based pesto on pancakes 🧀

[Josip @l3d1c]

🇭🇷 Croatia got eliminated from the World Cup by a closed-source sensor.

FIFA says the Kinexon chip in the Trionda "proved" Matanović touched the ball. Absolute disgrace. What actually happened: they ran signal processing over 500Hz IMU data from a 14-gram sensor and isolated a supposed contact spike from thousands of noisy samples dominated by bladder harmonics, panel flex, spin wobble and stadium micro-tremors, then nullified one of the most dramatic World Cup equalizers in history via spectral analysis of what is essentially glorified noise.

Oh, and it gets better. They moved the chip this year. Back in 2022, it used to hang suspended in the center of the ball. Now it's glued into the sidewall of ONE panel, with counterweights stuffed into the other three so the ball doesn't fly like a shopping cart. So sensitivity now depends on which side of the ball the "contact" happens relative to the sensor. Totally fine basis for ending a nation's tournament.

An IMU measures acceleration. Somewhere in a proprietary pipeline, a threshold decides which acceleration counts as "touch." That threshold is unpublished. The false positive rate is unpublished. The calibration data is unpublished. The patents are literally still in their secrecy window. And FIFA owns the raw data, so nobody can independently audit the trace that ended Modrić's last World Cup.

And we're all supposed to accept a "heartbeat graphic" on the broadcast as if that settles anything.

Since we sadly all know you won't ever admit your crimes or remove this technology for good, at least open source the detection pipeline, @FIFAcom!

Publish the thresholds, the error rates, the raw IMU trace from last night. If the tech is right, transparency costs nothing, right?

[alexis amber 💌 @daiquiriheiress]

while we’re talking about Cuba do not forget they tried to send us humanitarian aid during Hurricane Katrina and the US govt turned it away

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Everyone is covering the force majeure. Everyone is covering the 13 million tonnes. Everyone is covering the gas prices and the geopolitics and the five-year timeline.

My good friend Veron Wickramasinghe just asked the question nobody else is asking: how do you rebuild when the machines that make the molecules take three to four years to manufacture, ship through a closed strait, and commission in a war zone?

Read what he found.

Every LNG train at Ras Laffan requires high-purity nitrogen from Air Separation Units: cryogenic plants cooling air to minus 190 degrees to distil it into component gases. Pearl GTL needs 30,000 tonnes per day of pure oxygen from eight Linde-built ASUs. Each cold box: 470 tonnes, 60 metres tall. Lead time from contract to commissioning: three to four years. If destroyed, replacement arrives no earlier than 2029.

But here is the choke point that Veron identified that nobody else has. The heart of every cryogenic ASU is a brazed aluminium plate-fin heat exchanger called a BAHX. These exchangers operate with temperature differentials of one to two Kelvin and require precision brazing in vacuum furnaces. Only five companies on Earth are qualified to manufacture them. Five. For every cryogenic heat exchanger in every air separation unit, every LNG train, every industrial gas facility, and every hydrogen plant on the planet. Fives Cryo in France. Kobelco in Japan. Linde in Germany. Sumitomo in Japan. Chart Industries in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Current lead times: 12 to 18 months or more. And their order books are already full.

Veron was honest about what is confirmed and what is not. QatarEnergy CEO al-Kaabi confirmed LNG Trains 4 and 6 are damaged: 12.8 Mtpa offline, 3 to 5 year repairs, $20 billion annual revenue loss, force majeure up to 5 years. Shell confirmed Pearl GTL Unit 2 needs roughly one year of repair. What has NOT been confirmed is whether the ASUs themselves were destroyed. Shell’s one-year timeline is inconsistent with total ASU loss, which would require four to five years. Veron flagged this honestly and gave you the analysis both ways.

And then he showed you the cascade nobody else sees.

Qatar produces one-third of the world’s helium from the same facility. Helium is irreplaceable in semiconductor fabrication: cooling wafers, purging chambers, detecting leaks. Samsung and SK Hynix import 64.7 percent of their helium from Qatar. Spot prices have doubled. Liquid helium vaporises within 35 to 48 days. Fourteen percent of capacity is permanently damaged.

The LNG trains, the ASUs, and the helium plants all sit on the same rock, fed by the same gas field, accessed through the same strait. One set of missile strikes on March 18 to 19 took out 17 percent of global LNG, threatened one-third of global helium, and exposed a supply chain that runs through five workshops in Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and Wisconsin with three-year lead times and full order books.

This is what Veron understood that the headline analysts missed: the recovery is not constrained by money or political will. It is constrained by vacuum furnaces, aluminium metallurgy, and the physics of brazing at tolerances measured in single-digit Kelvin. You cannot accelerate physics. You cannot surge-produce a 470-tonne cold box. You cannot commission cryogenic equipment in a war zone.

Five companies. Five workshops. Three-year lead times. Full order books. A closed strait. An active war.

That is not a recovery timeline. That is a sentence. Read Veron’s full analysis. It is the most important thing written about this war that does not involve a missile.

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

I am devastated to share the news that one of my heroes — and a woman who has had an enormous impact on wildlife conservation — Dr. Biruté Mary Galdikas has died.

She was 79.

I feel so grateful that I had the honor of spending time with her.

Over the years, I have connected with so many of you over my love of orangutans (and elephants and mountain gorillas, of course); Dr. Biruté gets all the credit.

Orangutans would likely be extinct were it not for Dr. Biruté’s pioneering and exhaustive work over the last six decades.

Dr. Biruté was one of three women handpicked and mentored by legendary paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey to transform our understanding of the great apes.

Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees, Dian Fossey studied gorillas, and Dr. Biruté dedicated her life to orangutans, and together they revolutionized primatology and the case for great ape intelligence, emotional depth, and conservation.

While Jane Goodall proved that chimpanzees use tools, form complex social bonds, and possess a capacity for empathy once thought uniquely human, Dr. Biruté proved that orangutans are slow-breeding, highly intelligent, and extremely vulnerable.

Dr. Biruté built the conservation model to try to save orangutans and dedicated her life to protecting them.

Dr. Biruté is credited with conducting the longest-running longitudinal study by one principal investigator of any wild mammal in the world.

She was the first to document the long orangutan birth interval, which averaged 7.7 years, and recorded over 400 types of food consumed by orangutans.

Dr. Biruté’s research that fundamentally reshaped how scientists understood orangutans.

Before her field studies, the orangutan was the least understood of the great apes.

The orangutan population as it exists today, as fragile as it is, would not exist without her.

Many conservationists go as far as saying the orangutan, our cousin, would likely be extinct or close to extinct were it not for Dr. Biruté’s discoveries and her sacrifice.

Dr. Biruté took on palm oil conglomerates, illegal loggers, poachers, and gold miners.

She did so often at great personal risk, including death threats and kidnapping,

She remained in Borneo for over 40 years as an outspoken advocate for orangutans and the preservation of their rainforest habitat.

In 1986, she founded Orangutan Foundation International, with sister organizations established in Australia, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom.

We owe so much to Dr. Biruté and her incredible legacy.

[Laura Elliott @TinyWriterLaura]

additional fun fact: magnolias are actually older than bees and so evolved to close their flowers at night to trap beetles and cover them in pollen, then to open them again in the morning to let them travel to a different tree

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your fridge runs 24 hours a day. Solar panels only work while the sun’s out. That mismatch is the entire reason this plant exists, and the fix is just hot salt.

The Dunhuang plant in China’s Gobi Desert uses 12,000 mirrors aimed at a single tower about as tall as an 80-story building. All that focused sunlight heats a mix of salts (the same stuff in fertilizer) to 565°C, hot enough to glow red. That liquid salt gets pumped into giant insulated tanks. The tanks are so well insulated they only lose about 1°C per day. When the city needs electricity at 2am, the hot salt boils water into steam, the steam spins a turbine, and you get power. Same basic process as a coal plant. Just no coal.

Here’s what makes this different from regular solar: the storage lasts 11 hours. Sun goes down, plant keeps running all night. The big batteries that cities plug into their power grids right now? Those typically hold about 4 hours of electricity. Building batteries that last 11 hours is possible, but the cost balloons fast. A German energy storage study found that storing energy in hot salt costs roughly 33x less than storing it in the lithium-ion batteries we use today.

China has built 27 of these plants so far, enough to power roughly a million homes. They doubled that number in 2025 alone. Another 3,000 megawatts (enough for about 2 million more homes) are under construction right now, with 4,000 more in the planning stage. Beijing wants 15,000 megawatts by 2030.

The US tried this same technology once. Ivanpah, out in the Mojave Desert. Cost $2.2 billion. But they skipped the storage part entirely, so it could only make power while the sun was shining. It needed natural gas every morning just to start up. It’s now slated to shut down in 2026, thirteen years early, because regular solar panels got so cheap they made the whole project obsolete. China took the same idea, added the one part America left out, and is now building dozens of them.

One more thing worth knowing. The salt is made from basic industrial chemicals. No lithium mining. No cobalt. No rare earth metals. And it lasts 30 years of daily use before the tanks need work.

[Clarence Thomas the Tank Engine @TheRealJChubby]

Now I'm not a tech guy but it seems weird that an AI company would need a chemical weapons or high yield explosives expert.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇫🇷 French International Criminal Court (ICC) judge Nicolas Guillou, sanctioned by President Trump in August because of the court’s warrant for Netanyahu, says he has been cut off from basic financial and digital services.

“I discovered that almost all payment methods in France today are American,” Guillou said. “The only cards we have in France are Visa and Mastercard.”

He can no longer use Amazon, Airbnb, Booking or Expedia, and some UPS deliveries to his home have also been blocked.

French officials say efforts to lift the sanctions have seen no U.S. response. “If judges are afraid to judge… then we no longer have democracy,” Guillou told France Télévisions.

[Good View Hunting @SceneryCHN]

A grey-headed albatross chick will stay tucked in this tiny nest for nearly four months.

By the time it’s ready to leave, some chicks are actually heavier than their parents — meaning their first challenge before independence may be losing weight.

[iceberg ❄️🏔 @snowset]

If you scratch the surface here you'll find a wicked history.

They're building this data center at the site of a uranium enrichment facility in Piketon that was notorious for venting copious & illegal amounts of radioactive UF6 into the community under the cover of darkness.

Vortex of evil.

[Cedar Salvo 🇱🇧🇵🇸 @cedarsalvo]

Lebanon is the moment the people who told you Palestine was "complicated" finally go quiet. Not because they have nothing to say, but because acknowledging what Zionism is doing to Lebanon right now would force them to admit they've been lying all along.

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

Per the Lebanese Ministry of Health, the Israelis murdered 30 people and wounded approximately 80 others overnight in violent airstrikes across Lebanon. Two of those killed were Al-Manar TV political programs director Muhammad Sherri and his wife.

The Israeli army has now killed 21 journalists and media professionals in Lebanon since 2023.

[Frank Hoogerbeets  @hogrbe]

A million people are being displaced in #Lebanon due to Israel's illegal invasion. This is #Nakba all over again.

[Hala Jaber @HalaJaber]

‼️ Israel is threatening to target Lebanese medics, repeating the same excuse used in Gaza; that ambulances are being used for military purposes.

They lie.

26 Lebanese medics have already been killed.

Today’s warning means more will likely be killed under the same false pretext.

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

China just dropped its 15th five year and I genuinely think this is the most important document of 2026 & almost nobody in the West is talking about it

what gets me isn’t any single number…it’s the systemic vision, in one document they’re planning GDP growth, highvalue patents, digital economy at 12.5% of GDP, non-fossil energy at 25%, CO2 reduction, surface water quality at 85%, life expectancy at 80, forest coverage rate, grain production capacity…ALL of it in the same table with hard targets & binding indicators through 2030

in the West we treat economy, ecology, education, healthcare & energy security as separate ministries fighting over budgets, China treats them as organs of the same body, every line feeds the others, urbanization fuels productivity, R&D fuels patents, patents fuel the the digital economy, non-fossil energy fuels strategic independence….every variable is designed to accelerate all the others & that reflect china’s deeply HOLISTIC worldview

look at line 5, high-value patent going from 16 to over 22 per 10,000 people by 2030, quietest line in the whole table and probably the most important, a high value patent is the intellectual property of a technology that will structure a market for 20y MINIMUM

China is literally planning who owns the technological future, the licenses & dependencies other countriees will rack up on Chinese tech, this IS the economic and industrial colonization of the 21st century I keep talking about in my threads but with patents instead of cannons

while america bombs & europe debates, China plans, builds & executes and the scariest part is that based on their own audits the previous plans hit ove 90% of their targets

Western leaders rotate every 4 /5 years and make promises they’ll never have to keep, CCP plays on a 50 y horizon…this table isn’t a campaign platform, it’s a national spec sheet & that changes everything about how you read each number in it

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

Report from another massacre in Saida and a message to western governments.

[Yumna @yumna_patel]

Israel is a rogue state.

This is the result of the global inaction when Israel was perpetrating the worst of the Gaza genocide. That no world powers intervened to stop it then, was in effect a green light for Israel to replicate the Gaza model anywhere it wants. Because it can.

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

This is considered torture under international law.

The United States has kidnapped and is torturing the democratically-elected leader of a sovereign state.

We must all unite in demanding the release of President Maduro and First Lady Celia Flores.

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

Hezbollah Media Officer - First Jabal Amel Region / Salman Harb talking about the achievements of the resistance and Israeli crimes at the site of a massacre in Tayr Dibba.