05 Sci-Tech

Blurb:

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a ritual-based site that may have been built long before the rise of Maya rulers

Finding the oldest Maya site ever documented was only the beginning of archaeologist Takeshi Inomata’s discoveries. After locating the Aguada Fénix site buried in the jungle of southern Mexico in 2017, Inomata and his team began digging downward and uncovered a massive cross-shaped pit.

Inside the pit were pigments of blue azurite to the north, green malachite to the east and yellow ochre to the south, as well as marine shells interspersed with axe-shaped clay offerings to the west, says Inomata, a researcher at the University of Arizona. Later the team realized that the cross-shaped pit was aligned with giant canals that extended toward the four cardinal directions.

The cross and the canals, Inomata says, form a cosmogram—a monumental map of the universe etched into the landscape. Cosmograms were used by Mesoamerican civilizations to represent their understanding and cultural relationship with the cosmos. Inomata says that his and his colleagues’ findings, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, challenge long-held assumptions about the social order of the ancient Maya and the reasons behind their architectural achievements.

Blurb:

Ever-evolving research is steadily turning science fiction into science fact. Neural implants —tiny devices that read or stimulate brain activity —have already entered human trials, showing what’s possible when technology and neuroscience intersect. While early results prove the concept works, the race is now on to make these systems smaller, safer, and more reliable.

Developers and philanthropists alike have ambitious goals: from controlling computers and prosthetics with nothing but thought to restoring movement after paralysis and monitoring neurological disorders in real time.

Now, researchers from Cornell University have taken a major step forward. They’ve created a neural implant smaller than a grain of salt that can wirelessly transmit signals from inside the brain. Their results, published in Nature Electronics, show that this tiny implant emitted clean, uninterrupted data in healthy mice for more than a year.

Blurb:

COLUMBUS, OH — A new bill introduced in the Ohio Senate aims to align state law with what could become a major shift in federal firearms policy. Senate Bill 303, sponsored by Sen. Terry Johnson and backed by the Buckeye Firearms Association (BFA), would allow adults ages 18 to 20 to legally purchase handguns from federally licensed firearms dealers (FFLs).

Under current federal law, licensed dealers are prohibited from selling handguns to individuals under the age of 21. However, a growing number of legal challenges argue that this restriction is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court may soon weigh in, and Ohio lawmakers are preparing in advance.

“Sen. Johnson’s bill will not change federal law,” said BFA Executive Director Dean Rieck. “But it will prepare Ohio for the coming Supreme Court challenge to change the law regarding handgun purchases for those 18 to 20 years old.”

Blurb:

Detailed map of the genome one pixel per nucleotide. Credit: Radcliffe Department of Medicine

Scientists from Oxford’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine have achieved the most detailed view yet of how DNA folds and functions inside living cells, revealing the physical structures that control when and how genes are switched on.

Using a new technique called MCC ultra, the team mapped the human genome down to a single base pair, unlocking how genes are controlled, or, how the body decides which genes to turn on or off at the right time, in the right cells. This breakthrough gives scientists a powerful new way to understand how genetic differences lead to disease and opens up fresh routes for drug discovery.

“For the first time, we can see how the genome’s control switches are physically arranged inside cells, said Professor James Davies, lead author of the study published in the journal Cell titled “Mapping chromatin structure at base-pair resolution unveils a unified model of cis-regulatory element interactions.”

Blurb:

The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act was meant to keep children safe. Instead, it is keeping the public uninformed. Within days of the law taking effect in late July 2025, X (formerly Twitter) started hiding videos of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza from UK timelines behind content warnings and age barriers. A law sold as safeguarding has become one of the most effective censorship tools Britain has ever built. What is unfolding is no accident. It is the result of legislation that weaponises child-protection rhetoric to normalise censorship, identity verification and online surveillance.

The roots of Britain’s online censorship crisis go back almost a decade, to MindGeek, now rebranded as Aylo, the scandal-ridden company behind Pornhub. This tax-dodging, exploitative porn empire worked closely with the UK government to develop an age-verification system called AgeID, a plan that would have effectively handed Aylo a monopoly over legal adult content by making smaller competitors pay or perish. Public backlash killed AgeID in 2019, but the idea survived. Once one democracy entertained the notion that access to online content should be gated by identity checks, the precedent was set. The Digital Economy Act 2017 laid the groundwork, and the Online Safety Act 2023 made it law. Today, several European Union states, including France and Germany, are exploring similar legislation, each cloaked in the same rhetoric of “protecting children”. This is not conspiracy; it is the natural convergence of corporate capture and state control, wrapped in the moral language of child safety.

A Norwegian public transport company has found that Chinese-made electric vehicles have security flaws built into them that allow their Chinese manufacturers to remotely access them and even control them. This means they can be turned into saboteurs and user data is going back to the CCP.

Arild Tjomsland, one of the investigators, claimed, “The Chinese bus can be stopped, turned off, or receive updates that can destroy the technology that the bus needs to operate normally.”

Blurb:

Major security concerns have been raised in Norway after safety tests revealed that Chinese-made electric vehicles can be remotely accessed and controlled by their manufacturers in China.

A Norwegian public transport company conducted covert cybersecurity tests on electric buses from both European and Chinese makers.

The investigation sought to determine whether foreign-built vehicles posed a threat to national security.

Blurb:

In the fall of 2010, the Heritage Foundation was invited to send a speaker to a charter school class in the District of Columbia to discuss abortion. I was nominated for the task and arrived that morning at the Cesar Chavez Public Charter School for a back-and-forth with a representative from the D.C.-area Planned Parenthood.

The classroom had approximately 30 students, nearly all female and mostly freshmen and sophomores. It proved to be a good, low-key exchange, during which I learned the young women had been given a tour of a local Planned Parenthood facility. The classroom was not set up for audio visuals, and I had planned to dwell primarily on talking points about the value of life and setting behavioral standards necessary for personal success and happiness. But I did bring with me a set of visuals depicting the development of the child in the womb — straightforward prenatal biology and not violent images. The pictures were accurate and beautiful.

Blurb:

A troubling new medical study has found that stillbirth rates in the United States are continuing to surge to alarmingly high levels and show no sign of improvement.

The peer-reviewed study examined more than 2.7 million pregnancies between 2016 and 2022.

Researchers found that roughly one in 150 pregnancies (6.8 per 1,000) ended in stillbirth.

The rate is significantly higher than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) previous estimate of one in 175 (5.7 per 1,000).

The findings underscore what public health experts are calling a persistent and preventable national tragedy that is being massively underreported by the corporate media.

The results of the study were published in the medical journal JAMA.

Blurb:

The state of Texas has secured an “historic” $1.375 billion settlement agreement with Google

The October 31 announcement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office marked the conclusion of two of the largest data privacy enforcement actions ever brought by a single state against the tech giant. Paxton sued Google for unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data in 2022.

“This historic $1.375 billion price tag for Google’s misconduct sends a clear warning to all of Big Tech that I will take aggressive action against any company that misuses Texans’ data and violates their privacy,” said Paxton in a press release. “If Big Tech thinks they can get away with abusing user data and illegally spying on Texans without consequences, I will make sure they are proven wrong. This monumental settlement is a testament to my office’s commitment to taking on the biggest companies in the world and securing victory on behalf of Texans.”

“The settlement obtained by Attorney General Paxton for these combined abuses far eclipses that of any other one state’s settlement against Google for similar claims, with the largest single-state settlement to date outside of Texas being $93 million,” declared the AG office.  “Additionally, a forty-state coalition secured $391 million in its privacy case against Google, which is almost one billion dollars less than what Attorney General Paxton secured for Texas alone.”

Blurb:

Imagine reliving your entire life in the space of seconds. Like a flash of lightning, you are outside of your body, watching memorable moments you lived through. This process, known as “life recall,” can be similar to what it is like to have a near-death experience.

What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries.

However, a new study  from Dr. Ajmal Zemmar of the University of Louisville and colleagues throughout the world, “Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain,” published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, suggests that your brain may remain active and coordinated during and even after the transition to death, and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal.

Blurb:

The US Department of Commerce has launched what could become one of the most significant initiatives in the Administration’s AI Action Plan: the American AI Exports Program. This new effort positions the Department of Commerce as an active partner in expanding the global reach of American AI technologies: hardware, software, and models. This initiative marks a shift from regulating AI development domestically to fostering trusted AI ecosystems worldwide. At its core, this effort uses US economic and diplomatic strengths to shape the global AI marketplace before others do.

Over the past few years, Washington’s AI policy debate has focused on risk management: how to prevent bias, combat misinformation, and ensure safety in critical systems. These concerns are crucial, but they shouldn’t be the sole focus when discussing emerging technology. The AI Exports Program demonstrates a deliberate expansion of the federal government’s tools, with the Department of Commerce acting as both a regulator and promoter of growth.

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A Florida couple is fighting to regain custody of their twin boys after the state falsely accused them of child abuse.

Michael and Tasha Patterson’s ordeal began in October 2022 when the parents took their premature twins to Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, Florida. Hospital staff found that the twins had suffered several injuries, including rib fractures.

 

The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) took custody of the twins and Michael’s eight-year-old son.

Yet, multiple doctors found that the twins had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes easy bruising, dislocations, and an increased risk of bone fractures. Dr. Michael Holick, a renowned expert in metabolic bone disorders, examined Tasha and found that she had the same condition, which means she likely passed it on to the twins.

He concluded that it was most likely the twins inherited this condition from me… which affects bones, blood vessels, cartilage, muscles, everything,” Tasha told Townhall in a previous article.

You can read the original report here.

Nevertheless, the courts ruled against the couple. Judge Stacey Schulman did not allow the conclusions of the other doctors to be included in the court proceedings. “She didn’t allow us to bring in everything that we had. She only allowed us to bring in limited evidence… So even when it was brought up that we had other doctors saying the same thing. She said no,” Tasha said.

However, more information has now emerged regarding a potential conflict of interest involving Judge Schulman. Patterson and her attorney discovered through public filings that the judge’s family foundation donated at least $4,000 to ChildNet—the lead agency pushing for the removal and permanent adoption of the Pattersons’ children.

Moreover, Schulman never disclosed the donation, which was made in 2019, at any point before or during the proceedings, according to a motion filed by the Pattersons’ attorney.

 

ChildNet is a private, nonprofit agency contracted with DCF to manage foster care, adoption, and child welfare services in Broward and Palm Beach counties. It is responsible for handling child protection cases, which include placement, supervision, and determining whether to reunify parents with their children or to pursue adoption by other families. The agency wields tremendous influence in court proceedings as its recommendations carry weight with judges.

The wanna-be world czar Bill Gates signaled to the world that the climate change hoax jig was up after admitting “The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.”

This signals a potential shift in globalist strategy from promising to save the world from human greed and the brown people from the white devil, they’re going to go back to the basics, economic class. President Trump wasn’t letting Gates surrender so gently, however.

He quipped back, “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue,” he added. “It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

Blurb:

President Donald Trump said opponents of the “climate change hoax” had won the struggle after Bill Gates said supporters should pivot their efforts.

Gates has been a longtime proponent of policies to fight climate change, but on Monday he took a far more moderate tone that accepted the survivability of slightly higher global temperatures.

‘Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.’

“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” the president wrote on his Truth Social account.

“Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue,” he added. “It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

Blurb:

Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.

The key to the paper was the release of a new data set from Gaia, the galaxy mapping mission launched by ESA. As part of its third data release (DR3), it also captured data on thousands of asteroids. Some of these “tumble” by rotating around something other than their principal axis, but others do “spin” around their largest axis. Why some spin and some tumble wasn’t explained by current asteroid rotation models either. Neither was the overabundance of “slow rotators” whose rotational period was much slower than predicted in traditional models.

Blurb:

A new editorial written by Giovanni Fava published in Rivista di Psichiatria.

“The intellectual capital of medicine is the creativity linking clinical practice and research. Intellectual freedom, that allows the emergence of new paradigms, is the basic component of scientific progress in medicine. There have been major threats to intellectual freedom in the past decades: financial conflicts of interest that allowed the drug industry to gain control of scientific societies, clinical practice guidelines and reporting investigations in meetings and journals; special interest groups suppressing the pluralism of viewpoints; financial thresholds for investigators reporting their data and views (open access journals); the totalitarian derive of Evidence-Based Medicine.

Further, there have been growing attacks of publishers to the independence of editors and editorial boards, with the ensuing resignations of editors and members of the editorial boards. Such events recently occurred in a journal, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, that was a symbol of independent thinking, pluralism and innovations.”

Blurb:

It’s out with one dystopian tactic and on to the next for the British government’s ongoing assault on free speech.

London’s Metropolitan Police force told The Daily Mail on Monday that it is pulling back on investigating “non-crime hate incidents,” and instead will “focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations.” But after the U.K. government’s full-throated attack on free speech these last couple of years, it is going to take a lot more than words to restore trust. A good start would be dismantling other dystopian policies that seem to be a censorship crackdown waiting to happen, like its ever-expanding digital identification program.

Blurb:

Canada’s top constitutional freedom group warned that government officials have “relinquished” control over “future health crises” by accepting the terms of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) revised International Health Regulations (IHR).

The warning came in a report released by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). The group said that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s acceptance earlier this year of the WHO’s globalist-minded “pandemic agreement” has “placed Canadian sovereignty on loan to an unelected international body.”

“By accepting the WHO’s revised IHR, the report explains, Canada has relinquished its own control over future health crises and instead has agreed to let the WHO determine when a ‘pandemic emergency’ exists and what Canada must do to respond to it, after which Canada must report back to the WHO,” the JCCF noted.

Blurb:

China’s biggest all-electric bulk carrier, named Gezhouba, was launched on Thursday in Yichang, central China’s Hubei Province, marking a key milestone in the country’s green and intelligent shipping sector.

The vessel, with a length of nearly 130 meters and a maximum load capacity of over 13,000 tonnes, is equipped with 12 lithium battery power units providing total energy capacity of 24,000 kWh.

Its developer said this vessel allows for rapid battery swapping and boasts a range of 500 kilometers.

Blurb:

 

A squishy robotic “eye” can focus automatically in response to light, without any external power. The ultrapowerful robotic lens is sensitive enough to distinguish hairs on an ant’s leg or the lobes of a pollen grain.

The lens could usher in “soft” robots with powerful vision that would not need electronics or batteries to operate. Soft robotics can be used in a wide range of different applications, from wearable technology that can integrate with the human body to autonomous devices that can operate in uneven terrain or hazardous spaces, said study first author Corey Zheng, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Traditional, electrically powered robots use rigid sensors and electronics to see the world.

 

Blurb:

Higher education in the United States enjoys broad public support, but Americans are concerned about its costs and some aspects of campus culture, according to a sweeping new national survey.

The study is the first report from the American Higher Education Barometer (AHEB), a collaboration among researchers at the University of Rochester, Northeastern University, Rutgers University, Harvard University, and others. It draws on more than 31,000 survey responses from all 50 states, making it one of the most comprehensive snapshots of public opinion on US colleges and universities in recent years.

Blurb:

Elon Musk has made headlines again, this time sharply criticising NASA’s leadership as the competition to return to the Moon intensifies. The SpaceX CEO publicly questioned NASA administrator Sean Duffy’s competence, suggesting he lacks the intelligence to effectively lead one of the world’s most influential space agencies. Musk’s comments come in the wake of NASA’s announcement that lunar lander contracts will be opened to multiple competitors, not just SpaceX. Highlighting his frustration with what he perceives as weak leadership, Musk argued that America’s space programme requires stronger, more capable guidance.

Blurb:

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the scale and potency of the malicious activity in your email inbox. These threats no longer obvious; instead, they take the shape of professional and sophisticated messages tailored to your interests and current correspondence. But with the cybersecurity landscape quickly shifting due to AI-powered illicit activity, how can we ensure a secure inbox? And what would that practically look like?

Shane Tews spent some time discussing this and more with Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, co-founders of AegisAI. Cy and Ryan have spent a combined 12+ years at the forefront of cybersecurity, working to help reimagine and practically apply security on a personal level.

Blurb:

Heavy teaching loads, shrinking university budgets and expanding workload expectations have fueled stress and burnout among professors and other university employees in recent years.

Now, an increasingly polarized political climate, as well as emerging concerns around university funding cuts, self-censorship and academic freedom, has created new pressures for university and college employees.

The result is an academic profession caught in the crosscurrents of culture and politics, with implications that extend far beyond the classroom.