Tuesday 22nd October 2024

China’s Relentless Legal Warfare to Strangle Taiwan - Foreign Policy (No paywall)

In May, China held military exercises around Taiwan that simulated the opening maneuvers of a full-scale invasion. China has launched ballistic missiles over the island, and incursions by Chinese fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace are a daily occurrence. But while Beijing’s military provocations grab global headlines, its relentless campaign of diplomatic pressure and legal warfare—lawfare for short—to damage and delegitimize Taiwan has drawn much less attention. Yet this campaign is just as much an existential threat to Taiwan as any military attack.

China’s military actions are a form of shock and awe. They are designed to unleash fear among the Taiwanese population and bully the island’s international supporters into inaction. China’s lawfare is a silent killer, attempting to slowly strangle Taiwan’s ability to function as an autonomous, self-governing entity. If the world’s democracies do not act to relieve the pressure on Taipei, it will soon be too late.

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King Charles Gets Snubbed and Heckled During Australia Trip - Intelligencer (No paywall)

From health concerns to an Indigenous Australian senator shouting “You are not our king,” the royal tour is off to a rough start.

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Russian Propaganda Unit Appears to Be Behind Spread of False Tim Walz Sexual Abuse Claims - WIRED (No paywall)

A Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote wild and baseless claims that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sexually assaulted one of his former students, according to several specialists tracking the disinformation campaign.

Experts believe that the campaign is tied to a network called Storm-1516, which has been linked to, among other things, a previous effort that falsely claimed vice president Kamala Harris perpetrated a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011. Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West.

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Musk used 'Blade Runner' imagery at Tesla event despite being denied permission, lawsuit claims - Fortune (No paywall)

Both Musk and his company Tesla are named in a new lawsuit by Alcon Entertainment, a production company for Blade Runner 2049, which alleges the film’s imagery was used in promotional material for this month’s robo-taxi event. Alcon claims it explicitly denied a request for permission from the company shortly before the Cybercab was unveiled, but Musk and Tesla allegedly used the imagery anyway.

Alcon’s complaint includes accusations of copyright infringement and false endorsement, also naming Warner Bros. Discovery, which partnered with Tesla for the event. The dispute centers around Musk’s use of a slide during the presentation that featured a figure in a trench coat surveying a desolate, orange-lit landscape—an image reminiscent of an iconic scene from Blade Runner 2049 featuring Ryan Gosling’s character.

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These companies are creating food out of thin air - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)

A new crop of biotech startups are working on an alternative to alternative protein.

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The Return of Total War - Foreign Affairs (No paywall)

Every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions,” the defense theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the early nineteenth century. There is no doubt that Clausewitz was right. And yet it is surprisingly difficult to characterize war at any given moment in time; doing so becomes easier only with hindsight. Harder still is predicting what kind of war the future might bring. When war changes, the new shape it takes almost always comes as a surprise.

For most of the second half of the twentieth century, American strategic planners faced a fairly static challenge: a Cold War in which superpower conflict was kept on ice by nuclear deterrence, turning hot only in proxy fights that were costly but containable. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought that era to an end. In Washington during the 1990s, war became a matter of assembling coalitions to intervene in discrete conflicts when bad actors invaded their neighbors, stoked civil or ethnic violence, or massacred civilians.

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The science of why your body takes longer to bounce back after 40 - WSJ (No paywall)

Feel like it takes longer to recover from everything these days—whether it’s an injury or poor sleep? That’s the reality of what time is doing to our bodies.

Researchers call our ability to bounce back from health stress “biological resilience." Evidence suggests that it declines with age, driven by biological and other factors, including parenting, work stress, changes in exercise habits and menopause.

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Euclid mission reveals "page 1" of our cosmic story

By measuring gravitational lensing throughout cosmic time, it measures dark matter’s effects.

NASA’s Nancy Roman Telescope and NSF’s Vera Rubin Observatory will have complementary capabilities.

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A neuroscientist's guide to building a more positive reality

Meet the ‘brain coach’ who has found a way to flip negative thoughts and actions and use them for good

We’re all assigned a label at some point in our lives. You might be the smart one, the creative one or the lazy one. But is that designation really an accurate and comprehensive way to describe you?

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The myth of lone genius: How innovation clusters drive progress

Many cultures have the archetype of the lone genius. These are the hermitic scholars who isolate themselves from worldly concerns to focus on their studies, inventions, and arcane tomes. The thing is, this archetype is more myth and storytelling convenience than reality. Yes, there are examples of great minds who did their best work in solitude, but innovation tends to prefer groups of people sharing, vetting, and critiquing each other’s ideas through shared social networks.

Innovation clusters are a modern take on this historic trend. These hotbeds of creative businesses produce new technologies at fantastic rates. These businesses attract money, talent, and credentialed workers, which attracts more new industries to the area. Why they work and how they operate can shed light on the nature of innovation and offer a blueprint for a more inventive future.

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