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Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
2026 corn murals to feature patriotic theme
MITCHELL, S.D. (KELO)– Next year marks the 250th anniversary of America. The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4th, 1776. The Corn Palace in Mitchell is getting ready for the milestone. Rescue at Hippie Hole in the Black Hills Next year's murals will be all about the U.S. 'They're really representative of what our country's been through,' Corn Palace Director Dave Sietsema said. The patriotic theme of the 2026 designs coincides with the 250th anniversary of the country. 'We have some recruiting posters from the WWII era, we have the Wright Brothers aviation, we have the American eagle, the American flag, symbols like that that our country draws itself to to celebrate our patriotic side and who we are as a country,' Sietsema said. While the current murals will still remain up for months, work is underway to replace the material surrounding the murals. 'We've got a crew of high school and college kids who come back, we go out to any particular farmer's field and pick sour dock, like this right out of the field, and then we come back and we put in it a bundle like this,' Field Director Clark Mickelson said. The rye will also be replaced. Later this year, it will be time to add the new murals. 'Probably in October, November when the corn is harvested. It takes about 60 acres of corn to cover the corn palace,' Sietsema said. The murals were designed by Dakota Wesleyan students studying digital media and design. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Eisenhower Warned Us About the 'Scientific Elite'
In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. The federal government had become a major financier of scientific research after World War II, and Eisenhower was worried that the spirit of open inquiry and progress would be corrupted by the priorities of the federal bureaucracy. And he was right. Today, many of the people protesting the Trump administration's cuts to federal funding for scientific research are part of that scientific, technological elite. But there's a good chance that slashing federal spending will liberate science from the corrupting forces that Eisenhower warned us about. "If you look at, particularly, 19th century Britain when science was absolutely in the private sector, we have some of the best science," says Terence Kealey, a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham and a critic of government science funding. "It comes from the wealth of the rich. Charles Darwin was a rich person. Even [scientists] who had no money had access to rich men's money one way or another. The rich paid for science." Kealey points out that Britain's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita outpaced that of 19th-century France and Germany—both of which generously subsidized scientific research—indicating that the return on state subsidies in the form of economic growth was low. As America emerged as a superpower, its GDP per capita surpassed Britain's. "So the Industrial Revolution was British, and the second Industrial Revolution, was American, and both were in the absence of the government funding of science," says Kealey. Thomas Edison's industrial lab produced huge breakthroughs in telecommunications and electrification. Alexander Graham Bell's lab produced modern telephony and sound recording, all without government money. The Wright Brothers—who ran a bicycle shop before revolutionizing aviation—launched the first successfully manned airplane flight in December 1903, beating out more experienced competitors like Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who had received a grant from the War Department for his research. The notion that the government needs to accelerate scientific progress was based on America's experience during World War II, when federally funded research led to breakthroughs in rocketry, medicine, and radar. The Manhattan Project, which cost $27 billion in today's dollars, employed more than half a million people and culminated in the creation of the atomic bomb and the discovery of nuclear fission. "Lobbyists took the Manhattan Project and said, 'Look what government funding of science can do,' and they then twisted it," says Kealey. He acknowledges that the government can accomplish discrete, "mission-based" scientific projects—like racing toward a bomb—but he argues that this is very different from the generalized state funding of "basic research" that followed. In November 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Science and Development during the war. Roosevelt instructed Bush to come up with a plan to make federal funding of scientific research permanent. "It has been basic United States policy that government should foster the opening of new frontiers," wrote Bush in calling for the nationalization of basic science research. "It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers." Bush's treatise eventually led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. But it was a stunning accomplishment from America's greatest rival that would supercharge the nationalization of science. Sputnik, the world's first manmade satellite, seemed to confirm fears that the Soviets, with their centrally planned economy, might eclipse the U.S. in scientific innovation and weapons technology. That turned out to be completely wrong. But in 1957, Americans were terrified. After Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration tripled the budget of the National Science Foundation, which would provide federal grants to universities and labs. If federal funding of science is counterproductive, as Kealey argues, what explains the success of Sputnik and the Manhattan Project? Of course, government funding has led to major breakthroughs both during and after World War II, such as the synthesis and mass production of penicillin during World War II (though it was accidentally discovered in a contaminated hospital lab in 1928), cancer immunotherapy, artificial heart valves, and the gene-editing technology CRISPR. But this has to be compared to what might have otherwise happened. Good economics takes into account not only the seen, but the unseen. What are the unseen innovations the world misses out on when governments set the research agenda? "If the government funds science, it actually takes the best scientists out of industry puts them in the universities, and then industry in fact suffers," says Kealey. After Sputnik, government money pushed basic science out of the private sector. By 1964, two-thirds of all research and development was paid for by the federal government. "If you were a tool maker in Ohio in 1964, and you wanted to invest in R&D to make better tools because you wanted the beat your competitors in Utah, you wrote a grant to the Department of Commerce," says Kealey. "That's how nationalized American science was … Eisenhower's warning is absolutely correct." In academic science, process often takes precedence over outcomes. Researchers are incentivized to publish peer-reviewed papers that garner citations, which helps them secure prestigious academic posts and more federal grants. "What happens under peer review under the government is that there's homogenization, and only one set of ideas is allowed to emerge," says Kealey. The pressure to publish has created a positivity bias, where an increasing number of papers supporting a hypothesis are published, while negative findings are often buried. One biotech company could confirm the scientific findings of only six out of 53 "landmark" cancer studies. Swedish researchers found that up to 70 percent of positive findings in certain brain imaging studies could be false. A team of researchers re-examined 100 psychology studies and successfully replicated only 39. "There is still more work to do to verify whether we know what we think we know," they concluded. In an influential 2005 paper, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis flatly concluded that "most published research findings are false." He argued that the current peer review model encourages groupthink, writing that "prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma." "You end up with a monolithic view, and so you crush what's so important in science, which is different ideas competing in a marketplace of ideas," says Kealey. For decades, the federal government advised Americans to avoid saturated fat and prioritize carbohydrates based on the work of a researcher named Ancel Keys, who received substantial funding from the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Today, the debate that Keys suppressed rages on. "Ancel Keys said, 'I have the solution, it's all to do with fats,'" says Kealey. "And very quickly, you couldn't get grants to the American Heart Association unless you subscribe to Ancel Key's theory of fat. Having captured this small little redoubt, he then moved to the [National Science Foundation], and then suddenly the whole world believed only one thing." More recently, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya was attacked by the public health establishment for questioning the COVID-19 lockdowns. He told Reason there's an inherent conflict between the NIH director setting public health policy and doling out grant money. "If you have an NIH director that [sets policy and distributes money], they control the minds of so many scientists. It's an inherent conflict, and nobody's going to really speak. Nobody's going to disagree with them because that's the cash cow," says Bhattacharya, who President Donald Trump appointed head of the NIH. His agency now faces a proposed 40 percent spending cut. But if Kealey is right, slashing science funding could, counterintuitively, accelerate medical innovation in the long run. "If these changes can be managed in such a way that these scientists can move from the NIH into the private sector without massive disruptions to all the work and research they're doing, that will be to the benefit of America," says Kealey. It would be similar to what happened in the early 1970s, when Congress slashed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's budget in half, laying the groundwork for the rise of the computer age. "What happens to all those scientists? Well, they all go out to Silicon Valley, because they've all been made redundant … And they invent the modern world," says Kealey. "New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life," wrote Roosevelt in his letter to Bush. But maybe Roosevelt drew the wrong conclusions from the war. "Vision, boldness, and drive" can be found amongst the dreamers and tinkerers working in private laboratories, who are often too iconoclastic to be good candidates for government research grants but whose ideas, simply, work. "It's technology that keeps science honest," says Kealey. "If you're a scientist and you make an observation which can be tested, 'If you do this, the rocket will go that way, if you do that, the rocket will go this way,' then as a scientist you have to be honest because you'll soon be found out. But if your money comes from the government and it comes by peer review from committees, and the committees subscribe to a false paradigm, no one is going to test your paradigm." Before government money flooded in, private research facilities like Bell Labs were centers of innovation. AT&T's research lab discovered radio astronomy in 1933 when its scientists tried to figure out why its telephone wires experienced interference the longer they stretched. "You have a mission, you do research, and many times you make discoveries in pure science that actually are very valuable to everyone else," says Kealey. Vannevar Bush and FDR were wrong: The private sector can push forward the scientific frontier. In fact, federal funding of R&D in America has flatlined for decades, while business investment keeps going up. Abandoning NASA's Cold War space race monopoly, the government has outsourced rocket design to competing private companies. The world can barely keep pace with the breakthroughs announced by Silicon Valley's privately funded AI labs. "Science in America today is actually more private than it was in 1940. People just haven't seen it. No one wants to talk about it because there are no votes in privatizing science," says Kealey. "I would like to see that process continued." Let's heed Eisenhower's warning. The question is not whether or not America should continue conducting scientific research. It's about who is in control. Photo credits: MARILYN HUMPHRIES, MARILYN HUMPHRIES/2025 Marilyn Humphries/Newscom; Ron Adar, M10s/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group/Newscom; Don & Melinda Crawford/Don and Melinda Crawford/UCG/Universal Images Group/Newscom; Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group/Newscom; Gina M Randazzo/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Thomas Müller/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Chris Kleponis - Pool via CNP/Newscom; Jim LoScalzo - Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom Editor: John Osterhoudt Graphics: Lex Villena The post Eisenhower Warned Us About the 'Scientific Elite' appeared first on
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Newsmax host defends Qatar's gift to Trump then admits he'd ‘definitely criticize' Biden for the same thing
Newsmax host Rob Finnerty laid bare his hypocrisy on Tuesday night when he admitted that he'd 'definitely criticize' Joe Biden if the Qatari royal family had gifted him a $400 million plane while president – right after passionately defending Donald Trump over the same thing. Finnerty, a fervent MAGA sycophant who once proudly declared that Trump 'is a dictator that the American people want,' opened his primetime Newsmax broadcast by parroting the president's talking points when it came to justifying the lavish 'palace in the sky.' At the same time, he also took aim at Republicans who have come out against the president over accepting the gift, who have called it 'skeevy' and 'not America First' as it could run afoul of the Emoluments Clause. 'Once again, the current plane is almost 40 years old. To put that into perspective again, FDR, if he flew around on a 40-year-old plane at the start of the Second World War, he'd be cruising the friendly skies in the Wright Brothers glider from the very first flight in North Carolina,' the right-wing host declared. 'It was 1903. Do the math. If Spirit or some other low-cost airline was offering really cheap tickets, but the catch was you had to fly on a 40-year-old plane, would you still book that flight? I doubt it. I wouldn't.' Finnerty went on to air the president's recent comments in which he's made the case for accepting the pricey gift. 'Why should our military, and therefore our taxpayers, be forced to pay hundreds of millions of Dollars when they can get it for FREE from a country that wants to reward us for a job well done,' Trump declared on Truth Social this week. 'Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country.' After playing a clip of Trump saying the luxury jet was merely a 'gesture of good faith' and a gift to the United States and not him personally, Finnerty then groused about allies of the president taking issue with the Qatari plane. 'And even Republicans are so jazzed up about this,' he noted before reading off a tweet from Ari Fleischer urging Trump not to 'do it' because 'Air Force One should be American through and through.' Additionally, Finnerty shrugged off what the Constitution says about US government officials receiving gifts from foreign governments, mostly because Democrats were citing it. 'My goodness, Democrats are suddenly so upset at even the hint of a quid pro quo because of something called the Emoluments Clause,' he exclaimed. 'Public officials can't accept gifts, but this plane would not be a gift to Donald Trump. It would be a gift to the United States.' Still, Finnerty acknowledged that if the shoe were on the other foot, he'd be up in arms over the royal family of an authoritarian regime giving a Democratic president a massive airliner. 'I will say, I would definitely criticize Joe Biden if he cut the exact same deal, and I would criticize Joe Biden if he was about to get a $400 million plane from Qatar to fly around for a couple of years, then donate to his presidential library that no one would go to. I would definitely criticize that move,' the Newsmax anchor admitted. 'That would not go unnoticed by this show.' According to Finnerty, though, the hypocrisy on his end was acceptable because of the former president's son. 'But the left never seemed to care when Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of a Ukrainian energy company when his dad was vice president,' he concluded. 'That didn't seem to bother anyone on the left.'
Business Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
Slowing innovation is ruining American politics
IF THERE'S one thing every American agrees on, it's that politics has become vicious. There are plenty of explanations for why that is, from gerrymandering to the partisan sorting that has made both parties increasingly ideologically homogenous. One I'd add – but which often gets overlooked – is the slowdown in US technological progress outside of computing. Technology is the most important driver of economic growth, and its rapid progress allows political disputes to centre on how best to distribute gains. That's easy. What's hard is when technology stagnates, growth slows and politics become zero-sum. The last few years have seen the promise of new technologies that could help us escape that trap – but the Trump administration is throwing that opportunity away. The idea that technological progress has slowed might seem counter-intuitive when you consider the smartphone you probably have in your hand right now. But George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has mustered convincing evidence that that's exactly what's happening in nearly every field other than computing. For example, the Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1903; both the Boeing 747 and the Concorde appeared less than 70 years later. If you had shown either jet to the Wrights, they would have thought they were hallucinating. Fast forward another half century and the differences between the 747 and a modern passenger plane are subtle, while no civilian aircraft approaches the Concorde's speed. Life expectancy The problem stretches far beyond aviation. The most basic measure of social well-being is life expectancy. Advances in technology, such as vaccines and antibiotics, constantly increased our life spans during the 20th century. Yet American life expectancy peaked more than a decade ago. Why is innovation in such a slump? Government is certainly part of the problem. Across many areas (particularly housing), bad policy is crippling growth, as shown by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance and Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works. But there's more to it. Science has, in Cowen's words, plucked the 'low-hanging fruit'. You can only invent penicillin or jet engines once. In drug development, progress has become so difficult that it's governed by 'Eroom's Law' (Moore's Law spelled backwards), which posits that the cost of bringing a new treatment to market doubles every nine years. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Similarly, since the 1970s, innovation has shifted away from material technologies and towards digital ones which are far less constrained by energy requirements and physical limits. Largely unchecked by antitrust laws, dominant technology companies such as Alphabet and Meta Platforms have been able to form durable monopolies and capture the gains from these digital innovations, securing multi-decade positions atop a sector that was once characterised by constant ferment. Technological advances can make everyone better off. If you're reading this, you have more access to information and medical care than the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth did when your grandparents were born. These gains make reform easier by creating a surplus, which can be used to compensate interest groups hurt by the changes. When kerosene replaced whale oil for light, it devastated the whaling industry. But the benefits were so large that everyone, even (eventually) the communities that used to be supported by whaling, ended up better off. When that surplus goes away, people end up fighting much harder to avoid losses than they do to secure gains, making it difficult or even impossible to fix broken systems. Healthcare reform, for example, has stalled at least in part because any change to the system would hurt someone. If healthcare technologies were still leaping ahead as quickly as they were when antibiotics first rolled out, improvements in quality and efficiency would create the slack to compensate those hurt by the reforms. Recently, however, science and technology have offered the promise of revolution once again. On the energy front, the cost of utility-scale solar cells declined by 88 per cent from 2009 to 2024. Similarly, the price of lithium-ion batteries declined by 97 per cent from 1991 to 2021. This makes new renewable energy cheaper than new fossil fuels – and prices will continue declining. Further in the future, breakthroughs in nuclear fusion pioneered by companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems (an MIT spinout) might offer energy abundance of the sort once imagined by 1950s science fiction. Miracles discarded There are other examples throughout the sciences. Merck & Co's Keytruda and other immunotherapy drugs have transformed the way we treat cancer. SpaceX has cut the cost to put a satellite in orbit by a factor of 10. And AI may supercharge our ability to innovate, ranging from biological and drug-discovery research to improvements in materials science that may drive advances in the field, including superconductors and quantum computing. All these potential miracles, however, are being discarded. The administration's new budget proposes a 55 per cent cut to the National Science Foundation (the government's primary arm for research outside medicine) and a 40 per cent cut to the National Institutes of Health (America, and the world's, foremost medical research institution). These build on massive cuts to universities (most prominently Harvard, where I taught for many years, but others as well) where much of America's most important research happens. Even the flow of scientific talent into the US – long one of the nation's greatest advantages – is reversing, with top AI minds no longer coming here and the EU allocating almost US$600 million to lure away top American researchers. Science and technology can do amazing things. If we let them, they might even help fix our broken politics. The recent wholesale assault on science isn't just a threat to the American economy or health. It's a threat to the functioning of democracy, and perhaps our best shot at making it work better. BLOOMBERG The writer teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of 'Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter'
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Skywatch: Crowded space
A little over 240 years ago, birds were the only things that could fly above the ground untethered without eventually falling. That all changed in 1783 when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes made the first successful hot-air balloon flight over Paris. Just think about what must have been going through their heads when they saw the Earth from above. No humans had ever had a bird's-eye view like that before and lived to tell about it! It took until 1903 for the next major aviation feat to be accomplished when the Wright brothers flew the first airplane in the skies just south of Kitty Hawk, N.C. Fifty-four years later, the Soviet Union put the first human-made satellite, Sputnik 1, in orbit around the Earth, and four years after that, the Russians launched the first human-occupied satellite, Vostok 1, with astronaut Yuri Gagarin aboard. Since that time over 11,000 satellites have been launched into orbit, with and without people aboard. Many of those satellites have long since burned up in the Earth's atmosphere because of orbital decay. Others, mainly occupied by humans, have successfully re-entered the atmosphere to either land on the ground or splash down in the ocean. There is a fantastic website, that tracks objects in the sky. If you go to their search engine and type in Vanguard 1, you can see that it is in the first position of one of the first U.S. satellites launched in 1958 and is still in orbit 67 years later! When you explore N2YO, you can get orbital data on thousands in orbit. However, many of those satellites have stopped functioning, and many are actually spent rocket stages that boosted satellites into orbit. It's crowded above the Earth, but there's still a lot of room left. The really cool thing is that stargazers can see many of these satellites. If you're intently studying the night sky looking for constellations and observing with binoculars or a telescope, it's hard to go more than a half-hour without seeing a satellite zipping along. Most satellites move from west to east, but some are in polar orbits. The best time to see them is in the early evening for a couple of hours after evening twilight or a couple of hours before the start of morning twilight. That's because satellites have to reflect sunlight to be visible. Even if satellites had huge spotlights mounted on them, you'd never see them. They're just too high up. Just before morning twilight, and for a little while after evening twilight, there's no direct sunlight available to us on the ground, but high in space there's still enough sunlight to bathe satellites, sending secondhand sunshine our way. During the middle of the night the sun is entirely behind the Earth, so all satellites pass over in total darkness. By far, the easiest satellite to spot is the International Space Station. It's as bright as a jetliner passing over. Because of that many people see it all the time and figure it's a jet. Its first component or module was launched in 1998, and the station was completed in 2011. It's longer than a football field! What makes it so bright are the eight solar panels that are over 100 feet long and nearly 40 feet wide! They bounce a heck of a lot of secondhand sunshine our way! The ISS orbits the Earth about every 90 minutes, traveling at almost 5 miles a second. It moves in a general direction from west to east across the dome of the sky. The ISS doesn't pass over the same location each orbit. That's because of the nature of its orbit and the fact that Earth is rotating. There can be stretches of nights when it doesn't pass over at all. That's why you need to have an app or a website that will let you know where and when to look. Some apps will even alert you when the ISS is expected to pass over your location on Earth. My favorite website for keeping up with the travels of the ISS is With Heavens-Above all you have to do is configure it for your location with their massive database. Among many of its features, it'll provide a schedule for ISS flyovers and even a sky map to track it. You can also find out when other bright satellites will be passing over. My favorite free app for tracking the ISS is ISS Tracker. Allow that app to know your location, and you're good to go. Depending on where it's crossing your sky, the ISS can take up to around five minutes to pass. It resembles a super bright star. Depending on when you're watching it, in the early morning or early evening, it can suddenly disappear in the sky as it enters the Earth's shadow, or it can pop into view coming out of the shadow in the early morning. As much fun as it can be to observe satellites in the night sky, I'm afraid that in the future the skies may become too crowded. I'm worried that it's already beginning to happen. In particular I'm referring to Starlink satellites launched by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, otherwise known as SpaceX, a private space transportation enterprise founded in 2002 by South African native Elon Musk. Starlink satellites can provide much more available access to the internet throughout the world, even in remote areas. Already, there are hundreds and hundreds of Starlinks in orbit, and it's very easy to see them, sometimes in groups or lines, especially after they are first launched. As it is with the International Space Station, you can keep up with all of them on the Heavens-Above website, as well as other sites and apps. The big fear is that the natural beauty of the night sky could be ruined with too many satellites. Earth-based astronomical observations, both done by professionals and by amateur astronomers, are going to be interfered with significantly. I believe, and so do many others, that there must be some international regulations to keep this from happening. I can tell you as an astrophotographer that it's getting tougher and tougher to get time-exposure images that aren't marred by satellite streaks. Watching satellites is a lot of fun but let's not get the heavens too congested! Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of 'Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,' published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@ Skywatch: Dippers and bears flying high Skywatch: A crow, a cup and a water snake Skywatch: The two brightest stars, and a guest star Skywatch: Celestial twins proudly sharing Orion's shoulders Skywatch: Out with the hunter. In with the Lion.
