BLOGS

The effective mass of the electrons can be derived from the curvature around the maxima of the ARPES measurement data (image, detail). (Courtesy: HZB)

Topics: Alternate Energy, Applied Physics, Battery, Chemistry, Civilization, Climate Change

A longstanding explanation for why perovskite materials make such good solar cells has been cast into doubt thanks to new measurements. Previously, physicists ascribed the favorable optoelectronic properties of lead halide perovskites to the behavior of quasiparticles called polarons within the material’s crystal lattice. Now, however, detailed experiments at Germany’s BESSY II synchrotron revealed that no large polarons are present. The work sheds fresh light on how perovskites can be optimized for real-world applications, including light-emitting diodes, semiconductor lasers, and radiation detectors as well as solar cells.

Lead halide perovskites belong to a family of crystalline materials with an ABX₃ structure, where A is cesium, methylammonium (MA), or formamidinium (FA); B is lead or tin; and X is chlorine, bromine, or iodine. They are promising candidates for thin-film solar cells and other optoelectronic devices because their tuneable bandgaps enable them to absorb light over a broad range of wavelengths in the solar spectrum. Charge carriers (electrons and holes) also diffuse through them over long distances. These excellent properties give perovskite solar cells a power conversion efficiency of more than 18%, placing them on a par with established solar-cell materials such as silicon, gallium arsenide, and cadmium telluride.

Researchers are still unsure, however, exactly why charge carriers travel so well in perovskites, especially since perovskites contain far more defects than established solar-cell materials. One hypothesis is that polarons – composite particles made up of an electron surrounded by a cloud of ionic phonons, or lattice vibrations – act as screens, preventing charge carriers from interacting with the defects.

Charge-transport mystery deepens in promising solar-cell materials, Isabelle Dumé, Physics World

This collection of horror stories does not disappoint. Black Magic Women showcases scary short stories by women of color, starring black women in roles we’ve not seen before. From unexpected vampire love stories to women serial killers, ghosts to werewolves, cursed dolls to living, morphing skin, you’ll love every story in this collection. Eighteen stories, each one riveting until the end. Who says short stories can’t be as entertaining, striking, engaging and frightening as a novella or novel? These stories beg to differ (and to be read). The Killer Queen was my favorite. Which one will be your favorite?  

Had the opportunity to meet musical artists @_ugglyy(above)  and

@icemvne(not pictured). Thanks for your patronage and support.

The Memory of MALCOLM X - el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz

BORN: May 19, 1925 TRANSITIONED: February 21, 1965

REST in POWER!

The first direct image of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole shows an orange glowing ring — gas heated as it falls into the singularity — with the shadow of the black hole at the center. EHT Collaboration

Topics: Astrophysics, Black Holes, Cosmology, Einstein, General Relativity

In a triumph of observation and data processing, astronomers at the Event Horizon Telescope have captured the first-ever picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The black hole is named Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), and the reveal of its image received an international rollout this morning in simultaneous press conferences held by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and the European Southern Observatory headquarters in Garching, Germany.

The image represents 3.5 million gigabytes of data taken at millimeter wavelengths by eight radio telescopes around the world. “It took several years to refine our image and confirm what we had,” said Feryal Özel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, at the NSF press conference. “But we prevailed.”

Blackhole at the center of Milky Way imaged for the first time, Mark Zastrow, Astronomy

Figure 1: A cartoon showing the “self-lensing” of light by a supermassive black hole binary system. Jordy Davelaar and Zoltán Haiman of Columbia University predict that this effect could be used to study black hole binaries that are too far from Earth to probe with other techniques

Topics: Black Holes, Cosmology, Einstein, General Relativity

When galaxies collide, the central supermassive black holes that they contain begin to orbit each other. This supermassive black hole binary attracts gas, which flows through the system to form two disk-shaped structures, one around each of the supermassive black holes. The gas in these “minidisks” heats as it falls toward the holes and begins to radiate light. Astronomers have detected around 150 galaxies with candidate supermassive black hole binaries. And, as observations become more detailed, they expect the light from the minidisks in those systems to bear recognizable, time-dependent signatures from black hole distortions [1]. Now, Jordy Davelaar and Zoltán Haiman of Columbia University have theoretically tested how one such distortion—the “shadow” of the black hole—affects this light signature, finding that it causes a dip in the signal that should be observable in about 1% of candidate systems [2, 3]. The technique could allow astronomers to study black holes that are currently beyond the reach of conventional imaging methods (Fig. 1).

From gravitational-wave measurements of merging black holes to direct imaging of the plasma circling a black hole, the last decade has seen an explosion of observational evidence for black holes (see Viewpoint: The First Sounds of Merging Black Holes and News Feature: Black Hole Imaging Tests Einstein’s Limits) [4–6]. Yet despite these achievements, many questions remain about black holes, including a critical one: How do black holes grow to supermassive scales—millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun?

A black hole is a simple object, described by its mass, angular momentum, and electrical charge. Supermassive black holes are typically electrically neutral, so their mass and angular momentum parameters determine their gravitational fields. The gravitational field determines how the black holes bend light and thus how they appear to an observer on Earth. Light passing near the black hole is deflected by the gravitational field, producing a black hole shadow—a dark region that is often encircled by a bright light ring—whose size and shape come directly from the black hole’s mass and angular momentum.

Measuring a Black Hole Shadow, George N. Wong, APS Physics

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Image source: Facebook, Rick Steves

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Vladimir Putin is a reality daytrader. His invasion of Ukraine is a "special military operation," not a war, or more accurately, an ongoing war crime. Gaslighting eleven Russian time zones is as easy to him as flatulence. With the GRU and American social media, he can hack American minds with the wildest conspiracy theories almost at will. The ridiculous QAnon claptrap that democrats are "demon-spawned, blood-drinking pedophiles" sounds like a propaganda tactic from the Kremlin:

Putin befriended and supported European politicians who were willing to defend Russian interests. One was Gerhard Schroder, the retired German chancellor, who was in the employ of the Russian gas company Gazprom. A second was Milol Zeman, elected president of the Czech Republic in 2013 after a campaign partly financed by the Russian oil company Lukoil, and reelected in 2018 after an election financed by unknown sources. A third was Silvio Berlusconi, who shared vacations with Putin before and after leaving the office of Italian prime minister in 2011. In 2013, Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud and banned from public office until 2019. Putin suggested that Berlusconi's true problem was the persecution of heterosexuals. "If he were gay, no one would ever lay a finger on him." Here Putin was enunciating a basic principle of his Eurasian civilization: when the subject is inequality, change it to sexuality. In 2018, Berlusconi began a political comeback.

"The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America," by Timothy Snyder, page 100 (paperback), author of "On Tyranny."

Gallop shows the number of adults self-identifying as LGBT ticking up to 7.1% isn't evidence of lower testosterone any more than it is of mythical cooties. We've gone from "Will and Grace," the sitcom "Soap," Ellen DeGeneres, and Rachel Maddow on primetime television to legalizing same-sex marriage as a Constitutional Right. At least on the surface, we seem to be more tolerant. Math question: isn't 7.1% less than 92.9%?

Or, take nonexistent voter fraud. The Brennan Center "found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent." Red states are making laws over something more infinitesimal than pocket lint.

An election happened in 2020, and the Russian asset (emphasis on the first syllable), lost. He couldn't even admit the truth to his friend Piers Morgan, telling him "what if you're not real?" In typical duplicitous snowflake fashion, he stormed out when confronted with the truth: he lost. Did we give this ingrate the nuclear codes?

Vance: Some opposition to Obama ‘comes from the color of his skin’

Vance also previously advanced [a] defense of former President Barack Obama, a Democrat who was the country’s first Black president, and who was falsely labeled a Muslim and was the subject of the racist “birther” conspiracy. Vance said he admired Obama for his personal accomplishments, even though he disagreed with him politically.

J.D. Vance used to admonish Donald Trump’s ‘xenophobic’ appeals to voters. Until he decided to run for Senate. Clevland.com

The "Big Lie" as popularized by Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands" and executed by Vance and the American "son of perdition" has become less of a loyalty test, and more of a chanted mantra, eerily similar to Orwell's "two minutes hate" ritual. Yet, part of being in a cult means you curate reality: you daytrade it to avoid pain and steamroll up Maslow's pyramid to self-actualized pleasure. "Freedom" isn't the freedom to say two plus two equals four, it's the ability to troll on Twitter without fact check, or the threat of banning. (That worked out really well on January 6th.) What is painful to admit must be a conspiracy, not the outcome of voter mobilization, or concerns about fascism. "Others" - women, people of color, LGBT, youth - who did not vote for their Gollum avatar are "unpersons," and therefore since they do not exist, their votes are by definition fraudulent. Dehumanization is the first stage before slaughter and genocide.

Actual voter fraud committed during the 2020 election was committed by the followers of Putin's asset's personality cult. History has no impact and facts do not matter. Karl Rove opined about "creating realities" and for Putin and Russophiles like Rand Paul, Ukraine doesn't exist because it never existed. Therefore, uncomfortable histories about "your tribe" in the formation of the US must be banned, and I'm sure eventually, burned.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself."

"Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war."

-George Orwell, "1984"

Alternative facts. Big lies. Created realities. These things are not the basis for democracy, and two plus two is not five.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”― George Orwell, 1984, all quotes in italics from Good Reads

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Ukraine foils Russia-backed cyberattack on the power grid, The Statesman

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Cybersecurity, Existentialism, Fascism

Summary

This joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA)—coauthored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Energy (DOE)—provides information on multiple intrusion campaigns conducted by state-sponsored Russian cyber actors from 2011 to 2018 and targeted the U.S. and international Energy Sector organizations. CISA, the FBI, and DOE responded to these campaigns with appropriate action in and around the time that they occurred. CISA, the FBI, and DOE are sharing this information in order to highlight historical tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by adversaries to target U.S. and international Energy Sector organizations.

On March 24, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments of three Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers and a Russian Federation Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (TsNIIKhM) employee for their involvement in the following intrusion campaigns against the U.S. and international oil refineries, nuclear facilities, and energy companies.[1]

• Global Energy Sector Intrusion Campaign, 2011 to 2018: the FSB conducted a multi-stage campaign in which they gained remote access to U.S. and international Energy Sector networks, deployed ICS-focused malware, and collected and exfiltrated enterprise and ICS-related data. 
  • One of the indicted FSB officers was involved in campaign activity that involved deploying Havex malware to victim networks. 
  • The other two indicted FSB officers were involved in activity targeting U.S. Energy Sector networks from 2016 through 2018.
• Compromise of Middle East-based Energy Sector organization with TRITON Malware, 2017: Russian cyber actors with ties to the TsNIIKhM gained access to and leveraged TRITON (also known as HatMan) malware to manipulate a foreign oil refinery’s ICS controllers. TRITON was designed to specifically target Schneider Electric’s Triconex Tricon safety systems and is capable of disrupting those systems. Schneider Electric has issued a patch to mitigate the risk of the TRITON malware’s attack vector; however, network defenders should install the patch and remain vigilant against these threat actors’ TTPs.
  • The indicted TsNIIKhM cyber actor is charged with an attempt to access U.S.-protected computer networks and to cause damage to an energy facility.
  • The indicted TsNIIKhM cyber actor was a co-conspirator in the deployment of the TRITON malware in 2017.

Alert (AA22-083A)

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures of Indicted State-Sponsored Russian Cyber Actors Targeting the Energy Sector, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

So the warning by CISA has some connotations we should think about. Since Nexflix bailed on Russia, they could block streaming services and retaliate rather petty. Another is infrastructure such as public utilities. Yeah, getting your AC turned off when it's in the eighties outside sucks, but a hospital getting its power cut during an emergency operation, an episiotomy or sinus surgery can cost lives that otherwise wouldn't be affected. It would affect water and utilities, access to ATMs, and Wall Street trading. Any attack is a move of desperation, not "strength." Any rat trapped in a corner will strike back, even with its last breath. Sean Hannity tried to give Mango Mussolini a layup question that he couldn't answer: "is Putin evil?" After bodies stacked like Hurricane Katrina victims, a plethora of war crimes that would embarrass HITLER, he still can't form his puckered mouth, which strangely looks like an anus, to criticize his handler; he is still the lapdog of a KGB spymaster. I doubt it has anything to do with pee tapes: it's darker than that. He wants to BE Putin, he wants America to be Russia. He wants Jeff Bezos to bow to him on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in parody to 2 Thessalonians 2:4. Here is a failed businessman, a serial bankruptcy artist, a short-fingered vulgarian whose college professor stated he was the "dumbest student he EVER had," using more colorful metaphors. He takes a gig as host of a reality show to pay just enough of his crumbling life expenses to keep up the facade, and never admitted to himself that whatever his father had, he never had, and never will have. A person like that constructs fantasies because reality, "real reality," is too harsh for malignant narcissists. "Great again" in a sick mind is a dystopian nightmare to the sane rest of us, unless you're QAnon while reading this.

I think of Edward Snowden at this time. He's probably a valuable asset to Vladimir Putin and the GRU, despite his rock star status in exposing corruption: he broke the law and fled the country before it could prosecute him. Funny how he ends up in Russia; funny how the malware the GRU started using in 2016 suddenly "sprang up" spontaneously. I'm surprised no one is discussing this as a possibility. If you look at the link that I've provided, he boasted a top salary of $200,000 working at the NSA, as he put it, as a "computer Guru," without the benefit of a college degree. His paint job and privilege greased the skids to his ascension in the intelligence community (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and his six-figure salary. One thinks of the idioms "blowback" and "chicken's coming home to roost" the second made famous first by Chaucer of The Canterberry Tales before Malcolm X used the idiom to comment on President Kennedy's demise.

As Ukraine goes further in the crapper for the Russian bear, and Putin gets desperate to pull off a "win" in time for the May 9th festivities (the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in WWII), cyber warfare is his best option to damage, deter the West, and save "face" at home. Moscow's Flagship sunk: either from Ukrainian armaments, or Russian naval incompetence. Social media is making it difficult to blame the "special military operation" on ghost Nazis. Since American billionaires hide their money in the Caymans, and Russian oligarchs (tomato, to-MAH-toe) hide their grand theft in western countries, "nuking the joint" just because you're pissed at looking bad doesn't make financial sense. Neither does the use of chemical weapons because the optics of killing babies in a majority white country can't endear you to the crowd that thinks white people are being "replaced." Free trade after Ukraine is going to have a cost for Vladimir: it's not going to be free, and like Finland and Sweden considering NATO membership, he may have sparked a global "Green New Deal" revolution that mere logic, and the absolutely sane desire to save the planet couldn't. The veneer of invincibility so-called strongmen like to exude can't be as shiny as it was when W "looked into his eyes, and saw his soul." At least the 46th president called "malarky" on that google-eyed tyrant worship, proto the fascism the right is exhibiting daily.

CPAC stands for "conservative political action committee," and the action you would THINK they would like to be politically responsible for is the election of conservative lawmakers to enact a platform and state an agenda. As of 2020, there is none, except supporting the American Orange Fuhrer. CPAC is meeting in Hungary, home of authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, who has packed the courts, squelched the news down to a cheerleading outlet, attacked the LGBT in his country (guilty of the crime of EXISTING), rigged elections to where he cannot lose, demonized minorities and added to that antisemitism. Just the kind of country American Conservatives cum fascists (prior to WWII, there was a German American Bund that openly supported Hitler and the Nazis) would love to form in the US.

The Growth and Opportunity Project stated things that the right has thus far refused to do: change, evolve, give up the "Southern Strategy," start sounding less racist and appeal to more minorities, and young people. In other words, a functional political party would have taken the 2012 election loss as a wake-up call to course-correct.

What we are currently experiencing isn't a functional party. The party went from GOP to INGSOC, from Mitt Romney to a Boy From Brazil that had a copy of Hitler's speeches on his nightstand, that he obviously read. What he leads is more a Congress of sociopaths, people fearful of the changes their hubris wouldn't let them make. The percentage of black republicans has dwindled steadily since the 2000 RNC convention, but the New York Times managed to cobble a few together to make a point that fascists somehow have "inroads" with the African American community after Associate-Designate Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson survived what amounted to a Klan coven. Yeah: inroads.

If the DNC isn't making attack ads with the material the insurrection party gave during her marathon, disrespectful confirmation hearings, it amounts to bringing a butter knife to a bazooka fight. It is political malpractice. Batman doesn't negotiate with the Joker: he pummels him and sends him back to Arkham. He does it as many times as necessary.

Racists could care less about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and fascists ONLY care about their "superiority" and making sure the necks they stamp on never shift from their places. Put on your flack jackets and gear up for piles of manure dressed up as political discourse. Get ready for malware blackouts and excuses that this direct attack on our homeland is somehow "our fault" because a psychopath believed his yes men, and got out over his skis. Like Dumbo Gambino, we're finding out the "stable geniuses" are all flatulence and hype.

In the words of Star Trek (any version): "red alert. Shields up!"