytically distinct positions; but when criticism of Israel’s policies occurs in the context of talk about “Zio media conspiracies” – as has been the case recently among certain sections of the left in Britain – the two become functionally equivalent. The emergence of a left-liberal anti-Semitism is a defining fact of our age.

The rest of this "long read":

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/fictions-fascism-what-twentieth-century-dystopia-can-and-cant-teach-us-about

According to Fox News via Twitter,

.@POTUS has proclaimed May 1 to be 'Loyalty Day' #ProudAmerican

They also have a story about the proclamation (archived copy).

Wikipedia has this to say about the event:

The holiday was first observed in 1921, during the First Red Scare. It was originally called "Americanization Day" [...]

During the Second Red Scare, it was recognized by the U.S. Congress on April 27, 1955, and made an official reoccurring holiday on July 18, 1958 (Public Law 85-529). President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1, 1955, the first observance of Loyalty Day.

This year it is being observed on 30 April in Bradley, Illinois; on 29 April in Kansas City, Kansas; on 7 May in Brandon, South Dakota; on 1 May in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (pay-walled) and on 28 April in Brinnon, Washington. Loyal Americans, mark your calendars!

Update: on 29 April .@POTUS held a "Saturday night rally in Harrisburg." The Los Angeles Times reported:

When Trump hammered the media, people in the crowd turned around to jeer and boo at reporters typing in their laptops in the press area on the arena floor.