[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The murdered professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was on the brink of revolutionizing the energy sector and upending fossil fuel use as we know it.
Nuno Loureiro, 47, was gunned down at his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline on Monday.
Authorities believe that the same alleged gunman, Claudio Neves Valente, who carried out the mass shooting at Brown University, may have assassinated Loureiro, but the investigation is still ongoing.
Before his death, Loureiro was leading MIT's efforts to revolutionize energy production by making a game-changing clean power source that needs just a fraction of the fossil fuels current machines and vehicles use today.
His team's research at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) centered on plasma physics, the study of super-hot, ionized gases, and how to apply them to fusion energy, a promising clean power source.
Fusion provides what scientists call 'baseload electricity,' a steady supply of power 24/7, using tiny amounts of fuel with no air pollution or climate-warming emissions, unlike carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels.
A breakthrough in this field could disrupt the trillion-dollar fuel industry by reducing demand for oil, gas, and coal, especially for generating power and transportation. High-demand users like data centers could also switch to fusion for reliable, green energy.
'This is a very advanced technology, and whatever nation masters it first is going to have an incredible advantage,' Loureiro said on December 8.
They were also overseeing new projects like launching a special laboratory at PSFC to quickly test and develop tough materials that can handle the extreme heat and radiation inside future fusion reactors, helping make clean fusion power practical and safe.
Dennis Whyte, MIT's Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, said: 'His loss is immeasurable to our community at the PSFC, NSE [Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering] and MIT, and around the entire fusion and plasma research world.'
MIT has previously noted that more than $8billion has already been invested in the development of commercial fusion reactors, which could one day challenge the fossil fuel industry for dominance.
'If you walked into a room of fusion scientists in 2018 or 2019 and said there were going to be fusion startups, and venture capital funding to the tune of $9 billion, you would have been laughed out of the room,' Loureiro said in a statement two weeks ago.
Neves Valente and Loureiro previously attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000.
Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal's premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page.
That same year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon University, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school's then-president in February 2000.
Neves Valente went to Brown on a student visa and eventually obtained legal permanent residence in the US in September 2017.
It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
After officials revealed the suspect's identity, President Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the US.
Authorities said that the suspected gunman's original target was Loureiro, but it was unclear what his alleged motive was or what his relationship with Loureiro had been.
#1
I dunno. I'm no physicist but I've been hearing talk about fusion for several decades and nothing has come of it yet. Sounds like it would be nice but I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/22/2025 11:56 Comments ||
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#2
magnetic confinement fusion has had a number of 'breakthroughs' in the past few years
getting plasma temperatures in fusion territory for 2 minute, then 5 minutes and recently 20 minutes
but this is still way, way far away from a practical reactor
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
12/22/2025 16:05 Comments ||
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#3
Always 5 10 years off. Will still probably happen before CA High Speed Rail
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/22/2025 18:38 Comments ||
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#4
Hate to say it but I told you so. Laugh all you want but we have been getting closer. Then you have all the cold fusion guys that mysteriously "died".
Think about what is at stake here financially. Also Nuno Loureiro was Jewish. As what the Prof who was supposed to be teaching at Brown.
[PJMEDIA] A few days ago, I read a piece in which a man was quoted as saying, flatly, “I ate dog food,” because he was so poor. The line snagged in my mind, not because I doubted that he had struggled, but because I doubted the arithmetic.
It brought back a much older memory. In the 1980s and 1990s, media stories, television shows, and political rhetoric frequently claimed that elderly Americans were so destitute, they were “forced to eat cat food,” because it was all they could afford. I remember hearing this as a child, and even then it didn’t ring true. I’ve been a pet owner most of my life. I know what cat and dog food cost, even the cheap stuff. And as a mom who often lived on the edge of poverty, I know what human staples cost, too. Tuna, ramen, rice, beans, oatmeal — these have always been cheaper, pound for pound and calorie for calorie, than commercially prepared pet food.
So I started wondering: where did this story come from?
The answer, as it turns out, has very little to do with actual diets, and a great deal to do with symbolism.
The “eating cat food” trope did not emerge from grocery receipts or nutritional studies. It emerged from political rhetoric in the late 1960s and 1970s, during debates over Social Security, Medicare, and elderly poverty. It appeared in speeches, fundraising appeals, and eventually television scripts, usually off-screen and never examined too closely. The phrase was meant to shock, not to be audited.
That’s a tell.
When a claim is emotionally powerful, but strangely resistant to scrutiny — never shown, never priced, never compared to alternatives — it is usually doing symbolic work rather than descriptive work. “Cat food” was not chosen because it was realistic. It was chosen because it carried a moral payload. It signaled humiliation and dehumanization, not a literal menu.
FAT, HUNGRY, AND UNDERNOURISHED
If Americans were facing widespread caloric deprivation, we would see wasting bodies. That is what hunger looks like historically. Instead, we see the opposite: widespread obesity paired with chronic fatigue and persistent hunger. This is not a contradiction. It is a mismatch.
Calories are not interchangeable units of nourishment. Three hundred calories of snack cakes do not function the same way in the body as three hundred calories of eggs, beans, or a simple sandwich. Cheap modern food excels at delivering calories that fill briefly and addict long-term, and, crucially, they are ready to eat.
That last point is almost always ignored.
Ultra-processed food is cheap not only in money, but in time. It requires no planning, no cooking, no cleanup, and no attention. It can be eaten in a car, between shifts, or late at night when the day’s energy is gone. Moon Pies and RC Cola didn’t become cultural staples by accident. In the 1930s, they were explicitly marketed together as a complete, portable lunch for working men, especially in the South, something cheap, filling, shelf-stable, and easy to carry to a job site. They were engineered for immediacy: calorie-dense, instantly consumable, requiring nothing from the eater but a free hand. This is not incidental. It is the product. What we see today traces back to that one movement.
By contrast, nearly every food that actually produces lasting satiety requires preparation. Beans must simmer. Meat must cook. Even rice requires time and heat. These costs are trivial to someone with predictable hours and mental bandwidth. They are not trivial to someone exhausted, stressed, or constantly interrupted.
The foods that fail to satisfy are optimized for immediacy. The foods that sustain require forethought. And the people most likely to struggle with hunger are the very people whose lives leave the least room for planning ahead.
#1
The calorie is a unit of energy that originated from the caloric theory of heat. The large calorie, food calorie, dietary calorie, or kilogram calorie is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one liter of water by one degree Celsius.
#4
When I was a kid I once nibbled on a small chunk of a Milk Bone dog biscuit just out of curiosity. It wasn't bad.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/22/2025 11:59 Comments ||
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#5
And then, #3, I once had fish and chips in a small town outside of Boston. I figured it would be OK but found that it was made of fresh, Atlantic cod and it was very good. Yeah, they have lobster too. It's the seafood.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/22/2025 12:06 Comments ||
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#6
Meanwhile the food industry has some interesting ties with big pharma. Making us sick for the profit down the road. We are in fact being farmed.
[Bee] PHOENIX, AZ — Attendees at Turning Point's AmFest 2025 event experienced an awkward moment last night, as Tucker Carlson interrupted his own speech for an evening prayer to Mecca.
Onlookers were startled as Tucker halted a lengthy speech on cancel culture and looked at his phone. "Ope! Looks like it's that time again!" said Tucker to the confused audience as he rolled out an ornate prayer rug and began to kneel. "It's time to pray. That's important, obviously, and we're going to pray together, clearly. I mean, seriously, obviously. Why wouldn't we? HAHAHAHAHA!"
Sources said Carlson then began chanting in a haunting, melodic voice.
An uproar immediately started among the crowd, with confused audience members trying to make sense of the incident.
"Woah! What's he sayin'? Is he speaking terrorist?" said one agitated audience member. "I think he's speakin' terrorist! Get off the stage, terrorist! Booooooo!"
Carlson reportedly grew agitated as the crowd began to jeer and boo. "You're trying to censor me! This is cancel culture!" he cried. "How dare you! This is loathsome, obviously!"
At publishing time, Carlson had expressed hope for a much warmer reception at the upcoming QatarFest.
HOW A FALSE GENOCIDE NARRATIVE IS WORSE THAN AN ATOMIC BOMB!#Rewrite #Genocide #History
What were the consequences of Kagame's RPF who planned the genocide, infritrated the country, and then blamed it on the Hutu?
1)Many Tutsi who survived the genocide were killed by Kagame's RPF for fearing that they discovered what happened.
2)Many Tutsi were forced with guns to go and give false witnesses against the Hutu, even those who rescued them. The Hutu were killed, tortured, and jailed innocently.
3)Kagame's RPF forced many Hutu to accept genocide charges to build the genocide narrative.
4)Kagame's RPF encouraged many Tutsi who survived the genocide regarding revenge against the Hutu to turn them into killers so that Kagame's killers could be in the same boat as survivors to silence them by the time they shall discover that he was behind their death.
5)Kagame has killed many Tutsi who tried to bring Hutu/Tutsi unity, like Kizito Mihigo. They feared that the unity could turn all Rwandans against them.
6)Kagame, to manipulate Tutsi survivors, for 30 years, he gave them all financial support and denied anything to the Hutu to make the Tutsi special and better as a reward, with intentions to cover up his genocidal crimes.
7)He started many discriminative Tutsi organizations, where no Hutu is supposed to join. It's in these organizations that he had been brainwashing them and indoctrinating them, with a goal to isolate them from the Hutu to control the situation.
#3
Kagame, to manipulate Tutsi survivors, for 30 years, he gave them all financial support and denied anything to the Hutu to make the Tutsi special and better as a reward, with intentions to cover up his genocidal crimes.
They simply need more time to sort it all out. It's a tribal thing. Stay out of it.
#6
I was in Diego Garcia at the time. We had guns we had Will and we had transport and we were ordered to stand down. I had never been so pissed in all my life.
Posted by: Difar Dave ||
12/22/2025 16:51 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Bee] PHOENIX, AZ — Attendees at 
