Somehow I missed this when it first happened.

Spanish transport secretary resigns over trains designed too large for tunnels

New Civil Engineer | Feb. 23. 2023 | Ella Jessel

Heh!

Transport secretary Isabel Pardo de Vera and Isaías Táboas, the head of rail operator Renfe, have now quit their posts, bringing the number of people who have lost their jobs over the scandal to four.

The batch of 31 new trains was intended to upgrade the ageing rolling stock in the northern regions of Asturias and Cantabria and be in action by next year.

But the trains will now be delivered two years late after the size of the existing 19th century line gauge was incorrectly defined on the specification. The rolling stock has been designed to fit the specification for new infrastructure. The mistake meant the trains would not fit through some of the network’s existing tunnels.

Yet the Spanish Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Development has stressed that the mistake was spotted early and the trains had not yet been manufactured. “No public expenditure was made or incurred as a result of this situation,” it said.

The fiasco has caused a huge political storm and sent the project back to the drawing board.

… that sounds like a wee bit of ‘public expenditure made or incurred as a result of this situation,’ to me …

The head of the regional government of Cantabria, Miguel Angel Revilla, called it a “monumentally botched job”.

Renfe awarded the £227.5M contract to Spanish manufacturer CAF in June 2020, but a year later CAF realised that the dimensions it was provided for the trains were not correct and stopped building the trains.

Oh, and that … sounds like a second bit of public expenditure made or incurred as a result of this situation.

Scientists trapped antimatter particle for months — but studying it without blowing up lab was a challenge
NY Post | 10/25/2026 | Brandon Cruz

A team of physicists recently trapped a single antimatter particle for months — a delicate feat where one wrong move could’ve blown up their lab, according to new research.

Antimatter, which explodes when it comes into contact with the ordinary matter, was captured by researchers at Northwestern University and stored in a cold box where they used incredibly cold temps and magnets to suspend the particle in midair, according to findings published in the Physical Review Letters…

To keep it from touching anything, the team built a contraption called a “one-positron quantum cyclotron,” which uses near zero temperatures and invisible magnetic and electric forces to keep the particle floating in a vacuum, keeping it from ever touching a single wall.

The first-of-its-kind experiment put the particle into its lowest possible energy state, letting scientists control it with pinpoint precision for months without destroying it in order to study whether antimatter behaves differently than regular matter it mirrors.

The fearless physicists at Northwestern University, under the guidance of Gerald Gabrielse, first snagged the particle as it shot out of radioactive material, then froze it to just 0.3 degrees above absolute zero — negative 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.

All I want for Christmas is a One-Positron Quantum Cyclotron.

I could drop it in my car’s engine and see what happens.

Biologists May Have Discovered Two of the World’s Loudest Birds

SciTech Daily, University of Massachusetts Amherst | October 11, 2026

Outrage as scientists push to create ticks that spread red-meat allergies: ‘Isn’t this biological terrorism?’
daily mail

A recently unearthed study has set off a tidal wave of outrage after scientists claimed it was ‘morally’ justifiable to infect people with a virus making them allergic to meat.

Researchers Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth from Western Michigan University published an inflammatory paper in 2025, making the case that society had a moral ‘duty’ to spread ticks that were infected with or engineered to carry alpha-gal syndrome (AGS).

AGS is a real medical condition transmitted to humans through tick bites, causing victims to suffer allergic reactions when eating red meat, including beef, pork and lamb, dairy and other products derived from mammals.

The symptoms can range from a mild case of hives or stomach pain to severe and even life-threatening cases of anaphylaxis – where blood pressure suddenly drops and the person becomes unable to breathe as their airways swell up.

Crutchfield and Hereth claimed that it was morally wrong to eat meat because of the suffering animals endure and the environmental damage that the meat industry allegedly causes.

They argued that the only reason society should not be spreading ticks to infect people with AGS today is that scientists do not currently have an easy and effective way to do it on a large scale.

However, they added: ‘But it is feasible to genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks. If we are right, then today we have the obligation to research and develop the capacity to proliferate tickborne AGS and, tomorrow, carry out that proliferation.’

Their main findings were that promoting genetically modified ticks to spread AGS would make the world better and help people become more ‘virtuous’ by avoiding meat.

They also claimed that this process would not violate anyone’s rights, despite proposing to intentionally infect the population with a life-threatening infection.

“It’s not a bug, it’s a future!”

Bill Gates Releases Hundreds of Millions of Bacteria-Infected Mosquitoes Across Colombia
Slay News | May 29, 2026 | Frank Bergman

The revelation is drawing renewed scrutiny to Gates’s other mosquito-based biological interventions around the world, with scientists warning that the long-term consequences remain largely unknown.

… and …

Google Reportedly Planning to Release TENS OF MILLIONS of Mosquitoes into Two States to ‘Stop’ Spread of Several Dangerous Diseases
The Gateway Pundit | May 30, 2026 | Cullen Linebarger

America’s most infamous tech company has a bold, potentially risky plan to supposedly reduce the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, assuming the federal government will sign off on the proposal.

As The New York Post reported, Google wants federal approval to unleash approximately 32 MILLION mosquitoes into the states of California and Florida over the next two years.

Movies that have NOT starred me have NOT been awarded a Best Picture or Best Actor Oscar at a (nearly) 100 percent rate. The solution, I feel, suggests itself. Because of statistics.

Study Suggests Europeans Are Closely Related

SciTech Daily | May 8, 2013 | UC Davis

… thus giving the lie to anyone who called them a bunch of bastards.

A meter is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299,792,458 when expressed in the unit m/s, where the second is defined in terms of the cesium frequency ΔνCs (the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium 133 atom).

And now you know how far a meter is.

A foot is the length of some king’s foot.