FAA Greenlights Laser Sentry Guns To Combat Attack Drones In U.S. Airspace

The Federal Aviation Administration has given the green light for the U.S. military to deploy high-energy counter-drone laser weapons in U.S. airspace, adding a new, low-cost layer of protection against the rising threat from kamikaze drones. The decision follows a two-month interagency standoff over whether the systems posed a risk to general aviation and commercial aircraft, as well as incidents in Texas earlier this year that briefly led to an airspace closure.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford was quoted by The New York Times as saying the new laser weapon systems had completed a safety assessment that "determined that these systems do not present an increased risk to the flying public."

The decision paves the way for broader use of these 20- to 35+-kilowatt-class laser weapon systems along the southern border to combat drug cartel drones and one-way attack drones. These threats have caused alarm at the highest levels in Washington, especially following the use of drones by Iran in the Gulf area to target data centers, civilian infrastructure, and U.S. military bases.

The NYTimes provided more color on the FAA's decision:

The statement did not address whether the agency had determined that the high-energy lasers posed no physical risk to aircraft, or whether the safety determination was based on how the lasers were being deployed. But the F.A.A. determined that the risk would be minimal even if the laser came into contact with an airplane, according to an agency official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The controversy surrounding these laser weapons stems from the February 10 incident when the FAA briefly closed airspace over El Paso after Border Patrol fired the weapon at an object that turned out to be a metallic balloon. With the interagency standoff over, the U.S. military has considered deploying these lasers in Washington, D.C., to combat low-cost, one-way attack drones.

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/faa-greenlights-laser-sentry-guns-combat-attack-drones-us-airspace

🇺🇸🇺🇦 Russia may launch another massive strike on Kyiv by September 20th - U.S. intelligence warned Ukraine.

However, last night's attack on the Ukrainian capital was not the one previously warned about.

According to U.S. intelligence, Russia may be trying to deplete Ukraine's air defense reserves before a more devastating strike.

Apparently another leader at the function had the same thing happen to them, leading to speculation it might have been a Havana Syndrome device. That might explain why Xi’s first move was not to seek medical treatment, but rather to get home to controlled territory, and put the Army on alert. Shades of Biden in Las Vegas aborting the hospital run to board Air Force One and flee to a bunker in DC: https://x.com/AvelinoReAu/status/2100340506504974593

Cynthia's latest essay has dropped today featuring a series of major revelations about the parasitic growth of a shadow state within China, untold battles behind the scenes before during and after Tiananmen Square and the hives of Soros operatives that were purged after 1989
https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-beijing-technocrats

🧬 Life Uses 4 DNA Letters. Scientists Just Made 8 Work.

Every known organism on Earth writes its genetic instructions using the same four DNA letters: A, T, C and G.

Scientists have now shown that one of biology’s most fundamental molecular machines can read an alphabet containing eight.

Researchers tested E. coli RNA polymerase — the enzyme that reads DNA and turns its information into RNA — with synthetic DNA containing four additional chemical letters known as P, Z, B and S. Remarkably, the enzyme successfully recognized and transcribed the artificial base pairs using much of the same molecular machinery it employs for natural DNA.

Using cryo-electron microscopy at resolutions down to about 2.4 ångströms, the team could watch how the synthetic letters fit inside the polymerase. The artificial pairs adopted almost the same geometry as ordinary Watson–Crick DNA pairs, allowing the enzyme’s catalytic machinery to close around them and continue transcription. Researchers also engineered a modified version of one synthetic letter to reduce copying errors.

The implications are potentially enormous. A larger genetic alphabet could eventually produce RNA molecules with chemical capabilities unavailable to natural biology and might help scientists design new diagnostics, drugs and engineered biological systems. Expanded genetic alphabets have already been used experimentally to create molecules that recognize cancer cells.

But there is an important boundary: scientists have not created an eight-letter living organism here. The experiment demonstrates transcription by bacterial RNA polymerase; reliably replicating a full eight-letter genome and translating that expanded information into proteins inside living cells remain much harder problems.

For four billion years, life on Earth has been writing with four letters.

Apparently, biology’s machinery can read a bigger alphabet than evolution ever gave it.

#Genetics #DNA #SyntheticBiology #Biotechnology #RNA #Science

Primary paper — Nature Communications⁠

"Notice how the observed primordial abundances—the dashed rectangles–contain the predicted and observed data.

"Unfortunately, this is not so for lithium-7. The observed Li/H relative abundance is about 1-2 x 10^-10, but what is predicted is 5 x 10^-10 — that is, lithium appears to be about three to four times less than predicted by the BBN model. This inconsistency is called the ‘cosmological lithium problem’."

https://quantumworld.substack.com/p/the-big-bangs-smoking-gun-the-birth?r=lp6h7&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Diesel Prices Are Surging, But a Bigger Fertilizer Crisis Could Be Right Behind It:

Sulfur prices have surged more than fivefold, threatening phosphate fertilizer production. With global supply tightening, farmers could face higher prices, or even fertilizer shortages, heading into the months ahead.

“Let’s just talk numbers for one second,” Pratt says. “Typically, the global phosphate fertilizer market every year is 75 million tons. That’s how much phosphate fertilizer global farmers consume every year. Our best estimates are that producers around the world will probably make about 45 million tons this year, because they either can’t get or can’t afford sulfur.

"There is a looming crisis out there, and it’s not too far removed, it becomes a food crisis.”

“They could be looking at higher fertilizer prices, or they could be not able to find it at all,” Pratt says. “If we’re not able to produce phosphate fertilizers here, and our big competitors in other parts of the world are either slowed down or not producing, that’s a pretty dire situation.”

And the tension in the Strait of Hormuz and the Black Sea doesn’t seem to be easing anytime soon , meaning the sulfur squeeze could get worse before it gets better.

https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/crop-production/diesel-prices-are-surging-bigger-fertilizer-crisis-could-be-right-behi

"The fact of the matter is that neither evolution by natural selection nor by genetic drift can possibly account for the origin of ANY mammalian species, and quite possibly any species of any kind. The math and the science are both conclusively settled. But the fact that we now know how it didn’t happen tells us nothing about how it did happen."
https://voxday.net/#:~:text=The%20fact%20of,it%20did%20happen.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇮🇱 Democrats block Trump's $2,800,000,000 weapons transfer to Israel

The package included 40,000 one-ton bombs.

@Megatron_ron

For a country to actively seek EU membership, it has to be broke and desperate. It doesn't work in any other scenario

And this one was specifically about restarting negotiations. So the majority of Icelanders are against even the idea of talking to Brussels about that. A far cry from the gopniks from Kharkov, who laid their necks on the altar of "joining the EU one day"

BREAKING: Reported shortages and outages of diesel fuel in the US states of California, Florida and Texas

@Captain_America_News

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 Exxon Mobil has shut down one of the largest diesel refineries in the US,

The refinery produces ~11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel per day,

The company announces that the reason is an outage issues.

@Captain_America_News