April 23, 1968 Students at Columbia University in New York City occupied campus buildings to protest military research and the razing of part of the neighboring Morningside Heights section of Harlem to make way for a new student gymnasium. Perspective from 40 years on by Mark Rudd, one of the Columbia leaders
April 23, 1971 In the final event of Operation Dewey Canyon III, nearly 1,000 Vietnam War veterans threw their combat ribbons, helmets, and uniforms on the U.S. Capitol steps along with toy weapons. Read more about Operation Dewey Canyon III
April 23, 1996 Chernobyl veterans Nineteen Ukrainian demonstrators were arrested in the capital, Kiev, during an illegal anti-nuclear protest marking the 10th anniversary of the nuclear reactor explosion and fire at Chernobyl, Ukraine, until then the largest and deadliest nuclear accident in history, now exceeded by Fukushima. [see April 26, 1986].
April 22, 1963 The Mothers for Peace, a group made up of Catholic Workers, members of PAX (which became Pax Christi in 1972), Women Strike for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and others, met with Pope John XXIII to plead for a condemnation of nuclear war and the development of nonviolent resistance. About Women Strike for Peace
April 22, 1970 Banner at the first Earth Day On the first Earth Day observance, an estimated 20 million participated in peaceful demonstrations of concern for the environment across the U.S. including ten thousand grade schools and high schools, two thousand colleges across one thousand communities. 1st Earth Day, 1970 Beginnings of Earth Day from then Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) One on the 1st buttons
April 22, 1992 50,000 attended “Don’t Count On Us,” an anti-war rock concert in Belgrade, Serbia. It was to the nationalist regime of President Slobodan Milosevic an expression of the resistance within society to the military aggression he had been pursuing in the name of Serbian nationalism. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the various constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia—Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—had declared their independence. Following a military draft call-up, fewer than 10% had reported for duty, and there was considerable dissension within what was then still called the Yugoslav People’s Army.
April 22, 1997 On Earth Day, Plowshares activists Donna and Tom Howard-Hastings used handsaws to cut down three poles in northern Wisconsin supporting the ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) transmitter for communication with submerged Trident nuclear submarines. After the poles were cut they were decorated with photos of children and posted with documents about international law and treaties outlawing nuclear weapons. They also placed stakes to mark tree seedlings under the transmission lines that they said were “doomed to the cutting bar.” They cut a section of one of the downed poles, carrying it to the nearby transmitter site where they turned themselves in to security personnel. They were then taken into custody by county sheriffs. An ABC-TV news affiliate, along with reporters from two public radio stations, were on hand to observe what happened. During the three-day jury trial on charges of sabotage and property destruction in Ashland County District Court, the defense was allowed to present several expert witnesses, including a retired Navy captain, Trident missile designer Bob Aldridge, and international law expert Francis Boyle. Both Howard-Hastings defendants were acquitted of the sabotage charge, which carried ten years and a $10,000 fine, but were convicted of destruction of property. At sentencing, they claimed the court had no jurisdiction over them, seeing that a jury had determined that their action was reasonable, and that they did not damage the national defense. They also made a passionate appeal to the judge to heed international law and the World Court decision to outlaw nuclear weapons. Donna was sentenced to 114 days she had already served, with a three-year period of probation and restitution. Tom was sentenced to one year in prison, with credit for time served and three years of intensive probation, including electronic home monitoring, and restitution. The name Laurentian Shield refers the granite geological formation at the ELF site. More Plowshares actions
Snippet-go read this, the videos are delightful- Sen. Prof. Warren remains outstanding!
Oh yeah, baby, talk dirty to us.
Professor Senator Elizabeth Warren stopped by CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”on Friday for some chattin’ and some rantin’ and some tarriffsplainin’ for the benefit of the show’s blow-dried hosts. We don’t normally watch financial news shows, because what are we, the Vanderbilts? But put Warren on anytime, and we’ll consider tuning in more. She can be entertaining!
Especially if your anchor isn’t following her argument, which sends her into her professorial did-you-not-do-the-reading voice. Which is what happened to Sara Eisen, who must have thought for one moment that she was back at the Medill School and had skipped that week’s assignment. (snip)
Black Mirror, eat your heart out. Researchers have apparently just figured out how to make people see a color completely new to humanity.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley conducted the research, published Friday in Science Advances. Using a technique called Oz, the research team induced human volunteers into seeing a color beyond the “natural human gamut.” Oz could allow scientists to conduct experiments previously not possible before, the authors say, and the lessons we learn from it might even someday help color-blind people regain their missing color vision.
Our retinas contain certain photoreceptive cells, known as cones, that allow us to see color. There are three cone types that correspond to different wavelengths of light: short-wavelength (S) cones, medium-wavelength (M) cones, and long-wavelength (L) cones.
Typically, when we try to reproduce color in front of someone’s eyes, we do so by manipulating the spectrum of light seen by the retina’s cones. But since some of our cones, particularly M cones, share overlap in how they respond to certain wavelengths, there are theoretically colors out there that our eyes can never truly see. The UC Berkeley researchers, based on their earlier work studying cone cells, say they’ve found a way around this limitation. (snip)
What is the South African Renewable Energy Masterplan?
It is an industrial strategy that sets out how South Africa can set up a new manufacturing industry in renewable energy and battery storage value chains.
The masterplan was developed by the government, some sections of organised labour, a non-profit organisation advocating for renewable energy, and representatives of the renewable energy industries. It sets out a framework to produce renewable technologies locally. These include solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines and batteries.
The masterplan has been drawn up so that it aligns with South Africa’s existing national target of adding 3–5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity each year to 2030. This is a scale that can support the development of local manufacturing hubs. (One gigawatt can supply electricity to about 700,000 average homes.) This steady supply will be enough to give businesses and investors the confidence to commit to long-term investments in local manufacturing hubs. These are zones where renewable systems and components are produced or assembled for domestic and export markets.
The state-owned electricity company, Eskom, has not directly guaranteed that it will buy 3-5 gigawatts of renewable energy each year. But the government’s national electricity plan (the Integrated Resource Plan) provides a strong indication of future demand. (snip)
How Crocodile Ancestors Survived The Dinosaur Extinction
Evrim Yazgin Cosmos science journalist
Crocodiles are often thought of as living fossils – unchanged over millions of years. New research has shown that their evolutionary history is a lot more complicated than that.
Crocodilia is the surviving family of a lineage which emerged about 230 million years ago (mya) called crocodylomorphs. This group split from other reptilian species including those that eventually became dinosaurs. Today, the crocodilia include crocodiles, alligators, caiman and gharials.
Ancestors of modern crocodilians survived through 2 mass extinctions, including the one which spelled the end of the “Age of Dinosaurs” 66 mya.
The teeth of this fossil Borealosuchus skull typify the toothy grin of semi-aquatic generalist predators that survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Credit: Jack Rodgers/Natural History Museum of Utah.
The new study, published in the journal Palaeontology, shows that the secret to success of crocodylomorphs was their adaptability to new food sources and habitats.
“Lots of groups closely related to crocodilians were more diverse, more abundant, and exhibited different ecologies, yet they all disappeared except these few generalist crocodilians alive today,” says lead author Keegan Melstrom from the University of Central Oklahoma.
Today’s crocodilians are semi-aquatic generalists. The thrive in different habitats and aren’t picky eaters.
It was a different story with ancient crocodylomorphs.
Skulls of Araripesuchus gomesii (left), a Late Cretacious terrestrial predator and Cricosaurus suevicus (right), a Late Jurassic aquatic predator. Credit: University of Central Oklahoma.
The palaeontologists visited museum collections in 7 countries, across 4 continents to understand the evolution of crocodilian ancestors. They examined the skulls of 99 extinct crocodylomorph species and 20 living crocodilians.
Crocodylomorphs exploded after the end-Triassic mass extinction 201 mya which killed off ancient lineages of hypercarnivores and land-based predators.
“After that, it goes bananas,” says Melstrom. “Aquatichypercarnivores, terrestrial generalists, terrestrial hypercarnivores, terrestrial herbivores – crocodylomorphs evolved a massive number of ecological roles throughout the time of the dinosaurs.”
Toward the end of the time of the dinosaurs, however, crocodylomorphs started to decline.
Most of the specialised crocodylomorphs had died off by the end of the Cretaceous. Almost all 26 remaining species today are semi-aquatic generalists.
Some 215 million years ago in what is now northwestern Argentina, the terrestrial crocodylomorph Hemiprotosuchus leali prepares to devour the early mammal relative Chaliminia musteloides. Credit: Jorge Gonzalez.
“When we see living crocodiles and alligators, rather than thinking of ferocious beasts or expensive handbags, I hope people appreciate their amazing 200+ million years of evolution, and how they’ve survived so many tumultuous events in Earth history,” says co-author Randy Irmis from the Natural History Museum of Utah. “Crocodilians are equipped to survive many future changes – if we’re willing to help preserve their habitats.”
“Extinction and survivorship are 2 sides of the same coin,” Melstrom says. “Through all mass extinctions, some groups manage to persist and diversify. What can we learn by studying the deeper evolutionary patterns imparted by these events?” (snip-More)
US officials claim move was to curb drug trafficking while Quebec town says it ‘weakens collaboration’ among nations
View image in fullscreen A young girl walks over the Canada-US border line from the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Derby Line, Vermont, on Friday. Photograph: Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press via AP
The US has blocked Canadian access to a library straddling the Canada-US border, drawing criticism from a Quebec town where people have long enjoyed easy entry to the space.
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. It was built deliberately to straddle the frontier between the two countries – a symbol of cooperation and friendship between Canada and the US. (snip)
A nonprofit says it has raised enough money for Fairhope Public Library to cover state funds that the Alabama Public Library Service Board cut off last week.
Read Freely Alabama, a grassroots free speech advocacy organization that has fought restrictions on library content, said it had collected almost $39,000 from about 550 donors through Tuesday morning. Read Freely is organizing the campaign with EveryLibrary, an Illinois-based organization that promotes library funding and fights restrictions.
“We were trying to figure out what was the amount that they were pausing,” said Cheryl Corvo, a member of Read Freely Alabama and Fairhope resident. “Then, we found out it was $42,000 that they were pausing, and how it would affect our library.”
The Fairhope Public Library said it will have access to funding without interference from the state or any outside groups.
“We had a meeting with EveryLibrary, which is the group that has control of this particular fundraiser, and they take 10% and 90% of it comes to us,” said Randal Wright, a board member of the Fairhope Public Library.
The amount was not enough to severely debilitate the library’s operations, Corvo said. But it is enough to affect “some very vital resources that the library provided.” Corvo said the campaign should also make APLS aware of the magnitude of local support for the library.
Wright said that if the state continues to withhold money, the funds will go toward computers, books for the collection and paying for guest speakers. (snip)
April 17, 1959 22 were arrested in New York City for refusing to take shelter during a civil defense drill.
April 17, 1960 Inspired by the Greensboro sit-in of four black college students at an all-white lunch counter, nearly 150 black students from nine states formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Ella Baker, James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., the founders set SNCC’s initial goals as overturning segregation in the South. They also considered it important to give young blacks a stronger voice in the civil rights movement, as many had participated in sit-ins that had proliferated to dozens of cities over the previous three months. At the Raleigh conference Guy Carawan sang a new version of “We Shall Overcome,” an adaptation of an old labor song. This song would become the national anthem of the civil rights movement. People joined hands and gently swayed in time singing “black and white together,” repeating over and over, “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.” History of SNCC (It’s a Stanford.edu page, which “cannot be reached.” Take from that what you will. I’ve decided to note these things when they happen.) What SNCC did to make change happen (This page is good.)
April 17, 1961 Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion. An army of 1500 anti-Castro Cuban exiles, mercenaries equipped and trained at a secret Guatemala base by the CIA, landed at Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) in an attempt to “liberate” Cuba from Communist rule. Within three days, the invasion proved disastrous with nearly 1200 members of Brigade 2506 (who had been trained in the U.S.) taken prisoner. Known as Operation Zapata, it was conceived by Vice President Nixon, planned and approved by the Eisenhower administration, and executed shortly after President John Kennedy’s inauguration. President Kennedy receives the Brigade 2506 flag in Miami in 1962 and declares: “I promise to return this flag in a free Havana.”
Soviet General Secretary Nikita Kruschev sent a telegram to President Kennedy: “Mr. President, I send you this message in an hour of alarm, fraught with danger for the peace of the whole world. Armed aggression has begun against Cuba. It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America. The planes which are bombing Cuban cities belong to the United States of America, the bombs they are dropping are being supplied by the American Government . . . .” What actually happened
April 17, 1965 The first national demonstration against the Vietnam War took place in the nation’s capital. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the organizers, had expected about 2000 marchers; the actual count was 15,000–25,000. This was the largest anti-war protest ever to have been held in Washington, D.C. up to that time. The number of marchers approximately equaled the number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. Several hundred students in the protest broke away from the main march and conducted a brief sit-in at the U.S. Capitol’s door. An exam prepared by SDS about the Vietnam War (answers available)
April 17, 1965 Gay rights advocate Jack Nichols The first demonstration promoting equal treatment of homosexuals, Jack Nichols, Barbara Gittings and others picketed in front of the White House. There were no media present.. Read more
April 17, 1986 Reverend Jesse Jackson, future congresswoman Maxine Waters and others co-founded the Rainbow Coalition, initially intended as a progressive public-policy think tank within the Democratic Party. Representative Maxine Waters, Harry Belafonte, John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Willie Nelson August 6, 2005-Atlanta, Georgia. Brief history of Rainbow Push Coalition
April 17, 1992 On Good Friday morning, about 50 people accompanied Fr. Carl Kabat and Carol Carson to Missile Silo Site N5 at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, the same silo that Carl and other members of the Silo Pruning Hooks (see below) disarmed in 1984. They cut through a fence and, once inside, Carol used a sledgehammer on the concrete lid of the silo while Carl performed a rite of exorcism. Eventually, the police arrived and arrested Carl and Carol. They were jailed and held until their court appearance. At that time, they made a preliminary agreement with federal prosecutors wherein they would plead “no contest” to trespass in exchange for the property destruction charge being dropped; they were sentenced to six and three months, respectively, in a halfway house. Carl Kabat A History of Direct Disarmament Actions About the Silo Pruning Hooks action
Alex Shultz Published April 13, 2025 | Comments (4)
Diablo Canyon, California’s sole remaining nuclear power plant, has been left for dead on more than a few occasions over the last decade or so, and is currently slated to begin a lengthy decommissioning process in 2029. Despite its tenuous existence, the San Luis Obispo power plant received some serious computing hardware at the end of last year: eight NVIDIA H100s, which are among the world’s mightiest graphical processors. Their purpose is to power a brand-new artificial intelligence tool designed for the nuclear energy industry.
Pacific Gas and Electric, which runs Diablo Canyon, announced a deal with artificial intelligence startup Atomic Canyon—a company also based in San Luis Obispo—around the same time, heralding it in a press release as “the first on-site generative AI deployment at a U.S. nuclear power plant.”
For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails.
PG&E is deploying the document retrieval service in stages. The installation of the NVIDIA chips was one of the first phases of the partnership between PG&E and Atomic Canyon; PG&E is forecasting a “full deployment” at Diablo Canyon by the third quarter of this year, said Maureen Zawalick, the company’s vice president of business and technical services. At that point, Neutron Enterprise—which Zawalick likens to a data-mining “copilot,” though explicitly not a “decision-maker”—will be expanded to search for and summarize Diablo Canyon-specific instructions and reports too.
“We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures,” Zawalick said. “And that’s going to shrink that time way down.”(Emphasis mine- A. I worked at the nuke plant in my state in my 20s. I did Records Management. I’m not going to explain it all from back then the way I trained people, but it involves reading and interpreting what one has read in application to the function, part, area, etc. a document records, which is learned by reading the document, then coding it so it is efficiently retrieved later. So far, I don’t know that AI does that. Others who are more knowledgeable about records management and retrieval in this era and context may see better things than I see. The best worst I see is really angry and impatient engineers and inspectors in all the disciplines still at the plant. That’s no fun, anyway.)
Trey Lauderdale, the chief executive and co-founder of Atomic Canyon, told CalMatters his aim for Neutron Enterprise is simple and low-stakes: he wants Diablo Canyon employees to be able to look up pertinent information more efficiently. “You can put this on the record: the AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now,” Lauderdale said.
That “right now” qualifier is key, though. PG&E and Atomic Canyon are on the same page about sticking to limited AI uses for the foreseeable future, but they aren’t foreclosing the possibility of eventually increasing AI’s presence at the plant in yet-to-be-determined ways. According to Lauderdale, his company is also in talks with other nuclear facilities, as well as groups who are interested in building out small modular reactor facilities, about how to integrate his startup’s technology. And he’s not the only entrepreneur eyeing ways to introduce artificial intelligence into the nuclear energy field.
In the meantime, questions remain about whether sufficient safeguards exist to regulate the combination of two technologies that each have potential for harm. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was exploring the issue of AI in nuclear plants for a few years, but it’s unclear if that will remain a priority under the Trump administration. Days into his current term, Trump revoked a Biden administration executive order that set out AI regulatory goals, writing that they acted “as barriers to American AI innovation.” For now, Atomic Canyon is voluntarily keeping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission abreast of its plans.
Tamara Kneese, the director of tech policy nonprofit Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program, conceded that for a narrowly designed document retrieval service, “AI can be helpful in terms of efficiency.” But she cautioned, “The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day, I don’t really trust that it would stop there. And trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny.”
For those reasons, Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis—who represents San Luis Obispo—isn’t enthused about the latest developments at Diablo Canyon. “I have many unanswered questions of the safety, oversight, and job implications for using AI at Diablo,” Addis said. “Previously, I have supported measures to regulate AI and prevent the replacement and automation of jobs. We need those guardrails in place, especially if we are to use them at highly sensitive sites like Diablo Canyon.” (snip-MORE; not tl;dr, though.)
April 14, 1947 Segregation of Mexican-American children, common in California at the time, was declared unconstitutional by the Federal Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit. Suit had been brought against several school districts in Orange County by Gonzalo Méndez and several World War II veterans. Separate schools for those of Mexican parentage was struck down in Méndez et al. v. Westminster School District: “ . . . commingling of the entire student body instills and develops a common cultural attitude among the school children which is imperative for the perpetuation of American institutions and ideals. It is also established by the record that the methods of segregation prevalent in the defendant school districts foster antagonisms in the children and suggest inferiority among them where none exists . . .” Sylvia Mendez Mendez v Westminster History
April 14, 1968 A massive student rally in West Berlin blocked the city’s main thoroughfare, the Kurfurstendamm. It ended in violent clashes between police and the marchers. The students were protesting the shooting a week earlier of one of their leaders, Rudi Dutschke, outside the offices of the German Socialist Students Federation (SDS). Read more
April 14, 1988 The Soviet Union signed an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan after nearly ten years. The pact, drawn up in negotiations between the United States, the USSR, Pakistan and Afghanistan, was signed at a United Nations ceremony in the Swiss capital of Geneva. Entertaining and basically factual story of what pushed the Soviets out of Afghanistan
April 14, 1988 Denmark’s parliament, the Folketing, insisted that foreign warships affirmatively state whether or not they carry nuclear weapons before being allowed to enter Danish ports. Previously, their non-nuclear policy had not been enforced and such weapons were routinely carried on nuclear-capable NATO ships visiting Denmark. U.S. and other allies had abided by a policy known as “neither confirming nor denying” (NCND). Denmark’s Folketing The policy and its consequences
Scottie's Playtime 