... that viruses have a "tree of life" comparable to that for other forms of life.

From what I understand (as a geologist, not a biologist ; but I have been looking a Origin(s) of Life for longer than Slashdot has existed), there is a continual evolution of bacteria (and archaea) to simpler, smaller organisms where they get the opportunity, which sometimes go down the road into full-on viruses. So you don't have a "Tree of Viral Life", rather a crop of leaves on the Tree of Life, which have developed virus-like life habits, utterly dependent on other organisms for most of their biochemistry, and working by co-opting the biochemistry of their hosts, rather than carrying their own genetics and biochemistry machinery for doing that work.

There are many families of viruses, and some of these can be traced back to having probably originated in particular families of bacteria which are also known to be parasitic (obligate, or opportunistic) on other organisms.

The problem is, the tend towards genome simplification (and so, reduced biochemical cost) involved in turning a bacterium (or archaean, or potentially even an eukaryote) down the road towards being a virus, in and of itself implies the throwing away of large amounts of genetic information. Which means, losing evidence that could tell you the evolutionary history of the organisms.

I, personally, suspect that the proto-"cell walls" and the proto-"genetic machinery" evolved their first stages independently,

I'd add a "proto-metabolism" (converting environmental "food" into necessary chemicals, initially using inorganic catalysts until the genetics gets hooked up and better predominantly organic catalysts evolve) module too.

"Cell wall" could include various structures - both Deamer's lipid bilayer liquid membranes, and Cairns-Smiths mechanical sheets of phyllosilicates. My old professor was moderately into the way modern bacteria can corrode pockets deep into mineral grains, particularly feldspars (we didn't call him "Prof Plagioclase" to his face ; but the other profs knew who we were talking about) ; but that has obvious problems with diffusion of substrates which the phyllosilicate sheet model doesn't have.

Potentially, these are subject to experimental validation. Deamer has shown that his lipid bilayers can form vesicles in credible proto-biological stuations ; phyllosilicates can grow and shrink in biologically compatible environments (even themselves showing signs of Darwinian selection for optimising pore-fluid flow rates in wholly non-biological systems) ; Prof Plag was already looking at systems involving bacteria-rock interactions.

Deciding which was the One True Way life originated ... well, the field itself has a moderate, and accepted, degree of schizophrenia, sometimes talking about the "Origins of Life", and sometimes the "Origin singular of Life". It would be really spectacular geology that would give clear evidence one way or the other.

You can publish non-publicly?

I think you mean "they can have a private distribution" - say to the mailing list of [Editor], [Editorial Board for Topic B], [Archives] - or they can publish them to a publicly-readable (not necessarily publicly-writable) location.

This will be a problem for the bottom 10% of reviewers. The ones with the nous to include half a dozen references from a recent somewhat relevant review article will be able to avoid being such an obvious target.

While I've known professors who were fucking idiots, most of them were considerably brighter than the average.

More papers should be quashed.

That depends on what you think the purpose of a "paper" is. If you think it is to distribute genuinely new, significant advances in knowledge, or in data pertinent to a field where the direction "towards correctness" is unclear, then you're probably correct. If you think it's a tool for university (and other) administrators to assess the amount of "success" this researcher has compared to that researcher, aside from the relatively easy accounting of external funding attracted, and decide on tenure or unemployment ... then these administrators will want to be able to weigh the annual output without being open to fraud such as printing on 100 gsm paper instead of 80 gsm paper (a 20% increase in productivity there!)

I'm going to guess that you think academic should relate to the former aspect, not the latter. But as bean-counting administrators know only too well, they're the ones with the hire, retain, or fire power, and they're the dog that wags the tail of academic publishing.

I probably agree with you that that is an unfortunate circumstance. But blame and address the actual problem [bean-counters who count in simple metrics they can understand] not the symptom [over publication of "incremental progress" and "partial results" papers].

Nature isn't changing which papers are peer reviewed

All papers should be reviewed

Of course, what this doesn't address is a paper getting quashed because reviewers refused to approve it,

Reviewers don't decide if a paper gets published. That's the journal editor's (or editorial board) job. A reviewer can put in an absolute stinker of a report, and the author not make significant changes, but if the editor (board) thinks it's suitable for publication, then it will be published. It's not as if the reviewers are the dog, and the journals the tail being wagged.

possibly because the paper contradicted the reviewers' findings.

If that is the case, then the editor did an unprofessionally atrocious job of choosing reviewers, and a fuck-up like that should, quite appropriately, follow the editor around if they move to another journal. Assuming that they;re publishing professionals, not volunteers from the field - which is very often the case.

I could see that being a problem in the "humanities", where your opinions about the imagery of wombats in penguin poetry actually, in some sense, belong to you. But in the physical sciences investigating an external physical reality ... pfffftt. Reality wins over opinion.

Whether the new work does a better job than the old work ... well, you (the upset reviewer) either fucked up in your previous publication (in which case, here is a revolver with a single bullet, some whiskey, and a body bag ; please consider the cleaning staff), or someone has new techniques, materials, or samples (in which case, pffft - it's science). Or, just possibly, the laws of physics (and derivatives like chemistry, biology, geology, genetics) have changed (contra Doohan and Scotty's seminal works in the late 1960s).

Strongly implying that there are only two extremes?

That is a proposition that needs to be demonstrated. Alternative hypotheses being there is only one extreme ("correct", versus a multitude of ways of being incorrect, one vector per item of data), or that there are many extremes, at least as many as there are political parties in the world (several thousand?) and probably going up to the number of people in the world multiplied by the number of times per day that their opinions/ prejudices changes significantly. Which would be in the tens of billions, even if you only change your viewpoint a few times a year.

I don't "trust" AI agents any further than I can throw their programmers and trainers off a cliff, but if they can be made with low bias until trained by an individual user's choices, that might be a solution. Potentially, someone like GN could implement that for paid customers.

But their system's "lack of bias" would always be disputed by people from all strands of opinion.

Well with a Putin agent in control of America for the foreseeable future (the next revolution or two) getting your nuclear fuel from Russia will keep everyone that matters happy : President Putin and President Putin.

The overhead lines into your house are too. The line connection into your breaker panel is aluminum.

The "overhead line" is underground, from the nearest substation. Which, come to think of it, has no overhead lines into it either, so it must be supplied underground too. We do things differently to America.

And the Earth and Neutral lines coming into my consumer unit (different terminology too) are definitely copper. The Live line terminates within the supply-company's fuse block, so I can't examine that without breaking the tamper-evident seal.

The "last mile" of power distribution here is largely underground in urban districts, so weight-on-pole isn't a concern. (And for decades, we've been pushing telephone lines etc underground too. Dad's house was "telephoned" in the mid-1970s from a pole - and the roadside trees have snagged the line at least twice since then ; but no house I've owned has had telephone lines on poles. (1980s wiring?)

Different country, different choices. I'm not sure when (if, even) a decision was taken to go for underground distribution instead of on-pole here. Maybe in the aftermath of WW2?

My first career was mineral processing at a mine. A promising career in 1990, dead on its ass by 2000.

No first world country likes to have dirty things like mines around. Or, for that matter, the oil wells that fuel their cars - they like them decently over the horizon, out of sight from beaches with built-in hypothermia. The only metals mine to open in the country in my lifetime went bust about 18 months ago - just after I'd applied for a job there.

It's so much more civilised to buy processed materials from foreigners ... until the foreigners start to manage the prices for their benefit, not ours. The barbarians!

Even wire has gotten complicated.

Well when you're already talking about a composite cable with steel for tensile strength and Al for conductivity, yes, you're already talking about a relatively sophisticated technology.

To be honest though, I gave up expecting "wire" to be simple nearly 40 years ago when I had to carry out repairs on wire-rope ladders for the university caving club, on whose rungs people (including me) were intending to literally hang their lives. Wires (and "soft" ropes) have not been simple since the 1800s. In fact, since a former paid employment dealt with legislation from mine explosions in the 1800s (Humphry Davy and the "Safety Lamp" which you must have studied in school), I'd hazard a guess that wires and ropes went from being "simple" to being highly-researched in the years after a spectacular multiple-fatality rope failure in a mine shaft. I can't think of comparable failures in suspension bridge cables - because the suspension bridges I can think of from that era tended to use wrought iron bars and chains rather than "ropes". People don't look at materials closely until there are grieving bereaved families nagging politicians.

... you mine it and process it.

So all the price inflation in the world isn't going to do much until more copper mines and smelters are in operation - which is a decade-scale investment.

and that is why fucking around with the global commodities markets on a faster-than-monthly basis is a good way to fuck things up for decades.

Well done, Dear Leader, for acting like a Tangerine Shitgibbon. So glad to know you'll still be in power (or your appointees, as the Alzheimers bites) to try to sort out your own self-inflicted problems.

It's not just copper - a lot of high power grid lines are made of aluminium conductors with a steel core - you can get more conductivity for cheaper pylons carrying less weight. But it still needs mining and smelting.

The game changer would be if someone succeeded in inventing a sufficiently conductive carbon-based polymer. With some genetic engineering, we should be able to harvest the raw materials instead of mining them. I've been hearing about incremental advances in "plastic conductors" since I was literally in school. Sounds like it's poised for a revolution some century soon, because nobody has put any real effort into the problem. Assuming, of course, that such a thing is actually possible, of which there is no guarantee.

There will be knock on the door from the Thought Police for you in the near future. How dare you contradict the Dear Leader until he contradicts himself?

FTFA :

"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,"

What's that saying about "when you hear hooves, expect horses, not zebras". Note that the effect seems to be occurring in the particles caused by the interaction of a (notoriously unreactive) neutrino with a boring rocky particle (proton, neutron, electron, in roughly equal numbers) ; but those reaction products are boringly reactive particles, which is how the produce the showers which are behaving weirdly.

FTFS :

leaving Russia controlling roughly half the world's enriched uranium market.

A quick Wiki (verb) (because I noticed a similar claim in a non-America story recently and thought "I should check that") gives me :

Rank .. Country. . . . . Annual tonnage . . % of global total
1 . . . Kazakhstan . . . . 21,227. . . . . . . . 43.01%
2 . . . Canada . . . . . . 7,351 . . . . . . . . 14.89%
3 . . . Namibia. . . . . . 5,613 . . . . . . . . 11.37%
4 . . . Australia. . . . . 4,553 . . . . . . . . 9.22%
5 . . . Uzbekistan . . . . 3,300 (est.). . . . . 6.69%
6 . . . Russia . . . . . . 2,508 . . . . . . . . 5.08%
7 . . . Niger. . . . . . . 2,020 . . . . . . . . 4.09%
8 . . . China. . . . . . . 1,700 (est.). . . . . 3.44%
9 . . . India. . . . . . . . 600 (est.). . . . . 1.22%
10. . . South Africa . . . . 200 (est.). . . . . 0.40%

(There has got to be a better way of doing tables in Slash's crippled subset of HTML. But it's a rare-enough need.)
So, Kazahkstan (yes, it's a former SSR of the USSR ; but it hasn't been part of Russia for a generation now, and they'll be looking at Ukraine, reading the "Ukraine Lesson", and collaborating with whoever they can trust (DPRK, Iran, Pakistan?) to trade some of that lovely fissionable material for nuclear weapons technology) is by far the largest producer, with another former SSR on the list ahead of Russia (the Russian Federation). Haven't the Kazakh's changed from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script in recent years? Yes, I thought so.

If I were in an anti-proliferation inspectorate, I'd look at those production rates for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with the proverbial fine-tooth gamma-ray spectrometer. The amount of happy-happy-joy-joy they could mutually share with Iran (or Pakistan) by trading some lies on the export paperwork for the tech to low-enrich some of their uranium (destined for Iran (or Pakistan)) to, say, reduce by half the amount of enrichment that both themselves and Iran (or Pakistan) has to do.

Does Israel have planes with the range to bomb the further reaches of the 9th largest country in the world? I bet that question gives them twitchy arseholes in Jerusalem. Along with the question of how to get other distant countries to allow their bomber and tanker planes silent overflight.

The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?

S/next administration/next revolution of Trump's braincell/

As if there's going to be another "US administration", this side of the 3rd or 4th American revolution (depending on your opinion of 1/6). Hilarious.