Category Archives: Evolution

Its the classic underdog story.

The genre of dembow a Dominican style of music identified by its playful, rapid drum pattern and carefree energy began as a musical pariah, rejected by both mainstream and underground communities in its birthplace. When Id go to the television and radio stations, theyd say, No, we cant play that, El Alfa told Billboard in March. But you step in the streets, and all you could hear was dembow.

At that time, dembow faced relentless criticism and resistance due to what one Dominican Republic government official recently referred to as sexual and obscene content (not too dissimilar to what reggaetn acts faced early on in Puerto Rico). But in recent years, the genre has taken the world by storm. Latin stars across the board, including J Balvin, Rosala, Camilo, Natti Natasha, Daddy Yankee and Justin Quiles, have tapped into the genre in the last year alone, collaborating with dembow mainstays Chimbala and El Alfa, as well as the genres iconoclastic up-and-comer, Tokischa.

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See latest videos, charts and news

The genre has experienced greater awards show presence (Tokischa and Rosala live-debuted Linda at the 2021 Billboard Latin Music Awards), as well as Billboard chart highs (El Alfas La Mama de la Mama reached No. 9 on Hot Latin Songs last May). Its biggest stars are now transcending local nightclubs, performing across the global and and even packing arenas (El Alfa played a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden in 2021).

While many non-Dominicans were exposed to dembow by way of El Alfa, today, a number of dembow artists are sharing the spotlight, including Tokischa, Rochy RD, Yomel El Meloso, La Perversa, Braulio Fogon, Gailen La Moyeta, Leo RD, Kiko El Crazy and Bulova, among others.

Dominican Dembow is survival hood music and embodies Dominican Black joy its all ancestral from the dance movements to the diasporic drum patterns, says dembow historian, Jennifer Motaval. Throughout the years weve seen it evolve in production and lyricism, captivating global audiences. The music rose organically despite the many barriers that is monumental.

Below, Billboard explores the evolution of dembow by way of some of its most iconic musical moments.

1990: Shabba Ranks, Dem Bow

The genre dembow pulls its name from Jamaican dancehall artist Shabba Ranks anti-imperialist (and unfortunately, anti-gay) anthem Dem Bow, Jamaican Patois for they bow. The forever-sampled track became a catalyst for the Dominican genre, and sister genre reggaetn, both by way of reggae en espanol.

1993: DJ Boyo, Mujeres Andadoras

Within three years, Ranks riddim found its way to Quisqueya. Arguably the founder of Dominican dembow, DJ Boyo worked painstakingly to usher in a sound suited for a population responsible for the sweat-inducing tempo of merengue. Mujer Andadora arrived on the heels of Panamanian reggae en espanol godfather El Generals Tu Pum Pum, but was met with disdain from both radio DJs who mainly played salsa, bachata and merengue, and local spanish-language hip-hop artists. It remains the first example of Dominican dembow, before the sound became fully solidified.

2006: Los Andolocos, Ando Loco

Thanks to the rise of the internet and blogs, dembow was able to begin blossoming without the help of major television and radio stations. The track Ando Loco by Los Andolocos was the first to gain large-scale recognition in the Dominican Republic, being spun at clubs nationwide. This time period was also extremely fruitful for reggaetn across the way in Puerto Rico.

2010: Pablo Piddy, Quisqueyano Dembow

The 2010s can be understood as dembows springtime. An outpouring of popular tracks and artists bolstered the genre, like rapper-turned-dembowsero Pablo Piddy, Monkey Black, El Alfa and Chimbala, among others. Because of Piddys lyrical abilities, tracks like Quisqueyano Dembow brought a new level of composition and structure to the genre.

2012: Chimbala, Baila Con Lo Pie

While he started off producing records for dembow greats like El Alfa, Chimbala, aka el pequeito, stepped into full artist mode with the danceable Digo E and Con Lo Pie. Both tracks mark a pivotal moment for the ever-rising dembowsero, and remain dance favorites two decades later.

2014: La Materialista, La Chapa Que Vibran

Standing tall as one of the most recognizable women in the dembow genre, La Materialista made waves with her 2014 single, La Chapa Que Vibran. Moments like this (including Milka la Mas Duras Dale Ven Ven in 2009) were extremely noteworthy in a genre that like many others, did not prioritize creating space for women artists until much later in its history. Around the same time, other Dominican women in the urbano genre were also rising, like Amara la Negra and La Insuperable.

2017: Bad Bunny feat. El Alfa, Dema Ga Ge Gi Go Gu

El Alfa and Bad Bunnys Dema Ga Ge Gi Go Gu brought much of the larger Latin Urban music audience to dembow. The Puerto Rican megastar became a major supporter of the genre, collaborating again with El Alfa (2018s La Romana) and sampling other dembow artists like Chimbala and Rochy RD. While Conejo Malo was among the first of mainstream artists to tap into the explosive genre, he certainly wasnt the last, with Rosalia, J Balvin, Jowell y Randy, among others boasting a dembow track under their belts.

2020: Tokischa & Yomel El Meloso, Desacato Escolar

Dembow received the shake-up of a lifetime in 2020 by way of budding rapper-turned-genre mainstay Tokischa. Within a space historically dominated by male artists (save standouts like La Materialista, La Insuperable and Milka la Mas Dura), Toki burst onto the scene with sex-positive lyricism, bringing along a number of other female dembow acts, like Yailin la Mas Viral and La Perversa. She foreshadowed her mark on the genre with the opening line of Desacato Escolar: soy una nena rebelde.

2021: El Alfa, CJ & El Cherry Scom, La Mama de la Mama

It was the dembow single heard round the world. In summer of 2021, El Alfa, CJ and Cherry Scoms La Mama de la Mama dominated the streets and the charts, marking El Alfas (and arguably the genres) most noteworthy mainstream breakout moment, outside of a major outside collaboration. The electrifying single peaked at No. 9 on the Hot Latin Songs chart, marking a career high for El Alfa and the dembow genre.

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Hispanic Heritage Month: How Dembow Evolved into the Hottest Thing in Latin Urban Music - Billboard

Likely the most abundant enzyme on Earth, Rubisco performs the vital function of fixing carbon from the environment in photosynthetic organisms. Of the four forms of Rubisco known to exist today, form Ipresent in cyanobacteria, some algae, and plantshas the highest specificity for carbon dioxide and the most efficient catalytic activity. Researchers reconstructed ancestral Rubisco sequences and measured how well these revived putative proteins performed in a lab setting, proposing in a study published online yesterday (October 13) in Science that form Is improved qualities were acquired thanks to the gain of a small subunit. In the study, the authors retrace how this transition could have taken place.

Form I Rubisco is made up of eight identical catalytic large subunits and eight identical small subunits. Researchers long suspected that its enhanced ability to discriminate CO2 from the chemically similar molecule oxygen (O2) could be related to the presence of these small subunits, since no other forms of Rubisco have them. However, before this paper came along, we actually had no direct way of validating this, says University of Oxford plant evolutionary biologist Jacques Bouvier, who did not participate in this study, because removing the small subunits impairs the enzymes stability and function.

When Georg Hochberg, an evolutionary biochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, met synthetic biologist Tobias Erb and doctoral researcher Luca Schulz at the same institute, they thought they could probably tackle together the challenge of testing the role of the small subunit in the enzymes performance, he says, using phylogenetics and synthetic biology to reconstruct the ancestors of todays form I Rubiscos.

The researchers first reconstructed the phylogenies of both the large and small subunits. For this, they sampled very broadly, says Schulz, putting together a wide range of sequences obtained from public databases. Their analysis pointed toward two putative key ancestors of the large subunit: AncL, the last common ancestor before the large subunit began interacting with the small subunit, and AncLS, the last common ancestor of all Rubisco in which a large and small subunit interact. The analysis further suggested that the most parsimonious scenario is that form I Rubiscos evolved in thermophilic anaerobes before atmospheric oxygen levels rose, hinting that the high CO2 specificity may not have been a consequence of selective pressure posed by global high O2 levels.

Then, the team synthesized these two large subunit ancestors, as well as an ancestral small subunit (AncSSU) also inferred from the phylogenies. Once you know that sequence, you can use essentially pretty standard synthetic biology to synthesize a stretch of DNA that codes for it, feed it to bacteria that then interpret the stretch of DNA, and produce the protein, says Hochberg. The protein is then purified out of these bacteria, and researchers are able to characterize its activity, he explains. From this, he and his colleagues learned, for instance, that AncL does not seem to bind to AncSSU, whereas AncLS does, and furthermore, the small subunit is essential to itin its absence, AncLS solubility is impaired, suggesting that dependence on the small subunit likely evolved shortly after the interaction did.

Moreover, the catalytic efficiency and specificity to carbon dioxide were higher for the AncLS+AncSSU complex compared to the AncL. Was this due to the presence of the small subunit? It was difficult to tell, since AncLSs function is impaired without it. Hochberg, Schulz, Erb, and their colleagues thus aimed to reconstruct an ancestor of the large subunit that would allow them to test the question.

The structure of form I Rubisco: The large subunits are shown in cyan and the small subunits in magenta.

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, LAGUNA DESIGN

AncL and AncLS differed by 95 amino acid substitutions and three insertions. So the team reasoned that, as AncL does not interact with the small subunit and AncLS is dependent on it, those differences may be involved in that association. The researchers focused on 14 differences in AncLS that are near the small subunit. By playing around with these, they came to a Rubisco variant that is soluble and functional without the small subunit but that can bind to it: AncL+7. This enabled them to directly test how the interaction with the small subunit affects Rubiscos properties: They found that it increased the carboxylation efficiency, the temperature tolerance of catalysis, and the CO2 versus O2 specificity.

That the authors were able to engineer a Rubisco ancestor that was not dependent on the small subunit, yet was able to bind it, is a crucial advance of this paper, says Bouvier. This allowed the researchers to assess its activity with and without this small subunit, which we cant do in any other way, he notes.

The team was also able to show that by introducing one more substitution to AncL+7, specificity was further increased to a level that almost doubles that of AncL. This boost, though, only occurs if the small subunit is present. For Erb, this is the most exciting finding of the studythat is, that two Rubisco molecules that differ by a few mutations may behave similarly without the small subunit, but they suddenly diverge in their performance when interacting with it. In a way, he adds, the small subunit acts as an evolutionary modulator, meaning that mutations that were silent before suddenly make a difference when this interaction occurs.

Rubisco is known to have evolved prior to the Great Oxidation Event, which took place approximately 2.4 billion years ago when atmospheric oxygen increased, possibly as a consequence of photosynthesis carried out by ancestral cyanobacteria. Yet the timing of the origin of the high-specificity form I Rubisco is unclear. The authors proposal that the interaction with and dependence on the small subunitand consequent propertiesmay predate the global increase in oxygen on the planet opens an interesting discussion, according to other researchers who spoke with The Scientist.

If this hypothesis is correct, the initial main driving force may have not been avoiding the oxygenation reaction via its high specificity for carbon dioxide, as oxygen was not yet present in the atmosphere at high enough levels to present a problem, says Inger Andersson, a structural biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and the Institute of Biotechnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences who was not involved in the study. There was likely some other driverfor example, making a rigid active site that can hold this molecule [CO2] and avoid side reactions, she says. Selectivity for the carboxylation over the oxygenation later came as a bonus, she adds in a follow-up email.

We know that the global oxygen concentration was low before the Great Oxidation Event, but we dont really have any idea about what the local oxygen concentration might have been in some . . . environments, says Steven Kelly, a plant scientist studying the evolution of photosynthesis at the University of Oxford. It is possible to speculate that these high-specificity Rubiscos might have evolved in environments with high local oxygen concentrations, he adds, although there is no evidence to suggest whether this was the case. Kelly, who was not involved in the new study, cofounded and consults for Wild Bioscience, a company that aims to improve crop yield by boosting photosynthesis.

Hochberg says that one of the most exciting aspects of this work is that exploring the evolution of a well-studied and famous enzyme has actually taught us really novel things about how it works. . . . Questions that were not answerable through decades of really hard biochemistry have now become accessible by integrating this evolutionary perspective.

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Scientists Resurrect Ancient Rubiscos to Understand Their Evolution - The Scientist

Most Catholics these days dont think there is a conflict between the theory of evolution and their faith. But its harder to wrap our heads around the idea that were still evolvingand that God might be, too. This week, we talk with Sister Ilia Delio, a theologian who thinks we cant separate the evolving nature of our universe and consciousness from our faith. We ask Sister Delio what its like to work at the cutting edge of theology, where rapidly changing technology and artificial intelligence might be taking us as a species, and what that means for the church.

In Signs of the Times, Zac and Ashley discuss the still-open questions about the legacy and implementation of the Second Vatican Council, which opened 60 years ago this week. Did the council fail? What would success look like, and what would the church look like today if Vatican II hadnt happened?

Links from the show:

Whats on tap?

Pinot Noir

Excerpt from:

Does God evolve? How evolution and A.I. are pushing the horizons of theology - America: The Jesuit Review

rWhen most Americans dine at a South Asian restaurant, dessert isnt the most memorable part of their experience.

In general, diners may mention fragrant spices like turmeric (everyone likes turmeric). Oh, how cumin needs to be toasted and ground, they repeat, possessing the insight of someone who has only scanned the back of a Madhur Jaffrey book. Then theres the nascent vegetarian or vegan, the one who will question everything ingredient on the menu What exactly is ghee? Meanwhile, anyone who turns to Facebook neighborhood groups for tips will find a particular breed of diner obsessed with value the curries and naan bread have to be affordable because cheap food carries some type of soul-nurturing property. But seldom is a word spent remarking on the sweets.

South Asian sweets, or mithai like jamun, burfi, and jalebi havent caught on with the Western world, which is curious because those eaters sure love to note heat levels in South Asian food; something sweet would surely cool them off. But the desserts of South Asia which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka arent plated like European and American sweets, adorned with edible flowers or with precious sauce dots. There arent many pastry chefs emerging from sweet shops stationed in traditional South Asian enclaves such as Devon in Chicago, Jackson Heights in New York, and Jersey City. While Michelin may ignore mithai, theyre still wonderful in the eyes of other beholders.

Theyre decorative, theyre beautiful. You go to a store to buy them, says Meherwan Irani, chef and owner of Chai Pani in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized by the James Beard Foundation in Chicago in June as Outstanding Restaurant 2022 for its refined take on street food. But nobody in a million years would even attempt to try to make those at home, right?

Theres a gaudy quality to these offerings, popular during holidays like Diwali this year observed on Monday, October 24. Supply chain be damned, mithai makers will still acquire the edible gold and silver leaflets that decorate some of these treats. Diwali rituals call for offerings to the gods and sweets are a popular choice. The simplified explanation is that the five-day festival celebrates good triumphing over evil. The holiday is Hindu but celebrated globally by people of many different faiths.

For Chai Pani, holidays present a chance to expand the dessert menu (selling items like falooda, a Persian milkshake-like dessert with noodles), but on most days Irani serves only two desserts: kheer, made of milk, sugar, and rice; and suji halva made of almond, semolina, and cashews. South Asian sweets present a challenge because theyre so sweet, so chefs like Irani have to find ways to dial the sugar (or jaggery, based on the chefs preference and the ingredients availability) down while keeping the items recognizable.

Nobody sits down and eats like a whole bowl or a plate of mithai, Irani says. Usually in India, its a small bite just to sweeten the mouth.

Making mithai is a social activity for groups, mostly made up of aunties who gather in kitchens to pass along generational traditions: The men are in the other room playing cards, laughs Chicago chef Jasmine Sheth.

Diwali is a busy time for the Mumbai-born Sheth. Shes not just a mithaiwalla, someone who specializes in making South Asian sweets for holidays and other events. Sheth also cooks regional Indian dishes for pop-ups and sells spices under her company, Tasting India. Were trying to break stereotypes, she says. Its not just butter chicken and naan. There are so many other variations of Indian cuisine.

Since 2020 and the pandemics start, shes seen a boom in selling sweets for weddings and other celebrations. Tasting India blends tradition and innovation where customers can buy laddoo, those round, orange balls made of flour, jaggery, and ghee. But Sheth will also make mango cardamom flan, saffron truffles, and filter coffee pot de creme for special orders. This year, embracing Southeast Asian culinary traditions, Sheth also made mooncakes with toasted milk (which has the consistency of curd, called mawa) and brandied fruit.

Those popular flavors outside of South Asian traditions serve as a gateway to trying other dishes: Sweets are something that can bring instant gratification and happiness to people no matter what culture they are from, Sheth says.

Diwali sweets vary by region, especially when it comes to ingredients. The greatest hits include lentils, rice, chickpea, and flour. In Britain, low-fat versions are even available for those who want to stay away from deep-fried traditions. This year, Sheth is seeing a boom in corporate clients with customers ordering Diwali boxes packed with a choice of two different laddoos and cardamom khova truffles. Sheth describes these as white fudge spiked with cardamom.

Roni Mazumdar, co-founder of New Yorks Unapologetic Foods, likens a box of mithai to a box of chocolate. This analogy is more Cadbury than Russell Stover. Mazumdars restaurants include New Yorks only Michelin-starred Indian restaurant, Semma, and Eater Best New Restaurant Dhamaka. Earlier this year, chef Chintan Pandya won the Beard Award for Best Chef: New York.

But the labor it takes to make these desserts doesnt always make economic sense. Mazumdar says the profit margin for desserts at his restaurants is typically about 4 percent. Economics is why two desserts gulab jamun and rasmalai emerged as fixtures on South Asian menus, he adds: They both come in cans. Still, some pay tribute to the nostalgia. At Superkhana International in Chicagos Logan Square neighborhood, brunch diners can order French toast served with gulab jamun syrup. Co-chef Zeeshan Shah is also known for his bite-sized, cardamom-infused ice cream sandwiches that use Indian biscuit Parle-G.

For South Asian restaurants with tasting menus, a rarity across the country there are only two in Chicago operators can hide the cost of desserts in the overall price. But for a la carte restaurants, its a bigger challenge, says Dhamakas Pandya. With his first restaurant with Mazumdar, they hired a pastry chef that took paan (wrapped betel leaf) and dipped it in dark chocolate, and then infused it with chocolate mousse. They would sell about 10 of those a day.

You can do traditional desserts, or you can do contemporary desserts, Pandya says. Or you can do whatever you know, New World kind of dessert they dont sell much in Indian restaurants, or for that matter, ethnic restaurants.

At Dhamaka, the featured dessert is chhena poda, a baked cheese dish with sugar and semolina. Part of why it can stick in an upscale Indian restaurant is the similarity to cheesecake, though Mazumdar bristles at the notion that theyre creating some sort of fusion dish to pander: Chhena poda has been done for 250 years, Pandya adds. But what has happened is we have been so stupid about our own cuisine that we never promoted it.

Over in Chicago, Manish and Rina Mallick, co-owners of Rooh Chicago and Bar Goa made the unusual step of flying in a pastry chef. They met Abhimanyu Ghuliani on vacation while staying at the W Goa Hotel. Ghuliani has since moved to the Cayman Islands and the Mallicks brought him to Chicago where he spent two weeks sprucing up their dessert menus and working on mithai.

For Rooh, Ghuliani has a saffron cheesecake with a motichur laddoo and warm saffron cream. At Bar Goa, theyve taken a besan burfi (normally squares made from condensed milk, sugar, and flour) and shaped them like cigars, and dipped them in chocolate. The cigar includes an edible gold wrapper and an ashtray with crumpled pieces of edible gold that look like ashes. The cigar is then pumped with smoke from a cocktail gun and presented under a glass cloche. Manish Mallick says both dishes are permanent fixtures on the menu and hopes the cigar becomes a signature. This is a fun way to bring mithai to an audience beyond South Asians. They are also selling a traditional mithai box.

Getting the right pastry chef who understands the vision and is able to execute is extremely hard, he adds. Thats something thats being seen across all culinary traditions.

Note the edible gold wrapper.

Perhaps the diner of the future will be different. Mithai burfi officially exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a prominent display in Ms. Marvel, a story about a Pakistani American teen. Diners are also more familiar with South Asian cuisine than when Chai Pani opened in 2009. Irani offered dessert on his thali (thali is a traditional offering with small tastes in small steel tins on a single steel plate). Irani fielded many questions and found different ways to describe kheer, such as Indian rice pudding or a sweetened polenta.

And I remember the early days, watching the thalis come back to the kitchen and noticing what was eaten and what was not eaten, Irani says. And often the dessert was not really touched much. But as the years went by, I saw that less and less, as I noticed more and more that the dessert on the thali is now being consumed.

While Irani says his culinary focus will never be desserts, now the desserts get their own plates: Im trying to capture that feeling of when a mom makes, I dont know, rice pudding at home, or an apple pie at home, or something that seems familiar, he says.

Irani is even considering new dishes. Nashville celebrity chef Maneet Chauhan (Chaatable) has him thinking about gulab jamun cheesecake.

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The Evolution of the Diwali Sweet - Eater Chicago

Morelull and Shiinotic, its evolution, are two Gen 7 Pokmon, which both debuted in Pokmon Go during the Season of Light.

Released as part of the 2022 Festival of Lights in Pokmon Go, both of these grass and fairy-type Pokmon were clearly inspired by mushrooms.

Below youll learn how to get Morelull and evolve it into Shiinotic in Pokmon Go.

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Morelull first appeared on Friday, 14th October during the 2022 Festival of Lights in Pokmon Go.

Throughout this event, you can obtain Morelull through a variety of means:

As you can see from the methods listed above, encountering Morelull in the wild is the easiest way to find this living mushroom in Pokmon Go. You can increase your chances by using an Incense, which, thanks to the Festival of Lights bonuses, will last for two hours.

Due to the Festival of Lights being a short event, its a good idea to fight Morelul in a raid too. Since Morelull is a one-star raid Pokmon, you should be able to defeat Morelull by yourself - if your Pokmon are strong enough, of course. Look to the sections below to learn about Morelulls counters and weaknesses.

If youd like to catch Morelull through its Festival of Lights field research task, then its important to remember that the tasks given out by PokStops change on a daily basis. Thanks to this, Morelulls task may be hard to find, especially since you can still receive field research tasks from the monthly pool alongside the event-exclusive tasks.

At the time of writing, we dont know what Morelulls spawn rate will be once the 2022 Festival of Lights has ended. Theres a chance, however, that, like other recently released Pokmon, it will be hard to find.

To evolve Morelull into Shiinotic in Pokmon Go, you need to collect 50 Morelull Candy.

Since the Festival of Lights is a short event, you only have a small window to easily collect the required candy for Morelulls evolution. For this reason, youll want to use a Pinap Berry every time you attempt to catch a Morelull to double your catch candy. You can also collect some extra candy by making a Morelull your buddy Pokmon and exploring the world while playing Pokmon Go.

The Festival of Lights is currently running in Pokmon Go, which has seen the release of Morelull and Shiinotic.The quest steps 5 to 8 of A Cosmic Companion is now live as part of the Season of Light.Elsewhere, be sure to use Daily Adventure Incense for the chance of encountering Galarian Articuno, Galarian Zapdos and Galarian Moltres. There's also a new special research quest - A Mysterious Incense.Finally - don't forget about the new Prime Gaming rewards every fortnight.

If youd like to battle Morelull in one-star raids, then you should know its weaknesses and counters in Pokmon Go:

Below youll find the CP levels for battling and attempting to catch Morelull in Pokmon Go:

Good luck adding Morelull and Shiinotic to your Pokdex!

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How to get Morelull and evolution Shiinotic in Pokmon Go - Eurogamer.net

VERO BEACH, FL, October 14, 2022Today, Piper Aircraft announces it has implemented the latest evolution of Garmin software at NBAA-BACE in Orlando, FL.Piper Aircraft is committed to providing innovative safety enhancing technologies throughout its fleet. Previously, Piper Aircraft was first to market with Garmins Collier award-winning Autoland technology, a standard feature included on the M600/SLS.

The latest in Garmin software innovations designed for the G3000 avionics suite, which Piper Aircraft uses in their flagship turboprop, the M600/SLS will be on display in the convention center at NBAA. The updated software includes enhancements to the synthetic vision system, weather radar, navigation, flight planning, checklists, and Safetaxi. Additionally, the system will provide advanced database management with automation. One of the most significant additions is the new 3D SafeTaxi, which expands ground situational awareness with an advanced 3D depiction of the ground environment, including airport markers, buildings, and other position markings. The aircraft view displayed on the avionics can depict a 3D model of the aircraft, showing its position from above and behind. New to the system is taxiway routing guidance which further increases pilot awareness by providing both graphical and textual information, supporting the pilot at even the most complex airports. A taxiway route is entered through the taxiway selection screen, and then the system will use the aircraft position to depict the route on the display.

Bringing the latest avionics innovations to the G3000 equipped M600/SLS reaffirms our commitment to safety and remaining at the forefront of general aviation technology for all of our customers, said Ron Gunnarson, Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Customer Support at Piper Aircraft. We look forward to watching our customers utilize this technology and appreciate our ongoing partnership with Garmin.

Piper Aircraft will have a demonstration kiosk at NBAA-BACE this year, located at Booth #4886 in the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. In addition, Piper Aircraft will exhibit the M600/SLS, M350, and Archer LX at the NBAA-BACE outdoor displays, located at Orlando Executive Airport, Booth #AD-409.

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Experience the latest Evolution of Garmin Software - Vero News

This is the second in a three-part series on continuous security.

In our previous post we outlined Jits philosophy behind continuous security, and how elite and modern engineering teams who will embrace this approach will actually increase velocity despite common misconceptions around security bogging down engineering.

Security is here to stay and needs to be embedded early. Weve learned this from shift left, which is already proving to not be early enough, and born-left security is now an emerging practice embedding security as early as the first line of code.

However, applying this in practice requires some realignment of process and practice. By identifying fixes that can be made immediately and prioritizing the rest, we can then create a good framework and baseline security posture to maintain and improve.

When we talk about continuous security, it also consists of a few pillars that will help bring security closer to engineering practices and unleash the true potential of developer-owned security.

These pillars include:

We spoke about this briefly in our previous post, but to unpack this more deeply, lets take a look at what elite engineering looks like, and what security can take from this approach. When we talk about the metrics that quantify elite engineering, there are two primary categories DORA looks at: speed and safety.

With the continued evolution of the attack surface and sophistication of exploits as the stakes get higher with each breach, safety must stop being an afterthought in engineering. While this is usually quantified in metrics such as change failure rate (CFR) and mean time to restore (MTTR), another extremely important focus gaining more and more centrality in engineering processes is security risk management.

But this begs the question: Why hasnt security been a native citizen in development processes until now despite all of the efforts to shift it left and farther left, and even make it born left.

This is because of the entire mindset of security is issue-driven, versus the engineering mindset is fix-driven.

Lets take a look at the DORA safety metrics, that are measured in CFR and MTTR. Even if you have introduced failure into your systems (where CFR measures how often this even happens), MTTR measures how quickly you can introduce the fix and restore your systems, which are largely regarded as metrics that define elite engineering teams. However, security tools today only introduce noise with the many issues they flag, and very few tools take a fix-first approach.

The most common OSS tools in use today are laser-focused on detection and much less on remediation. Even those that provide guidance for how to fix the issue, rarely point you to the exact line of code to fix.

Engineering teams focused on high velocity arent interested in what is wrong. Theyre interested in how to fix it when it has gone wrong (theyll reserve the what happened for the post-mortem or the sprint retrospective). Resolving the issue becomes the highest value in software delivery.

DevOps and automation have introduced best practices and eventually even playbooks that can be automated with the most common failures.

If we start with the first pillar of continuous security, security as code (SaC) is aligned with developer workflows and provides fixes to known problems throughout the coding process. Even more importantly, it also provides extensibility since security is codified and therefore programmable, which ultimately allows people to manage their own custom risks and processes.

Security orchestration is achieved by evolving remediation processes to be more automated, batch-oriented and simpler. Finally, continuous monitoring serves to ensure no new threats are introduced, and those emerging threats in running services are rapidly caught and mitigated.

While the fix-first mindset enables us to not introduce new issues, this doesnt negate the specific effort and resources you should dedicate to continuously reduce your security debt of existing critical issues. Which is the orchestration part of it.

By aggregating similar issues and processing them as a batch, you can achieve greater security efficiency and minimize your backlog more rapidly (many security products now take this approach.). Continuous monitoring and security orchestration go hand in hand, as once you are aware of existing problems and discover production issues, a good automation process will help mitigate these risks more rapidly than former processes.

This is similar to fixing a breach in a boat. You start by making sure to fix the hole before removing the water. Once you can nail down the mechanism for fixing new issues as they come up and instill a fix-first mindset, it is then possible to decouple this from the effort of fixing existing problems and automating this process as well.

Yet, this is basically where security fails. A laundry list of vulnerabilities simply doesnt do the job any longer.

While visibility and observability are the first steps to fixing failure, understanding how to actually follow through and fix issues rapidly will be the true measure of making security a first-class citizen in engineering and delivery, and then automating whats possible and prioritizing the rest.

Great, so hows that done?

Once we understand this fundamental mind shift, we can reverse engineer how to go about applying a fix-first approach to security for modern engineering processes where the primary goal is to ship code to production as rapidly as possible with security already embedded.

In our previous post, we discussed the three core pieces to making this possible: differentiation, prioritization and remediation. Below well take a deep dive on how to apply this in your engineering practices right away.

Lets talk about current security gating and where this can be optimized, automated or moved to the backlog when necessary. When we talk about continuous integration and deployment, the typical diagram includes Build >> Test >> Release >> Deploy.

To this, over the years, weve added layers for pre-coding, coding and post-deployment so this now looks like: Plan >> Code >> Build >> Test >> Release >> Deploy >> Run / Operate

To each one of these phases we have tried to embed security as seamlessly as possible, and this has had some successes and some failures.

One of the great successes of the DevSecOps approach was embedding security checks in a way that is code-centric, and in a place that in any case has other gates, during the pull request (PR) (with different controls for build, test and release).

This made it possible to include actionable security fixes into other code and bug fixes, while still in the same context of engineering that same piece of code. Its a method that has proven highly effective for embedding security into code early, and before merging and deploying code to production.

What has proven less successful are the ways that security vulnerabilities have been handled at runtime both at the level of the cloud provider infrastructure and the application. The common practice for this layer is to run these checks on a predefined schedule and alert the DevOps or cloud engineer to any issue (during the run/operate phase). This is completely decoupled from any engineering process, and often leaves this area in no mans land or opens the door to creating infrastructure drift. The same type of problem occurs with security findings discovered against the runtime application.

Once the code is deployed and running in production, tracking down the code owner is difficult and bringing them back into this piece of codes context, even more so. Infrastructure security issues that arise after the fact are a common contributor to infrastructure drift, as many times engineers prefer to make changes in the console or UI instead of through infrastructure as code. This would require the code to be redeployed through the regular pipelines and checks and adds other humans to the process.

The other half of it is even when debugging is done in production, many times due to the urgency of the fix, these changes also often bypass code gating as well. This also assumes that the fix is simple and detection as well, where in reality neither of these is true. Rarely is a solution provided as code, as these have the tendency to be error-prone and complex solutions. And even if it is, the fix is not always straightforward and easy, although more than ever there is a need for shift-left practices for runtime as well.

This commonly happens because after deployment there is no longer real clarity regarding ownership, and scheduled checks are decoupled from any ongoing engineering process. Therefore, if an alert arises, the engineer will want to deal with it as quickly as possible, and manual changes or drift will only be detected upon the next scheduled run. That can be hours, days or weeks away when another engineer is on call.

A good practice would be to move these checks and controls into the same code-centric gate the PR and ensure that at the very least they are caught upon first deployment to staging, so as not to reach production again while the engineer who wrote the code is still in context. This will make it possible to ensure that there are no alerts or issues with the infrastructure and runtime of choice.

To take this further, there are security measures we can take as early as the coding itself through in-IDE security alerts and pre-commit hooks to help embed security as early as possible into our products and systems.

The code-centrics aspects are the easy part. They are often already implemented in security-minded organizations, where each PR is viewed as a new security delta from existing code.

For the non-code centric changes, such as infrastructure changes, IaC and even config as code and to be even more accurate and clear, these include both changes in the code that lead to non-code issues, such as a change in IaC has some consequences in the infrastructure runtime, or a change in the application code that can lead to non-code issues in the runtime it is slightly harder. But it is not impossible to find a good framework for defining a baseline and to ensure this is maintained with every deployment or environment change.

Anything that doesnt fall into these two categories of immediately fixable issues are treated as backlog fixes, and go through the prioritization and remediation framework we define based on their severity, fixability and ability to be automated and orchestrated.

Examples Include:

These are just some of the parameters that affect our prioritization and decision-making around issues in our backlog.

Continuous security is possible by breaking down the formerly daunting domain of security into developer-centric language, tools, workflows and processes. By delivering security as code, the automation already possible in other engineering disciplines is also now possible in security. Once we identify the areas we can automate, its possible to achieve true security orchestration basically the automation of workflows and not simply one-off tasks. The final piece is to ensure we are constantly maintaining this baseline security posture we have defined and achieved, through continuous monitoring and grooming of our security backlog.

In our next post, well dive into how the adoption of this approach benefits CISOs as well and share the CISO perspective that demonstrates how formerly opposing views are now converging into a single worldview that has, until recently, been a source of friction and frustration in many engineering organizations. All of these together will be the enabler of engineering velocity, making it possible for CTOs and CISOs alike to deploy rapidly and with confidence.

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Continuous Security, the Next Evolution of Developer Velocity - thenewstack.io

"Hellraiser: Hellseeker" is notable for the return of the original film's final girl, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), but otherwise it essentially recycles the plot of "Hellraiser: Inferno." Again, the film follows a corrupt husband who realizes by the end of the film that he's actually been trapped in Hell, and is being punished by Pinhead (Doug Bradley) for crimes he committed while he was alive. Though he has a more prominent role, Pinhead doesn't actually appear until the final act, when Trevor (Dean Winters) realizes that the body on the table is not his dead wife's but his own.

Screenwriter Tim Day recounts having a hard time getting Laurence, who exited the franchise after cameoing in the third film, to sign on to the project. He says it was actually Bradley himself who convinced her. As Laurence recalled in Cinescape (again, via Clive Barker's website), "I got a call from Doug Bradley at home, and kind of out of the blue he said that he was doing 'Hellraiser' and that the director was talking about the fact that he would love to bring back the Kirsty character in a cameo."

Despite this rehashed plot, "Hellraiser: Hellseeker" presents an interesting shift in Pinhead's methods and motivations. In a return to the original source material, Pinhead becomes fixated on capturing Kirsty, who escaped the Cenobites in the original film. To save herself, Kirsty brokers a deal with Pinhead, offering up five different souls in exchange for her own.

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The Evolution Of Pinhead From 1986 To 2022 - /Film

The dynamics between men and women, united only by the constant quest to be first to deliver the scoop, and all the ego-bruising drama that entails, has all the ingredients for making great entertainment. Throw in an entrenched culture where behaviour, which by todays standards is clearly outrageous bullying, was encouraged, the allure of untold riches and intoxicating celebrity and ... viola!

And yet what is depicted often falls short of what was reality.

Rupert Murdoch once spoke admiringly of his former corporate henchman, the late Sam Chisholm, as an effective executive, but he was also territorial as hell. He calls the plays, and he gets it right more often than not. The problem is, he plays favourites, and he frightens people.

Apparently Chisholm could reduce eminently qualified professional adults to tears with a single, withering glare, and a barrage of insults.

At the time this was something to be admired.

Never speak ill of the dead they say, but no sooner had the news been confirmed former Nine news boss John Westacott died last week and his detractors - many of them former underlings - were sending me details on his less commendable traits as a powerful newsman.

Former 60 Minutes executive producer and head of Nine news, the late John Westacott.Credit:Steve Bacon

Westacott was famously charged with using the term f***ability 14 years ago - which he later denied ever saying - when former Channel Nine reporter Christine Spiteri launched an unfair dismissal and sexual discrimination claim in which she cited the term, allegedly used by Westacott when discussing hiring female journalists.

The case came to a close when Spiteri eventually reached an undisclosed settlement with Nine, but not before casting a dim light on the commercial broadcast news business and the blokey culture which had grown around it, not only at Nine, which owns this masthead, but at rivals Ten and Seven too.

Since then weve been treated to the Jessica Rowe shit sandwich scandal and the Don Burke revelations.

Former Seven West Media and Nine Entertainment chief executive David Leckie died in 2021, aged 70.Credit:Janie Barrett

The late Nine and Seven boss David Leckie was famous for his curmudgeonly corporate persona, and calling underlings everything from drop kicks to f***wits, behaviour a CEO today would be fired over today.

In April, Michelle Gotthelf, a former top editor at the New York Post, settled a discrimination case in which she claimed the papers now retired former editor-in-chief, Australian news veteran Col Allan, had sexually harassed her and retaliated against her when she reported him.

But for years before that, Allens supposed antics, involving everything from office sinks to legendary long lunches, had become folklore within the media business.

Ironically, it was the sort of alleged behaviour which had been tolerated for years, that would guarantee others front page treatment on his beloved Daily Telegraph today.

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I will deck you, buddy: The evolution of Australias TV industry - Sydney Morning Herald

Effect of diagenesis on pores

By integrating the organic geochemical data (e.g. Ro), transformation of clay mineral composition and diagenesis, a comprehensive division scheme was proposed for the diagenetic stages for the K2qn1 shales of the Gulong sag (Fig.7). The shale in the Qingshankou Formation of the Qijia-Gulong sag was in the middle diagenetic stage.

Diagenetic evolution of the K2qn1 shale in the Gulong sag.

During diagenesis, clay minerals, biogenic silica, organic matter, and carbonate were transformed. When the temperature was above 70C, the conversion of clay mineral composition was an important driving factor for the change in shale material, wherein the transformation of smectite or I/S into illite was predominant than that into I/S with high illite content at temperatures between 70 and 100C20. Furthermore, burial diagenesis results in the existence of silica as microcrystal quartz in the clay matrix that has undergone illitization. The transformation of biogenic silica during burial diagenesis is common in siliceous biogenic shales. It changes from opal-A to opal-CT and then becomes quartz21. Additionally, our study reveals that the crystal morphology of carbonate minerals changes during burial diagenesis, wherein the thermal evolution of organic matter greatly influences the crystal size and morphology of carbonate minerals22.

Thus, using observations from the backscattered electron (BSE) mode of FE-SEM, the diagenetic evolution sequence of the K2qn1 shale in the Gulong sag can be summarised as follows (Fig.7): pyrite/siderite Icalcite Ichlorite Idissolution Iauthigenic quartz I/kaolinite Iillitesmectite mixed layer Idissolution IIchlorite IIillite I/authigenic quartz IIcalcite II. These observations correspond with a recent report stating that the transformation of swell clays to illite at the middle diagenetic stage makes the Gulong lacustrine shale more vulnerable to hydraulic fracturing17.

Similar to other clastic rocks, argillaceous sediments were unconsolidated after deposition in a soft mud state, thereby developing primary pores and free water. As the sediments in this stage were not separated from the overlying water, the pore water retained the properties of the bottom water of the sedimentary lake basin, which was rich in metal cations, such as Fe2+, Mg2+, Ca2+ and Na+. In this anoxic environment, self-shaped microcrystalline siderite, framboidal pyrite aggregates, and a small amount of micritic microcrystal calcite were formed. The development of primary pores in this stage provided sufficient space for the development of siderite and pyrite cements (Fig.4). Thus, the degree of self-shape was high, crystals were large, scattered distribution of self-shape single pyrite crystal reached 0.01m, and the long axis of pyrite aggregate and siderite crystals reached 0.05m23.

With the gravity load effect of overlying water and deposits, the enriched free water in the primary porosity continuously decrease; the primary porosity sharply decreases, and the slime sediments gradually change from unconsolidated sediments to weakly consolidationsemi-consolidation24. At this stage, small amounts of pyrite and siderite continued to form. Furthermore, in the Fe2+- and Mg2+-rich alkaline diagenetic environment, chlorite cement began to form, and chlorite films were formed along the surface of clastic particles in argillaceous rocks with a high silt content25. At this stage, with increasing burial depth, temperature and pressure, as a result of continuous cementation and significant compaction, plastic clay was continuously deformed, broken and rearranged, and rocks were almost consolidated. The diagenetic fluid environment gradually changed from alkaline to acidic, where unstable feldspar, carbonate and other easily soluble minerals were corroded forming secondary dissolution pores (Fig.5) because CO2 and organic acids entered the pore fluid and generated hydrocarbons with thermal evolution. The K+, Ca2+, Al3+ and Si4+ contents in the pore fluid continuously increased, forming authigenic quartz and kaolinite cement that filled the intergranular and feldspar dissolution pores after the dissolution of feldspar. During this stage, with temperatures ranging from 35 to 70C, abundant smectite in argillaceous sedimentary rocks gradually began transforming to illite, thereby forming an intermediate product, namely, the illitesmectite mixed layer20.

In the middle diagenetic stage, the K2qn1 shales in the Gulong sag were completely consolidated, the formation temperature reached 85140C20, and a large amount of smectite transformed to illite. Under the catalytic activity of temperature and clay minerals, the organic matter evolution entered the thermal catalytic hydrocarbon generation stage, forming a large number of carboxylic acids and dissolving in water, making the diagenetic fluid weakly acidic. Thus, feldspar and carbonate minerals underwent continuous dissolution. However, the water rock reaction was not significant; thus, the pores formed by dissolution were also limited because the shale was subjected to continuous high compaction and cementation26,27. Owing to the continuous hydrocarbon generation and expulsion, most organic acids are constantly discharged from shale reservoirs28, and acidic substances in pore fluids are consumed during dissolution. The diagenetic fluid environment thus gradually changed from acidic to weakly alkaline owing to the decarboxylation of carboxylic acids. In an alkaline diagenetic environment, a small amount of hairy authigenic illite, amorphous microcrystalline quartz, leucine calcite and iron dolomite cement filled some residual intergranular pores and secondary dissolution pores. Detrital quartz particles underwent weak alkaline dissolution, forming a small amount of quartz dissolution pores (Fig.5).

Reservoirs at different diagenetic stages have different diagenetic strengths and physical properties during burial diagenesis29,30. The porosity of reservoir rocks is affected by both burial depth and time. The burial time has a continuous effect on the porosity, and the uplift of the stratum decreases the effect of depth31. The K2qn1 shale in the study area reached its maximum burial depth in the early Late Cretaceous (100Ma), followed by large-scale uplift. After the Palaeogene, slight subsidence occurred again; however the burial depth did not exceed the maximum burial depth during the early Late Cretaceous; therefore, the depth effect disappeared during the maximum burial depth period to the present. Combining the differences in diagenesis, thermal evolution, hydrocarbon generation, and tectonics during the different burial stages, the pore evolution of the K2qn1 shale can be divided into two sub-stages (Fig.8).

Shale pore evolution of the K2qn1 shale in the Gulong sag.

In the middle A1 stage, wherein the rate of porosity decrease was relatively low, the porosity decreased from 25 to 10% (Fig.8). The burial depth of this stage was 10001700m; the thermal evolution of organic matter began and gradually entered the peak of hydrocarbon generation, as shown by the increase in the Ro value with depth. Furthermore, at this stage, the porosity significantly decreased as the drainage of pore water became difficult and the intensity of compaction gradually weakened. With the progress of thermal evolution and hydrocarbon generation, organic matter gradually began to crack and formed pores. Simultaneously, large amounts of organic acids were produced during hydrocarbon generation, causing the corrosion of feldspar, carbonate and other susceptible minerals and the formation of secondary dissolution pores. Additionally, the mineral conversion of smectite and kaolinite to chlorite reduced the development of inter-crystal micropores in clay minerals. Owing to the conversion of smectite to illite, authigenic quartz cemented the micropores; the conversion of potash feldspar to hydronic feldspar inhibited the dissolution of potash feldspar and acidic plagioclase at this stage, thereby reducing the development of secondary dissolution pores.

In the middle A2 stage, the porosity slowly decreased until it became stable, and the porosity decreased from 10 to 5%. At this stage, the burial depth was>1700m, and the diagenetic fluid environment gradually changed from acidic to alkaline. Compaction during the diagenesis was not evident at this stage, and cementation was enhanced. In the early stage, as the smectite transformed to illite, a large amount of authigenic quartz had cemented the pores as the diagenetic environment changed from acidic to alkaline, and calcite and iron dolomite cement filled the pores. The dissolution was relatively weak at this stage, and only a portion of the clay minerals and quartz underwent dissolution to form a small number of secondary dissolution pores.

Read more:

Pore types, genesis, and evolution model of lacustrine oil-prone shale: a case study of the Cretaceous Qingshankou Formation, Songliao Basin, NE China...