Leyzorek's News Anthology -Issue No. 7 |
|
|
Dear readers, LNA is back with fourteen more of the most exciting and intriguing recent news stories. Remember to "Read more" on every story to get a fuller understanding of each topic. The latest updates on the website include numerous new photographs of spectacular skies and amazing arachnids and one new video featuring mortal combat between predator, a yellow garden spider, and prey, a Japanese beetle, in addition to several new pages dedicated to current works so that you can read them on the website, rather than having to download them, although that option is still available. Some essays will also have links to my new Hub Pages account where they are also published. There is also a new member contribution from my little brother that is well worth reading. 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 9/10/18 Current Events - Fox News: Chinese citizens were granted religious freedoms by the Chinese constitution in the year 1982 , but those freedoms only allow worship in government sanctioned gatherings, making the activities of many millions of Chinese Christians participating in underground and house-based churches illegal, because these organizations ignore the government regulations; activists in China recorded piles of burning Bibles and forms renouncing religious face and proclaiming allegiance to China’s Communist Party that citizens were allegedly forced to sign or lose welfare benefits and be expelled from school, all part a campaign by the Chinese government to “Sinicize,” or make Chinese, religion.
Date: September 10, 2018. From: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/09/10/chinese-officials-burn-bibles-close-churches-force-christian-to-denounce-faith-amid-escalating-crackdown.html. - Science: A study published by Yan Li et. al. used a climate model to predict that a wind and solar farm covering just twenty percent of the Sahara desert could increase rainfall in the region by 200-500 mm/year, because wind turbines increase surface roughness which increases wind drag and because solar panels with a heat-energy conversion efficiency of less than 46% (current average efficiency is approximately 15%) reduce the surface albedo, or light reflectivity, both of which effects increase rainfall likelihood, but eighty percent of the projected rainfall increase is accounted for an increase in vegetation cover which further roughens the surface, creating a positive feedback loop for precipitation, and this would provide approximately eighty-two terawatts of electricity over an average year, more than enough to satisfy global energy demands, which amounted to only eighteen terawatts in 2017.
Date: September 7, 2018. From: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6406/1019. Read More: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2004JD004763. - Space.com: Doctoral student Gerry Zhang et. al. from the University of California, Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center, developed an algorithm called a “convolutional neural network” to sift through four-hundred terabytes of data collected by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia on August 26, 2017, that were originally analyzed using traditional methods which found 21 successive radio bursts, called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), all from a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away called FRB 121102 and all in the period of one hour, which is remarkable in itself because FRBs in all other known cases have been one-time bursts, but using the algorithm developed by Zhang et. al., researchers discovered an additional seventy-two FRBS bringing the total to ninety-three; the researchers are part of the Breakthrough Listen project which searches for signs of extraterrestrial life using its 100 million dollar funding and is one of several projects run by Breakthrough Initiatives directed by Pete Worden; some scientists think FRBs emanate from quickly rotating neutron stars, or pulsars, but their source is unknown, leaving extraterrestrial origin a tantalizing possibility.
Date: September 11, 2018. From: https://www.space.com/41775-breakthrough-listen-fast-radio-bursts.html. Read more: http://seti.berkeley.edu/frb-machine/. - NBC News: A report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by Nicole Maestas et. al. in collaboration with the Rand Corp. reviewed over 31,000 physician surveys from the period leading up to the current opioid epidemic, 2006-2015, and showed that twenty-nine percent of the time physicians did not include a pain diagnosis in their prescription of opioids.
Date: September 10, 2018. From: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/americas-heroin-epidemic/doctors-gave-no-reason-third-opioid-prescriptions-study-finds-n908336. Read more: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/prescribing/guideline.html. - Phys.org: A new study published September 12, 2018, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine showed that gene edited mice functionally lacking a gene called CMAH, which humans naturally lack, were able to exercise for longer than normal mice because of their extra hind limb muscle and capillaries, which increase the supply of blood and oxygen to muscles, combined with increased mitochondrial respiration, changes that, taken together, increase the capacity of skeletal muscles to utilize oxygen; if these findings apply to humans, they may help explain why humans developed into one of the mammal species most adept at long distance running, but these weren’t the only effects losing CMAH had on humans: it also increased their cancer risk from eating red meat and their risk of type two diabetes.
Date: September 12, 2018. From: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-gene-mutation-humans-optimal-long-distance.html. Read more: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1886/20181656. - BBC: The International agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) predicts that 9.6 million people will die of cancer in 2018 out of 18.1 million cases, predominantly because of lung, bowel, and female breast cancer which will account for a third of all cancer deaths; this figure is up from the 2012 figure which was 12.1 million cases and 8.2 million deaths, partially due to an aging world population and an increasing tobacco use trend among women that contribute to the figure that one in six women will contract cancer in their lifetime, a figure that is one in five for men.
Date: September 12, 2018. From: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45497304. Read More: https://www.iarc.fr/. - Science: A 110 million dollar endeavor conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, to develop a Zika virus vaccine at seventeen sites in in nine countries is now facing an unexpected challenge, because the number of Zika virus cases have dropped dramatically since they swept across the Americas in 2016 causing the children of infected mothers to birth children with brain damage called microcephaly, or small head syndrome, and researchers are having difficulty finding enough test subjects for their vaccine candidates, so they are considering purposefully inoculating humans with weakened viruses, something they considered before but their proposal was shot down by an ethics committee convened by NIAID and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, that called it “premature,” but now NIAID is willing to go forward with the proposal by lead researcher Anna Durbin of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, as long as “they’re careful” (NIAID director Antony Fauci) and 138- participants have already enrolled, all of them being women to avoid transfer of the virus through semen.
Date: September 12. 2018. From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/massive-zika-vaccine-trial-struggles-researchers-revive-plan-intentionally-infect. Read more: https://www.cdc.gov/zika/index.html. - Sputnik News: Hundreds of Roman gold coins, some 1600 years old, have been, according to Italian media, been discovered inside a stone urn found in the basement of an abandoned theatre in Como, northern Italy.
Date: September 16, 2018. From: https://sputniknews.com/europe/201809161068082050-epochal-haul-coins-italian-theatre-gold/. Read more: https://www.ancient.eu/Roman_Coinage/. - BBC: A satellite called NovaSAR, resembling a cheese grater, manufactured by Brittsh company Surrey Satellite Technology Limited was launched into orbit by an Indian rocket from the Satish Dhawan spaceport today that has the ability to detect objects on the Earth’s surface as small as eighty-seven centimeters in diameter and take pictures regardless of weather conditions and even at night; it will be used to track illegal shipping activity in the world’s oceans.
Date: September 16, 2018. From: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45523677. Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45523524. - BBC: Dr Antony van der Ent, a researcher at the University of Queensland, has been studying a rare rainforest tree, Pycnandra acumanata, found on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific Ocean whose latex has a strange blue-green color due to its content of up to twenty-five percent nickel; it belongs to a unique category of plants called hyperaccumulators that could be used to clean metal-contaminated soils.
Date: September 5, 2018. From: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45398434. Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/hyperaccumulator. - Science: On September 13, researchers seeking to revamp a project begun in 2009 called the Genome 10,000 Project, which sought to sequence the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate species but only created one hundred poor quality sequences, officially launched the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), releasing fifteen high quality sequences of fourteen species out of the 66,000 known vertebrate species, all of which the researchers want to sequence now that the cost of genome sequencing has gone down significantly, but the project will still cost an estimated 600 million dollars and the researchers have only raised 2.5 million dollars in the three years that VGP has been going.
Date: September 13, 2018. From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/researchers-reboot-ambitious-effort-sequence-all-vertebrate-genomes-challenges-loom. Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6346/10. - Science: This week, an international team of researchers published a study in plus one that analyzed traces of fat found on pieces of 7,200 year-old Croatian pottery and measured carbon content to determine whether it came from meat, milk, or cheese; they found that it came from cheese, which would make it the oldest cheese in the world if the analysis is accurate, but some scientists are skeptical.
Date: September 7, 2018. From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/world-s-oldest-cheese-may-have-been-discovered-croatian-pottery. Read more: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/09/news-7200-year-old-cheese-ancient-food-chemistry/. - Science: The performance on language and arithmetic tests of 20,000 Chinese citizens was tested by researchers from 2010-2014 and the results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were broken into groups based on the air pollution where the tested citizens lived and it was found that lower test scores correlated positively with higher pollution levels; the average performance loss seemingly caused by pollution was equivalent to one year of education, and the losses were greatest in men, individuals over the age of sixty-four, and individuals with the less education.
Date: August 28, 2018. From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/air-pollution-could-be-making-us-less-intelligent. Read more: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115. - Published this week in the journal Neuron was a discovery of proteins called TMC1s that help fine hairs in our cochlea (inner ear cavity shaped like a spiral) change sound waves into brain waves by acting as valves that are opened by sound waves allowing charged particles to flow, which set off a cascade of brain waves, thus detecting the sound; this discovery is a breakthrough in a forty-year endeavor to find the mechanisms behind our hearing and may help create new treatments for hearing loss.
Date: August 23, 2018. From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-pinpoint-ear-protein-allows-us-hear. Read more: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30631-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627318306317%3Fshowall%3Dtrue. |
|
|
|
|