chrisl

Lamarck was the "original", and Lysenko was the Soviet proponent of it. ( @Offshoot and @G.I. Joebeat me to it but I didn't read far enough first.)

CRISPR

Like a good horror movie. You know it's coming, but if the writing and direction are good, it still catches you by surprise.

This may be one of the scariest things you’ll ever read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024815118

Antibiotic resistance to extremely high antibiotic levels in 11 days:

I think it’s time for a discussion of UGVs with tripod mounted Brens on them.

Sure, it takes more debris to be a problem, but that doesn't mean someone might not want to remove someone else's satellite from a higher orbit, or at least render it useless in some way. GPS satellites are not in GEO - that's not a very good orbit if you want to get high precision globally. They're in 55 degree orbits at about 10,000 km. GEO tends to have things like regional weather sats and big comm relays. ISR stuff tends to be in high inclination LEO, sometimes highly elliptical.

Just about everybody with substantial space access has done various levels & types of ASAT test - you don't have to break satellites into little pieces to render them inoperable. And cost-to-orbit is getting low enough that for some players it's very practical to contest earth orbit (not really restricted to LEO).

double post

That's exactly what Russia tried in Nov 2021. They took out a fairly large satellite in a quite messy way. It was before I was paying close attention to Russian space assets, and it confused a lot of people at the time because it would also threaten Russian satellites. But after Feb 24 when I started looking into Russian space based ISR, they really had nothing substantial to lose and had the potential to create blind spots in US/NATO ISR by "accidentally" taking out western sats.

The list of Ukrainian equipment losses is still up, with links to the Russian losses that go to the 404 page. I haven't been checking the losses for a while - when did he split off the RU and UK losses onto separate pages? The Russian list maybe got too long and his CMS doesn't support that much on a single page or something, so he's got to do some editing/splitting.

Forcing RU to pick alternate targets is a good thing. Kyiv is a very large urban area, so they don't need particularly good accuracy to *something* if the missiles get through. Possibly the only other large urban area in range is Kharkiv, and after that, things get smaller or less dense, or both fairly quickly. If RU has terrible accuracy (and so far their performance suggests that they do), then switching to other targets means they have a smaller chance of hitting something other than dirt, even if the missiles do get through.

I suspect it's an easier problem in many ways at sea. At least the outer picket of defense doesn't have the complication of all sorts of buildings and terrain as it approaches horizon pointing. You have to worry about friendly ships, but there will be fewer of them than stuff you have to worry about in an urban environment and you can always know where they all are.

I think Kazakhstan's "thanks, but we're good" when invited to participate in the SMO was the start of the Russian soft-collapse. Belarus adding to that would be a major enhancement, though.

I meant to comment on that yesterday in the context of Steve's post about camouflage. With the cheap drones, they don't even necessarily need fancy thermal optics, just optics that reach a little outside the visible range. Most commercial image sensors are sensitive out to to the near IR, a little outside the human visible range, and have a filter to keep from recording that part. Sensors without the filter can potentially pick up enough to notice differences in properties of things a little beyond the visible, so even if it looks green (or like trash) visually, some things can stand out as being different enough from the background environment to investigate closer.

Of course they can intercept everything. It's just that sometimes they're intercepting it on the ground using their whole AD system or other random equipment or facilities. What MoD claims is true, but incomplete.

An open window in his future to fall out of while having a heart attack?

I just started - it's got footage of the surrender to the drone and the rest is an interview with one of the Ukrainians involved. It's in Russian, but autosubtitle->autotranslate is sufficient to get the gist of what they're saying.

Only if you're not digging in additionally inside them. They're big enough that they provide cover for moving among positions, but you'd still want to dig in positions, and those positions would be elevated relative to surrounding terrain.

Something I've wondered about a bit is what those berm-enclosed spaces are for in the Ukrainian farm fields, like in the the picture that I left in the quote. There was one near the battle of of the T, too. They don't look like they're used as a divider between fields - the tree strips seem to serve that function. They look a bit like they could be seasonal reservoirs, but they don't have obvious inlets and outlets, or indications that they have variable water levels. They do break up lines of sight and make somewhat natural defensive positions in the open spaces. So does anybody know what they are/what they're called?

It was also still well inside Russia so they may have thought it was safe to fly at altitude.

Don't they have rules about going outside the fuel/ammo dump to smoke? That big a fire for that long is probably going to mean that bridge is toast.

With that map, I'd be seriously tempted to make a really hard drive toward Crimea from Kherson, and maybe Zaporizhzhia at the same time, wait to see if RU sends reinforcements through Crimea, then take out both rail lanes and one road lane of the Kerch bridge. Then pause that attack once the outside lines are long and thin and start poking at wherever the Crimea reinforcements came from. The time to take out the Kerch bridge is right as they're about to wrap it up, while the repair equipment is still vulnerable, too.

It's hard to render airfields inoperable - all you need is a long flattish spot, and to do that all you need is a bulldozer or a bunch of conscripts with shovels and rakes. For all the things the RA does wrong, one thing they've historically done well is make aircraft that aren't very picky about runway quality. If you're bombing an airfield, you need to either hit the aircraft directly (or indirectly, as we saw in the airfield bombing that took a while to decide what actually happened on the ground), or hit the infrastructure that makes it more valuable than a bare flat spot: fuel storage tanks, fuel trucks, ammo dumps. IIRC, in the Syrian cruise missile attack, they were mostly targeting aircraft directly through hangar roofs or doors.

The room to room version will already have to be autonomous to deal with terrible RF reception. Even if there aren't people working on this, there are people working on this, because there are peaceful applications for it other than blowing up Russians.