https://onuroncer.com/signal/ Signal, not noise — science and world events, sourced and explained, by Onur Oncer. en-us Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:05:00 +0000 https://onuroncer.com/signal/what-the-260-280-ratio-measures/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/what-the-260-280-ratio-measures/ Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:05:00 +0000 The gap between pure DNA at 1.8 and pure RNA at 2.0 is 0.2. Solution pH moves the ratio by 0.2 to 0.3, and wavelength accuracy alone can move it 0.4. https://onuroncer.com/signal/blast-overpressure-exposure-tracking/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/blast-overpressure-exposure-tracking/ Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 DOD completed 198,161 blast-exposure cognitive baselines in FY2025. The Army has started tracking under 2% of exposures. Half a measurement is not one. https://onuroncer.com/signal/battery-queue-13-percent-gets-built/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/battery-queue-13-percent-gets-built/ Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:05:00 +0000 Berkeley Lab counts 749 GW of storage waiting to interconnect. Historically 13 percent of queued capacity gets built, and storage fell 16 percent in 2025. https://onuroncer.com/signal/cameras-that-never-asked-for-a-password/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/cameras-that-never-asked-for-a-password/ Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Three 2026 CISA advisories describe cameras with no authentication at all: open snapshot endpoints, default credentials, hard-coded keys. Not bugs. Defaults. https://onuroncer.com/signal/when-the-lab-robot-sleepwalks/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/when-the-lab-robot-sleepwalks/ Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:05:00 +0000 LLM agents were given a real atomic force microscope and 100 tasks. GPT-4o failed 29 percent of trials, and some failures were the machine doing extra. https://onuroncer.com/signal/premarket-step-supplements-skip/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/premarket-step-supplements-skip/ Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The FDA does not approve supplements. But one premarket safety filing is mandatory, and the agency estimates 4,600 that should have been sent never were. https://onuroncer.com/signal/xps-charge-referencing-284-8-ev/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/xps-charge-referencing-284-8-ev/ Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:05:00 +0000 Nearly every XPS paper charge-references to adventitious carbon at 284.8 eV. Three large datasets disagree about whether that is valid, and the split is real. https://onuroncer.com/signal/how-accurate-are-bomb-dogs/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/how-accurate-are-bomb-dogs/ Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A NIST-funded study put 56 explosive-detection dog teams through the new national certification standard. None passed. The reason is training material access. https://onuroncer.com/signal/will-your-home-battery-start-your-ac/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/will-your-home-battery-start-your-ac/ Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:05:00 +0000 Kilowatt-hours do not decide whether your air conditioner restarts in an outage. The motor-start rating does, and two popular home batteries differ by about 2x. https://onuroncer.com/signal/license-plate-readers-at-your-gate/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/license-plate-readers-at-your-gate/ Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A new 216-agency study found vehicle theft fell 11 percent after fixed plate readers went live. None of that evidence is about cameras at a private gate. https://onuroncer.com/signal/virtual-staining-hallucinations/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/virtual-staining-hallucinations/ Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:05:00 +0000 AI virtual staining can paint plausible cells that were never in the sample. In a blinded test, board-certified pathologists accepted the convincing ones. https://onuroncer.com/signal/multivitamin-epigenetic-aging-clocks/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/multivitamin-epigenetic-aging-clocks/ Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A multivitamin trial moved two of five epigenetic clocks. What a clock measures, and why four months younger is a rate multiplied by two years. https://onuroncer.com/signal/the-xps-peak-that-is-not-sp3-carbon/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/the-xps-peak-that-is-not-sp3-carbon/ Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:05:00 +0000 For decades the 285 eV peak in carbon XPS has been labelled sp3 carbon. A 2026 DFT study assigns it to carbon next to a seven- or eight-membered ring. https://onuroncer.com/signal/heat-degrades-the-dog-not-the-scent/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/heat-degrades-the-dog-not-the-scent/ Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Army-funded studies held explosive vapor constant and changed only the weather. Detection dogs still got worse. The degradation is in the sensor, not the plume. https://onuroncer.com/signal/does-heat-kill-your-battery/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/does-heat-kill-your-battery/ Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:05:00 +0000 A multi-year Sandia study found capacity fade rose with temperature for LFP cells but fell for NMC. The advice to keep batteries cool is chemistry-specific. https://onuroncer.com/signal/does-wpa3-stop-deauth-attacks/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/does-wpa3-stop-deauth-attacks/ Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 WPA3 makes Protected Management Frames mandatory. Peer-reviewed research found MFP is not sufficient: a forged beacon still knocks clients off the network. https://onuroncer.com/signal/ai-protein-design-biosecurity/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/ai-protein-design-biosecurity/ Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:05:00 +0000 A Science paper found AI-redesigned proteins slipping past DNA synthesis screening. The gap was real and got patched. The proteins were never actually built. https://onuroncer.com/signal/creatine-hcl-menopause-trial/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/creatine-hcl-menopause-trial/ Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A creatine trial in menopausal women registered fatigue as its primary outcome. The published abstract reports reaction time, brain creatine and lipids instead. https://onuroncer.com/signal/polya-selection-versus-rrna-depletion/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/polya-selection-versus-rrna-depletion/ Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:05:00 +0000 Poly(A) selection and rRNA depletion are not two roads to one transcriptome. One study found ten times more novel transcripts; another recommended the opposite. https://onuroncer.com/signal/drone-detect-and-avoid-ads-b/ https://onuroncer.com/signal/drone-detect-and-avoid-ads-b/ Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 GAO says a drone's best collision-avoidance tool is ADS-B In. It only shows aircraft that choose to broadcast, and down low, most of them are not required to.