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After a devastating conflagration, trees regrow using energy stored long ago ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.” Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors,...

The tech billionaires behind a project to build a utopian new city in California's Bay Area have released the first artistic renderings of their ambitious plans. Previously known only as 'Flannery Associates,' the group rebranded as 'California Forever' and released the plans in a publicity blitz on Thursday night, following months of silence and speculation. Led by former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, the group's backers include Silicon Valley heavyweights such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Andreessen Horowitz investor Marc Andreessen, and Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs. California Forever is now the largest landowner in Solano County, which is...

As its partnerships in India/Southeast Asia and China have grown, Sequoia Capital will move to an independent partnership structure, forming three firms with separate brands, the company said Tuesday. The venture capital behemoth known for its early investments in Google, Apple, and some of China's biggest internet companies, had taken a local-first approach to its leadership, but its back-office functions were centralized. With the company's growth, "it has become increasingly complex to run a decentralized global investment business," Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha, Neil Kumar, and Shailendra Singh said in a statement. Each business has evolved to meet the opportunities in...

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News AnalysisMajor U.S. firms, including Intel and Sequoia Capital, have maintained financial and research ties with a Chinese company known to provide artificial intelligence to Beijing’s military, according to a new report by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University.4Paradigm, a major enterprise AI company headquartered in Beijing, was awarded a contract to provide China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.Its contract was for a “battalion and company command decision-making model and human-machine teaming software,” according to the report, which did not specify the date of the contact.Meanwhile, 4Paradigm has also...

What a piece of work. The critic of our article on the obvious questionable election results in Colorado neglected to disclose that his wife worked for Sequoia and Dominion Voting Machines for more than a decade. Today we’ve uncovered that he also failed to mention attending a party with top Democrat schemers and Dominion employees. We reported on February 12th the suspect and questionable results in Colorado in the 2020 election. ... Colorado’s 2020 Election Results Make No Sense – No Way Biden Received Half a Million More Votes than Obama, Hillary or Trump. No Way! Colorado’s 2020 election results...

JUST IN - Class action complaint filed in the southern district of New York against Robinhood App (via FOX News) -----------------------------------------

Here’s a blast from the past! Back in 2006 when the great Lou Dobbs was at CNN the former news channel ran a segment on Smartmatic voting machines. According to this CNN report, Smartmatic was based in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and was sold to Sequoia. But the top officials for Smartmatic were still in Venezuela. CNN was worried this could interfere with our democracy. Amazing!

Why are Smartmatic and Dominion hiding their direct ties?Why are they scrubbing the internet of articles linking the two companies?Smartmatic posted a tweet this week outright denying their transfer of technology to Dominion voting systems.But there is evidence that this is completely false.In December 2007 Smartmatic announced the sale of their Sequoia Voting Systems to Dominion Voting Systems.Smartmatic published a press release announcing their sale Sequoia voting systems as shown in screenshot below.Below you will find a press release from Dominion voting systems announcing their purchase of a Intellectual properties, Hardware and Software that was once owned by Smartmatic.Here is...

Mexico said Wednesday it will send 101 firefighters to the United States to help battle wildfires in California. The country’s Environment Department said five teams of 20 trained, equipped firefighters from Mexico’s national forestry commission will work with the U.S. Forest Service. They will be sent first to work in California’s Sequoia National Park. The park is threatened by the SQF Complex of fires ignited by lightning in the Sequoia National Forest. The department said Mexico can spare the crews because in 31 of Mexico’s 32 states there are no active wildfires. The summer and early fall are rainy season...

No one is more important to the history of environmental conservation than John Muir — the “wilderness prophet,” “patron saint of the American wilderness” and “father of the national parks” who founded the nation’s oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club. But on Wednesday, citing the current racial reckoning, the group announced it will end its blind reverence to a figure who was also racist. As Confederate statues fall across the country, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in an early morning post on the group’s website, “it’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some...

The incident occurred Saturday evening when the woman fell into Silliman Creek near the Twin Lakes Trail and was subsequently swept downstream, according to the National Park Service. ... Record high temperatures in the region coupled with rapidly melting snow in mountain areas is causing swift, cold and dangerous river conditions, park officials warned. “River crossings fluctuate with temperature and time of day,” U.S. Park Ranger Leah Tobin said in a prepared statement. “Just because you are able to cross in the morning, does not mean the same crossing will be at the same level when you come back in...

CALAVERAS COUNTY, Calif. (AP) — A giant sequoia tree known for the huge tunnel carved through it has toppled during California’s weekend storms. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the historic Pioneer Cabin in Calaveras Big Trees State Park in Calaveras County came down during heavy rains on Sunday. A Facebook post from the Calaveras Big Trees Association confirmed the news.

A powerful winter storm in California has brought down an ancient tree, carved into a living tunnel more than a century ago. The "Pioneer Cabin Tree," a sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, saw horses and cars pass through it over the years. More recently, only hikers were allowed to walk through the massive tree. Over the weekend, a powerful winter storm slammed into California and Nevada, prompting flooding and mudslides in some regions. The Associated Press reports it might be the biggest storm to hit the region in more than a decade. On Sunday, a volunteer at the...

The historic Pioneer Cabin Tree, a former "drive-through" giant sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park in Calaveras County, was felled in California's weekend storms. The tree was hollowed out in the 1880s to allow tourists to pass through it, and even allowed cars, but more recently has hosted only hikers. It was part of the "Big Trees Trail" at the state park. Jim Allday of Arnold is a volunteer at the park who was working there Sunday. He said the tree went down about 2 p.m. and "shattered" on impact.

“So there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that those stickers were purposefully placed over the manufacturer’s identifying plates in order to keep their origin a secret." An acquaintance returned from early voting in Manassas, Virginia, quite irate. The stakes are high in this highly unusual once in a lifetime presidential election. As she was waiting for her registration paperwork to be processed, she studied carefully the rear of each of the voting machines that were about three feet from her. She wanted to find out the name of the manufacturer of the machines being used.

SEATTLE - Police and firefighters spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday morning trying to coax down a man who climbed to the top of downtown Seattle's iconic 80-foot-tall Sequoia tree and has refused to come down. Crews brought a ladder truck to the scene, at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Stewart Street, after receiving reports of a man stuck in the upper branches of the tall tree, just after 11:30 a.m. Tuesday. The fire truck's ladder was extended to within a few feet of the man, then negotiators climbed up and tried to speak with him. So far he...

A U.S. supercomputer has won back the crown in the never-ending battle for the world's most powerful supercomputer. Its victory is the latest milestone marking the steady climb of computing power all across the globe. The Top500 industry list gave its No. 1 ranking to the Sequoia supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — a spot earned by Sequoia's ability to crunch 16.32 quadrillion calculations per second (16.32 petaflops/s). Such supercomputing power is used by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to simulate nuclear weapons tests for older weapons that have been sitting in the U.S. arsenal....

ISC 2012For the second time in the past two years, a new supercomputer has taken the top ranking in the Top 500 list of supercomputers – and it does not use a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. But the question everyone will be asking at the International Super Computing conference in Hamburg, Germany today is whether this is the last hurrah for such monolithic parallel machines and whether the move toward hybrid machines where GPUs or other kinds of coprocessors do most of the work is inevitable. LLNL's Sequoia BlueGene/Q super being assembled by IBM (click to enlarge) No one can predict...

U.S. government researchers are warning that someone could sneak an inexpensive piece of electronics into e-voting machines like those to be used in the next national election and then remotely change votes after they have been cast. ... Basically, when a voter pushes a button to record his or her votes electronically, the remote hijacker could use a Radio Frequency remote control to intercept that communication, change the votes, and then submit the fraudulent votes for recording. The researchers uncovered similar problems with Sequoia e-voting systems in 2009.