Crosswalks are dangerous.

A particular danger at crosswalks is cars making turns. It's often hard to see pedestrians when other cars are blocking the view. (And bicycles are always something to watch for.)

Because the JTEC is an evolved version of the older AMTEC, Alkali Metal Thermal-to-Electric Converter, in which the working fluid was liquid sodium. The version with hydrogen is much easier to work with. AMTEC looked great in small-scale lab experiments, and for a while in the 90s they were heavily pushed as the successor technology to thermoelectrics currently used in radioisotope power systems, but turned out they were too hard to work with. (I still kinda like the technology, though. It's thermodynamically elegant.)

There's also a JTEC variant that uses oxygen, I believe: https://www.researchwithrutger...

It's more as if there were a Diagnosis of Seeing Manual (DSM) that redefined the definitions to merge blindness with other vision problems into a single category, a spectrum "Visual-acuity spectrum disorder". So people who previously said "I'm blind and need accomodation" now get put in the same category with people who say "I have visual acuity spectrum disorder" because their vision is 20-40.

Autism most certainly does exist. The difficulty here is that in the most recent DSM, autism was redefined as a spectrum, and the "mild" end of the spectrum manifests as socially awkward. But there's no clear dividing line anymore; neurotypical behavior can shade into socially awkward behavior by infinitesimal degrees. And, worse, in the popular conversation about autism, most people talk about the mild form, previously a separate diagnosis of "Asperger's", and the profound version gets ignored.
https://www.hawaiitribune-hera...
  https://www.economist.com/scie...
  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

  (apologies for the paywalled articles, but those are the ones that go into better depth).

Nobody was doing strained-layer epitaxy in the 1950s.

Yes and no.

Visible light carries energy, and hence, yes, absorbing visible light will heat the fabric. However, at temperatures less than a thousand degrees or so, most of the heat energy is carried in infrared light. Since the fabric is specified as being black in visible light, it may or may not be absorbing in infrared.

Well, yes: we live in a society in which 50-kg small humans coexist in spaces with 1000- and 2000- kilogram metal vehicles travelling at a hundred km/hour, and only the social rules keep them safe.

The entirety of our civilization's "safety" relies on our society and its rules. It's not a "small minority"-- it's all of it. Every time I drive I put myself in a situation in which I'm less than one second away from flaming death if I should make the wrong move.

Right-wing operatives have long been pushing that ALL government work should be done by hiring contractors from private industry. This was an example.

The contractor they had been hired by was a company called Opexus; they were hired as engineers working on projects for various agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Energy, Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

Obviously Opexus didn't do a good job at background check.

A few more sites: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
  https://arstechnica.com/inform...
  https://cyberscoop.com/muneeb-...

I'd say the safest place to cross would be in front of a huge, impossible to miss bus, with a flipped-out sign reading "STOP" and with flashing lights.

For years the oil companies were heavily funding people to create doubt about climate science. They eventually got publicly outed for paying for bad science, and stopped because it looked bad.

As for atmospheric science, the main funding for atmospheric science is in improving weather models, including hurricane path predictions and aviation weather. Climate predictions are pretty much just another application of the models made for other purposes.

As for the oil companies, they shifted their strategy to funding "think tanks" pushing libertarian ideas, funding advocacy that the government needs to avoid taking any action on climate change.

I remember when my second grade teacher told us that the earth was hotter in summer because it was closer to the sun!

The lesson is, maybe you should learn more science after 2nd grade.

I'm not worried about people who make errors, discover the errors, and retract the work. I worry about the people who lie, and when the lie is pointed out, double down with bigger lies.

To be more accurate, this was an error in an economic study. Economists might think their field is a science, but scientists don't.

The normal cycles-- known as "Milankovitch variations"-- happen on a time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. The current climate change is much faster than that.