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Compton Scatterbrained

@comptonscatter.bsky.social
319 followers 74 following 10K posts

Bad hearing, bad sight, scattered brain. Full of PFAS, but a true believer in radiation hormesis. Why isn't rutile rutilant? I like valence electrons (but K shell too) & deep time.

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Reposted by Compton Scatterbrained
Ko van Huissteden @kovanhuissteden.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Een geschatte verdubbeling van het stroomverbruik in 5 jaar tijd, terwijl andere bedrijven en hele woonwijken moeten wachten op aansluiting. Duurzame stroom verzacht dat probleem niet. 'Veel datacenters in Nederland houden water- en stroomverbruik geheim' - nos.nl/l/2633080
nos.nl
'Veel datacenters in Nederland houden water- en stroomverbruik geheim'
Uit cijfers die wel beschikbaar zijn, blijkt dat de milieubelasting stijgt, meldt Trouw.
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Luis Villa @lu.is · 29/09/2026
We badly need a McPhee of tech.
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 29/09/2026
That one! I wrote about it a few months back while trying to explain what I think LLMs still can’t (and maybe won’t for a while) land in writing buttondown.com/apperceptive...
buttondown.com
It's still what computers still can't do
The cover of John McPhee’s book Oranges, which is about, you guesed it, oranges. It’s great. The New Yorker writer John McPhee, perhaps the 20th century's...
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
toddler asked me what this was. I said "It's a floor-zamboni."
Grocery-store floor-cleaning thingie machine.
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John Trant @trantteam.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I am currently fighting a losing battle with multiple industrial partners that they should not use AI chemical structures in their materials. Like...I'll recoulor and 3dize with shadows and glowy shit in Blender if they want...and yet...GPCRs with either 8 or 6 TMHs, indoles that...arent indoles.
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U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission @cpsc.gov · 28/09/2026
Finding Backrooms frightening largely due to all the unanchored furniture.
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Brandon Hacha @brandonhacha.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Tbh, I’m baffled by people who don’t do cursory Wikipedia searches for organizations like this. None of the three societies in the first paragraph have a Wikipedia article.
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Ida Ꮚ•ꈊ•Ꮚ @floofyfluff.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Bumble shark plushies! She's so fuzzy 😭🐝
A photo of Humlehaj, the bumble shark, being held by two arms up in the air against a background of sunflowers and a traditional red Swedish house. Humlehaj is a hybrid between bumblebee and shark, and has therefore a fuzzy body and brown and yellow stripes, as well as small bumblebee wings. She looks like she is ready to buzz away and towards the sunflowers! If only those hands would let her go... Free her!!!A photo of Humlehaj, the bumble shark, being hugged sweetly against a person wearing a striped t-shirt. There are some sunflowers in the background. Humlehaj has two hands cosily hugging her against the person's chest. She is such a cosy cuddle buddy!Humlehaj has been caught again in this photo, and is being held against someone wearing a dark brown coat while she is pointed outwards, her fins sticking out a little.. Humlehaj does not seem to mind much, though, as she is smiling and as round as ever. One could even say she loves a good play session!
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John Hawks @johnhawks.net · 27/09/2026
Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar, is known today for Neanderthal behavioral evidence, including a remarkable controlled hearth for production of pitch from gum rockrose. In 2021, the team discovered a chamber sealed for more than 40,000 years, results to come! www.johnhawks.net/p/a-visit-to...
johnhawks.net
A visit to Vanguard Cave, a Neanderthal workshop
The site has seen remarkable discoveries over 30 years, and excavations have opened a new unexplored chamber.
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HydrologyNL @hydrology.nl · 28/09/2026
"For the first time, scientists link heavy snow to groundwater in California", by @ianjames.bsky.social www.latimes.com/environment/...
latimes.com
For the first time, scientists link heavy snow to groundwater in California
Scientists are finding that snowfall is more connected to water underground than we knew. Using satellite data, they found groundwater levels actually rise during big snow years, in contrast to most y...
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Geology Johnson @geologyjohnson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
So, I noticed something interesting in this view of the unconformity. There's an extra unit of rock between the Old Red and the greywacke visible in the cliff that is not present in the classic view of the outcrop. See diagram and alt text. 1/x #Geology
Pencil diagram of a cliff where three different rock formations come into contact. The units are: old red sandstone, Mystery unit of yellow calcareous sandstone layered with pale green-white platey to powdery material, the Greywacke grey muddy sandstone. Simplified pencil diagram of a cliff where three different rock formations come into contact. The units are: old red sandstone, Mystery unit of yellow calcareous sandstone layered with pale green-white platey to powdery material, the Greywacke grey muddy sandstone
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
jfc I can't even... wtf did I just read in that abstract
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
There is nothing you can do to convince me to put my unpublished work into this. My biggest worry is reviewers or editors disrespecting my intellectual property. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/s...
nytimes.com
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
"Beneath the earth likewise there are laws of nature, less familiar to us, but no less fixed. Be assured that there exists below everything that you see above."
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Cedric Feschotte @cedricfeschotte.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Thrilled to see this published today! Truly special because we made the initial discovery >15 yrs ago! We found two copies of a human gene called BC200 embedded in a human poxvirus. BC200 blurs the line between gene & transposon—both functional & mutagenic! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/n
science.org
Escape of the BC200 gene to a human poxvirus reveals its persistent transposition in primates
Transposable elements mobilize within and occasionally between genomes, including from host to virus. We identified two insertions of the human BC200 noncoding RNA gene in the poxvirus molluscum conta...
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
LOL I had a quote from Seneca and wanted to find the work it came from again and when I put it in DuckDuckGo I got nothing but Google did one better and its shitty AI confidently said "This profound quote is from John Ruskin... it appears in his monumental work, Modern Painters..." fucking lol
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
seis matters, lol
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 23/09/2026
A big part of the paper (and my career) is comparative planetology, the comparing of one world with another. So in this paper, we talk about how and when the crusts of these worlds developed. Those of Mars, Mercury, and the Moon are ancient; some of Earth is very recent. And Venus?? who tf knows
Crustal growth rates of the inner Solar System bodies plotted as cumulative crustal mass as a function of time. Since Earth has two types of crust, it has two curves. Mars, Mercury, and the Moon had the bulk of their crusts in place very early on. Some of Earth's continental crust is very old, but much of it isn't. The Venus crust might be very young, on average, maybe, somehow.
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 23/09/2026
I said I'd do a thread about my new Space Science Reviews paper, so here it is! This is part of a collection of papers arising from a meeting at the International Space Science Institute in Bern in 2024: a workshop to better understand rocky extrasolar planets. A 🧵:
Interior structure models of Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and Io, all shown to scale and key elements labelled.
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Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
1. Coyote vs. Acme is amazing, and you should all watch it. 2. Do not, under any circumstances or reasons, try to go up against the Road Runner - it will only end in your pain and misery. #LooneyTunes
Poster for Coyote vs. Acme featuring an unhealthy amount of dynamite sticks.
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Kate Littler @palaeoclimate.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
My god, the sheer number of wasted human work hours that these statistics expose. Think of all the great stuff they could have been doing rather than writing doomed proposals. Almost anything would have been better!
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Ines Kostić #teamplanet 🌍 @ineskostic.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
PFAS bedreigt ons drinkwater en onze gezondheid. Het zit zelfs in moedermelk. We vergiftigen in rap tempo onze drinkwaterbronnen, zegt toezichthouder ILT. Maar in de EU houdt industrielobby actie tegen. PvdD roept het kabinet op: neem nu nationale maatregelen om onze kinderen te beschermen.
nu.nl
Bij veel Nederlanders stromen te veel chemische stoffen uit de kraan
In een groot deel van Noord- en Zuid-Holland zitten meer pfas in het drinkwater dan het RIVM aanvaardbaar vindt. In sommige steden is dat zelfs twee tot drie keer zoveel. Het drinkwater blijft wel vei...
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Carrie Brown @brizzyc.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
You would have to physically restrain me if I had a kid in the NICU and I found out some unvaccinated asshat risked their lives www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/m...
nbcphiladelphia.com
Possible measles exposure reported at the NICU at CHOP in Philadelphia, officials say
Health officials say that a possible measles exposure was reported in the NICU at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia last week.
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Robert Mahon @bedform.org · 22/09/2026
Oh motherfucker shitbag orange moron just made my flume laser scanner system cost 50% more with his stupid ass Canadian tariffs I am gonna SCREAM
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Prof Chris Jackson @seismatters.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
📕 NEW BOOK!!! 📕 I co-authored a book for DK, contributing several chapters, including ones on stratigraphy, climate change, and key events in Earth history 🌍 Aimed at a very broad audience, the the illustrations are simply incredible 🥰 I hope I didn’t mess up or leave anything important out! 🙏🏾
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
OMG LOOKIT THIS LIL GUY BEING A VERY WERY ITTY BITTY KINASE-Y GUY aaaaaaawwwwww
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Brendan @chemscrapes.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A chemical look at the clashes famous London calling album cover. Instead of a guy smashing a guitar into the ground, there are a bunch of instantaneous dipoles . The name of the album is London Forces
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Simon Bayly @simonbayly.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
ALT text “pink protein slides towards and then aggressively hugs smaller teal protein”
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
okay I loved reading this
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Helen MC @crystallised-cricket.com · 21/09/2026
AUSTRALIA and beyond - We need to assemble again for #Putnisite! This amazing structure needs your support in today's #MinCup26 battle. For shear density and novelty in its strange/wonderful crystal structure it should get your vote over #Julienite
Image representing the crystal structure of putnisite - here red spheres represent oxygen atoms, light blue spheres/polygons represent calcium atoms, dark blue spheres/polygons represent silicon atoms, brown spheres/polygons represent carbon atoms, green spheres/polygons represent strontium atoms.  There is also some chromium hiding in the structure that is in part represented by a yellow triangle.   The representation is drawn in VESTA from entry #20044 in the American mineralogist databaseImage representing the crystal structure of julienite - here red spheres represent oxygen atoms, dark yellow spheres/polygons represent sodium atoms, dark blue spheres/polygons represent cobalt atoms, yellow spheres represent sulfur atoms, brown spheres represent carbon atoms and light blue spheres represent nitrogen atoms. The structure is viewed down its c axis and shows that there are sodium/water(oxygen) units surrounded by cobalt complexes with nitrogen, carbon and sulfur attached.  The representation is drawn in VESTA from entry #9760 in the American mineralogist database
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Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give
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Dr Joanne Williams @jowilliams.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Life in the ocean is huge and complex, with limiting factors like "is there enough oxygen AND light AND nutrients at this depth?" Not content to measure physics of water, some ambitious folks measure biogeochemistry, with autonomous Argo drifters, that dive down and relay back data by satellite.🌊
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
okay the OpenAI hack's XKCD reference made me snort coffee. xkcd.com/2347/
Post from Harsh Jaiswal (rootxharsh), 18 Sept 2026:

We’re disclosing HEIF Heist, a months-long investigation into libheif that allowed us to hack OpenAI, Slack, Meta, GitHub Ent, Rails, Next.js, ImageMagick, and many more. 

It was literally xkcd #234, one obscure image library beneath a huge number of apps."

Underneath he has xkcd #2347, underlining the title text's mention of a vuln in ImageMagick breaking the internet.
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This is a perfect post for #MinCup except I dunno if any mineral is capable of imitating escher
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Chantzy @chantzy.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Whoever is adding these community notes to the BC Gov's strangely misleading posts about permanent daylight saving time, please keep doing what you do
Proposed Community Note saying BCs 93% survey result came from a choice that excluded permanent standard time instead of BC Gov claim that 93% supported permanent DST Proposed Community Note says scientific evidence, including from Canada, opposes permanent daylight time and supports standard time. BC Gov says their policy is backed by scientific research
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Ilyaz Nasrullah @ilyazn.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026
Mijn blogpost van afgelopen weekend is aangevuld en nu een essay in Trouw. Het is lastig om tegen alle onzin op te boksen, maar het helpt dat Trouw dit verhaal een mooie plek heeft gegeven (het wordt genoemd op de voorpagina en is het openingsverhaal in De Verdieping). www.trouw.nl/verdieping/s...
trouw.nl
Slaat AI op hol? Welnee, AI-bedrijven gaan onverantwoordelijk te werk – en daar leiden ze graag de aandacht van af
Is AI losgeslagen, zoals talloze media de afgelopen tijd berichtten? Niet uit zichzelf, schrijft informaticus Ilyaz Nasrullah, maar het komt de verantwoordelijke techbedrijven maar al te goed uit als ...
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Ilyaz Nasrullah @ilyazn.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026
"Wat ik bedoel te zeggen: dit narratief van op hol geslagen technologie helpt OpenAI om af te leiden van de juridische aansprakelijkheid voor de hack van Hugging Face – wat simpelweg een strafbaar feit is – door de verantwoordelijkheid bij de technologie te leggen." www.trouw.nl/verdieping/s...
trouw.nl
Slaat AI op hol? Welnee, AI-bedrijven gaan onverantwoordelijk te werk – en daar leiden ze graag de aandacht van af
Is AI losgeslagen, zoals talloze media de afgelopen tijd berichtten? Niet uit zichzelf, schrijft informaticus Ilyaz Nasrullah, maar het komt de verantwoordelijke techbedrijven maar al te goed uit als ...
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
We have Grady Hillhouse's Engineering In Plain Sight book, and the kids love it. But it's very US-oriented. Is there something similar for Dutch ground/infrastructure?
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Leonid Schneider @forbetterscience.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Congratulations to Elsevier on this insanity my colleague found. Is anything in this clinical trial from Spain and UK real? www.cell.com/the-innovati...
cell.com
Quantum evidence of nonlocal consciousness during clinical death
If consciousness can operate under quantum principles, then the boundaries between life, death, and cognition are far more permeable than current science allows. In the first large-scale, randomized, ...
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Patrick van der Wel @pcavanderwel.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
A new preprint from my lab - this time on chemRxiv: Xingang Liu et al "Unmasking the Non-Covalent Nature of HA–Dopamine Assemblies: Insights from 1H NMR Degradation Tracking and Multidimensional NMR” Notably, my lab’s first solution #NMR paper !! #nmrchat #glycotime doi.org/10.26434/che...
doi.org
Unmasking the Non-Covalent Nature of HA–Dopamine Assemblies: Insights from 1H NMR Degradation Tracking and Multidimensional NMR | ChemRxiv
Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a polysaccharide with diverse clinical and industrial applications. One of the key challenges is its sensitivity to enzymatic degradation. Chemical modifications offer a potent...
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
"Next you play them some sick beats on a UHF radio, and the protons start to rock out." Why can't *all* news publications and magazines and whatnot just explain physics like this? It's practically song lyrics
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Been thinkin' about whether we'll see a gradual but noticeable (and measurable) decline in the fruits of boredom with everyone able to self-stimulate with the least exertion (short-form videos etc) and GenAI.
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Adam Pascale @seislologist.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It may seem like just another earthquake browser app, but Seismoscope makes reporting what you felt much easier, and your feedback goes directly to the relevant authority. Seismoscope also includes @earthquakes.au data that you can’t get anywhere else 😊
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Okay this really surprised me. I keot hearing it was damn *hot* in the Cretaceous, when CO2 levels were high, but this recent geochemistry Tyrannosaur-tooth study is like "nah, these are summers you *wish* you had"
Highlighted text:
"Simulated air temperatures averaged over the region of the HCF relevant to this study (paleolatitude 49° to 53°N, 75° to 85°W) at 3× CO2 yielded warm month temperatures of 24.9° to 29.5°C and mean annual temperatures of 17.8°C. Simulated air temperatures at 6× CO2 yielded warm summer month temperatures of 27.7° to 33.4°C and mean annual temperatures of 20.7°C (fig. S6)."

The heading "Bivalves" is visible underneath.
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 17/09/2026
HOLY SHIT NEW IMPACT CRATER ON THE MOON This crater is 222 m (728 ft) across, and formed in spring 2024. Statistical modelling tells us this is a 1-in-132 year event. So the last time a crater this big formed on the Moon was 1894.
A large crater with bright rays is situated in the centre of this image. The dark, pockmarked lunar surface makes up the background.
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Oh fucking hell. Went to show my kids who Ms Frizzle was—just pictures on the internet. Found a sorta weird-looking one, and I clicked because it was on DeviantArt. It was just AI. Followed by a huge pile of more AI-generated Frizzles. And then moar Frizzles by other "artists."
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Tobias Gilk, MRSO, MRSE @tobiasgilk.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Apropos of World Patient Safety Day, yesterday I advised an MRI tech to run, screaming, from their current job based on what sounded like a near-total absence of MRI safety governance structures. #MRI #MRIsafety #worldpatientsafetyday
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David @yonderdavid.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
People with 3D printers seem generally happier with their purchases than people with 2D printers. I take from this that the hard part is squishing everything down flat.
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Compton Scatterbrained @comptonscatter.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
There is a website. It hosts videos. My browser can play videos! The website tells my phone to download an app from the app store, instead of playing the video. As if my browser could not play videos, which it totally can. And it's free! Why *wouldn't* I eat the dog food?
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Simon Hammann @simonhammann.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It's incredible how many AI generated figures I've seen over the last few days at a conference. Most of them unnecessary, optional illustration that could be skipped or a proper image could be used. Do you/did you see this as well this year?
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