Here's a bizarre article I've found:

US steel company makes plans for nuclear fusion

US steel company Nucor and Helion Energy plan to develop a 500-MWe nuclear fusion plant at one of Nucor’s steel manufacturing plants. The agreement between the two companies, which includes an investment by Nucor in Helion, will accelerate the journey towards sustainable, carbon-free industrial manufacturing, said Helion. By deploying 500 MWe of fusion power, they will make history in the steel sector.

Fusion power will revolutionise energy supply for Nucor’s steel manufacturing operations, providing baseload zero-carbon electricity, says the nuclear fusion company. Nucor is already a leader in decarbonising the steel industry and this project reinforces the company’s commitment to becoming the cleanest steel manufacturer globally.

In May, Helion announced it had signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with high-tech giant Microsoft to supply electricity generated from its first fusion power plant.

Nucor CEO Leon Topalian emphasised the significance of the collaboration with Helion: “This project marks a tremendous milestone in the potential for the use of nearly limitless clean electricity for industrial manufacturing. By entering this agreement, we are demonstrating our commitment to be the cleanest steel producer in the world, while setting an example for all manufacturing companies.”

Helion has constructed six working fusion prototypes and is the world’s first private fusion company to achieve 100mn-degree plasma temperatures. The company is currently building its seventh prototype, Polaris, which is expected to be the first to demonstrate electricity production from fusion.

The company has the backing of three rich tech pioneers: Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI; Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz; and Facebook co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Have we forgotten that nuclear fusion isn't able to generate net electricity yet, and isn't even particularly close to doing so? Did that discovery pass me by? Why are there plans being drawn up based on the hypothetical results of the Polaris prototype? Is this just a bazinga-brain thing?

I'm gonna go try and get $50 million from Bill Gates to power his data centers with my perpetual motion machine; I'm on the 20th prototype but I think this one will be the one to crack it

The thumbnail of Rhodes kinda looks like it's for a YT video that's going to talk to you about space lasers starting wild fires. 🫤

Thousands of Portuguese protest for the right to affordable housing

Several thousands of people took to the streets in Lisbon and other major cities across Portugal on Saturday to protest for the constitutional basic right to housing. Protests organised by civil society groups were scheduled in 24 cities across the country. This is the second protest of the year that focuses on affordable housing, within a context of continuous increase of prices to rent and interest rates skyrocketing which has a big impact on most households due to mortgages.

Maldives: Opposition candidate wins presidential election

Opposition candidate Mohamed Muiz won the Maldives presidential runoff on Saturday. He secured more than 54% of the vote, beating incumbent Ibrahim Solih, who had 46% after almost all the ballots were counted.

Solih conceded defeat after an official count showed his pro-China rival Mohamed Muizzu in an unassailable lead. "Congratulations to president-elect Muizzu," he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Solih prioritized building relations with India during his time in office in sharp contrast to the coalition supporting Muiz that launched an "India out" campaign.

An engineer, Muiz had served as the housing minister for seven years. He was mayor of Male, the capital, when he was chosen to run for president. Muiz's party, the People's National Congress, is viewed as heavily pro-China. He also promised to remove Indian troops from the Maldives and rebalance the country's trade, which he said favored India. His mentor, former President Abdulla Yameen, borrowed heavily from China for construction projects and spurned India. Muiz has vowed if elected to free Yameen, currently serving an 11-year sentence for corruption.

Solih was elected in 2018 on a wave of discontent with Yameen's increasingly autocratic rule, accusing him of pushing the country into a Chinese debt trap. The Maldives is strategically vital in the middle of the Indian Ocean, astride one of the busiest east-west shipping lanes in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaJ3odgOJ5U

Hopefully this means they will treat these failed property developers as running Ponzi schemes (which they were) and claw back as much as possible to clean up the mess.

Taiwan unveils its first domestically manufactured submarine

President Tsai Ing-wen said building submarines was a crucial military deterrence.

"Even if there are risks, and no matter how many challenges there are, Taiwan must take this step and allow the self-reliant national defense policy to grow and flourish on our land," Tsai said. It must still undergo sea trials and will not enter service for another two years.

Taiwan's navy has two working submarines bought from the Netherlands in the 1980s. It previously said it had plans to build eight submarines.

...

Huang Shu-kuang, the convener of Taiwan's Indigenous Defense Submarine program, said he believes a fleet of 10 submarines would make it harder for the Chinese Navy to extend its power in the contested maritime region.

The island's Institute for National Defense and Security Research believes deploying submarines at major chokepoints would be enough to cause problems for China.

TEN submarines!? Well, that's just about sealed China's fate there I think. I bet Xi Jinping will think twice before brutally, illegally, unprovokedly, evilly invading Taiwa-- wait, China has over 6 times as many? Fuck.

This is from a progress report of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were agreed on in 2015 to be achieved int 2030, from Nature Journal

Of the 36 SDG targets reviewed in the GSDR to provide a snapshot of progress, only two were on track as of 2023, namely access to mobile networks and internet usage (see ‘SDGs Midway — Snapshot of Progress’). Fourteen showed ‘fair’ progress, with targets just in reach if efforts are stepped up. Twelve showed limited or no progress, including for poverty, safe drinking water and ecosystem conservation. And eight targets were assessed as still deteriorating: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, fossil-fuel subsidies and numbers of unsentenced detainees; enhancing economic growth, vaccine coverage, sustainable fishing and food security; and preventing the extinction of species.

So globally we're getting poorer and emitting more carbon BUT more people are closing themselves off on the internet and watching the world burn through their screens

Building pipelines as Canada burns

The Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion in British Columbia is running into another round of problems and generating even more opposition. ‘The controversial government-owned fossil fuel company is seeking regulatory approval to change its pipeline construction methods and route, after running into problems drilling a tunnel.’

Indigenous people impacted by this project are coming out strongly against this development. The ‘Stk’emlúpsemc te Secwépemc Nation, who have a ‘“historical, cultural and spiritual connection” to the lands the pipeline is being built on, said they never supported or consented to such a change.’ They contend that the new approaches sought by the company ‘would cause “significant and irreparable harm” to their culture, and to the integrity of the spiritually significant lands in question.’

The Trans Mountain pipeline constitutes a key element of Canada’s expanding role as a major oil and gas producer and a look at its history offers some insights into the nature of fossil-fuel capitalism in this country. Such an examination becomes even more compelling because this year Canada has experienced its most severe wildfire season ever.

A statement issued by the federal government notes that ‘Canada’s 2023 wildfire season is the most destructive ever recorded, and it’s not over yet. By September 5, more than 6,132 fires had torched a staggering 16.5 million hectares of land. To put that in perspective, that’s an area larger than Greece and more thandouble the 1989 record.’

From one side of the country to the other, fires forced the evacuation of tens ofthousands of people and the populations of North American cities choked on the smoke that filled the sky. The raging fires, moreover, while they were an effect of climate change, became a cause of its intensification. By the end of July, ‘accumulated carbon emissions from wildfires across Canada from Jan. 1 to July 31 totalled 290 million mt …This is already more than double the previous record for the year as a whole and represents over 25% of the global total for2023 to date.’

Months after hospitalization for COVID-19, MRIs reveal multiorgan damage

In one of the most comprehensive post–COVID-19 MRI studies to date, scientists have found that about 6 months after being infected, some 60% of hospitalized patients showed abnormalities in multiple organs, especially the brain and lungs, compared with 27% among people who had never had the disease. Patients’ hearts, however, looked no different from those of uninfected people—a result that surprised scientists, as previous research suggested SARS-CoV-2 can wreak havoc on that organ.

“This is an intriguing study … and adds to the growing literature on multiorgan impacts after severe COVID-19 infection,” says Linda Geng, a clinician-researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine. She and others caution that the new findings only reveal associations between COVID-19 and organ damage; they don’t prove infection caused that damage or explain how it occurred.

The organ damage might have been there already, as the article goes on to explain. Ideally we'd need scans pre- and post-infection, but scanning a shitload of regular people with MRI machines in the "hopes" that enough of them will then get infected for a reasonably large study is probably outside the budget of these kinds of studies. Also, as the article explains, MRI scans revealing organ abnormalities doesn't always - or even often - indicate that the patient is actually having any issues with that organ (aside from the lungs, where there is a connection). For example, it's not just plausible, but very common, for somebody with kidneys that look kinda fucked up on MRI images to have not once had an issue with their kidneys.

Nonetheless, the section on the heart is curious:

The finding that hospitalized patients and controls had roughly the same rate of heart abnormalities was counterintuitive, says study co-author Betty Raman, a cardiologist at the University of Oxford. Clinicians “do see patients coming into hospital” with heart inflammation and other complications from COVID-19, she says. The results, which reflect the organ’s status several months post infection, might suggest the heart recovers relatively quickly from any damage.

Then again, heart abnormalities might not be as closely linked to COVID-19 as previously thought, notes Steffen Petersen, a cardiologist at Queen Mary University of London who has collaborated with some of the study authors but was not involved in the new research. This study found abnormal MRI results in 20% to 25% of both controls and hospitalized patients, suggesting “a lot of these cardiac abnormalities that were seen in the COVID group must have been there beforehand.” Post–COVID-19 patients with lingering cardiac symptoms might have disorders like heartbeat irregularities that aren’t always visible with MRI, or dysfunction in other organs, he adds.

Why Are People Frightened That Kids Will Learn About Sex?

CW: very brief mention of SA

Here’s what mystifies me about all the right-wing panic about sex education: I have never really understood why nude bodies cause some people such horror. I mean, we’ve all got bodies. Everyone, no matter how young, has seen at least their own genitals before, so it’s not like the existence of genitals is a surprise to them. Why do we have this weird taboo about certain parts of the body?

Prudish attitudes toward sex and nudity have always seemed one of the strangest aspects of our culture. I genuinely don’t get it. Why would a parent be horrified at little cartoons showing what testicles are? Why should a child not understand what a testicle is? Ismail says he was startled and shocked by the book’s casual nudity. But what I wish he’d reflected on more deeply is: why? Why do you recoil when you see the normal processes of human development and reproduction depicted in a matter-of-fact way? What is there to fear about this?

Obviously part of it is that there is a kind of mental alarm bell that goes off anytime “sex” and “children” are in the same sentence, because everyone is rightly horrified by child sexual abuse and pedophilia. But protecting children from sexual abuse (which It’s Perfectly Normal has a whole section on) is not the same as protecting them from a knowledge of what sex is. Why is it so hard to keep this distinction clear? Why care whether kids find out about sex when they’re young? Like I say, I read about it when I was four. I didn’t understand it, in fact I forgot most of what I’d read except the little pictures. But it did absolutely nothing to hurt me, and I don’t see how cutting out the reproduction pages of How Your Body Works would have made my development any more healthy.

The central, and I guess radical, premise of It’s Perfectly Normal is exactly what the title says: sex is normal. Many parents are disturbed that the book tells young people that masturbation is natural and okay. This is an idea so shocking in the U.S. that Bill Clinton fired his surgeon general when she endorsed it. But come on! Everyone knows it’s true. Aside from the “NoFap” movement, most people masturbate. Why pretend this isn’t true? Why try to stigmatize it and make young people feel ashamed over something everyone else is secretly doing?

I say thank God for sex-positive education. Repressive taboos do not help young people. Consider the taboo on discussing menstruation. I recently interviewed Congresswoman Grace Meng about her “Menstrual Equity For All” act, and she noted that even though access to period products is crucial and the lack of access causes significant harm, there’s still a frustrating widespread idea that discussing menstruation is embarrassing:

Periods in general have very much been a taboo topic in our society. You can ask any person who gets their period: we all share the experience of hiding the product in our sleeves, of making sure no one around us knows that we are at that time of the month, even though it’s a natural part of our bodily functions. We just really haven’t talked about this enough. I’m pretty sure that some of my colleagues have signed on to my bill because they wanted me to stop talking about periods on the floor of the House.

On the Ukrainian front, nothing new.

First Sunak gives up on net-zero basically, and now they're doing this:

UK approves controversial North Sea oil and gas production

The UK approved the exploration of oil and gas in its largest undeveloped field, the North Sea Transition Authority, the responsible regulatory body said on Wednesday.

To improve energy security and ensure low energy prices, according to the authority, it had "granted development and production consent" to the companies Equinor and Ithaca Energy.

Production on the Rosebank field, located in the North Sea some 128 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of the Shetland Islands, is expected to start in 2026 at the earliest and could produce an expected 300 million barrels of oil over its lifetime.

Pretty funny how all these promises are made and then the second that a capitalist is like "Actually, we would prefer if this didn't happen", down the politicians get to licking boots. Not sure why Western countries are even pretending to have net-zero policies anymore, none of them are actually going to fulfil them.

Any talk on the Wagner plane that made an oopsie in Mali? What are they doing there anyway? I've been kinda swamped at work for months, so out of the loop on news