There's a strong clue in TFS : they talk about running a cable from Morocco around to make landfall in "SW England".

Not "SE England", where the government and a significant part of the population live, who'll be using the power, But "SW England". Because it is cheaper to move megawatts over high voltage lines on pylons than to move the same number of megawatts the same number of kilometres using HV sub-sea cables.

It's actually a lot cheaper to move megawatts over land than under-sea. At work, we'd do a megawatt or two for 5 km sub-sea, rather than building generators and 4 * RB-211s on glorified poles above sealevel ; but for a 10km stretch the balance shifted to building a bigger platform (artificial land) and dropping the jet engines and generators onto that.

For any Morocco/ North Africa solar farm, the logical way to proceed is to export the power across the Strait of Gibraltar (e.g. Ceuta to Algeciras), or Melilla to Almería ; include appropriate load balancing into the Spanish and French on-land grids, and then jump the power From Calais to Dover, or Dieppe to Hastings.

But that would mean talking to our neighbours, which is as radical as the US and Canada continuing to have a demilitarised border.

UK doesn't need more Solar as much as it needs more storage.

Listening to the foaming-at-the-mouth of the NIMBYs, that's not going to happen any decade soon.

They have sufficient geothermal for their needs. If they build (surely the verb should be "mine"?) more, they'll most likely use it locally to generate higher-value exports (say, BioJet-A1, or $cryptocurrency-du-jour$) than waste money and maintenance on thousands of km of sub-sea power cable.

... it's servers in the US (and therefore, rooted by the NSA), then why haven't they moved the EU branch of their services to local servers?

The obvious inference is that the NSA won't let them - or will require them to root such servers for NSA surveillance. And the obvious next step would be that the NSA then gives this data to US corporations that bribe the Executive appropriately.

For stony meteorites it would be about the temperature of melting ice.

IF the meteorite had been in an Earth-like orbit for long enough to equilibrate to Earth-like orbital conditions.

But if, for example, it was on a comet-like orbit, it could come in with an outer Solar system temperature. Or a "just been Sun-diving" temperature, which wouldn't be much different.

But regardless, this suggests it's not rotating in the same plane as the Milky Way?

Neither are we.

In a relatively simple system - the Solar system - with only a few interacting components compared to the galaxy, we have an angular momentum budget dominated by Jupiter's orbiting around the Sun (then Saturn, and some change). But we have one planet rotating "on it's side" (Uranus, rotation axial tilt 98 to the rotation axis of the whole system), and another planet rotating retrograde (Venus, axial tilt 178). If you're a PIAPer, that system's inclination is 122.

Simple system. Complex result.

(But yeah, I have a "Earth is in a special place - distrust result" reflex too. I find the fact that the Solar systems' rotation axis is close to the galactic plane ... uncomfortable. And you can see that with your naked eye.)

So are electrons. But they have both spin, and angular momentum.

Not simply.

M87 and M87* are considerably larger than the Milky Way and SgrA* (though I don't know which way the SMBH:galaxy mass ratio goes), yet rotates slower. So the obvious "more infalling mass means more accumulated angular momentum, means more rotation" argument doesn't work, or is overcome by effects you'd expect to be second-order.

The people at IArxiv let you choose how your daily list of papers gets ranked. (They're a service that tells you about all today's papers (preprints. technically) on the various sections of Arxiv.) AIUI, they assign number of keywords to each paper - a lot of papers include a list of "keywords" ; then there is the title and the abstract - which would provide appropriate keys if you don't want the "editors" to influence the system ; obviously, the authors are going to try to get you to read their paper, same way as advertisers and their copy. Then if you click through from the email to get the paper's PDF, your account gets scored from the keywords, and after a time (the first few dozen papers you choose to read, IME) the ranking of papers to your expressed interests actually gets pretty close.

I could see that sort of thing working for news. But I can also see that the likes of YT, Google, and news agencies are going to be far more interested in serving your eyeballs the most profitable set of adverts, not what you're actually interested in. As the saying goes, if you're not a customer, you're the product.

Yes, exactly. Best Buy got Napster because they bought Roxio - the CD-Burning software company. LOL. "Roxio Toastt". Roxio was the first vulture to pick the bones of the original Napster, buying branding assets when the feds shut it down.

Invented virtualization.

... 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.