The citric acid in your food is grown on a black mold. Pfizer figured out how to mass produce it and it's how Pfizer learned to make penicillin. Nearly all of it, about 2 million tons a year, comes from a fungus called Aspergillus niger fed sugar in steel tanks. The mold eats the sugar and gives off citric acid. The acid gets filtered off, crystallized and sold as a white powder. A Pfizer chemist named James Currie got it running at scale in 1919, and by 1939 a pound had gone from $1.25 to 20 cents. The deep tanks Pfizer built for citric acid are the ones it used for penicillin in 1941, when it was the only company making it by fermentation. About 60% of it is made in China, and the US has had tariffs on Chinese citric acid since 2009 at the request of ADM, Cargill and Tate & Lyle. Sprite, Gatorade, Hunt's tomatoes, Kraft mac and cheese, Pillsbury frosting and the liquid eggs on a hotel line all have it. It's the most used acid in food because it's cheap, it's sour, it keeps cut fruit from browning, and it holds pH where bacteria don't grow. A 2018 paper described 4 people who reported joint pain and swelling after eating foods with manufactured citric acid, but the authors wrote that nothing had been proven. No large scale controlled study has been run since.

Offshore drilling rig in Gabon sinking as one of the supporting legs punched through the seabed. 110 of 115 people accounted for. $208 million gone.

I’ve done my share of high-speed autobahn driving in Germany but nothing like this. This is a Bugatti Chiron accelerating up to 417kph or just on 260mph! Absolutely insane speed!

FORTRESS: The Pentagon is preparing every major U.S. military base to survive 90 days without outside support — no civilian power grid, no global supply chains, no outside fuel or water. The initiative, revealed in documents reviewed by Fox News Digital, envisions portable nuclear reactors, massive battery storage, and microgrids that can disconnect installations from civilian electricity entirely. Strategic reserves of munitions, fuel, critical minerals, and medical supplies would be stockpiled based on wartime consumption rates. Civilian factories are being pre-identified to shift to defense production during a crisis. Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell put it bluntly: "Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures." Full story here foxnews.com/politics/inside-…

SITUATION DETECTED: Following the massive cyberattack on Japan's GMO Internet Group, which led to fraudulent trades across 70+ brokerages and FX platforms, CEO Masatoshi Kumagai warns that the internet itself is on the verge of collapse.

I cannot wrap my head around the endgame here. If you destroy the planet, crash the global economy, and leave ordinary people too broke to buy anything, what exactly are billionaires planning to do with all that money? Sit in underground bunkers staring at bank balances while the world falls apart? Wealth is only valuable when there's a functioning society around it. So what exactly are they trying to win?

This will be the soundtrack of my sleep.

Currently there are two simultaneous race wars, Turkey vs. China and Japan vs. French leftist/immigrants. The Japanese 🇯🇵, as you know, are culturally allergic to public disorder. So the Franco-Japanese War kicked off when they saw French accounts cheering on the riots while using anime avatars and Japanese characters in their handles. They said those anime characters are about virtues such as courage, justice, effort, and friendship, and they shouldn't be associated with torching cars or looting. Basically the message was: “if you need a symbol for destruction, invent your own. Stop culturally appropriating ours for your ugly ends.” From there it escalated into classical mutual stereotype annihilation. The Japanese didn't hold back, using typical allusions to apes and hounding on their failure to build thriving societies despite being given all the aid and welfare in the world. The French accounts (majority were rocking North African flags) hit back, insulting Japanese for screwing sex dolls and working so hard they commit suicide. It wasn't pretty. While that was cooking, a separate Turkey vs. China war was already underway. Algerians 🇩🇿 noticed and decided to ride for their “Turkish brothers,” dropping cartoons roasting the Chinese. The Moroccans 🇲🇦, watching from the sidelines, started laughing and saying "screw the Ummah," telling them they really didn’t want to invite the Chinese to attack them. The Algerian account responded by calling the Moroccan’s sister a whore. This, my friends is what I personally call "fractal racism." On the surface, you think it's just one undifferentiated “brown Muslim” mass. But when you zoom in, what you get is infinite-resolution tribalism and more divisions of recursive hate. At this magnification, the French Muslim immigrant blob split along Maghrebi lines that few of us outsiders know exist. French-Algerian accounts volunteering as Turkish proxies then invites Chinese 🇨🇳 online aggression. Which means the Chinese and Japanese (and Koreans 🇰🇷 who joined them), are now united in common cause in mutual contempt for the same people. Two separate race wars are threatening to collapse into one lol. The internet is so weird and entertaining isn't it. Where and how else could this have happened? Two sides with the deepest historical hatreds on the planet, and likely a fissure point of the next actual kinetic World War, are briefly aligned.

Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications. On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments. While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software. After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely. openai.com/index/securing-ou…

British codebreaker Gareth Williams was found decomposing inside a locked duffel bag in his apartment in August 2010. Williams was a gifted mathematician hired by the Government Communications Headquarters (Britain’s signals intelligence agency) in London in 2001 at just 21 years old. He was on an assignment with MI6 at Vauxhall Station, London at the time of his death, having transferred over in 2007. An article published in May 2012 reported that he was on a team of British agents who attended the Black Hat and Defcon 18 hacker conferences in the United States, among his final assignments before his untimely death. Police entered his apartment after he failed to show up for work for several days in a row. Williams was last seen on CCTV images on August 14th, 2010, and his body was discovered in a bathtub in his home nine days later. There were no apparent signs of struggle, no drugs, alcohol, or poison in his system, and no signs of external injuries. Several theories for his cause of his death have arisen but none have been conclusively proven. The coroner’s report on his death in 2012 stated he was most likely locked inside the bag by “a third party” and suffocated within minutes. Williams was believed to have engaged in risky sexual behavior prior to his death and may have entered the bag willingly. In 2015, a former KGB agent named Boris Karpichkov, now living in London, made the spectacular claim that he had learned through sources in Russia that Williams was killed by SVR agents after they attempted to recruit him. The recruitment was based on leveraging Williams’ predilection for cross-dressing as blackmail material against him. According to Karpichkov, Williams refused the recruitment offer and was subsequently killed using an undetectable poison introduced via his ear canal. While the Russian government has a long history of using poison for assassinations, it is very rare to target a foreign intelligence officer in their home country. In 2021 a new inquest was opened into Williams’ death, predicated on recent advances in DNA forensic technology. That inquest is still ongoing. #mi6 #codebreaker #blackhat #london #mystery

🩵🖤 8am tomorrow.

Why do people say Jesus H Christ. What does it stand for. What is his middle name

Name one brand that used to be elite on the terraces in the 80s or 90s, but is now strictly worn by dads doing Sunday supermarket shopping.

Earlier today, a number of harvesters, accompanied by dozens of individuals, arrived to conduct an uncoordinated olive harvest in an area near Beitar Illit. Harvesting in this area requires a request to be submitted to the relevant authorities in advance of the start of the olive harvest season. This coordination is necessary to ensure the security of the area and maintain public order. Due to the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community, IDF soldiers, Border Police forces in Judea and Samaria, and officers from the Judea and Samaria District Police arrived at the scene and detained those present. The landowner was informed that he must coordinate the olive harvest on his plot of land and was provided with the relevant contact information to arrange a harvest at a later date. It should be emphasized that authorized olive harvests have taken place and continue to take place. To date, approximately 100 coordinated harvests have been conducted across Judea and Samaria, yielding many dozens of tons of produce, with security provided and coordination by the security forces, without any unusual incidents. In areas designated for coordinated harvesting, only harvesters will be permitted to enter, solely for the purpose of harvesting. As in previous years, security forces are working to facilitate a safe and orderly olive harvest season, with a firm commitment to enabling harvesting without unusual incidents or interruptions, alongside their ongoing defensive and counterterrorism missions.

‘When Jewish children are called baby killers at school, it's clear Britain has a serious problem with antisemitism’ ✍️ Katie Kindler for LBC Opinion lbc.co.uk/article/jewish-chi…