Dear Readers,

Many intriguing discoveries and advances have been made recently in the fields of science and technology, and this issue's higher-than-average emphasis on science stories reflects this. However, in the interest of balanced reporting, I have also included several political current events as well. Do not hesitate to share in the forums what story you found most intriguing and any questions you have about the stories.

I have uploaded many new photographs to the website for your enjoyment, including of a cute clay sculpture, a venomous Jack o' lantern, a brilliant spider, and an invernal view. In addition, I amended the home-page text.

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

12/3/18

Current Events

1. The Associated Press: According to a new report published in the journal Pediatrics by Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention researchers on November 26, 2018, between 1 and 40 and one and fifty-nine children in the United States aged three to seventeen years have autism.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Date: November 26, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              From: https://www.apnews.com/f78f5b4e9280469bb1d6ad3d8a2c7313.                                                                                                                                                            Read more: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/142/6?current-issue=y.                 
2. Science: Researchers in Key Largo, Florida, at the Dolphins Plus Marine Mammal Responder positioned television screens in front of two groups of eleven dolphins and monitored their responses, which showed that they were captivated by the moving pictures independent of what they were; although there were differences in responses between sexes, this technique could be used to stimulate the brains of dolphins held in captivity and the results will be published in the journal Zoo Biology.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Date: December 3, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/these-dolphins-enjoy-watching-spongebob-squarepants-and-it-could-be-good-them.                                                                                                                                                                                          Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/zoo.21444?referrer_access_token=bwB7l1STvd8qqG2eAZtiZk4keas67K9QMdWULTWMo8PKllcUJZfMNd_VltYMZvGy1mQHzApFTRs1RQFVB2w6aoGqxK9kBm_8e3msiBg_3XFq-sj9Zj1A4BuWY8SrKqe8.                                                                                              
3. Science: Yale University planetary astronomy Christopher Spalding et. al. have proposed a hypothesis that would resolve the so called “faint young Sun” paradox, which arises from physicists’ predictions that when the Earth was young, the Sun was 15-25% dimmer than today, meaning that all liquid water on the surface of Mars and  Earth should have been frozen, despite evidence from old rocks that liquid water existed on both planets at the time, instead of the current hypothesis that postulates an ideal mixture of greenhouse gasses in the two planets’ atmospheres which was able to keep them above the freezing point of water; they propose that if the Sun’s mass were about five percent greater when it was young, then it would have shined bright enough to resolve the paradox, except for one problem: there has been no way to reliably track the sun’s mass, something Spalding and his team have proposed could be solved by sending a rover equipped with dating equipment to Mars where it could date layers of sedimentary rock that have not shifted since there deposition due to Mars’ tectonic stagnancy; the thickness of these layers is influenced by the rate of erosion during the deposition cycle which is influenced by level of rainfall which is influenced by temperature which is influenced by distance from the sun which varies according to a 400,000 year long cycle of variation in orbital shape, so if the sun were five percent brighter when the Earth was young, the layers on Mars should be five percent thicker for that time period, allowing the theoretical rover to determine if the sun really was five percent brighter in Earth’s infancy or whether this intensity was reached at a different time, leaving the paradox unsolved.                                                                                                                                                                        Date: December 3, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/did-our-ancient-sun-go-diet-bands-martian-rock-could-solve-faint-young-sun-paradox.                                                                                                                                                                                          Read more: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0612321.                                                           
4. Science: A 2017 JAMA study that diagnosed ninety-nine percent of the 111 brains donated by deceased National Football League players between 1963 and 2008 with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) did not account for the possibility that players with CTE might have been more likely to donate their brains, thus leading to an overestimation of CTE prevalence; a new study published November 28, 2018 in the journal Neurology  created a curve that represents the prevalence of CTE In the NFL using the results of the 2017 study but also accounting for bias, resulting in a curve that ranged from just under ten percent to almost 100 percent probability that NFL players will eventually develop CTE.                                                                                                                                                                                                        Date: November 29, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/ten-percent-nfl-players-could-eventually-develop-serious-brain-disease.                                                                                                                                                                                                            Read more: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/ninety-nine-percent-ailing-nfl-player-brains-show-hallmarks-neurodegenerative-disease.                                        
5. Science: For ten years, scientists have relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect brain activity in heavily damaged brains of vegetative individuals, individuals from whom no external physical response can be elicited, but now scientists report on November 21, 2018, in the journal Current Biology a new method of doing so using a net of electrodes placed over the scalp which was able to measure brain activity in damaged brains similar to healthy brain activity in response to hearing their native language.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Date: November 26, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/new-test-spots-hidden-consciousness-severely-injured-brains.                                                                                                                                                                                                                Read more: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31458-1?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982218314581%3Fshowall%3Dtrue.                                                                                  
6. Science: A paper published November 21, 2018, in the journal Insectes Sociaux revealed that Formica archboldi headhunter ants native to Florida may collect the head casings of larger trap jaw ants in order to mask their scent from the trap jaws and also help them evade another species called kidnapper ants; National Geographic reports on November 27, 2018, that the headhunters are able to subdue the bigger, fiercer trap jaws using fast jets of toxic acid.                                                                                                                                                                                                      Date: November 28, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/headhunter-ants-might-keep-enemy-skulls-scent-camouflage.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Read more: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00040-018-0675-y.                      
7. RT: The New York Police Department (NYPD) has purchased fourteen drones which it claimed in a press release might be used for  things such as “crime scene documentation,” “traffic and pedestrian monitoring at large events,” “search and rescue,” and “other emergency situations with approval of Chief of Department,” and it claims that no weapons will ever be carried; most of them are small quadcopters, but two are large, weather resistant drones with 30X camera magnification, thermal imaging, and three-dimensional mapping, to be used for “search and rescue.”                                                                                                                                                  Date: December 5, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        From: https://www.rt.com/usa/445589-nypd-drone-program-launch/.                                                                                                                                                              Read more: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p1204a/nypd-new-unmanned-aircraft-system-program#/0.                                                                                                
8. The Verge: On December 5, 2018, SpaceX, a private rocket company, launched one of its reusable Falcon 9 rockets with a Dragon cargo capsule filled with supplies for the International Space Station which NASA contracted, along with hundreds of experiments to be conducted in zero-gravity by the astronauts, including Robotic Refueling Mission-3, an attempt at “transferring super-cooled propellants in orbit.”                                                                                                                                      Date: December 5, 2018                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           From: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18113714/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-iss-crs-16-dragon-capsule-watch-live.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Read more: https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/12/05/spacex-falcon-9-boosts-dragon-cargo-ship-to-orbit-first-stage-misses-landing-target/.                                                       
9. USA Today: Tests conducted at the University of Queensland, Australia, have confirmed that a new cancer diagnosis test utilizing gold nano-particles that change color when exposed to cancerous DNA can detect cancer in a blood sample with ninety percent accuracy in only ten minutes, unlike the week it takes for more expensive DNA sequencing, researchers claimed on December 4, 2018, however Dr. Dino Di Carlo of the UCLA cancer center says it will not be very revolutionary due to slow rate at which cancer progresses and due to the dangerously high probability of producing false positives.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Date: December 4, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          From: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/12/04/cancer-researchers-australia-develop-universal-blood-test/2209555002/.                                                                                                                                                                                            Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07214-w.                                 
10. The New York Times: Brazilian researchers at the Hospital das Clínicas at the Universidade de São Paulo led by gynecologist Dr. Dani Ejzenberg said on December 4, 2018, that a woman on whom they had conducted a successful transplant of a uterus from a dead woman had given birth to a healthy, six-pound baby girl by cesarean section; the results were published in The Lancet.                                                                                                                                                                                      Date: December 5, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/health/uterus-transplant-birth.html.                                                                                                                                                  Read more: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31766-5/fulltext.                                                                                                    
11. The Federalist: In New York City, Tim Cook, technology company Apple’s CEO, stated December 3, 2018, as he accepted the first ever “Courage Against Hate” award from the Anti-Defamation League “We only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence: You have no place on our platforms. You have no home here.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Date: December 4, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    From: http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/04/apple-ceo-tim-cook-sin-not-to-ban-people-tech-platforms/.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2018/09/08/alex-jones-apple-pulls-infowars-app-app-store-following-twitter/1240003002/.                                   
12. Grayzone Project: A documentary begun in 2015 by a filmmaker, Rowan Wernham, and a journalist, Yasha Levine, called “Pistachio Wars” will soon be published; it details how after former U.S. President Jimmy Carter instated a trade embargo on Iran in 1979, America was no longer receiving Iranian pistachios, considered the best in the world, and Stewart Resnick, who had recently moved to Central Valley, California, the heart of pistachio production in the U.S., saw his chance and grew, along with his wife and business partner Lynda Resnick, a pistachio business that would come to dominate an American pistachio market far larger than it had ever been before, due to advertising, and continues to so under its current name, the Wonderful Company, as well as putting other, smaller growers out of business and endangering local estuary ecology by draining more water into their farm than the entire city of Los Angeles, and they also contribute to foreign woes by contributing to organization that advocate for more restrictions on and war with Iran, one of the Resnicks’ global competitors and possible domestic competitor if Iran is ever allowed free trade.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Date: December 4, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    From: https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/04/pistachio-wars-how-the-resnicks-snack-food-fortune-is-fueling-the-assault-on-iran/.                                                                                                                                                                                          Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41640066.                                             
13. The Next Web: Rockefeller University physicist Alipasha Vaziri is preparing to conduct a follow-up experiment to one he conducted last year, which proved that the humans are able to perceive individual photons stimulating their eyes, in which he will test whether humans can perceive any difference between a normal photon and a photon that has been entangled with another photon; if the answer is yes, then the theory of quantum mechanics does not tell the whole story about the universe because it says that quantum phenomenon happen covertly and should not be perceptible, but if the answer is no, then it will come through the trial unscathed.                                                                                                                                              Date: December 6, 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            From: https://thenextweb.com/science/2018/12/06/how-the-human-eye-could-destroy-quantum-mechanics/.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Read more: https://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single-photons-1.20282.     
14. Fox News: On December 7, 2018, an ‘unmanned spacecraft,” the Chang’e 4, was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China atop a Long March 3B rocket headed for the dark side of the Moon, a mission that, if successful, will make China the first country to land on the far side of the Moon.                                                                                                                                                                              Date: December 7, 2018. From: https://www.foxnews.com/science/china-launches-ground-breaking-mission-to-land-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon.                                                                                                                                                                        Read more: https://www.space.com/42665-china-launches-moon-far-side-lander-rover.html.