Abram Leyzorek
9/18/18
Current Events
- CNN: Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported September 18, 2018, that a Russian IL-20M fighter jet on maritime patrol was inadvertently shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft defenses in Latakia while Israel was conducting an attack on a Syrian Armed Forces facility on September 17, 2018; Russia blames Israel for the deaths of the fifteen Russian servicemen on board the jet, but Israel blames Syria for “firing indiscriminately” and claims that the Russian jet was outside of the area of concern.
Date: September 18, 2018.
From: https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/17/politics/syrian-regime-shoots-down-russian-plane/index.html.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/18/649064034/russian-surveillance-plane-accidentally-shot-down-by-syrian-forces-moscow-says.
2. CBS News: The senate passed a bill proposed by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R- Tennessee, on September 17, 2018 with a 99-1 vote called the Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act which will allot 7.9 billion dollars to the CDC, Department of Health and Human Services, and other agencies for the purposes of research into treating children harmed by opioid abuse, establishment of rehabilitation facilities, and restriction of the flow of foreign opioids into the United States via mail.
Date: September 17, 2018.
From: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-passes-comprehensive-opioids-bill/.
Read more: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm.
3. CNN: Japanese billionaire Yusaka Maezawa, 42, who runs a business called Start Today, which sells music and clothing, will be the first tourist to the moon on SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket, currently under development, as soon as 2023; he says he will bring eight “artists” along with him free of charge.
Date: September 18, 2018.
From: https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/18/technology/yusaku-maezawa-spacex/index.html.
Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/17/17871724/spacex-big-falcon-rocket-bfr-mars-design-elon-musk.
4. USA Today: Research published September 17, 2018, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal linked cleaning product use to childhood obesity by taking fecal samples from 757 babies, asking the mothers about their cleaning habits, and tracking the weight of the babies till age three; the fecal samples of babies exposed to more cleaning products had more Lacknospiraceae gut bacteria, a bacterium that increases likelihood of obesity and babies with this bacterium were more likely than others to obese by age three, but the study does not prove a causal link and did not track other factors such as diet that could have influenced weight gain.
Date: September 17, 2018.
From: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/allthemoms/2018/09/17/household-disinfectants-could-making-your-kids-fat-study-says/1341446002/.
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/05/right-bacteria-obesity/2771685/.
5. Phys.org: A new study published September 19, 2018, in the journal Biology Letters showed in laboratory conditions that mosquito larvae take up microplastics, tiny shards of plastic from synthetic clothing, contact lenses, etc, and carry those with them until maturity and if they are then eaten by a predator that predator will carry the same microplastics, and they move on up the food chain; the researchers say it is highly probably that this is already happening in the wild and not just with mosquitos, as many other insects have the same life cycle as mosquitos do. Date: September 19, 2018.
From: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/9/20180479.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06749-8.
6. Nature: Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich are the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature Communications on September 18, 2018, that describes a reimagining of the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment but instead of a cat it involves two physicists, each in separate boxes, and one flips a coin and then sends a message to the other and the other guesses heads or tails and then both boxes come off; most of the time both physicists will agree on the answer, but it is possible for both of them to be sure of different answers, which means that the interpretation of quantum mechanics they were using, called the Copenhagen interpretation (which states that the position quantum particle is represented by a probability wave function until the position is measured, at which point the function collapses into one of the possible positions), contradicts itself and does not provide an entirely accurate description of reality.
Date: September 18, 2018.
From: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06749-8.
Read more: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/schr%C3%B6dinger%E2%80%99s-cat-explained/.
7. Live Science: A study published in the Astrophysics Journal by an international research team from the University of Arizona, Penn State University, and Sabanci University in Turkey describes the detection of an infrared signal that emanated from near a pulsar called RX J0806.4-4123 that is eight-hundred light years away; the finding is interesting because signals from pulsars are generally in the X-ray frequency and are point signal unlike this one which was both infrared and extended, meaning that the signal was spread out over a large area, and the researchers presented two possible sources, one being that it emitted from a pulsar wind nebula surrounding the pulsar, a giant disc of material possibly left over from a supernova, or from a nearby pulsar wind nebula as something called a pulsar wind, but they’re still not sure why it emitted infrared radiation rather than the typical X-rays.
Date: September 18, 2018.
From: https://www.livescience.com/63611-mysterious-infrared-signal-space.html.
Read more: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aad6df/meta.
8. BBC: A team of researchers from the Australian National University in Canberra published an analysis of fossil samples of an ancient life form called Dickinsonia in the journal Science; the fossils were found in North West Russia and contained 95% cholesterol, a fat molecule unique to the animal kingdom which unequivocally proves that Dickinsonia, which was previously unclassified, was an animal, the oldest animal in the geologic record, in fact, at 558 million years old.
Date: September 20, 2018.
From: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45588213.
Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1246.
9. CNN: A report published September 21, 2018, by the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that one in twenty deaths, over three million in 2016, are alcohol related, and that seventy-five percent of these deaths are accounted for by men; the effects of alcohol are even more widespread, with 237 million men having disorders caused by alcohol consumption and forty-six million women having the same.
Date: September 21, 2018.
From: https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/21/health/global-alcohol-deaths-who-intl/index.html.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/23/health/global-alcohol-study/index.html.
10. Tech Radar: Susan Molinari, vice president of public policy and government affairs at Google, send a letter to senators stating that Google doesn’t mind if third-party apps collect data from Gmail accounts as long as those apps are transparent about how they use it and they are allowed to share it with other third-party apps, but Google defends itself by saying that it conducts a rigorous review of the app before giving it access to Gmail messages and that Gmail users voluntarily give them this access when they install them and accept the conditions of installment.
Date: September 21, 2018.
From: https://www.techradar.com/news/google-may-not-read-your-gmail-messages-but-third-party-apps-do.
Read more: https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/20/technology/google-gmail-scanning/index.html.
11. Washington Post: On September 24, 2018, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu issued a statement that Russia would give Syria one of its powerful S-300 missile defense systems to, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, countervail any porential threats to Russian service members, alluding to the downing of a Russian Il-20M fighter jet that resulted in the deaths of fifteen Russian service members which Russia blames on Israel; Israel had long opposed such a move, but Israel and Russia will maintain good relations.
Date: September 24, 2018.
From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-blow-to-israel-russia-says-it-will-send-syria-powerful-antiaircraft-missiles/2018/09/24/674745b8-bffe-11e8-be77-516336a26305_story.html?utm_term=.cf67eb1e9d75.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia/russia-after-netanyahu-visit-backs-off-syria-s-300-missile-supplies-idUSKBN1IC0SW.
12. Live Science: Surendra Adhikari, an Earth system scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was the lead researcher in a new study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters’ November issue that identified three causal factors in the gradual shifting of the Earth’s axis of rotation of a few centimeters per year: the rising of land relieved of pressure as glaciers recede, diminishing of the Greenland ice sheet, and convection in the mantle.
Date: September 24, 2018.
From: https://www.livescience.com/63655-why-earth-wobbles.html.
Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X18305314?dgcid=rss_sd_all.
13. PetaPixel: JAXA, the Japanese space agency, landed two rovers on September 21, 2018, from its Hyabasha-2 spacecraft on the asteroid 162173 Ryugu, which is 174-million miles from Earth, and snapped photographs of it, marking the first time humans have landed rovers on an asteroid; Hyabasha-2 had been travelling for 3.5 years and had travelled 1.9-billion miles before it first reached the asteroid in June of 2018.
Date: September 24, 2018.
From: https://petapixel.com/2018/09/24/the-first-photo-from-the-asteroid-japan-just-landed-rovers-on/.
Read more: http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/topics/20180922e/.
14. NPR: Andrea Cristanti, a professor of molecular parasitology at Imperial College London, lead a new study published in Nature Biotechnology and sponsored by Target Malaria which shows that the introduction of mosquitoes, Anopholes Gambiae, gene-edited with CRISPR, a revolutionary new gene editing tool, to impair reproductive capacity into population of unedited, caged mosquitoes causes the entire population to go extinct; while this may prove to be a potent weapon against malaria-spreading mosquitoes, much research is needed to determine if it is safe to release it into the wild.
Date: September 24, 2018.
From: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/24/650501045/mosquitoes-genetically-modified-to-crash-species-that-spreads-malaria.
Read more:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245.epdf?referrer_access_token=fMYyVrsP96aQJxNz9Z1xRdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MR-Zb364-5obJjO9bbZ93-u9r5j70MrgF9m0jWNnaGmq-1lcDiQtTrpRVCXHNO5rVViswcZ2GsFSeSWncOvsjASIJ3Gv138cS5pCisAXvoxVkCjkzpf60npoZlNQ8CI0bdJ-rJKzHyRVgdFheFH1na4f_m2pzOKCTcFm50UUyge54QBzFsjNWVFKRSlsHRKXfOcXRFPhNqG2rZ6gzrUbsMoxAAJrD50yWlwVRSKX2lO0EvUBBAUy6343JHBHAygzSomBj7I1wkR4Vxw2Kp2I3z&tracking_referrer=www.npr.org.
- https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEPSiTjwp7pAkBjwxz-PE_6YqFggEKg0IACoGCAowm_EEMKAiMOfsywM?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen.