“Compleximers”—materials that can be molded like window glass but that resist impacts like plastic does—shouldn’t exist, researchers say. Nevertheless, a few grams of one such substance sit in a laboratory at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
In Nature Communications, Wageningen physical chemist Jasper van der Gucht and his team describe what makes compleximers as meltable as glass yet as hard to break as plastic. Someday, this paradoxical stuff could make it easier to fashion and fix sturdy protective gear such as helmets.
Window glass, called silica, and most plastics are “glassy” materials—when they cool from their liquid states, they don’t solidify into crystals with neatly arranged atoms like water does when it freezes into ice. Instead, they form an amorphous mass that feels like a solid but has randomly arranged atoms like a liquid.
For decades, scientists have thought, based on experimental observations, that the lower a glassy material’s melting rate, the less impact it can bear. Both slow-melting window glass and faster-melting plastic abide by this rule: the former changes state slowly but shatters easily, whereas the latter solidifies and melts abruptly but can better withstand impact. But van der Gucht and his team found that compleximers completely defy this law. The trick could lie in the material’s structure: its long chains of molecules, called polymers, are held together by a far-reaching kind of bond.
The researchers initially created compleximers, a term they coined, as an easily recyclable alternative to a type of plastic called thermoset. Thermosets are made up of polymer chains held tightly together by extremely hard-to-break chemical bonds, which makes them very stable but hard to recycle. The researchers added charged molecules, which made the chains cling to one another using an ionic, “opposites attract” type of bond instead, and they incorporated water-repelling compounds to stop the chains from disintegrating in water. The charged molecules’ ionic interactions—which hold over longer distances than the previous chemical bonds—may help compleximers stay compact rather than rapidly expanding to melt immediately when heated, the team suggests.
Ionic interactions could improve the mechanical properties of glass-forming materials and make them easier to work with, says University of Chicago chemical engineer Matthew Tirrell, who was not involved in the work.
The slow melting also means compleximer-based objects are easier to fix than ones made of thermosets; “just by heating it with a heat gun, you can repair a scratch or a crack,” van der Gucht says.
Both researchers say this rule-defying material could also give physicists a better understanding of how glass forms, a phenomenon called the glass transition. Finding these long-range interactions that make glassy materials melt differently, van der Gucht says, “should help theorists explain the glass transition in a more general sense.”
Just like grape farming requires year-round preparation, building a successful company requires consistent effort, patience, and focusing on sustainable growth rather than quick wins.
Just as crops need protection from disease, businesses must proactively guard against threats to keep operations running effectively.
The most enduring companies focus on long-term value and steady development instead of chasing fast profits or short-lived success.
What comes to mind when you try to picture a future tech CEO? Do you picture a lone programmer working out of his humble garage in Palo Alto, bent over a motherboard with a screwdriver in a pair of Levi’s 501s? Or do you imagine some Ivy Leaguer building the next major social media platform in his dorm while his roommates are busy going to parties and trying out for the rowing team?
No matter what you’re thinking of, I’ll bet it’s not a teenage kid harvesting grapes in rural Washington State. But that’s exactly how my career started, and I’m glad it did.
Before I was the CEO of an industry-leading power dialer for outbound sales teams, I spent my days helping out on my parents’ concord grape farm: a 700-acre property located a few hours southeast of Seattle.
Pruning vines, managing canopy growth, and shearing clusters might not seem analogous to living in Silicon Valley or going to Harvard. But these experiences taught me some of the most memorable and valuable lessons of my life.
Now it’s time to harvest those lessons and bring them to you. Here’s what growing grapes in my youth taught me about how to grow a company.
A time to plant and a time to harvest
One lesson from my childhood that I come back to over and over again is that growth happens in cycles. It’s rarely consistent and linear. You have to plant seeds before you can reap the fruits of your labor.
Concord grapes are normally harvested at the end of the summer or early in the fall. It’s an immensely satisfying time of year. You can tell they’re ready to come off the vine because they turn a distinctive, dusky shade of purple that makes them stand out like precious stones in the early morning sunlight. Dawn is the best time to collect them, just after the morning dew dries.
But that means you spend the rest of your year working, and working hard. Grapes don’t grow by themselves. Winter is for pruning and cutting back dead wood so that your fruit-producing canes are free to grow. Spring is when you’ll maintain your trellises and monitor your grapes for weeds or signs of disease. And canopy management will eat up most of your summer as you remove excess leaves to increase the amount of sun and airflow your crops are getting.
That takes a huge amount of effort, especially when you’re doing it for 700 acres. But every phase is an essential part of producing the end product.
The same thing applies to PhoneBurner. Tech companies that are market leaders face immense pressure to innovate. But we can’t just deploy new features all the time if we want to grow the platform sustainably. For instance, we could have rushed into parallel dialing to help customers dial contacts faster. Instead, we focused on making our single-line power dialer faster and easier to use. It may not chase vanity metrics, but it helps teams have more real conversations while protecting their caller ID reputation.
Decisions like that were our way of tending the vineyard — being deliberate about where we invested our time so we could strengthen the parts of the platform our customers rely on most.
Protecting your crop as a lesson in risk management
Grapes and technology are both more vulnerable than you might think, and grapes aren’t the only thing that grew on my parents’ farm. If we weren’t careful, we also got black rot and mildew. Keeping our grapes safe meant constantly taking steps to prevent those threats and mitigate the damage they caused whenever they did manage to show up.
Outbound calling has its own version of crop disease. Phone numbers can get mislabeled as spam, blocked by carriers or filtered before they ever reach the person you’re trying to call. When that happens, it doesn’t matter how strong your team or message is — your calls simply stop getting through.
That’s why PhoneBurner released ARMOR® and was among the first to focus heavily on number reputation, answer rates and Responsible Communications™ practices. If your numbers aren’t healthy, your calls won’t reach people. And if your calls don’t reach people, nothing else in your outbound strategy has a chance to work.
Growth and sustainability
Finally, I want to push back against a narrative I hear about all too often in tech: that successful entrepreneurship looks like getting in on the ground floor of an idea when it’s profitable, making a lot of money quickly, and then getting out before it inevitably collapses. I have never believed in this kind of approach to business, and I never will.
None of the really successful people I’ve met in my lifetime have been flash-in-the-pan founders. The Forbes business empire is 108 years old. Steve Forbes, whose advice I once asked for at a book signing in my twenties, never staked his family’s legacy on a quick cash grab. The risks he took were calculated to help him continue his stewardship of what the generations before him had started.
I don’t work full-time on the family farm anymore, although I try to help out whenever I’m back in the area. But working there years ago helped me understand the value of building things that last, and that’s the attitude I’ve applied to all of my business ventures — from PhoneBurner to the DRIVE (Data Reporting Information and Visualization Exchange) Conference at the University of Washington, which I founded in 2011 and which is still going strong today.
Few Americans — 24 percent — think the war in Iran has been worth the costs and benefits, according to a survey from Ipsos and Reuters, released on Tuesday. Another 22 percent were not sure.
Even among the president’s core supporters, there is a divide: 55 percent of Republicans said they thought the war was worth the costs and benefits, a far cry from the vast majority of his base who support Mr. Trump on most other issues. Instead, as the war stretches into its seventh week, 20 percent of Republicans said they thought the war had not been worth the cost, and another 24 percent were not sure.
The survey was taken after the cease-fire and after President Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
This poll adds to other evidence that fissures over the war are emerging within the Republican Party. A CNN poll taken in late-March found that Republicans who did not identify as “MAGA” were significantly less likely to support the war than “MAGA Republicans.”
Young Republicans are also far less likely to approve of Mr. Trump’s decision to take military action than are Republicans older than 45.
This is the first time Ipsos has asked the costs-and-benefits question. But the survey also included a question that has been repeated since the war started, and found that just 35 percent of Americans approved of the military strikes in Iran. That number has remained stable among all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, over the last month.
More on the Fighting in the Middle East
Global Economic Warning: War in the Middle East has upended the world economy, the International Monetary Fund said, warning in a report that disruptions to oil markets could slow growth, fuel inflation and raise the possibility of a global recession.
Strait of Hormuz: Shipowners and shipping experts said they did not expect a large number of vessels to return quickly to the strait because of concerns that the United States’ blockade plan lacked detail on how commercial vessels would be protected if they decided to go through the waterway.
Iran’s Internet Blackout: As the country’s near-total internet blackout extends into its seventh week, Iranian businesses and academics are arguing that the shutdown not only violates citizens’ rights but further destabilizes the country’s already weakened economy.
Israelis on the War: The ongoing war has left many in Israel despairing over how little they believe the fighting accomplished compared with the objectives laid out by their leaders.
A 63-year-old man has been functionally cured of HIV with a bone marrow transplant. While bone marrow donations have resulted in HIV remission in the past, this is the first time that has occurred with a donation from the recipient’s sibling.
The man received a bone marrow donation from his brother, who has a rare genetic mutation called CCR5Δ32 that confers resistance to HIV-1, the most common type of human immunodeficiency virus. When a person has two copies of this genetic mutation, the CCR5 surface protein, to which HIV commonly binds, is prevented from being expressed on human immune cells called T cells. A paper published today in Nature Microbiology showed how, after the transplant, the donor cells had replaced the HIV-positive man’s bone marrow cells and their genes had two copies of a CCR5Δ32 mutation (not all cells in the recipient’s body got replaced, however). His healthy T cell count soared in the year after the procedure and stayed at healthy levels after he stopped antiretroviral therapy (ART)—the gold standard treatment for HIV—two years later.
ART drugs can prevent HIV from reproducing in the body and spreading to other people. But they don’t eliminate the virus entirely—it sticks around in dormant reservoirs around the body. If a person with HIV stops taking ART, the virus begins spreading again.
In the new study, the researchers tested the recipient’s blood, gut tissues, and bone marrow to search for reservoirs of HIV after the bone marrow transplant. They found no detectable HIV in the places it would normally linger in someone who was on ART.
“If this reaction does not happen in all or at least most of the immunological tissues, there might be a risk for rebound at some point,” says Marius Trøseid, an infectious disease specialist at Oslo University Hospital and a co-author of the paper. “I think we have shown, for the first time, that it’s a complete engraftment—both in peripheral blood, which has been shown in several other cases, in bone marrow, which has also been shown in a couple of other cases, and then also the gut mucosal tissue, which we think is key for [a] cure.”
But this treatment isn’t yet available for most people with HIV. Patients in New York City, London, Düsseldorf, and other places who achieved HIV remission after a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a CCR5Δ32 mutation each needed it for another reason, such as cancer treatment.
“This is really only for a patient with additional malignancies or medical conditions that require a transplant because [by] itself, it’s just too risky” compared with ongoing ART treatment, says Jingmei Hsu, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health’s Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center and lead author of the study on a patient in New York City, who was not part of the new paper.
For recipients, bone marrow transplants present significant risks, including severe infections, graft versus host disease (GVHD), in which donor cells attack the patient’s body, or even death. So “the risk of transplant needs to be substantially lower than the risk of the patient dying from their malignancy,” Trøseid says.
Through various studies that have measured the effect of a bone marrow transplant on a person’s HIV status, scientists have seen the infection go into remission even when the donor does not have two copies of the CCR5Δ32 mutation. Because the new study used donor cells from the patient’s sibling, it adds novel information about how these transplants work.
If the cells are too different from those of the donor, transplant complications such as GVHD could be more of a concern, says Björn-Erik Ole Jensen, head of the infectious disease department at the University Hospital of Dusseldorf, who was not involved in this study. If the donor cells are too similar to those of the recipient, however, there’s a risk that the treatment could fail to effectively destroy infected T cells.
“[A sibling transplant] may be a difference, but we don’t understand everything perfectly,” Jensen says. “This is why all these cases are still interesting.”
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Colorized transmission electron micrograph of numerous HIV-1 virus particles (blue) replicating from a segment of a chronically infected H9 T cell (red). NIAID/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Open since 2016 on the NRG Solar Terrace atop the SAP Tower, the organic farm typically grows nearly 40 crops, including broccoli, squash, eggplant, peppers, artichoke, strawberries, garlic, and herbs. Harvested ingredients show up in the stadium via the hors d’oeuvres passed out in suites, the fresh market salads served in premium clubs, and as special menu items sold at select concessions vendor stands. Crops are replanted annually after each harvest, with one to two planting cycles per season, depending on growth. Anything left over is donated to local food banks and nonprofits.
Open since 2016 on the NRG Solar Terrace atop the SAP Tower, the organic farm typically grows nearly 40 crops, including broccoli, squash, eggplant, peppers, artichoke, strawberries, garlic, and herbs. Harvested ingredients show up in the stadium via the hors d’oeuvres passed out in suites, the fresh market salads served in premium clubs, and as special menu items sold at select concessions vendor stands. Crops are replanted annually after each harvest, with one to two planting cycles per season, depending on growth. Anything left over is donated to local food banks and nonprofits.
“Faithful Farm is the largest on-site farm at a stadium in North America at 7,500 square feet, and it’s not just for show,” Jon Severson, the regional executive chef for Levy, the hospitality team at Levi’s Stadium, tells Food & Wine. “Each year, we plan menus across the stadium around the crop harvest calendar, and we work proactively with our farm partner, Farmscape, to cultivate in-season produce that is ripe at just the right time to bring peak freshness to game day.”
Inside Levi’s, fans have access to more than 100 food and beverage concessions, which include food stands, bars, and beer carts. On Super Bowl Sunday, two dishes will be sourced directly from the farm: the Gilroy Garlic Steak Frites sold near sections 109 and 315 and in the East Field Club, and the Rooftop Bulgogi Vegan Cheesesteak, available in the Bud Light Club.
“We’re using collard greens in our Rooftop Bulgogi Vegan Cheesesteak. It brings a crisp, slightly bitter freshness to cut the rich and creamy sriracha,” says Severson. “We’re also roasting hanger steak for our Gilroy Garlic Steak Frites with rosemary from our rooftop for a nice, herb-forward c
rust. It’s hyper-local sourcing on a massive scale, unlike anywhere else.”
Fans likely won’t see the farm when attending Sunday’s game — it’s only available for certain ticket holders to visit during the regular season — but attendees seeking something more elevated to eat than nachos or hot dogs (though rest assured, they’re still there, too) may taste its impact with locally grown flavors that are raising the bar on stadium fare.
Severson adds, “It’s the ultimate tool that our chefs use to put an extra culinary touch on all that fans can enjoy at the stadium.”
Necessary for a presidential candidate to be able to read or even write; even a congenital idiot can run for the presidency of the United States of America and serve if you were elected. “
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Click the link below the bottom picture
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The image showed President Trump in a white and red robe, commonly used in renderings of Jesus Christ and in Scripture prophesying his return. Bright golden light, which is used to depict divine intervention in religious imagery, radiated from Mr. Trump’s hand as he touched the forehead of a sick man. A woman observed the scene with her hands steepled in prayer.
As he received two bags of a McDonald’s food delivery to the Oval Office on Monday morning, Mr. Trump told reporters that he did not catch all that religious imagery. He said he had thought the image he had posted to his Truth Social account had depicted him not as Jesus — but as a physician.
“I thought it was me as a doctor,” Mr. Trump said of the social media post, which he deleted after an outcry. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”
He added, “I make people better.”
A screenshot of a post on President Trump’s Truth Social account. The image in the post, likely created with artificial intelligence, shows the president as a Jesus-like figure, apparently healing a man. Credit…via Truth Social
The post’s removal was a rare retreat for Mr. Trump, who had posted the apparently A.I.-generated image shortly after using the same platform to attack the American-born Pope Leo XIV, a vocal critic of the U.S. war in Iran. The appearance of the image had sparked an evening’s worth of backlash from religious leaders and Christian supporters who were hurt and shocked that Mr. Trump had appeared to depict himself as a Jesus-like figure.
Later in the day, in an interview with CBS News, Mr. Trump repeated his explanation that he believed the image, which he said he thought was made by “a very beautiful, talented artist,” had depicted him as a doctor.
“I viewed that as a picture of me being a doctor in fixing — you had the Red Cross right there, you had, you know, medical people surrounding me,” he said. “And I was like the doctor, you know, as a little fun playing the doctor and making people better. So that’s what it was viewed as. That’s what most people thought.”
He said he had taken the image down because “I didn’t want to have anybody be confused. People were confused.”
Mr. Trump did not apologize for either post, just as he did not apologize for threatening to wipe out the Iranian civilization last week. (“I’m fine with it,” he said of the threat on Fox News on Sunday, because it had brought Tehran to the negotiating table.) The post attacking Pope Leo XIV as “weak on crime” remains online, and so do countless posts from legions of critics who believe Mr. Trump’s mental fitness for office should be evaluated.
As a rule, Mr. Trump does not apologize for doing and saying things that hurt or offend people, and officials in his White House characterize his behavior as radically refreshing and transparent. Outrage from people representing powerful constituencies that helped elect him to a second term has only rarely prompted him to backtrack or retreat.
In February, Mr. Trump deleted a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, the former first lady, as apes after several members of the Republican Party — including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican — called on him to remove it. Mr. Trump took the post down, blamed a staff member and never apologized.
“I just looked at the first part — it was about voter fraud in some place, Georgia,” Mr. Trump told reporters of that video in February. “I didn’t see the whole thing.”
A little over two months later, Mr. Trump was again in a position of explaining the thought process behind something inflammatory he posted to his social media account. (Other posts sent on Sunday night included a rendering of a Trump office building on the moon and a meme mocking the long careers of Democratic politicians.)
Mr. Trump was talking to reporters in the first place because White House officials had staged a fast-food delivery to the Oval Office to promote a Trump administration-led policy that has removed taxes on overtime and tips. A woman named Sharon Simmons delivered the bags of burgers and avoided the president’s questions about whether she opposed “men playing in women’s sports.” Ms. Simmons stayed on message: “I’m here about no tax on tips.”
Standing next to Ms. Simmons, who wore a red shirt that said “DoorDash Grandma,” Mr. Trump refused to apologize for his post attacking the American-born pope. “I’m just responding to Pope Leo,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s nothing to apologize for. He’s wrong.”
Leo is one of the world’s most powerful critics of the U.S. war with Iran. In recent days, he has condemned the worship of mortals and money, the pitfalls of arrogance, and the “absurd and inhuman violence” unleashed by fighting that has further destabilized the Middle East.
“Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise,” Mr. Trump wrote in a lengthy social media post on Sunday night. “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
On Monday morning, Leo told reporters he had “no fear” of the Trump administration. He added that he was not afraid of “speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.”
Later on Monday, Vice President JD Vance, the highest-ranking Catholic in the federal government, was asked to respond to the president’s criticism of the pope in an interview on Fox News.
Mr. Vance said that he would advise the Vatican to “to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church, and let the President United States stick to dictating American public policy.”
Other prominent conservatives, and not only Catholics, quickly expressed outrage at the image that Mr. Trump posted of himself as a Jesus-like figure.
“Does he actually think this?” Riley Gaines, the anti-transgender rights activist, posted on social media. “God shall not be mocked.”
David Brody, an evangelical journalist with the Christian Broadcasting Network, called on Mr. Trump to take it down.
Last year, after the death of Pope Francis, Mr. Trump posted a photo of himself as pope and joked that he would like to be the next pope.
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President Trump said on Monday that he had thought the image he had posted to his Truth Social account had depicted him not as Jesus — but as a physician. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
Necessary for a presidential candidate to be able to read or even write even a congenital idiot can run for the presidency of the United States of America and serve if you were elected “
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Proverbs 27:22
New Living Translation
22 You cannot separate fools from their foolishness, even though you grind them like grain with mortar and pestle.
EVIL PEOPLE
They had been long accustomed to do evil. They were taught to do evil; they had been educated and brought up in sin; they had served an apprenticeship to it, and had all their days made a trade of it. It was so much their constant practice that it had become a second nature to them. – Matthew Henry
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”
Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!
Isaiah 59:14
New Living Translation
14 Our courts oppose the righteous, and justice is nowhere to be found. Truth stumbles in the streets, and honesty has been outlawed.
Jeremiah 5:21
New Living Translation
21 Listen, you foolish and senseless people, with eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear.
This sounds just like today’s World although it was written about Israel in Babylonian captivity.
History repeats itself
Isaiah 59:9-15
New Living Translation
9
So there is no justice among us, and we know nothing about right living. We look for light but find only darkness. We look for bright skies but walk in gloom. 10 We grope like the blind along a wall, feeling our way like people without eyes. Even at brightest noontime, we stumble as though it were dark. Among the living, we are like the dead. 11 We growl like hungry bears; we moan like mournful doves. We look for justice, but it never comes. We look for rescue, but it is far away from us. 12 For our sins are piled up before God and testify against us. Yes, we know what sinners we are. 13 We know we have rebelled and have denied the Lord. We have turned our backs on our God. We know how unfair and oppressive we have been, carefully planning our deceitful lies. 14 Our courts oppose the righteous, and justice is nowhere to be found. Truth stumbles in the streets, and honesty has been outlawed. 15 Yes, truth is gone, and anyone who renounces evil is attacked.
The Lord looked and was displeased to find there was no justice.
The Artemis II moon mission might have come to an end after a 10-day voyage around the moon and back. But thankfully, the mission’s crew—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—as well as NASA’s cameras on Earth and in space, captured their daring journey from start to finish.
In fact, the mission was largely communicated to the world in photos, especially those from Monday’s capstone lunar flyby. From the moment the Orion spacecraft left the launchpad last Wednesday, each milestone was made timeless with stunning, perspective-shattering visuals that were beamed down to Earth via the Orion spacecraft’s novel laser-based communications system.
Here’s a look at twelve of our favorite photographs from the mission, including the moon photos that have inspired billions to gaze at the night sky anew.
1. Launch Day
Thousands of people trekked to Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday, April 1, to watch the lift off of the first crewed moon mission since 1972. The launch went smoothly, and within a few hours the astronauts were in a controlled orbit, positioning themselves for a maneuver to put them on course for the moon the next day.
NASA
2. Spaceship Earth
On Tuesday, April 2, the Orion spacecraft burned 6,700 pounds of fuel to lurch out of Earth orbit and toward its distant target. The astronauts gazed out the capsule’s windows at an ever-shrinking Earth, committed to their long journey.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Thomas Fuchs
A future tech CEO
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NASA
James' World 2 