Nearly a dozen years ago I wrote an article for  The Huffington Pos t on  Star Power for Humanit y.  The latest June issue of  Scientific American  featured  Star Power: What is the future of fusion energy?   You can click on that link for the full article.  I'll summarize: This past December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNR ) claimed a breakthrough in attaining net positive with their laser fusion system.  No one had ever done that before. As an aside, I worked there in the 1970's on that project, and left because I could not envision the laser that would accomplish this task.  Can you believe that was around half a century ago? The bad news is that net positive is a long way from commercialization.  And certainly, that intriguing ultimate laser has not yet been invented. Well anyway, this article was written by Philip Ball, a British science writer who is my same age.  He has a PhD in physics from Bristol Un...

 From the  New York Times  this morning: Covid death has been   far more common in red America . Over the past three months, the death rate in counties that Donald Trump won in a landslide has been more than twice as high as the rate in counties that Joe Biden won in a landslide, according to   Charles Gaba , a health care analyst. The second lesson is that interventions other than vaccination — like masking and distancing — are less powerful than we might wish. Although masks reduce the chances of transmission in any individual encounter, Omicron is so contagious that it can overwhelm the individual effect One, nothing matters nearly as much as vaccination. A continued push to persuade skeptics to get shots — and to make sure that people are receiving booster shots —   will save lives . Two, there is a strong argument for continuing to remove other restrictions, and returning to normal life, now that Omicron caseloads have fallen 95 percent from their peak...

   From  Worldometer  (new deaths yesterday):          DAY    USA    WORLD     Brazil      India      South Africa June     9     1093     4732       1185        246        82 July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120       572 Aug    12     1504     6556       1242       835       130 Sept     9      1208    6222        1136      1168        82 Oct     21     1225     6849         571       70...