Science Lounge

[dcf2]

China leads research in 90% of crucial technologies — a dramatic shift this century

The United States tops the remaining areas in an assessment of 74 technologies.

www.nature.com

China is leading research in nearly 90% of the crucial technologies that “significantly enhance, or pose risks to, a country’s national interests”, according to a technology tracker run by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) — an independent think-tank.

The ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker evaluated research on 74 current and emerging technologies this year, up from the 64 technologies it analyzed last year. China is ranked number one for research on 66 of the technologies, including nuclear energy, synthetic biology, small satellites, while the United States topped the remaining 8, including quantum computing and geoengineering.

The results reflect a drastic reversal. At the beginning of this century, the United States led more than 90% of the assessed technologies, whereas China led less than 5% of them

 

[dcf2]

Recently in Science, looking at perhaps the most fundamental Chicken or Egg question. RNA-based replication at the origin of life.

QT45 - A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand.

Abstract​

The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural complexity impede self-replication and preclude their spontaneous emergence. Here we describe QT45: a 45-nucleotide polymerase ribozyme, discovered from random sequence pools, that catalyzes general RNA-templated RNA synthesis using trinucleotide triphosphate (triplet) substrates in mildly alkaline eutectic ice. QT45 can synthesize both its complementary strand using a random triplet pool at 94.1% per-nucleotide fidelity, and a copy of itself using defined substrates, both with yields of ~0.2% in 72 days. The discovery of polymerase activity in a small RNA motif suggests that polymerase ribozymes are more abundant in RNA sequence space than previously thought.

 

[nycfan]

“… Compared to the sun, its luminosity is about 300,000 times greater and its diameter about 1,500 times greater.

If it were in the place of the sun, its surface would extend to a distance between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, our solar system's fifth and sixth planets. Traveling at the speed of light would take six hours to circumnavigate the star's surface.

WOH G64, around 10 million years old, appears to be near the end of its lifespan. In contrast, the sun is about 4.5 billion years old and has an estimated 5 billion more years left. WOH G64 is located about 160,000 light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km)….”

A supergiant star that is evolving amazingly rapidly — it changed from red supergiant to yellow hypergiant in a little over a decade, which seems nuts based on what scientists have previously observed.

 

[an0maly]

Review and commentary regarding one of the most important recent books on American/Trump Cult/Republican denial and sabotage of science:

Science under Siege, Michael Mann and Peter Hotez (Review) - 3 Quarks Daily

by Paul BratermanStudy this book if you are at all interested in the threats to the scientific and rational underpinnings of our culture, in the US and to

3quarksdaily.com

Some long excerpts of the article:

Some examples of what would have seen impossible a mere decade ago. Vaccine refusal based on ignorance and ideology is estimated to have caused at least 230,000 unnecessary Covid-related deaths in the US. (For comparison, the total US military death toll in all foreign wars since World War II, including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and both Gulf Wars, was slightly less than 90,000). The US Department of Energy secretly commissioned a report from the denialist fringe of climate science (two of whose members I have written about earlier), and then attempted to conceal their working documents. As I write, the future shape and funding of agencies such as NOAA, NSF, and NASA is in doubt. And two days after the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz, the US Interior Department announced that it was paying almost $1 billion to the French company, TotalEnergies, to not proceed with planned wind and solar generation. All this in the nation that has been (had been?) the world’s leader in science for more than 80 years.

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To summarize the main findings; the driver for climate change denial is the fossil fuel industry, backed up by the power of petrostates and billionaires. The forces behind vaccine denial are less obvious, but spring from opposition to the pandemic lockdowns, which were bad for business. This then generalized to a broader attack, firstly on government regulation, such as vaccine requirements, and hence on the scientific underpinning of these policies. All of this fits in well with the American ideology of Individual Enterprise, mistrust of government, resentment of experts, and the search for scapegoats.

The attack on science is made possible by a number of factors. First among these is the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth, both corporate (as with the fossil fuel industries) and individual. This accumulation has been made possible by taxation and subsidy policies. The use of money to influence politics gives an extremely high return on investment, and the US Supreme Court has greatly facilitated such expenditure, by its 2010 ruling in Citizens United that corporations had the same First Amendment free speech rights as individuals. The authors also mention Reagan’s 1987 abolition of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcast media to give evenhanded treatment of controversial topics, and the fact that in any case this doctrine would not have applied to social media, which have overtaken the legacy media in the last two decades. To this I would add the adoption of primary elections. This was intended to further democracy by weakening the power of the political party establishments. However, the presumably unintended consequence was to make all elected officials dependent on their own funding sources, and vulnerable to the threat of being “primaried” by billionaires threatened by their policies.

In recent years, there has been a further development, namely the takeover by extremely wealthy individuals of the means of communication. The Murdochs’ News Corporation and its successors, which include Fox News, have long had enormous influence in the UK press and in US television. Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest individuals, bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $350 million, and in 2024 effectively destroyed the paper in order to further the candidacy and interests of Donald Trump, while Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, bought Twitter (which he renamed X) in 2022, for a price of $44 billion, and allowed thoroughly discredited accounts to resume. We now know that the purchase was financed by a range of associates, including a Saudi Arabian Crown Prince, and Larry Ellison, whose other media interests are mentioned below, as well as Fidelity Investments, which has lost a lot of money as a result, and really should have known better. Another recent development is the use of bots to generate multiple messages that appear to come from different individuals. By 2020, an estimated 15% of accounts on Twitter were actually run by bots, and we can assume that this proportion will have greatly increased since then. Cryptocurrency obscures such funding, as does the use of “dark money.” This is money whose ultimate source is effectively concealed through networks, often involving partisan so-called educational charities whose donors can claim tax relief. Also, since at least 2016, Russia has been running troll farms to influence social media.

The book classifies those at work undermining science into five categories; plutocrats, petrostates, propagandists, professionals, and the press. Wealth is more unevenly distributed in the US than for many decades, with 728 billionaires holding between them as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. I would add that people who become billionaires are generally extremely successful at controlling events, and furthering their own interests. As the authors point out, plutocrats are sometimes major benefactors, with Pete’s own work vaccines having benefited from the legacy of John D Rockefeller. More to the point here is what happened during the Covid pandemic. During lockdowns, demand for gasoline falls, reducing the income of fuel companies such as Koch Industries, which therefore campaigned against lockdown and in favor of the foredoomed search for herd immunity (more on herd immunity below). A handful of Texas oil billionaires is behind the organization Texans for Vaccine Choice, which does not just defend conscientious objection to vaccine requirements, but promotes the conspiracy theorist myth that vaccines cause autism. Vaccine refusal was to lead to at least 40,000 unnecessary deaths in Texas.
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Terrifyingly, but too late for inclusion in this book, in June 2025 Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the Center for Disease Control Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing them with eight new advisers more to his liking, including vaccine opponents and conspiracy theorists {the functioning of this committee is now in litigation, because of judicial concern about its fitness for purpose).

It gets worse. In August 2025 the White House issued an executive order, subordinating all federal grants to political control, offering an absurd array of reasons including the long refuted allegation that the Wuhan research laboratory was the source of Covid, as well as the factually incorrect assertion that this laboratory had received US federal funding. And as I was writing this paragraph I learnt that the US Center for Disease Control has paused testing for rabies and monkeypox, because of staff reductions.