InnovaQuartz LLC

Seems at the beginning of all this Global Warming advocacy, we were trying to keep temps at 1.5 C max rise...

Number of the day: 1.43°C
By Ben Geman, Axios

Global average temperatures last month were 1.43°C above the estimated 1850–1900 average used to define the pre–industrial level, per new data from the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Temps were also 0.52°C above the 1991-2020 average for April, the research service said.
Why it matters: It was the third-warmest April on record behind 2024 and 2025.

What's next: More heat.

The coming months are expected to bring strong El Niño conditions, the climate pattern characterized by warmer-than-usual sea surface temperatures.
That's bringing projections that 2027 will exceed 2024 as the hottest year on record.

A grocery chain witnessed something almost unheard of. They removed a CEO employees genuinely admired.
Arthur T. Demoulas led Market Basket, a New England supermarket company with 71 stores and nearly 25,000 employees 🏬👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. Unlike many corporate executives, he focused on affordable prices 💸, strong employee benefits 🤝, profit sharing, and personally connecting with workers by name. Over time, this created extraordinary loyalty throughout the company ❤️.
When he was removed during a family conflict ⚖️, workers responded in a way few companies had ever seen. Warehouse staff stopped shipments 🚛, drivers refused deliveries, and store shelves slowly emptied 🛒. Customers also joined the boycott, causing company sales to collapse by more than 90% 📉.
For six weeks ⏳, the business struggled to operate. But the movement was never about demanding bigger salaries or bonuses. Employees simply wanted their leader back. Their solidarity became a powerful example of what respect driven leadership can create 💪.
In the end, an agreement was reached, and Arthur T. Demoulas returned after purchasing the opposing share of the business. The story became a lasting reminder that when leaders genuinely value people, those people often stand beside them when it matters most 🙌

No worries -- I saw a documentary from the future that shows Voyager merged with a nice alien craft...it's all good.

NASA shuts off another Voyager 1 instrument as humanity's most distant spacecraft prepares for risky 'Big Bang' maneuver to save power After nearly 50 years in space, the two Voyager spacecraft are very low on nuclear power. Voyager 1 just shut off another instrument to save the mission.

'Nations need to prepare now': Key Atlantic ocean current is much closer to collapse than scientists thought An alarming study claims the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is weakening more than believed previously. But experts say its findings are far from the final word.

I made a few hundred of these this morning. We call them "baguettes" after the tiny chips of diamond in jewelry...for obvious reasons. These are the largest ones I make at 1.2 mm. The smallest ones I've made so fat are 0.8 mm. if I can get that down to 0.4 mm or so, then coronary artery disease treatment will be forever changed and stents will be a thing of the past.

The trick is keeping the apex of that conical section super sharp. You see, the highest radiant power of the laser resides in the center of the beam and that's the part that imparts the apex, where the light is focused axially instead of being reflected and refracted to exit orthogonal to the longitudinal axis. (We want 100% orthogonal, if possible.) For the larger devices I make tips with a radius of curvature (ROC) at about a red blood cell diameter (0.010 mm) work really well with less than 1% of the laser emission exiting axially.

If that same radius were on a 0.4 mm cone the axial emission (leakage) would be probably be over 5%. That might work, but it would present problems in designing the catheter's plastic parts and could limit the tortuosity of the arteries that could be addressed. I really need to get the tip to around 0.004 mm ROC and that just isn't possible with a 0.0106 mm wavelength (CO2 laser). So I've ordered a 0.000267 mm wavelength laser and hope to get that incorporated into my R&D machining system before the summertime.

My parts should be clean and dry now, so I should get back to work...

This is Prometheus. It's designed for braking up large urinary stones found in the ureter and bladder. Such stones typically eat laser fibers for lunch, meaning the efficiency of the surgery falls off rapidly because the fiber tips get damaged rapidly. Most folks attribute this damage to flying stone fragments. I am not so sure that's right, but if it is, this fiber will last a lot longer than the ones used today.

Normal fiber tips are 'cleaved'-- they are scored and snap cut, leaving a sharp edge and relatively flat surface. Both are easily chipped by flying stone debris. These tips are also usually 0.6 mm in diameter, although some are as large as 1 mm but the bigger fibers cost a boat load of money. (I know, I make some of them.)

Prometheus tips are 1.2 mm in diameter but the fiber is only 0.6 mm, so right there we have the robustness of the largest fiber available -- plus some -- at the cost of the smaller fiber. That won't matter if it's toast in 5 minutes like regular fibers, though, so I made it with a focusing lens that allows working a few millimeters away from the stone. The round profile adds to the resistance against damage from fragments, too, deflecting some and eliminating any sharp edges that are easily chipped.

I think it's going to be a winner for large stones, particularly coupled with our new thulium laser. We did a stone case with the laser the other day -- a 4 cm diameter staghorn stone -- and finished in 45 minutes with a regular 0.6 mm fiber. Thulium lasers don't usually do very well with large stones...this one did as well as a holmium.

We're making our new thulium fiber lasers in small numbers as we finish equipping our new laser manufacturing facility in Phoenix to be operated by Trimedyne (Trimedyne is a wholly owned affiliate of InnovaQuartz). This is the first one being shipped to a customer.

A 3-D Look Inside Trump’s Revamped Oval Office (Gift Article) Take a 3-D tour of the president’s office, where he covered more than a third of wall space with gold.

Scientists are finally studying the important stuff, eh?

The idiocracy bleats anew…

Blaming some child deaths on covid shots, FDA vows stricter vaccine rules Vinay Prasad, the nation’s top vaccine regulator, said his team concluded that coronavirus shots were linked to children’s deaths, necessitating a new approach.