Samsung Electronics has decided to build an advanced U.S. chip plant in Texas, a win for the Biden administration as it prioritizes supply chain security and greater semiconductor capacity on American soil. From a report: South Korea's largest company has decided on the city of Taylor, roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) from its giant manufacturing hub in Austin, a person familiar with the matter said. Samsung and Texas officials will announce the decision Tuesday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter, asking not to be identified because the news hasn't been made public. A Samsung representative said it hadn't made a final decision and declined further comment. Samsung is hoping to win more American clients and narrow the gap with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Its decision, which came months after de facto leader Jay Y. Lee was released from prison on parole, follows plans by TSMC and Intel Corp. to spend billions on cutting-edge facilities globally. The industry triumvirate is racing to meet a post-pandemic surge in demand that has stretched global capacity to the max, while anticipating more and more connected devices from cars to homes will require chips in future. The plant will cost Samsung $17 billion to set up, according to WSJ.

Recently Australian developer Geoffrey Huntley announced they'd created a 20-terabyte archive of all NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.

But one NFT startup company now says they tried downloading the archive — and discovered most of it was zeroes. Many of the articles are careful to point out "we have not verified the contents of the torrent," because of course they couldn't. A 20TB torrent would take several days to download, necessitating a pretty beefy internet connection and more disk space to store than most people have at their disposal. We at ClubNFT fired up a massive AWS instance with 40TB of EBS disk space to attempt to download this, with a cost estimate of $10k-20k over the next month, as we saw this torrent as potentially an easy way to pre-seed our NFT storage efforts — not many people have these resources to devote to a single news story.

Fortunately, we can save you the trouble of downloading the entire torrent — all you need is about 10GB. Download the first 10GB of the torrent, plus the last block, and you can fill in all the rest with zeroes. In other words, it's empty; and no, Geoff did not actually download all the NFTs. Ironically, Geoff has archived all of the media articles about this and linked them on TheNFTBay's site, presumably to preserve an immutable record of the spread and success of his campaign — kinda like an NFT...

We were hoping this was real... [I]t is actually rather complicated to correctly download and secure the media for even a single NFT, nevermind trying to do it for every NFT ever made. This is why we were initially skeptical of Geoff's statements. But even if he had actually downloaded all the NFT media and made it available as a torrent, this would not have solved the problem... a torrent containing all the NFTs does nothing to actually make those NFTs available via IPFS, which is the network they must be present on in order for the NFTs to be visible on marketplaces and galleries....

[A]nd this is a bit in the weeds: in order to reupload an NFT's media to IPFS, you need more than just the media itself. In order to restore a file to IPFS so it can continue to be located by the original link embedded in the NFT, you must know exactly the settings used when that file was originally uploaded, and potentially even the exact version of the IPFS software used for the upload.

For these reasons and more, ClubNFT is working hard on an actual solution to ensure that everybody's NFTs can be safely secured by the collectors themselves. We look forward to providing more educational resources on these and other topics, and welcome the attention that others, like Geoff, bring to these important issues.
Their article was shared by a Slashdot reader (who is one of ClubNFT's three founders). I'd wondered suspiciously if ClubNFT was a hoax, but if this PR Newswire press release is legit, they've raised $3 million in seed funding. (And that does include an investment from Drapen Dragon, co-founded by Tim Draper which shows up on CrunchBase). The International Business Times has also covered ClubNFT, identifying it as a startup whose mission statement is "to build the next generation of NFT solutions to help collectors discover, protect, and share digital assets." Co-founder and CEO Jason Bailey said these next-generation tools are in their "discovery" phase, and one of the first set of tools that is designed to provide a backup solution for NFTs will roll out early next year. Speaking to International Business Times, Bailey said, "We are looking at early 2022 to roll out the backup solution. But between now and then we should be feeding (1,500 beta testers) valuable information about their wallets." Bailey says while doing the beta testing, he realized that there are loopholes in the NFT storage systems and only 40% of the NFTs were actually pointing to the IPFS, while 40% of them were at risk — pointing to private servers.

Here is the problem explained: NFTs are basically a collection of metadata, that define the underlying property that is owned. Just like in the world of internet documents, links point to the art and any details about it that are being stored. But links can break, or die. Many NFTs use a system called InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS, which let you find a piece of content as long as it is hosted somewhere on the IPFS network. Unlike in the world of internet domains, you don't need to own the domain to really make sure the data is safe. Explaining the problem which the backup tool will address, Bailey said, "When you upload an image to IPFS, it creates a cryptographic hash. And if someone ever stops paying to store that image on IPFS, as long as you have the original image, you can always restore it. That's why we're giving people the right to download the image.... [W]e're going to start with this protection tool solution that will allow people to click a button and download all the assets associated with their NFT collection and their wallet in the exact format that they would need it in to restore it back up to IPFS, should it ever disappear. And we're not going to charge any money for that."

The idea, he said, is that collectors should not have to trust any company; rather they can use ClubNFT's tool, whenever it becomes available, to download the files locally... "One of the things that we're doing early around that discovery process, we're building out a tool that looks in your wallet and can see who you collect, and then go a level deeper and see who they collect," Bailey said. Bailey said that the rest of the tools will process after gathering lessons based on user feedback on the first set of solutions. He, however, seemed positive that the talks of the next set of tools will begin in the Spring of next year as the company has laid a "general roadmap."

GoJays shares a report from Yahoo Finance: Nvidia's (NVDA) stock closed out the trading day Thursday with gusto, following its impressive Q3 earnings report on Wednesday. Shares of the chip maker ended the day up 8.25%, after jumping more than 10% at the open. The stock's performance comes after the company reported quarterly revenue jumped 50% year-over-year on the back of strong performances by its data center and gaming businesses in Q3.

Nvidia's data center arm has been a boon for the firm, helping to power its stock price up 124% year-over-year at the close of trading on Wednesday. And the company's earnings report only buoyed investor confidence in the business, which saw record revenue of $2.94 billion in the prior quarter, a 55% year-over-year increase. Not to be out done, Nvidia's gaming business also brought in record revenue of $3.22 billion, a 42% year-over-year increase. Needham analysts said Nvidia could become the "first trillion dollar semiconductor company." As Bloomberg notes, $60 billion was added to the company's market capitalization on Thursday, which is near the $800 billion threshold. "Since early October, Nvidia has added nearly $300 billion in market value, about the equivalent of the market cap of Disney, Netflix or Pfizer."

Slashdot reader AltMachine writes: In October 2019, Google said its Sycamore processor was the first to achieve quantum supremacy by completing a task in three minutes and 20 seconds that would have taken the best classical supercomputer, IBM's Summit, 10,000 years. That claim — particularly how Google scientists arrived at the "10,000 years" conclusion — has been questioned by some researchers, but the counterclaim itself was not definitive.

Now though, in a paper to be submitted to a scientific journal for peer review, scientists at the Institute of Theoretical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said their algorithm on classical computers completed the simulation for the Sycamore quantum circuits [possibly paywalled; alternative source of the same article] "in about 15 hours using 512 graphics processing units (GPUs)" at a higher fidelity than Sycamore's. Further, the team said "if our simulation of the quantum supremacy circuits can be implemented in an upcoming exaflop supercomputer with high efficiency, in principle, the overall simulation time can be reduced to a few dozens of seconds, which is faster than Google's hardware experiments".

As China unveiled a photonic quantum computer which solved a Gaussian boson sampling problem in 200 seconds that would have taken 600 million years on classical computer, in December 2020, disproving Sycamore's claim would place China being the first country to achieve quantum supremacy.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, briefly hit a market cap of $2 trillion. The Verge reports: The tech behemoth's market cap is currently at a comfortable $1.98 trillion, but crept over the $2 trillion mark midday Monday, later closing out at $2,987.03 per share. Alphabet's market cap has just about doubled from $1 trillion since January 2020. [...] Alphabet nearly joined Apple and Microsoft as one of three US-based companies that are part of the exclusive $2 trillion club.

Peloton, the makers of an internet-connected exercise bike, saw their stock price drop 35% overnight on Thursday, reports CNBC. "At least four Wall Street investment firms downgraded the stock following Peloton's dismal fiscal first-quarter financial report... Peloton's stock has fallen 63% year to date."

The company had cut its annual revenue forecast — by $1 billion — and lowered its projections for both profit margins and paying subscribers. Bloomberg reports: At best, Peloton currently expects to have 3.45 million connected fitness subscriptions by the end of the fiscal year. It had previously called for 3.63 million. And gross profit margin will be 32%, compared with an earlier forecast of 34%. All that will add up to a loss of as much as $475 million, excluding some items....

On a more upbeat note, the company hinted that it plans to launch new products in the coming weeks and months. Peloton has been working on a rowing machine and a heart-rate monitor that attaches to a wearer's arm, Bloomberg News has reported.
The article suggests Peloton's business was hurt by the end of lockdowns, supply-chain constraints, and the cost of freight. But they also point out another factor. "Like several other companies, Peloton also blamed Apple Inc.'s ad-related privacy changes, which have made it more difficult to target shoppers based on their interests." Apple's new Ad Tracking Transparency feature (or "ATT") now first asks users to deny or allow apps to track their activity for the targeted advertising which had apparently been boosting Peloton's business.

And tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) tipped us off to a larger trend, since Gizmodo reports that Peloton "isn't the only company that has pointed accusingly at Apple lately." When reporting its third quarter earnings at the end of October, Facebook (now called Meta) — which depends on targeted ads for almost 98% of its revenue — said that ATT had decreased the accuracy of its ad targeting. The feature also increased "the cost of driving outcomes" for advertisers, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explained, and made it harder to measure those outcomes. "Overall, if it wasn't for Apple's iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth," Sandberg said.

On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that ATT had cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an estimated $9.85 billion in lost revenue in the second half of this year. That's an 87% increase year over year.

UnknowingFool writes: The civil trial of Ira Kleiman vs. Craig Wright started on Monday in Miami. The estate of David Kleiman is suing Craig Wright, the self declared inventor of bitcoin, for 50% ownership of 1.1 million bitcoins. The estate claims Kleiman was in a partnership with Wright to mine the coins but after Kleiman died in April 2013, Wright denied any partnership. At over $60,000 each per bitcoin, this case is currently worth $65 billion.

Craig Wright has previously claimed he is the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, which has been met with skepticism based on his inability to show any proof. In this case, Wright has made numerous dubious claims. After the case was filed in 2018, Wright claimed he did not have the keys to the coins but that they would be arriving in January 2020 through a "bonded courier." After January 2020, Wright provided keys to the estate for verification which the estate claims the bitcoins were fake. Expressing skepticism that the courier even existed, the estate asked for more information about the courier. Wright then claimed the identity of the courier and all communications were protected under attorney-client privilege as the courier was an attorney.

Yahoo has officially exited China, shutting down all of its services in the communist country as of Monday, Nov. 1. From a report: "In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet. We thank our users for their support," the rep added. Yahoo's exit from China coincided with the enactment of the country's Personal Information Protection Law, a privacy law that went into effect Nov. 1 that imposes new data-collection restrictions on tech companies, the Wall Street Journal reported.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo News: Brazil said it was raising its climate commitments on Monday at the start of the COP26 summit, including ending illegal deforestation by 2028, marking a change of tone after more than two years of soaring destruction under President Jair Bolsonaro. Speaking by live video link, Brazil's Environment minister, Joaquim Pereira Leite, said on Monday the country would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, compared with a previous commitment to reduce emissions by 43% over that period.

In a plan to meet that target presented by the Environment Ministry, Brazil moved forward by two years its existing commitment to end deforestation by 2030. That trajectory includes cutting deforestation 15% annually between 2022 and 2024, 40% in 2025 and 2026 and 50% in 2027. Deforestation hit a 12-year high in Brazil's Amazon rainforest in 2020, with preliminary government data showing a possible single-digit decline for 2021. [...] Pereira Leite also said Brazil would formalize a commitment to become "climate neutral" by 2050 during COP26, a promise first made by Bolsonaro in April. Brazil announced some ambitious environmental promises, but as CNN points out, the country has a dismal track record. "During Bolsonaro's first year in office, in 2019, deforestation in the Amazon rose 34%. The next year, it rose another 7%, according to INPE, the government agency that monitors deforestation in the country."

Some climate activists are "urging delegates at Cop26 not to trust the 'greenwashing' promises of Jair Bolsonaro's government," reports The Guardian. They say the world "should pay more attention to the destructive policies of the recent past than vague promises about the future, which they say are aimed at securing cash."

"Nowadays Brazil has an anti-environmental policy," says Suely Vaz, a former head of the environment regulator Ibama who now works for the Climate Obsevatory. "They are paralyzing everything. Deforestation and forest fires are out of control. This must change to ensure that climate money -- which is important for our country -- can be used in very detailed, specified way."

More than 63,000 pounds of trash — including a refrigerator — have now been removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, reports USA Today: A half-mile long trash-trapping system named "Jenny" was sent out in late July to collect waste, pulling out many items that came from humans like toothbrushes, VHS tapes, golf balls, shoes and fishing gear. Jenny made nine trash extractions over the 12-week cleanup phase, with one extraction netting nearly 20,000 pounds of debris by itself.

The mountain of recovered waste arrived in British Columbia, Canada, this month, with much of it set to be recycled. But this was not a one-off initiative. In fact, it was simply a testing phase. And the cleanup team is hoping it's only the start of more to come: more equipment, more extractions and cleaner oceans.

The catalyst behind the cleaning is The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit trying to rid the world's oceans of plastic. Boyan Slat, who founded the organization in 2013 at the age of 18, called the most recent testing phase a success, but said there's still much to be done. The 27-year-old from the Netherlands said the group can enter a new phase of cleanup after testing eased some scalability concerns and proved that the system could accomplish what it was designed to do: collect debris... It hopes to deploy enough cleaning systems to reduce the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 50% every five years and to initiate a 90% reduction in floating ocean plastic by 2040... While Jenny tackles the garbage patch, The Ocean Cleanup will work on a larger, full-scale cleaning system set to be released in summer 2022 that expects to be the blueprint for creating a fleet of systems.

Slat projects they will need 10 full-scale systems to clean the patch at a rate of just under 20,000 tons per year, which would put the group on par to reach its goal of reducing the mass by 50% in five years.
The garbage patch now has its own page on Wikipedia, which points out that some of the plastic in the patch is over 50 years old. "The patch is believed to have increased '10-fold each decade' since 1945. Estimated to be double the size of Texas, the area contains more than 3 million tons of plastic." So it's even more amazing that "It's within the realm of possibility for the first time since the invention of plastic that we can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," Slat tells USA Today.

The group also says that 95% of the plastic it collects can be recycled. And they've already begun turning that plastic into products like sunglasses to be sold on its website.

The New York Times describes a six-year grass roots effort to fund historic preservation and natural resource conservation in Montana — and how it collided with Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman who had never before been involved in politics, and her very influential Facebook group: Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.

Ms. Grulkowski set about blowing up that effort with everything she had.

She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.

None of this was true.

Yet it soon became accepted as truth by enough people to persuade Montana's leading Republican figures and conservative organizations, including the farm bureau, Gov. Greg Gianforte and Senator Steve Daines, to oppose the proposal and enact a state law forbidding the federal government to create any heritage area in Montana.

It is a ban that the state has no authority to enforce.
Some comments on the episode (via the New York Times):

• Ellen Sievert, retired historic preservation officer for Cascade County:
  "We've run into the uneducable. I don't know how we get through that."

• Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls:
  "Misinformation is the new playbook. You don't like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality." (In fact, it's now become an issue in the mayor's race.)

The episode was especially distressing for Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the town's local newspaper until being laid off in 2016 — and is also vice chairman of the proposed heritage area's board. The Times reports that "In the paper's place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski."

And meanwhile, "Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist." [There are 55 of them, in 34 different states.]

Finally the Times interviewed Ed Bandel, who'd led the Montana Farm Bureau's opposition to the Montana heritage area. When asked for his supporting evidence, "Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski."

And when asked about the argument that it in fact posed no threat to property rights, Bandel remained unconvinced. "They say, 'Don't worry, we're going to do it right. Don't worry, we'll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn't he...?"

A contract with a tech giant can put a startup on the map with venture capitalists and the market at large. That's what happened for Netskope, a cloud-based data security provider. Founded in 2012, the company was able to quickly scale up and secure multiple rounds of funding -- in part because it had a top-tier customer right out of the gate: Netflix. From a report: There was just one catch to landing that deal: It had to hire the streaming company's vice president of IT operations, Michael Kail, as a consultant and an advisor, and pay him with fees and stock options. Netskope (not to be confused with the now-defunct Netscape) wasn't the only startup confronted with that proposition. At least nine firms that worked for Netflix entered into similar arrangements, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Other companies drawn into Kail's web included software, cloud-storage and analytics companies Docurated, Numerify, NetEnrich, Platfora, VistaraIT, ElasticBox, Maginatics and Sumo Logic. The shady-sounding plot was described by the government during a criminal trial earlier this year in San Jose federal court. Kail was found guilty of more than two dozen fraud and money laundering counts. At his sentencing Oct. 19, prosecutors will ask that he get a stiff punishment of seven years in prison as well as be ordered to pay fines, restitution, and forfeit a $3.3 million home in Los Gatos, California.

The former Netflix VP, who also briefly served as chief information officer at Yahoo, "leveraged his status as a leader of the IT community in Silicon Valley to subvert the trust of Netflix and others to profit at their expense," prosecutors said in a recent court filing. They added that the similar schemes are "almost certainly" common among high-level tech executives, but that in no way excuses the behavior. The startups that paid to play, and possibly many others, believed this was how Netflix did business." A disturbing element of this narrative is the unequal playing field startups are on when they negotiate with big companies. As the government suggested, the crimes also seem relatively easy for an influential executive to carry out -- especially since the founders of fledgling firms have little if any incentive to blow the whistle, and may feel they have no choice but to go along with a pay-to-play scheme. In his own memorandum to the court, requesting that he be sentenced to a year of house arrest, Kail, 49, described himself as a "global power leader, top dev ops influencer and a thought leader." He appeared to minimize the impact of the crimes, describing them as "regrettable flaws in communication and transparency," and asserting that his undisclosed business relationships were more helpful than harmful to all involved. Yet many startup founders already have ample complaints about overly-generous advisor compensation and messy cap tables, even without the added corporate bribery wrinkle.

Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?

"China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August," reports Reuters, "showing a capability that caught U.S. intelligence by surprise, the Financial Times reported, citing five unnamed sources."

AFP explains what's uniquely threatening about hypersonic missiles: Ballistic missiles fly high into space in an arc to reach their target, while a hypersonic flies on a trajectory low in the atmosphere, potentially reaching a target more quickly. Crucially, a hypersonic missile is maneuverable (like the much slower, often subsonic cruise missile), making it harder to track and defend against. While countries like the United States have developed systems designed to defend against cruise and ballistic missiles, the ability to track and take down a hypersonic missile remains a question.
Business Insider highlights this assessment from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the US/Canada organization providing North America's aerospace warnings: In August, General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD, said that China's advanced hypersonic capability would "provide significant challenges to my Norad capability to provide threat warning and attack assessment," the Financial Times said... Sources also told the paper that the Chinese weapon could theoretically fly over the South Pole, another cause for concern for the US military, whose missile systems focus on the northern polar route.
Bloomberg reports that the missile missed its target (by over 32 kilometers — about 20 miles), "and the test doesn't necessarily mean China will deploy such a weapon, the Financial Times said..."

They also point out that "Along with China, the United States, Russia and at least five other countries are working on hypersonic technology." (Reuters adds that "last month North Korea said it had test-fired a newly-developed hypersonic missile.")

The Los Angeles Times reports that homemade (usually 3D-printed) "ghost guns" have contributed to more than 100 violent crimes this year, according to a report released Friday by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)." Detectives have linked the untraceable weapons to 24 killings, eight attempted homicides and dozens of assaults and armed robberies since January, according to the report.

And police expect the problem to get worse, the report said. During the first half of this year, the department confiscated 863 ghost guns, a 400% increase over the 217 it seized during the same period last year, according to the report. That sharp jump suggests the number of ghost guns on the streets and such seizures "will continue to grow exponentially," the authors of the report wrote.

"Ghost guns are an epidemic not only in Los Angeles but nationwide," the department said...

Because they are not made by licensed manufacturers, they lack serial numbers, making them impossible to track. Felons who are banned from possessing firearms because of previous offenses increasingly are turning to ghost guns, LAPD officials have said. The LAPD's analysis was compiled in response to a City Council motion, introduced by Councilmen Paul Koretz and Paul Krekorian, that calls for a new city ordinance banning the possession, sale, purchase, receipt or transportation of such weapons or the "non-serialized, unfinished frames and unfinished receivers" that are used to make them.

The LAPD said it is "strongly in support" of the proposed ordinance. "Ghost guns are real, they work, and they kill," the agency said in the report.

Americans are taking notice of extreme weather events, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. From a report: Two-thirds of Americans say extreme weather events in the U.S. have been occurring more frequently than in the past, while only 28% said they've been taking place about as often, and just 4% perceiving a dropoff in frequency. So far in 2021, the U.S. has seen a record 18 billion dollar extreme weather events. When it comes to extreme weather events in their backyards, 46% of U.S. adults say the area where they live has had an extreme weather event over the past year. The area with the greatest number of people reporting an extreme weather event was the South Central Census Division. It includes Louisiana, a state hit hard by Hurricane Ida and heavy rainfall events.

Brazil's Federal Deputy Aureo Ribeiro has revealed that Brazilians could soon be able to buy houses, cars and even McDonald's with Bitcoin. From a report: The South American nation is preparing to vote on a cryptocurrency regulation bill which is expected to be presented to the Plenary of the Chamber of Deputies within the next few days. "We want to separate the wheat from the chaff, create regulations so that you can trade, know where you're buying and know who you're dealing with," Ribeiro said.

"With this asset you will be able to buy a house, a car, go to McDonald's to buy a hamburger -- it will be a currency in the country as it happened in other countries." Bill 2.303/15, which calls for the regulation of virtual currencies, was approved for presentation last week. If it gets the thumbs up from the Chamber of Deputies this week, then Brazil looks set to follow El Salvador's example and make Bitcoin legal tender. Further reading: In Brazil, Bitcoin Acceptance Comes With More Regulation.

"New Zealand's central bank is exploring the possibility of issuing a digital currency, saying the benefits it would bring include its potential use as a monetary policy tool," reports Bloomberg. The central bank cites "the declining use, acceptance and availability of cash in New Zealand, and emerging innovations in private money, namely stablecoins." While developing a central bank digital currency would require long lead times given the complexities and involve a multi-stage approach, the Royal Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) said it broadly favors the idea. A digital currency should support the New Zealand dollar "as our single unit of account" and be exchanged 1-for-1 with cash, it said, adding "cash is here to stay for as long as some of us need it."

The RBNZ said a digital currency would support the value anchor role of central bank money by:

- Providing individuals and businesses with the option of converting privately issued money into a digital form of central bank money, ensuring the long-term convertibility of private money into central bank money

- Improving the technological form of central bank money to ensure it remains relevant in a digital future

- Providing an additional monetary policy tool by it being either issued to provide monetary stimulus, or interest bearing....

Other central banks around the world, including the European Central Bank, are also exploring the possibility of issuing a digital currency.

A New York Times science/global health reporter reminds us that "Newer variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious, infecting far more people than the original virus."

But then they add that "Two new studies offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more efficiently through air." Most researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most harmful. The new studies don't fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing in ways that make it more formidable.

"This is not an Armageddon scenario," said Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one of the new studies. "It is like a modification of the virus to more efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of expected, and we now see it happening in real time." Dr. Munster's team showed that small aerosols traveled much longer distances than larger droplets and the Alpha variant was much more likely to cause new infections via aerosol transmission. The second study found that people infected with Alpha exhaled about 43 times more virus into tiny aerosols than those infected with older variants.

The studies compared the Alpha variant with the original virus or other older variants. But the results may also explain why the Delta variant is so contagious — and why it displaced all other versions of the virus...

At least in some crowded spaces, people may want to consider switching to more protective masks, said Don Milton, an aerosol expert at the University of Maryland who led the research. "Given that it seems to be evolving towards generating aerosols better, then we need better containment and better personal protection," Dr. Milton said of the virus. "We are recommending people move to tighter-fitting masks."

In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that "new evidence undermines the COVID lab-leak theory — but the press keeps pushing it." A paper posted online [in September] chiefly by researchers at France's Institut Pasteur and under consideration for publication in a Nature journal...reports that three viruses were found in bats living in caves in northern Laos with features very similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. As Nature reported, those viruses are "more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses."

Another paper, posted in late August by researchers from the Wuhan lab, reports on viruses found in rats also with features similar to those that make SARS-CoV-2 infectious in humans.

Two other papers published on the discussion forum virological.org present evidence that the virus jumped from animals to humans at more than one animal market in Wuhan, not just the Huanan seafood market. Given that these so-called wet markets have long been suspected as transmission points of viruses from animals to humans because they sell potentially infected animals, that makes the laboratory origin vastly less likely, according to a co-author of one of the papers. "That a laboratory leak would find its way to the very place where you would expect to find a zoonotic transmission is quite unlikely," Joel Wertheim, an associate professor at UC San Diego's medical school, told me. "To have it find its way to multiple markets, the exact place where you would expect to see the introduction, is unbelievably unlikely."

As virologist Robert F. Garry of Tulane, one of Wertheim's co-authors, told Nature, the finding is "a dagger into the heart" of the lab-leak hypothesis.