Tootfinder

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution plans to cut around 50 positions, or ~15% of its workforce, with about half of them in the newsroom, as it seeks to cut costs (J. Scott Trubey/Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
https://www.ajc.com/business/2026/02/the-a

AJC is eliminating news and operations jobs, shifting resources to growth
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said Tuesday it will lay off staffers in the newsroom and other segments of the business.

"New Eco-Friendly Tech Eliminates ‘Forever Chemicals’ With Record-Breaking Speed–And it’s Reusable"
#PFAS #ForeverChemicals

New Eco-Friendly Tech Eliminates ‘Forever Chemicals’ With Record-Breaking Speed–And it’s Reusable
Researchers invented an eco-friendly way to capture—and destroy—toxic forever chemicals in water (PFAS) 1,000x better than current methods.

🤯 Specific brain signals rapidly eliminate body fat in mice
#fat

Specific brain signals rapidly eliminate body fat in mice
Researchers at WashU Medicine have identified a potent pathway that begins in the brain and leads to loss of all body fat without reducing food intake. The study is reported in Nature Metabolism.

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

I have long felt that liberal/progressive messaging often tended towards not merely hyperbole, but hyperbole that carried far more than the intended message.
Consider the phrase "Defund the police". That carries a clear message that implies near elimination of police based law enforcement. Few of us want that. Police are an important element of an ordered society.
But pretty much all of us see that police are doing too much and that it is better to restructure police…

Summary:
A colossal ancient impact may have reshaped the Moon far more deeply than scientists once realized.
By analyzing rare lunar rocks brought back by China’s Chang’e-6 mission from the Moon’s largest crater,
researchers found unusual chemical fingerprints pointing to extreme heat and material loss caused by a giant impact.
The collision likely stripped away volatile elements,
reshaped volcanic activity,
and left a lasting chemical signature deep belo…

Chang’e-6 lunar samples reveal a giant impact reshaped the Moon’s interior
A colossal ancient impact may have reshaped the Moon far more deeply than scientists once realized. By analyzing rare lunar rocks brought back by China’s Chang’e-6 mission from the Moon’s largest crater, researchers found unusual chemical fingerprints pointing to extreme heat and material loss caused by a giant impact. The collision likely stripped away volatile elements, reshaped volcanic activity, and left a lasting chemical signature deep below the surface.

I got the demo of this game but I am too moronic to pass the very first level.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2707490/Tower_Factory/

Tower Factory on Steam
Tower Factory is a tower defense and automation game with roguelite elements. Optimize resource production using conveyor systems while defending against monster waves. Can you find and destroy the enemy tower before it's too late?

How To Control Your #Dreams At Night: 3 Secrets From Research
- What are lucid dreams
- How to induce them (for example, waking up two hours earlier than usual and then coming back to sleep)
- How to control them (for instance, using your voice to give instructions to the dream elements)
Keep dreaming!
Source:

How To Control Your Dreams At Night: 3 Secrets From Research - Barking Up The Wrong Tree
Wouldn't it be great to be able to control your dreams at night? Well, you can. Scientifically. Here's how...

Proton Energy Dependence of Radiation Induced Low Gain Avalanche Detector Degradation
Veronika Kraus, Marcos Fernandez Garcia, Luca Menzio, Michael Moll
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01800 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01800 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.01800
arXiv:2602.01800v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs) are key components for precise timing measurements in high-energy physics experiments, including the High Luminosity upgrades of the current LHC detectors. Their performance is, however, limited by radiation induced degradation of the gain layer, primarily driven by acceptor removal. This study presents a systematic comparison of how the degradation evolves with different incident proton energies, using LGADs from Hamamatsu Photonics (HPK) and The Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona (IMB-CNM) irradiated with 18 MeV, 24 MeV, 400 MeV and 23 GeV protons and fluences up to 2.5x10^15 p/cm2. Electrical characterization is used to extract the acceptor removal coefficients for different proton energies, whereas IR TCT measurements offer complementary insight into the gain evolution in LGADs after irradiation. Across all devices, lower energy protons induce stronger gain layer degradation, confirming expectations. However, 400 MeV protons consistently appear less damaging than both lower and higher energy protons, an unexpected deviation from a monotonic energy trend. Conversion of proton fluences to 1 MeV neutron-equivalent fluences reduces but does not eliminate these differences, indicating that the standard Non-Ionizing Energy Loss (NIEL) scaling does not fully account for the underlying defect formation mechanisms at different energies and requires revision when considering irradiation fields that contain a broader spectrum of particle types and energies.
toXiv_bot_toot

🔬 Scientists demonstrate low-cost, high-quality lenses for super-resolution microscopy
#microscopy

Scientists demonstrate low-cost, high-quality lenses for super-resolution microscopy
Researchers have shown that consumer-grade 3D printers and low-cost materials can be used to produce multi-element optical components that enable super-resolution imaging, with each lens costing less than $1 to produce. The new fabrication approach is poised to broaden access to fully customizable optical parts and could enable completely new types of imaging tools.