Dear readers,

Are you aware of the current events section of the forums on our website? If not, I encourage you to check it out and be the first to post your thoughts on the latest, intriguing current events published below.

Coming soon to the website will be more interesting photographs and recordings of piano music, as well as more chemistry related papers. Remember that you can post your own work, weather it be essays, photographs, or interesting videos, on the forums and request official publication on the website.

Enjoy!

Sincerely,

Abram Leyzorek

DISCLAIMER:

The opinions, sentiments, and/or intentions presented in the report below do not have any relation to the opinions, sentiments, and/or intentions of Abram Leyzorek.

Abram Leyzorek

10/10/18

Current Events

1. NPR: A report published in October 2018 by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals how vulnerable weapons systems being developed by the Department of Defense (DoD) are to cyber-attacks; tests showed that it was possible to take control of certain weapons systems using relatively simple tools and remain undetected.

    Date: October 9, 2018.

    From: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/09/655880190/cyber-tests-showed-nearly-all-          new-pentagon-weapons-vulnerable-to-attack-gao-says.

    Read more: https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-19-128.

1. Healio: According to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nick Obradovich of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showing that elevated temperature and precipitation levels, a potential side effect of climate change, increase the incidence of suicide as well as negatively affecting general mental health.

    Date: October 9, 2018.

    From: https://www.healio.com/psychiatry/practice-                  management/news/online/%7Be13d5c23-0f38-49a5-a426-2397600f0715%7D/climate-change-poses-large-scale-threat-to-mental-health.

Read more: https://www.healio.com/psychiatry/practice-management/news/online/%7b2c8392da-e0ec-46b4-8903-450ac8890fbd%7d/report-explores-climate-change-effects-on-mental-health/

1. Space.com: The first mission to mercury in fourteen years was launched on October 19, 2018, jointly by the European and Japanese space agencies and will reach the tiny, innermost planet seven years from now, expending more energy than would be required to reach Pluto, the outermost planet of our solar system, because it will need to complete several flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself before it will be on the right path to intercept Mercury and orbit, something made very difficult by the planet’s small size, high speed, and close proximity to the Sun; the probe, BepiColombo, consists of two separate spacecraft, Europe’s Mercury Planet Orbiter and Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter.

Date: October 20, 2018.

From: https://www.space.com/42205-why-its-hard-to-get-to-mercury-for-bepicolombo.html.

Read more: https://www.space.com/35671-bepicolombo-facts.html.

1. BGR: A recent study published in Jama Network Open surveyed 122,007 patients between 1991 and 2014 for fitness levels and then tracked their mortality rates; the results showed that being sedentary correlated to a greater increase in mortality rates than being a current smoker, having hypertension, or being diabetic and the study also found that there is no increase in mortality rates from exercising to an extreme degree.

Date: October 19, 2018.

From: https://bgr.com/2018/10/19/exercise-health-study-smoking-cardiovascular-disease/.

Read more: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428.

1. BBC: Donald Trump speaking to reporters after a rally in Nevada stated that he would pull the US out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia that was signed in 1987 by USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagen due to their alleged violation of it, which Russia denies; the treaty banned all missiles with a range of 310-3400 miles.

Date: October 20, 2018.

From: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45930206.

Read more: https://www.state.gov/t/avc/trty/102360.htm.

1. Reuters: Norwegian Joachim Roenneberg, who lead a team of saboteurs, carrying out Brittain’s Operation Gunnerside, into Nazi Germany in 1943 to destroy the well-defended Norsk Hydro Plant which was producing D2O (heavy water), an essential component in nuclear weapons, and successfully blew up key components of the plant and escaped to Sweden two weeks after completing the mission, has died aged ninety-nine, according to an October 21, 2018 announcement by Norwegian officials.

Date: October 21, 2018.

From: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-roenneberg/man-who-foiled-nazi-nuclear-plan-dies-aged-99-idUSKCN1MV0R1.

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22298739.

1. Medical News Today: Dr. Nalinikanth Kotagiri of the Cincinnati Cancer Center in Ohio received on October 20, 2018, the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Breakthrough Award which grants 600,000 dollars for three years of research into treating metastatic breast cancer with light-activated drugs which could allow cancer cells to be destroyed without harming healthy cells; patients with stage one breast cancer have a nearly 100 percent chance to live another five years, stage two patients have a ninety-three percent chance, but once the cancer has metastasized, the chance drops to twenty-two percent.

Date: October 20, 2018.

From: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323394.php.

Read more: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/photoimmunotherapy-video.

1. The Washington Times: Early October 21, 2018, 5,000 Honduran migrants fleeing poverty and high homicide rates continued their march towards the United States from their current position in Southern Mexico, where they met some resistance to crossing the Mexican Border; U.S. President Donald Trump has tweeted that he will not allow them into the US illegally.

Date: October 21, 2018.

From: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/21/migrant-caravan-swells-5000-advances-toward-us/.

Read more: https://www.apnews.com/b709e05ec83c49e6876ff612141ae942.

1. BBC: CEO of Apple Tim Cook has called on Bloomberg’s publication Businessweek to retract a story it published earlier in October, 2018, about malignant computer chips from China being inserted into servers used by more than thirty US companies , including Apple; Businessweek has stated that it will stand by its reporting despite Mr. Cook’s claims that he could find no evidence to support Businessweek’s allegations.

Date: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45922621.

Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17935868/chinese-spies-microchip-hack-servers-apple-amazon-supermicro .

1. Fox News: While workers from Highways England were expanding the A14 highway between Cambridge and Huntingon, Cambs, England,  they uncovered bones dating back to the Ice Age belonging to wooly mammoths and rhinoceroses.

Date: October 22, 2018.

From: https://www.foxnews.com/science/130000-year-old-woolly-mammoth-bones-discovered-in-england.

Read more: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7545346/woolly-mammoth-found-under-a14/.

1. NPR: A study published in the Spring of 2018 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that getting a hearing aid can slow the rate of memory loss in old age by seventy-five percent by stimulating the brain, this only equates to remembering less than one word more on memory test of reciting ten words; the same researchers published a companion study in the journal PLOS One showing that vision restoration via cataract surgery also slows cognitive decline, by fifty percent in this case.

Date: October 22, 2018.

From: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/22/658810909/can-t-hear-well-fixing-hearing-loss-can-keep-your-memory-sharper.

Read more:

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jgs.15363?referrer_access_token=I4295zyckUyn7qeIZ7zjVIta6bR2k8jH0KrdpFOxC66RiFlPN_Y_XPqihJQ0lvrnEgdBo6axYk86e_e6WxmhtlGXcx_a6HvjNWaSVm7fD3E2M9ozpQc2BkpgqsSdvJvO.
2. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0204833.

1. NPR: More than 4,000 Swedes have made the 180 dollar purchase of microchip implants the size of rice grains inserted just below the thumb with a syringe that can be used to unlock doors, share information with smart phones, and substitute for train tickets all with just one swipe of the hand and with many more applications coming in the future, such as paying at restaurants, stores, and even collecting health data; the main provider of these chips is a startup company called Biohax International headed by Jowan Österlund, a former body piercer.

Date: October 22, 2018.

From: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin.

Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/03/10/468556420/body-hacking-movement-rises-ahead-of-moral-answers.

1. The Verge: Elon Musk tweeted on October 21, 2018, that the tunnel his Boring Company is constructing beneath the headquarters of his SpaceX company in Hawthorne, California, will open on December 10, 2018, and will offer free rides to passengers the following day; the construction will be able to transport eight to sixteen passengers in their vehicle at speeds of up to 155 mph on autonomously driven skates mounted on magnetic rails.

Date: October 22, 2018.

From: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/22/18008674/elon-musk-boring-company-first-tunnel-la-date-opening.

Read more: https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/.

1. CNN: Julia Baudry, an epidemiologist at Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in France, lead a research team to study the diets of 68,946 French adults and showed that those who ate the most organic foods found their risk of developing postmenopausal breast cancer drop by 25% and their risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma drop by seventy-three percent compared with those who rarely or never ate organic foods; the results were published October 22, 2018, in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Date: October 22, 2018.

From: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/health/organic-food-cancer-study/index.html.

Read more: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2707948.