Russian leaders and propagandists have at once denied the existence of a Ukrainian nation and called for purging or cleansing the Ukrainian territory, in terms that often mirror rhetoric preceding past genocides. In this report, the authors seek to shed light on how Russia's extremist, hate-peddling narratives deployed in the war have spread online through social media.

Russian propaganda is making inroads into some of the major European languages—Spanish and German, as well as French and Italian.

REMVE narratives are also finding more-receptive audiences among relatively small linguistic communities in Eastern Europe. Serbian- and Bulgarian-language communities emerge as particularly vulnerable to cross-language and cross-cultural transmission of REMVE messages on both X and Telegram.

However, Russia's ability to successfully mainstream its propaganda and mobilize its audiences against Ukrainians is limited: The most virulent REMVE conversations on these two platforms remain highly Russian-language dominated, are concentrated in specific communities, and do not draw much attention from others in the networks.

Full research report: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA3400/RRA3450-1/RAND_RRA3450-1.pdf

The incoming Trump administration has been supportive of this European initiative. It is consistent with the president-elect's stated desire to disengage the United States from security matters on the continent, and instead have the European Union and the United Kingdom take the lead. But a deployment of European forces to Ukraine will inevitably entangle the Americans. European militaries depend on their U.S. allies for out-of-area operations. Inevitably, a large deployment to Ukraine will once again expose this dependency when they turn to the United States for help with critical tasks such as air lift, logistics, and intelligence that they cannot conduct alone.

The Ukrainian military faces critical challenges that demand immediate, honest evaluation:

• Infantry roles becoming increasingly unsustainable

• Recruitment system disproportionately burdens vulnerable populations

• Command structures trapped in outdated bureaucratic frameworks

• Morale gradually eroding under prolonged combat stress

• No clear exit strategy for frontline soldiers

• Commanders prioritizing reporting over human lives

• Declining Western support momentum

• Deeply entrenched leadership inefficiencies

Suggested changes:

• Implement merit-based officer promotion systems
• Establish fixed, transparent service terms
• Rebuild trust between military leadership and soldiers

More in the article.

According to the article, Danieli continues to operate in Russia despite EU sanctions, collaborating with steel giants like Severstal and MMK, both linked to military production. Danieli reportedly uses its Chinese subsidiary to bypass sanctions, enabling the supply of equipment to Russia. In 2023, its Russian subsidiary’s cash flow increased 35-fold, contradicting claims that the business is unprofitable or disconnected from the military sector. The company’s justification hinges on technicalities, but the financial and strategic realities suggest complicity in sustaining critical industries that support Russia’s war economy. At what point does this move from legal maneuvering to outright enabling?

How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary

Metadata

• Author: Stephen Ornes
• Category: rss
• URL: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-base-3-computing-beats-binary-20240809/

Highlights

Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a stool to stand on its own, and at least three points to define a triangle.

If a three-state system is so efficient, you might imagine that a four-state or five-state system would be even more so. But the more digits you require, the more space you’ll need. It turns out that ternary is the most economical of all possible integer bases for representing big numbers.

Surprisingly, if you allow a base to be any real number, and not just an integer, then the most efficient computational base is the irrational number e.

Despite its natural advantages, base 3 computing never took off, even though many mathematicians marveled at its efficiency. In 1840, an English printer, inventor, banker and self-taught mathematician named Thomas Fowler invented a ternary computing machine to calculate weighted values of taxes and interest. “After that, very little was done for years,” said Bertrand Cambou, an applied physicist at Northern Arizona University.

Why didn’t ternary computing catch on? The primary reason was convention. Even though Soviet scientists were building ternary devices, the rest of the world focused on developing hardware and software based on switching circuits — the foundation of binary computing. Binary was easier to implement.

Many microbes and cells are in deep sleep, waiting for the right moment to activate.

Harsh conditions like lack of food or cold weather can appear out of nowhere. In these dire straits, rather than keel over and die, many organisms have mastered the art of dormancy. They slow down their activity and metabolism. Then, w

Sitting around in a dormant state is actually the norm for the majority of life on Earth: By some estimates, 60% of all microbial cells are hibernating at any given time. Even in organisms whose entire bodies do not go dormant, like most mammals, some cellular populations within them rest and wait for the best time to activate.

“Life is mainly about being asleep.”

Because dormancy can be triggered by a variety of conditions, including starvation and drought, the scientists pursue this research with a practical goal in mind: “We can probably use this knowledge in order to engineer organisms that can tolerate warmer climates,” Melnikov said, “and therefore withstand climate change.”

Balon is notably absent from Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, the two most commonly studied bacteria and the most widely used models for cellular dormancy. By focusing on just a few lab organisms, scientists had missed a widespread hibernation tactic, Helena-Bueno said. “I tried to look into an under-studied corner of nature and happened to find something.”

“Most microbes are starving,” said Ashley Shade, a microbiologist at the University of Lyon who was not involved in the new study. “They’re existing in a state of want. They’re not doubling. They’re not living their best life.”

“This is not something that’s unique to bacteria or archaea,” Lennon said. “Every organism in the tree of life has a way of achieving this strategy. They can pause their metabolism.”

“Before the invention of hibernation, the only way to live was to keep growing without interruptions,” Melnikov said. “Putting life on pause is a luxury.”

It’s also a type of population-level insurance. Some cells pursue dormancy by detecting environmental changes and responding accordingly. However, many bacteria use a stochastic strategy. “In randomly fluctuating environments, if you don’t go into dormancy sometimes, there’s a chance that the whole population will go extinct” through random encounters with disaster, Lennon said. In even the healthiest, happiest, fastest-growing cultures of E. coli, between 5% and 10% of the cells will nevertheless be dormant. They are the designated survivors who will live should something happen to their more active, vulnerable cousins.

More fundamentally, Melnikov and Helena-Bueno hope that the discovery of Balon and its ubiquity will help people reframe what is important in life. We all frequently go dormant, and many of us quite enjoy it. “We spend one-third of our life asleep, but we don’t talk about it at all,” Melnikov said. Instead of complaining about what we’re missing when we’re asleep, maybe we can experience it as a process that connects us to all life on Earth, including microbes sleeping deep in the Arctic permafrost.

Valtonen’s goal is to put CPUs back in their rightful, ‘central’ role. In order to do that, he and his team are proposing a new paradigm. Instead of trying to speed up computation by putting 16 identical CPU cores into, say, a laptop, a manufacturer could put 4 standard CPU cores and 64 of Flow Computing’s so-called parallel processing unit (PPU) cores into the same footprint, and achieve up to 100 times better performance. Valtonen and his collaborators laid out their case at the IEEE Hot Chips conference in August.

A strong majority of Americans across the political spectrum sympathize more with Ukraine than Russia in the ongoing war: 62% of respondents express more sympathy with Ukraine than Russia, including 58% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats. At the same time, just 2% of respondents said they sympathized more with Russia in the conflict, including 4% of Republicans and 1% of Democrats. Republicans (20%) were more likely than Democrats (7%) to say they sympathized with neither side, while equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats (5%) said they sympathized with both sides equally.

The percentage of respondents who said they want the United States to stay the course in supporting Ukraine grew from our October 2023 poll, reaching the highest level in our tracking since the spring of 2023. In our latest survey, 48% of all respondents said that the United States should support Ukraine as long as the conflict lasts, including 37% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats. All these numbers are new highs in our four polls since March-April 2023.

Highlights

“Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet.” (Chuckles.) “Good luck!” (Laughter.) “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” (Laughter.)

While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China.

Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.

This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited—especially in the places where they have historically flourished.

Instead of portraying China as the perfect society, modern Chinese propaganda seeks to inculcate nationalist pride, based on China’s real experience of economic development, and to promote a Beijing model of progress through dictatorship and “order” that’s superior to the chaos and violence of democracy.

In September 2022, when Putin held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he claimed that he was protecting Russia from the “satanic” West and “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction.” He did not speak of the people he had tortured or the Ukrainian children he had kidnapped.

Another strange actor in this field is RRN—the company’s name is an acronym, originally for Reliable Russian News, later changed to Reliable Recent News. Created in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (like Notre Pays, or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive.

None of these efforts would succeed without local actors who share the autocratic world’s goals. Russia, China, and Venezuela did not invent anti-Americanism in Mexico. They did not invent Catalan separatism, to name another movement that both Russian and Venezuelan social-media accounts supported, or the German far right, or France’s Marine Le Pen. All they do is amplify existing people and movements—whether anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Ukrainian, or, above all, antidemocratic.

Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying.

Highlights

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.

We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD. Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies.

To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists.

However, many of the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri remain not only unread, but also unopened. This is because the eruption of Vesuvius left the scrolls carbonized, making it nearly impossible to open them. Despite this obstacle, Dr. Brent Seales pioneered a new technology in 2015 that allowed him and his team to read a scroll without opening it. The technique, using X-ray tomography and computer vision, is known as virtual unwrapping, and it was first used on one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the En-Gedi scroll, the earliest known copy of the Book of Leviticus (likely 210–390 CE). The X-rays allow scholars to create a virtual copy of the text that can then be read like any other ancient document by those with the proper language and paleography skills. Using Dr. Seales’s technique, scholars have been able to upload many of the texts online. A group of donors led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have offered cash prizes to teams of classicists who can decipher the writings. The race to read the virtually unwrapped scrolls is known as the Vesuvius Challenge.

Highlights

When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.

A series of papers from the lab of Carl Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water. If microscopic organisms struggled to get enough food to survive under these conditions, as Simpson’s modeling work has implied, they would be placed under pressure to change — perhaps by developing ways to hang on to each other, form larger groups, and move through the water with greater force. Maybe some of these changes contributed to the beginning of multicellular animal life.

The experiment comes with a few caveats, and the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed; Simpson posted a preprint on biorxiv.org earlier this year. But it suggests that if Snowball Earth did act as a trigger for the evolution of complex life, it might be due to the physics of cold water.

It is difficult to precisely date when animals arose, but an estimate from molecular clocks — which use mutation rates to estimate the passage of time — suggests that the last common ancestor of multicellular animals emerged during the era known as the Sturtian Snowball Earth, sometime between 717 million and 660 million years ago. Large, unmistakably multicellular animals appear in the fossil record tens of millions of years after the Earth melted following another, shorter Snowball Earth period around 635 million years ago.

The paradox — a planet seemingly hostile to life giving evolution a major push — continued to perplex Simpson throughout his schooling and into his professional life. In 2018, as an assistant professor, he had an insight: As seawater gets colder, it grows thicker. It’s basic physics — the density and viscosity of water molecules rises as the temperature drops. Under the conditions of Snowball Earth, the ocean would have been twice or even four times as viscous as it was before the planet froze over.

As large creatures, we don’t think much about the thickness of the fluids around us. It’s not a part of our daily lived experience, and we are so big that viscosity doesn’t impinge on us very much. The ability to move easily — relatively speaking — is something we take for granted. From the time Simpson first realized that such limits on movement could be a monumental obstacle to microscopic life, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Viscosity may have mattered quite a lot in the origins of complex life, whenever that was.

“Putting this into our repertoire of thinking about why these things evolved — that is the value of the entire thing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it was Snowball Earth. It doesn’t matter if it happened before or after. Just the idea that it can happen, and happen quickly.”

Highlights

Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases.

Her latest system takes 3D images of a patient’s blood vessels, then simulates and forecasts their expected fluid dynamics. Doctors who use the system can not only measure the usual stuff, like pulse and blood pressure, but also spy on the blood’s behavior inside the vessel. This lets them observe swirls in the bloodstream called vortices and the stresses felt by vessel walls — both of which are linked to heart disease. A decade ago, Randles’ team could simulate blood flow for only about 30 heartbeats, but today they can foresee over 700,000 heartbeats (about a week’s worth). And because their models are interactive, doctors can also predict what will happen if they take measures such as prescribing medicine or implanting a stent.

It’s a lot of data. We’re running simulations with up to 580 million red blood cells. There’s interactions with the fluid and red blood cells, the cells with each other, the cells with the walls — you’re trying to capture all of that. For each model, one time point might be half a terabyte, and there are millions of time steps in each heartbeat. It’s really computationally intense.