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Surgeon General Alcohol Warning

Science-based Medicine Feed - Wed, 01/08/2025 - 5:06am

In 1964 the US Surgeon General released its first report on the health risks of smoking and tobacco use. This turned out to be a landmark move, paving the way for the following decades of progressively more restrictive regulation of public tobacco use and marketing. In 1964 smoking was at its peak in the US, when 42% of Americans smoked. Today the […]

The post Surgeon General Alcohol Warning first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
Categories: Science

We Could Search for Aliens Harvesting Energy from their Pet Black Hole

Universe Today Feed - Wed, 01/08/2025 - 3:48am

Of all the unanswered questions in modern science, perhaps the most talked about is whether we are alone in the Universe. A new paper looks at another way we might be able to detect advanced civilisations and at its centre is the need for energy! The more advanced a civilisation becomes, the greater their need for energy and one of the most efficient ways, according to current theories, is to harness the energy from an actively feeding black hole. The paper suggests a civilisation feeding matter into a black hole could harvest energy from it, more excitingly perhaps, the process could be detectable within 17,000 light years! 

The search for intelligent life beyond Earth has been of fascination to scientists, philosophers and even inspired artists over the centuries. With hundreds of millions of stars in our Galaxy and billions of other galaxies across the cosmos, it seems the odds are in our favour of finding some other civilisations out there. 

Planets everywhere. So where are all the aliens? Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent decades adds to the excitement so, researchers have directed radio telescopes and space probes on the search for aliens. Projects like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been scanning the sky looking for unusual patterns or messages that could reveal an advanced civilisation but despite the effort, there is a distinct lack of success, yet.

A different approach is to search for advanced civilisations based upon their energy signatures. It’s an innovative idea that seeks to identify civilisations based upon artificial patterns in the electromagnetic spectrum. We have certainly seen how human energy demand has increased as we have become more advanced and so theoretically any more advanced civilisations would need to harness energy on a scale far in excess of what we currently use. It may be that civilisations use giant megastructures like Dyson spheres to harness energy from stars and it’s the output from these or their impact on the light from a star that may be detectable.

Artist’s impression of a Dyson Sphere, an proposed alien megastructure that is the target of SETI surveys. Finding one of these qualifies in a “first contact” scenario. Credit: Breakthrough Listen / Danielle Futselaar

In a paper authored by Shant Baghram and published in the Astrophysical Journal, the team begin by categorising civilisations on the Kardashev Scale. It categorises advanced civilisations by measuring their technological advancement based upon the amount of energy they are capable of harnessing and using. They also propose an alternate scale based upon the Kardashev scale and the distance a civilisation is able to explore space, suggesting more advanced can explore further from host planet. 

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Credit: C. Padilla, NRAO/AUI/NSF

As a paper based purely on a theoretical model, they take the advanced civilisation’s category and explore the idea that they may use Dyson sphere’s around primordial black holes as an energy source. The team also propose observational techniques that may be employed to detect such structures using infrared and sub-millimetre signatures. They do assert however that telescopes like ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimetre/Sub-millimetre Array) is well placed to make observations and even to detect signatures and maybe even megastructures at distances of approximately 5.4 kiloparsecs (178 light years.)

Source : In Search of Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligence Through Dyson Sphere–like Structures around Primordial Black Holes

The post We Could Search for Aliens Harvesting Energy from their Pet Black Hole appeared first on Universe Today.

Categories: Science

New Glenn launch: Blue Origin's reusable rocket set for maiden flight

New Scientist Feed - Wed, 01/08/2025 - 2:58am
Jeff Bezos’s space company is about to launch New Glenn, a reusable rocket intended to rival SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, for the first time
Categories: Science

Vaccine misinformation can easily poison AI – but there's a fix

New Scientist Feed - Wed, 01/08/2025 - 2:00am
Adding just a little medical misinformation to an AI model’s training data increases the chances that chatbots will spew harmful false content about vaccines and other topics
Categories: Science

Here's How Pluto and Charon Became a Bizarre Double Planet

Universe Today Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 6:14pm

On July 14th, 2015, the New Horizons probe made history by accomplishing the first flyby of Pluto and its largest satellite, Charon. The stunning images this mission took of these icy worlds have helped scientists address some of the key questions about Pluto and its massive moon, which have been shrouded in mystery for decades (owing to their great distance from Earth). One of the biggest mysteries that scientists have contemplated since Charon was first discovered in 1978 is how it came together with Pluto in the first place.

For decades, astronomers suspected that Pluto and Charon formed through a process similar to Earth and the Moon. This theory, known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis, states that roughly 4.5 billion years ago, primordial Earth was struck by a Mars-sized body named Theia. In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Arizona challenged this assumption and offered an alternate theory known as “kiss and capture.” Their findings could help scientists better understand how planetary bodies in the outer Solar System form and evolve.

The study was led by Adeene Denton, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). She was joined by Erik Asphaug, a Planetary Science Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) and the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) at the University of Arizona; Robert Melikyan, an LPL Graduate Student, and Alexandre Emsenhuber, a Postdoctoral Researcher from the Space Research and Planetary Science (SRPS) at the University of Bern. The paper that describes their findings, “Capture of an Ancient Charon around Pluto,” was published in the journal Nature Geoscience

Previously, scientists believed that Pluto and Charon formed from a massive collision, similar to the Giant Impact Hypothesis. According to this theory, a Mars-sized planet named Theia collided with a primordial Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago. This impact turned both bodies into molten debris that eventually coalesced to form the Earth and Moon, eventually settling into the Earth-Moon system. According to the team’s study, this theory does not fit when it comes to Pluto and Charon because it fails to take into account the structural strength of cold, icy worlds.

Using the University of Arizona’s high-performance computing cluster, the team conducted advanced impact simulations. This showed that when Pluto and a proto-Charon collided, they became temporarily stuck together and formed a single snowman-shaped object – not unlike Arrokoth, the first Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that New Horizons surveyed on December 31st, 2018. Over time, they separated to become the binary system we observe there today. Said Denton in a U of A News story:

“Pluto and Charon are different – they’re smaller, colder and made primarily of rock and ice. When we accounted for the actual strength of these materials, we discovered something completely unexpected. Most planetary collision scenarios are classified as ‘hit and run’ or ‘graze and merge.’ What we’ve discovered is something entirely different – a ‘kiss and capture’ scenario where the bodies collide, stick together briefly, and then separate while remaining gravitationally bound.”

Their results also suggest that Pluto and Charon remained largely intact during their collision and retained much of their original composition. This challenges previous models that suggest that colliding bodies will exchange material during the impact. This is based on studies of the Apollo moonrocks, which indicated that the Earth and Moon are similar in composition, a finding that led scientists to conclude that the Earth-Moon system formed together. What’s more, their research offers a potential explanation for how Pluto may have developed an internal ocean.

View from the surface of Pluto, showing its large moon Charon in the distance. Credit: New York Times

The collision process, they state, combined with the tidal friction caused by the separation of Pluto and Charon, would have caused considerable internal heating for both bodies. This could have provided the necessary mechanism for creating a subsurface ocean, contrary to a previous theory where scientists have argued that Pluto formed during the very early Solar System when there were far more radioactive elements. However, scientists have expressed doubts about this theory because of the timing constraints it imposes.

Denton and her colleagues are now planning follow-up studies to explore several related questions about this system of icy bodies. This includes how tidal forces influenced Pluto and Charon’s early evolution when they were much closer together, how this formation scenario aligns with Pluto’s current geological features, and whether similar processes could explain the formation of other binary systems. Said Denton:

“We’re particularly interested in understanding how this initial configuration affects Pluto’s geological evolution. The heat from the impact and subsequent tidal forces could have played a crucial role in shaping the features we see on Pluto’s surface today.”

Further Reading: University of Arizona, Nature

The post Here's How Pluto and Charon Became a Bizarre Double Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

Categories: Science

The Lunar Surface Remelted, Obscuring an Easy Answer to its True Age

Universe Today Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 2:01pm

How old is the Moon? Astronaut-gathered samples from the lunar surface put its age at about 4.35 billion years. However, other evidence suggests it’s much older, around 4.53 billion years old. A team of scientists published a recent paper that suggests the Moon’s surface age was “reset” in a melting event.

The generally accepted theory about the Moon’s formation goes like this: about 4.5 billion years ago and about 200 million years after the solar system began to form, something happened. A single Mars-sized object named Theia (or possibly a series of objects) collided with or was somehow captured by infant Earth. That tumultuous crash sent a lot of molten rock and debris into space. Eventually, most of it coalesced to form the infant Moon, which settled into orbit around Earth. Debris from the inner solar system bombarded the pair for millions of years thereafter.

Fast-forward to the present day, where we can study rocks collected from the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. Scientists analyzed those samples and found them to be about 4.35 billion years old. That suggests the Moon is NOT 4.53 billion years old. Which is true? It turns out there’s strong evidence for an older Moon. It exists in some zircon minerals on the lunar surface. They’re at least 4.51 billion years old. thermal models and simulations also suggest a lunar age somewhere between 4.43 and 4.53 billion years. So, why are lunar surface rocks almost 200 million years younger?

Dating the Moon

As it turns out, both numbers could be true. The Moon could have formed very early, but it experienced something that changed its geological clock. According to UC Santa Cruz professor Francis Nimmo and a team of researchers, the Moon likely did form 4.51 million years ago in that catastrophic collision with baby Earth. But, 180 million years later, it may have experienced a “remelting”. That reset the ages of lunar rocks to around 4.35 billion years. That’s why the surface samples collected by the Apollo astronauts show a younger age.

Sample collection on the lunar surface. Apollo 16 astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr. is shown collecting samples with the Lunar Roving Vehicle in the left background. Image: NASA

“We predict that there shouldn’t be any lunar rocks that are older than 4.35 billion years because they should have experienced the same resetting,” said Nimmo. “Because this heating event was global, you shouldn’t find rocks anywhere on the Moon that are significantly older than that.”

Nimmo and his colleagues suggest that a global remelt of lunar rocks could account for the existence of younger surface rocks. The Apollo rocks suggest something happened, and the return of rocks from China’s Chang’e 6 mission could offer more evidence for that theory. For their paper, the authors used modeling to show that the Moon may have experienced sufficient tidal heating to cause this remelting approximately 4.35 billion years ago, which could “reset” the apparent formation age of these lunar samples.

Chang’e-6 lander on the lunar surface, as seen by a mini-rover nearby. (Credit: CLEP / CNSA) Modeling a Lunar Surface Reset

What could cause a global melting strong enough to reset the age of the Moon’s rocks? Nimmo suggest that the Moon experienced tidal heating due to the evolution of its orbit around Earth. This happened because the Moon was closer to Earth, and the orbit was pretty unstable during certain epochs. Thanks to the immense tidal pull from Earth, the Moon could have been heated, which led to the alteration of its geology and the “age reset” of its rocks.

It turns out that the Moon isn’t the only place in the solar system where this could happen. The volcanic moon Io in orbit around Jupiter experiences the same type of tidal attraction as it orbits. That helps explain Io’s extensive volcanic activity and surface “paving” by the frequent eruptions from its volcanic features. It also explains why we don’t see widespread craters on Io.

If the same thing happened to the infant Moon after its original formation, cooldown, and subsequent bombardment, we wouldn’t see any of its original craters. They’d have been covered by subsequent eruption and melting when the Moon’s orbit was stabilizing.

Why is the Lunar Surface Age Important?

The formation and evolution of the solar system and its many different bodies is still a hot area of study. Among other things, scientists want to understand the timing of events that shaped solar system objects. For that, they need a better understanding of the geology of each object. More data leads to better models of every aspect of solar system formation—from the first “push” in the protosolar nebula to such events as collisions, tidal heating, orbital dynamics, and surface evolution of different worlds. That’s where planetary science missions come in handy. They provide “in situ” data about each world (or object, in the case of asteroids, moons, comets, and rings), and they fill in gaps in the history of each place.

“As more data becomes available—particularly from ongoing and future lunar missions—the understanding of the Moon’s past will continue to evolve,” Nimmo said. “We hope that our findings will spark further discussion and exploration, ultimately leading to a clearer picture of the Moon’s place in the broader history of our solar system.”

For More Information

A “Remelting” of Lunar Surface Adds a Wrinkle to Mystery of Moon’s True Age
Tidally Driven Remelting Around 4.35 billion Years Ago Indicates the Moon is Old
Moon Formation

The post The Lunar Surface Remelted, Obscuring an Easy Answer to its True Age appeared first on Universe Today.

Categories: Science

NASA Lays Out Two New Options for Mars Sample Return

Universe Today Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 1:59pm

Months after deciding that its previous plan for bringing samples back from Mars wasn’t going to work, NASA says it’s working out the details for two new sample return scenarios, with the aim of bringing 30 titanium tubes filled with Martian rocks and soil back to Earth in the 2030s.

One scenario calls for using a beefed-up version of NASA’s sky crane to drop the required hardware onto the Red Planet’s surface, while the other would use heavy-lift commercial capabilities provided by the likes of SpaceX or Blue Origin.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency plans to flesh out the engineering details for each option over the course of the next year and make its choice in 2026. But that all depends on what Congress and President-elect Donald Trump’s administration want to do.

An artist’s conception shows NASA’s sky crane system lowering a rover onto the Martian surface. One option calls for a similar system to be used to put a sample retrieval platform on Mars. (NASA Illustration / Ashwin R. Vasavada)

Nelson noted that China is planning to launch a Mars sample return mission in 2028.

“I don’t think we want the only sample return coming back on the Chinese spacecraft, and that’s just simply a grab-and-go kind of mission, whereas ours has been a very methodical process. … I think that the administration will certainly conclude that they want to proceed, so what we wanted to do was to give them the best possible options so that they can go from here,” he told reporters.

For years, NASA has been working on a plan that started out with the collection and caching of samples by the Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero Crater, which is considered prime territory for harboring potential evidence of ancient life. Those samples would have been gathered up and brought to a sample retrieval platform, where they would have been sent into Martian orbit on a rocket known as the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The samples would be transferred to a Mars orbiter built by the European Space Agency. That orbiter would then deliver the samples back to Earth for laboratory study.

It was a complex plan, and last year, NASA determined that the operation would have taken until 2040 to get the samples back, with a price tag of $11 billion. “That was just simply unacceptable,” Nelson said.

NASA asked its experts as well as commercial space ventures to come up with ideas for lowering the cost and speeding up the schedule, which resulted in the two options presented today.

The sky crane option would build upon the technology that used a rocket-powered, free-flying platform to lower NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to the Martian surface. “You’re looking at cost in the range of $6.6 billion to $7.7 billion,” Nelson said.

The estimated price tag for the commercial heavy-lift option is in the range of $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion. “You all know that SpaceX and Blue Origin have already been ones that have expressed an interest, but it could be others as well, and a team is evaluating and researching all industry capability to include the schedule and the budget to determine the best strategy going forward,” Nelson said.

Both options would use many of the same elements proposed under the previous plan, but would trim costs by using a smaller Mars Ascent Vehicle as well as a simpler design for the sample retrieval platform, powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator rather than solar panels. The samples would be brought back from Mars and sent down to Earth by ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter. NASA said ESA is currently evaluating the options proposed by NASA.

The newly proposed schedule could lead to launches in the 2030-31 time frame, and delivery of the samples by as early as 2035. “But it could go out to 2039,” Nelson said. “Now, a good reason for why it could get extended out is if the Congress and the new administration do not respond.”

Nelson said Congress would have to commit at least $300 million during the current fiscal year to keep the Mars sample return campaign on track. “If they want to get this thing back on a direct return earlier, they’re going to have to put more money into it, even more than $300 million in fiscal year ’25, and that would be the case every year going forward,” he said.

Trump has been bullish on Mars exploration, in part due to the influence of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. So bullish, in fact, that Trump wants to have astronauts on the Red Planet by 2028, potentially forcing another overhaul of the Mars sample return campaign.

“We will reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said during a campaign rally last October. “Elon promised me he was going to do that. … He told me that we’re going to win, and he’s going to reach Mars by the end of our term, which is a big thing. Before China, before anybody.”

The post NASA Lays Out Two New Options for Mars Sample Return appeared first on Universe Today.

Categories: Science

Smart food drying techniques with AI enhance product quality and efficiency

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 1:18pm
Food drying is a common process for preserving many types of food, including fruits and meat; however, drying can alter the food's quality and nutritional value. In recent years, researchers have developed precision techniques that use optical sensors and AI to facilitate more efficient drying. A new study discusses three emerging smart drying techniques, providing practical information for the food industry.
Categories: Science

Trash to treasure: Leveraging industrial waste to store energy

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 11:09am
As more products begin to depend on battery-based energy storage systems, shifting away from metal-based solutions will be critical to facilitating the green energy transition. Now, a team has transformed an organic industrial-scale waste product into an efficient storage agent for sustainable energy solutions that can one day be applied at much larger scales.
Categories: Science

Trash to treasure: Leveraging industrial waste to store energy

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 11:09am
As more products begin to depend on battery-based energy storage systems, shifting away from metal-based solutions will be critical to facilitating the green energy transition. Now, a team has transformed an organic industrial-scale waste product into an efficient storage agent for sustainable energy solutions that can one day be applied at much larger scales.
Categories: Science

Advancements in neural implant research enhance durability

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 11:09am
Neural implants contain integrated circuits (ICs) -- commonly called chips -- built on silicon. These implants need to be small and flexible to mimic circumstances inside the human body. However, the environment within the body is corrosive, which raises concerns about the durability of implantable silicon ICs. A team of researchers address this challenge by studying the degradation mechanisms of silicon ICs in the body and by coating them with soft PDMS elastomers to form body-fluid barriers that offer long-term protection to implantable chips. These findings not only enhance the longevity of implantable ICs but also significantly broaden their applications in the biomedical field.
Categories: Science

Pluto-Charon formation scenario mimics Earth-Moon system

Space and time from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 11:09am
A researcher has used advanced models that indicate that the formation of Pluto and Charon may parallel that of the Earth-Moon system. Both systems include a moon that is a large fraction of the size of the main body, unlike other moons in the solar system. The scenario also could support Pluto's active geology and possible subsurface ocean, despite its location at the frozen edge of the solar system.
Categories: Science

Scientists advance nanobody technology to combat deadly Ebola virus

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 11:09am
Ebola virus, one of the deadliest pathogens, has a fatality rate of about 50%, posing a serious threat to global health and safety. To address this challenge, researchers have developed the first nanobody-based inhibitors targeting the Ebola virus.
Categories: Science

The scandal of English grooming gangs

Why Evolution is True Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 9:15am

UPDATE:  A UK government report from 2020 suggests that there are conflicting data on the ethnicity of the offending “grooming gangs”. Click below to see the study and I quote from page 10 of the Executive Summary (bolding is mine):

17. A number of high-profile cases – including the offending in Rotherham investigated by Professor Alexis Jay,3 the Rochdale group convicted as a result of Operation Span, and convictions in Telford – have mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity. Beyond specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending. Research has found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.4 Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.5 However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending. This is due to issues such as data quality problems, the way the samples were selected in studies, and the potential for bias and inaccuracies in the way that ethnicity data is collected.6 During our conversations with police forces, we have found that in the operations reflected, offender groups come from diverse backgrounds, with each group being broadly ethnically homogenous. However, there are cases where offenders within groups come from different backgrounds.7

Stay tuned, and if you know of more dispositive data, place it in the comments. If this be true,  then even bringing in the element of race is misguided. But as I say below, it doesn’t matter what color or ethnicity the pedophiles were, for nearly everyone agrees that the whole issue of grooming gangs has been grossly mishandled by the UK authorities, and largely swept under the rug.

UPDATE 2: A reader calls attention to this NYT article claiming that Musk’s tactics in exposing the grooming gangs are dishonest and politically motivated.

 

The Free Press headline below may be exaggerated, but it comes close to the truth.  For it’s about the “grooming gangs” that have plagued England for several decades.  They involve groups of men—most often of Pakistani or Bangladesi ancestry—whose goal is to subjugate and rape young children of both sexes. Some children have been killed.  But because the perps are usually people of color, the government, the police, and the public have largely ignored the issue.  This is a huge scandal involving, once again, a clash of ideologies that came down the wrong way. The warring ideologies are to avoid denigrating immigrants of color versus protecting children against pedophiles.

Yes, some of these gangs have been broken up and the perps sent to prison, but only now, with the prompting of Elon Musk, is it being publicized as the heinous crime it is. (The fact that Musk is widely hated makes it hard for people to accept the situation, but his actions in this case are right.) For the grooming is still going on, and not just in the UK but in other places in Europe.  Unfortunately, calling attention to these gangs is seen not only as racist, but as anti-immigrant, both characterizations being horrible to liberals.

I’m not going to describe these crimes in detail, as they makes me sick, but you need to know about them, and the UK needs to start taking the issue VERY seriously.

First, a piece from the Free Press, which you can access by clicking on the headline.

There’s a thread of incidents tweeted by Elon Musk you can find at the link, and of course everybody is festooning them with community notes because Musk. This first one, for example, happened five years ago, and the perps are in jail. But it tells you the kind of things that can happen. Here are the first two tweets, apparently both from 2013.  But as the article above notes, this is still going on,

pic.twitter.com/mt1csIreQd

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 5, 2025

A quote from the Free Press piece:

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

Although some have said that this is no longer a problem, and the perps are all in jail, that’s simply not true. The first link above goes to a UK government site about the Grooming Gangs Taskforce, and was published in May of last year:

In the last 12 months the crack team of expert investigators and analysts has helped police forces arrest over 550 suspects, identify and protect over 4,000 victims, and build up robust cases to get justice for these appalling crimes.

Established by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in April 2023, the Grooming Gangs Taskforce of specialist officers has worked with all 43 police forces in England and Wales to support child sexual exploitation and grooming investigations.

Led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and supported by the National Crime Agency, the taskforce is a full time, operational police unit funded by the Home Office to improve how the police investigate grooming gangs and identify and protect children from abuse. It is staffed by experienced and qualified officers and data analysts who have long-term, practical on-the-ground experience of undertaking investigations into grooming gangs.

Finally, from Unherd, an article about how the cops are complicit in not going after grooming gangs. It’s written by a former detective :


The answer is pretty much what you would expect: going after grooming gangs that largely comprise people of color is seen as racist, and you know how the British cops are with “hate speech”:

The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims’ accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

It is incomprehensible to me how the police, government, and general public prefer to brush this issue under the rug: it’s pedophilia, for crying out loud, and the abuse is both horrible and pervasive. But I’ll close with the observation that again we see a clash of two opposing views: one in which people of color should be treated fairly, which is good, and the other in which children should not be sexually abused, completely incontestable.  But when people of color begin mass sexual abuse of children, and those children appear to be mostly white, you can see how it poses a conflict for the woke. Yet it should not be a conflict, for no matter what color the abusers and rapists are, they are violating the law big time and should be taken off the streets. That has happened to some extent, but not nearly to the extent that should be the case.

h/t: Luana

Categories: Science

What is hMPV, the virus spreading through China?

New Scientist Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 8:51am
An uptick of human metapneumovirus (hMPV) cases in China has raised concerns over another pandemic, which appear to be unfounded
Categories: Science

Developing printable droplet laser displays

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 8:45am
Researchers have developed an innovative method for rapidly creating laser light sources in large quantities using an inkjet printer that ejects laser-emitting droplets. By applying an electric field to these droplets, the researchers demonstrated that switching the emission of light on and off is possible. Furthermore, they successfully created a compact laser display by arranging these droplets on a circuit board.
Categories: Science

Developing printable droplet laser displays

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 8:45am
Researchers have developed an innovative method for rapidly creating laser light sources in large quantities using an inkjet printer that ejects laser-emitting droplets. By applying an electric field to these droplets, the researchers demonstrated that switching the emission of light on and off is possible. Furthermore, they successfully created a compact laser display by arranging these droplets on a circuit board.
Categories: Science

Smarter memory: Next-generation RAM with reduced energy consumption

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 8:45am
Researchers have developed a technology for voltage-controlled magnetization switching, which has the potential to be implemented in next-generation computational memory. This advanced technology enables low-energy data writing operations with non-volatility, making it scalable for future applications that require stable and reliable memory.
Categories: Science

Smarter memory: Next-generation RAM with reduced energy consumption

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 8:45am
Researchers have developed a technology for voltage-controlled magnetization switching, which has the potential to be implemented in next-generation computational memory. This advanced technology enables low-energy data writing operations with non-volatility, making it scalable for future applications that require stable and reliable memory.
Categories: Science

Revolutionizing data centers: Breakthrough in photonic switching

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 01/07/2025 - 8:43am
Engineers created a smaller, faster and more efficient photonic switch, which leverages principles from quantum mechanics and could accelerate everything from streaming to training AI by supercharging data centers.
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