You are completely wrong. Out of Africa is correct. Out of Asia is incorrect, and is outdated sino propaganda. Even the modern Chinese state admits that DNA evidence pretty conclusively points to out of Africa.
Almost everyone on our team is on Android, but we wanted to iterate on the platform that most users are on and focus on getting that experience right.
Sales will somewhat depend on when we bring on someone to pick up the Android front-end.
We're a really small team, and with hardware, firmware, services, and apps, the engineering footprint becomes quite large.
What often doesn't get factored in is manufacturing test rigs, plus we have software to support clinical research.
I'm not complaining about it, but holding off on Android seemed to be the right move, as we can't remove any of the other functions. We've had quite a few requests for Android.
"Passenger rail analysts said that it isn’t unusual for rail operators to pad their schedules when introducing new trains, especially if they will run alongside older ones. For example, during a rollout, a railroad might schedule more generous dwell time at stops, they said."
Also, the new schedule is only about 15 mins longer than the old one...this is a big nothingburger.
You’re right on this point, but my read of the article was that you can buy the fastest trains in the world but if your infrastructure is not up to enabling them, they won’t go much faster than the ones you have already.
The headline — which, let's face it, will be the only thing a whole bunch of people are going to read — really makes it out like they bought shitty trains, or even that trains can't be better. Which is just untrue.
>"Passenger rail analysts said that it isn’t unusual for rail operators to pad their schedules when introducing new trains, especially if they will run alongside older ones. For example, during a rollout, a railroad might schedule more generous dwell time at stops, they said."
I would guess to account for any unfamiliarity from the operators (new systems, etc) and allowing more time to sort out any other kinks. (they also pad the schedules for old trains too -- this is to accommodate small slowdowns without causing cascading delays).
If you run the new trains at maximum potential then they will just catch up to the old train in front of them and then have to maintain the old train’s pace. So during the transition period you couldn’t really run the new train faster anyways.
No — Old trains: schedule based on experiences from having ran them for at least a year (i.e. all seasons)
New trains' buffers are larger because you don't know e.g. how shit the brakes are when you have tons of leaves on your rails. (Yes this is an actual thing¹.)
Just like on a car, if your break pads are capable of completely stopping the wheel, but the wheel is not capable of creating enough braking force with the surface, then you slide. If you lubricate between the wheels and surface, which is essentially what leaves do on rails, no amount of at-wheel breaking power will stop you.
This is what antilock Brakes in cars prevent, they pulse the brakes to allow the tire to regain traction, preventing slippage and loss of control.
Note that a modern train also has the same system, only more so, a car would typically have 4 wheels, I think the Acela probably has like 96 or something.
There's also some "infant mortality" stuff, the EMUs (Electric Multiple Units, which I suppose is roughly what this is?) in my country have not good failure rates in their first weeks and months but they get much better (typically best in class due to fewer moving parts than say a diesel) in mid-life.
Brake performance is a thing you can simulate and measure on a test track, which presumably happened at least months ago. However loss of adhesion, the reason braking stops working on contaminated railheads is also impacted by moisture, a bunch of dry leaves won't make anywhere close to the same problem as the same leaf material after a nice gentle drizzle, not really rain per se, not enough to actually wash the rails clean, but ensuring the leaves turn into a thin mush that makes braking next to impossible.
RAIB report 12/2023 about an incident near me talks about that, the driver maybe makes some dubious decisions, but ultimately he brakes, and it does nothing, so he brakes harder, still nothing, maximum braking, still nothing, select emergency braking (same effect but hey, it's there to be used right), still nothing - oh shit, we've passed the danger signal and I see another train, time to leave. He actually spent ages in hospital because he tripped trying to flee and was trapped in the wreckage, but on the other hand if he'd just sat there frozen he might well be dead 'cos his train did indeed smash into the other one so the side where the driver is sat smashed into another train at like 50+mph.
The new cars hold far more people, are faster, and they are supposed to be paired with comprehensive upgrades to the extremely aged infrastructure and tracks along that route.
Both the cars and the overhaul on the route were funded by the Biden admin (primarily with funds allocated by congress between 2021 and 2023) with the intent that modernisation to the route would gradually allow the cars to run at speed over the next few years. Now it's unclear what the status is of this infrastructure overhaul with the current administration suspending funds for the previous admin's projects.
> Amtrak previously has said the new trains could potentially shave 20 minutes off the travel time between New York City and Washington, D.C., reducing the duration to around 2½ hours
> because of Amtrak’s old infrastructure, the new trains can only travel at top speed during certain portions of the journey [...] Infrastructure upgrades planned over the coming years will improve trainspeed and reliability, the railroad said.
> Each new train will hold 386 passengers, an increase of 27% compared with the current fleet.
Therefore: Faster trains carrying more people. Just not faster on day 1.
I cannot overemphasize how epochal of a crisis this would be for human civilization - the gulf stream is pretty much the only thing keeping northern europe (The UK, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of germany, the Netherlands, etc) habitable by current standards.
Basically, the gulf stream is a conveyor belt that grabs nice warm water from southern latitudes (carribean, southeast atlantic ocean) and slowly moves it up the east US/Canadian coast, when it then gently arches past the tip of Greenland and Iceland before splitting and arriving in northern Europe.
To get an idea of how big of a problem the gulf stream going away would be, look at the comparative latitude of the UK and the Nordic countries compared to north America. The UK is aligned with Newfoundland in Canada, where it gets more than a little chilly. The UK is currently nice and toasty because of the gulf stream. It would be an extremely uncomfortable place without it - no more agriculture as the UK knows it now, no more nice weather. Fishing grounds destroyed, etc. The general public doesn't seem to really understand the massive impact of a potential gulf stream shutdown.
The AMOC collapsing (I have no idea why the title says 'Gulf Stream' as that is different and not mentioned in the post), has far more disastrous implications than destroying the climate of Europe.
It's the beginning of the process of ocean de-oxygenation, ultimately creating a lifeless ocean that emits hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. It would completely disrupt the planetary food change, make the ocean poisonous, and fundamentally alter life on this planet in unimaginable ways.
For a more detailed look at the issue I highly recommend Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky".
Ok, but this happens pretty regularly on a planetary scale (at least every 110,000 years or so) - why hasn´t it been so disastrous before - say at the end of the last interglacial?
There were fewer humans around last time. Also there were no 'journalists' around to proclaim it so. If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?
And presumably there's another side of it too? Like all that hot air would have to be somewhere else if not Western Europe. That somewhere else would also have a bad time, just in the opposite direction. Very bleak.
Crazy in my mind to think about the system moving unimaginable amounts of energy around the planet and now we're changing it on a time scale shorter than what the planet usually sees. Reminds me of what I read about the Younger Dryas and how temperatures changed within centuries, if not decades.
I've heard some speculation that rapid climate change at that time could be the origin of global flood myths in so many cultures. Imagine you're just minding your own business and a glacial dam breaks. As far as you're concerned, you just experienced a global flood.
Melting so much ice in such a short time without some kind of a dam made of not-ice is physically unimaginable. Water has soooo much heat capacity it'd take hundreds of years unless we're talking about a yellowstone or deccan traps eruption under the south pole or something (haven't done the math, but I'm not sure if it'd be enough).
>> Crazy in my mind to think about the system moving unimaginable amounts of energy around the planet and now we're changing it on a time scale shorter than what the planet usually sees.
The inter-glacial periods are 10K to 20K years. We are currently around 12000 years into it. "AI overview" keeps telling me human induced climate change may lengthen it, but the collapse of the AMOC might just end it.
Europe suffers from unprecedented heat waves, record after record. Wouldn't it be beneficial for temperatures to drop 10C?
I remember the winters in Eastern Europe in the 80's unbearably cold (to a child), now barely any snow and endless forest fires in summer...
It doesn't work that way. It would result in hotter summers and colder winters. So it wouldn't alleviate the heat waves but exacerbate them.
Large bodies of water like the Atlantic or the Med keep us cool in summer and warm in winter. Climate change in general leads to more extreme weather events and weather just simply being a lot more volatile.
You're probably going to get downvoted, but the reality is it's a valid question.
Just as apparently sulfur emissions from global shipping fleets helped offset some warming and eco-friendly fuel actually caused problems, the climate is complex, and there are definitely going to be the collision of interesting trade-offs.
Unfortunately, most likely, the answer is there won't be anything beneficial here. Remember, the key here isn't average global temperatures, but rather the temperature range. Life likes a temperate climate in a narrow range of degrees. Not just humans, but agriculture too.
If you lower the winter temperatures by 10 degrees, and raise the summer ones by 10, your crops still die either from the frost or from the fire. And humans likewise either freeze on the street or overheat in the sun.
This is the main thing climate change denialists can never seem to grasp. It's not the specific temperature numbers, it's the SPEED at which it's happening. Humans, in their current biological form, have been around for a million years, and survived much larger climate swings. But...the climate also changed slower. And they migrated. And they still almost didn't make it several times, barely surviving.
A world where hundreds of millions of people from the indian subcontinent are trying to escape murderous heat one season while tens of millions of people in Europe are freezing in the winter, and putting up walls to protect what they already have, is not one where humanity thrives.
In the long term we'll probably be fine. A few billion will die. Demographics and politics will shift. The human spirit will persevere, and we'll innovate our way through and adapt to a new world.
But it might take a century and our children and our children's children will not be better off than us.
The gulf stream doesn't create heat, it just moves it. If it doesn't move as much heat, then the destination will get colder and presumably the source will get warmer.
Okay. Let's say the low lows of a middle Sweden equivalent climate are brought more in line with current UK temp ranges. Let's say the winter temp goes up +10 degrees Celsius.
What happens then to, say, the Mediterranean at +10 C average temps? Seems quite bad, eh?
All this nonsense is the same as the guys who have predicted 80 of the last 2 recessions. But hey, if you can exaggerate the output your model suggests that was built from faulty assumptions, incomplete data, hubris, and spans decades in time and get people to buy it and continue to fund your project, good for you.
They’re probably more unreliable as climate is far more complex than economics and predicting 50 years out with any certainty is a ridiculous notion for both.
Most of the high profile climate models have been wrong… but in underestimating the speed of global warming. So things generally are worse than research suggests.
I think you underestimate how well the models are doing.
You can put your head in the sand, but it will not save you. You must take the world on from first principles, and dive deep into the details if you want truth. Simply countering that nobody can predict what will happen is not an argument, it's a plea to stay ignorant.
Open your mind until your brain falls out. How many bromides should we exchange? Saying “there’s no proof” is better than believing everything that comes your way with 0 critical analysis. But it’s nice to feel smart.
Jesus, what does that even mean? Simple physics says carbon dioxide traps heat. Chemistry 10th grade. Did you take it? This is not hard. Only an absolute ignoramus would pretend it's not happening at this point.
No worried, HN has plenty of cranks who don't have real arguments or references to actual studies. I suppose it's just comforting to pretend it's business as usual.
Or we understand geometry and how the volume of carbon has to geometrically increase by a square per degree and it’s not even possible for us to put that much in the atmosphere.
The fact you don’t even understand this basic fact and yet are so certain should concern you.
1. Logarithmic effect of CO₂
• The warming effect of carbon dioxide grows logarithmically with concentration, not linearly.
• This means the first 100 ppm of CO₂ caused a much larger temperature impact than, say, an increase from 400 → 500 ppm.
• Each additional molecule of CO₂ contributes less extra warming because much of the infrared spectrum it absorbs is already saturated.
2. Geometry of “forcing”
• Scientists describe this as radiative forcing, measured in watts per square meter.
• Roughly, each doubling of CO₂ concentration produces about +3.7 W/m² of forcing, which translates (with climate sensitivity) to ~1.5–4.5°C warming.
• So it takes geometrically more CO₂ to achieve each additional degree of warming. For example:
• Going from 280 → 400 ppm may give ~1°C warming.
• Going from 400 → 560 ppm (another 160 ppm) gives another ~1°C.
• Going from 560 → 840 ppm (280 ppm more) gives another ~1°C.
• And so on — the increments needed get larger each time.
This is a bit better. You are saying it IS happening, but just not gonna be that bad. I sure hope that's correct, but don't you think 1000s of climate scientists have taken this simple fact as a consideration in their analysis? Even if the effect is logarithmic, we are now at 420 CO2, well above preindustrial 280. We’ve already added 1.2 degrees of global warming. Continuing on the current trajectory will push us to 560 or higher within this century for multiple additional degrees C of warming. The fact that each extra ppm does a bit less does not mean the danger goes away, it means you need bigger increments of CO2 to get the same forcing, and presently we are adding those big increments very quickly. Climate scientists already use the logarithmic law of CO2 and the forcing geometry in all their calculations.
Fully aware. At least in a lab. Regardless we know it’s an inverse square law thing and to even get to any sort of “runaway” or even conditions in this article would take such an enormous gain in carbon release (not considering what’s falling back) that it’s not even possible. It’s fantastical.
If it was linear I’d be concerned. But it’s not. So yeah let’s solve other more realistic problems.
No, the trial is closed to new participants. Check the company website to see if they are having international trials or are open to compassionate use.
I can explain. BCG infects the actual epithelial cancer cells inside the bladder, triggering Th-1 response (production and release of cytokines by activated CD4 T cells).
The cytokines induce an inflammatory response, which I turn activates other immune system cells such as CD4 and CD8, NK cells and macrophages.
The immune cells then attack the bladder cancer cells, hopefully destroying them, thus "fighting cancer".
I wish I could find the article, but there is a clinic somewhere that ran trials where they deliberately wouldn’t treat the cancer too aggressively. Instead they experimented with treatment frequency but with control being the aim instead of elimination.
The theory being that they could keep it at bay indefinitely and lower the chance of selection pressure kicking in. The thought behind their approach is that they wanted their patients to die of something different than their cancer.
As an aside, the disappearance of insects is noticeable elsewhere. I'm a big fishing guy, have been my whole life. Many old-timers I know have commented on the lack of insects.
We've all noticed that certain flies and lures have stopped working, or at least, have significantly reduced efficacy. We think it's because for at least several generations (fish have short lifespans), they haven't been exposed to those insects.
I've heard that too. But, from my experience, it's mostly insecticides: people want mosquito-free and flea-free (and ants, roaches etc) yards, and spray/spread poison that kills them. Unfortunately, it kills everything. I cancelled my yard service and noticed that birds started coming back, chasing the food supply. Butterflies cover my lantana, and I see fireflies at night.
I live in Minnesota and the struggle is tough. Either my yard is completely unenjoyable for the family due to mosquitoes and deer flies some years or I kill 50 insects that I don’t want for every one that I do.
I put up deer fly traps every year and that helps, but this year in particular has been awful for both them and mosquitoes. Luckily for the bugs my sprayer is broken and I haven’t had time to fix it.
I deliberately avoid the place on our property where fireflies are, on the years that I do spray. We really need a better solution.
Just to be clear, if we go outside right now we instantly have multiple deer flies trying to land on us and bite, which is only a distraction for the mosquitoes. Without swatting I’d probably get a mosquito bite a minute midday or maybe 5-10 a minute at 7pm.
You can target mosquitoes more directly with mosquito dunks. It's a block of dehydrated bacteria that produces a toxin believed to only impact the larva of mosquitoes, fungus gnats, and black flies. Basically you make sure all standing water in the area is drained or has a mosquito dunk in it. You can make buckets full of yard debris and water and a mosquito dunk to attract mosquitoes to lay their eggs that then get killed.
You can also try to increase the number of predators. Create habitats for bats, dragonflies, mosquito larva eating fish, etc.
I've found picaridin lotion to be much less annoying than DEET spray but still effective this year.
Yeah, I’ve used mosquito dunks experimentally but we have a pond behind our house and in front of it, and a lake nearby. It’s Minnesota, after all. I did try to chuck some dunks into the ponds but they have a lot of cattails in the way so I was unsure if they even made it in the water.
Our attic was such a good habitat for bats we had to do something about it ;). But we’re also surrounded by woods.
You immediately bring the results to your doctor ASAP. They'll recommend follow-up testing since they want verification of third-party results and, well, are doctors and will know better about what to test for. If you do indeed have cancer, they will refer you to an oncologist who sub-specializes in that type of cancer.
