Dear Readers,

I hope you enjoy this issue of LNA and have a happy New Year!

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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

1/2/2019

Current Events

• Science: Researchers reported December 12, 2018, in the journal Royal Society Open Science that perhaps the most enduring legacy of human beings will be the tremendous change they made in the number, composition, and size of chicken bones in the middle of the twentieth century when they invented factory farming, something that will be preserved for gaes in the fossil record.

Date: December 12, 2018.

From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/modern-humanity-s-legacy-might-be-all-chicken-bones-we-leave-behind.

Read more: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180325.

• Fox News: On December 28, 2018, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R- S.C., and Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., the two representatives chairing the committees looking into possible bias of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI against the then presidential candidate Donald Trump, submitted a letter to the DOJ and senate majority leader Mitch McConnel, R- Ky., saying that their original questions and concerns were “exacerbated” by findings and suggested that the DOJ appoint a special counsel to look into the matter, but did not divulge a full report of the findings; they also urged Congress to reopen the investigation 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s questionable emails.

Date: December 29, 2018.

From: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republicans-unceremoniously-end-probe-into-fbi-doj-bias-against-trump-in-favor-of-clinton.

Read more: https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Joint-Investigation-Letter-3.pdf.

• RT: On December 29, 2018, US District Judge Edmond E. Chang dismissed a lawsuit against Google filed in 2016 by plaintiffs in Illinois seeking five million dollars in damages from Google’s violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which outlaws any nonconsensual gathering of biometric data, by collecting biometric data of Illinois civilians through photographs of them stored on Google Photos; Judge Chang ruled in favor of Google that the plaintiffs were not entitled to compensation as no “concrete” damages were inflicted.

Date: January 1, 2018.

From: https://www.rt.com/usa/447902-google-facial-recognition-lawsuit/.

Read more: http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004&ChapterID=57.

• RT: The United States’ decision to withdraw from the United Nations Education Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) came into effect on December 31, 2018, right before Israel’s decision to do the same took effect on January 1, 2019; both nations cited pro-Palestine, anti-Israel bias as the reason for withdrawal.

Date: January 1, 2019.

From: https://www.rt.com/news/447872-us-israel-leave-unesco/.

Read more: https://www.rt.com/news/406475-us-withdraws-unesco-december/.

• Cnet: On January 20, 2019, a “super blood wolf moon” will be visible in the Western hemisphere; the moon will be at its perigee, or closest point to the Earth, making it appear larger at the same time the Earth will cast a shadow on the moon tinging a rusty orange, and all this on the first full moon in January, nicknamed the wolf moon.

Date: January 2, 2019.

From: https://www.cnet.com/news/super-blood-wolf-moon-highlights-start-of-2019-eclipse-season/.

Read more: http://whenisthenexteclipse.com/a-super-wolf-blood-moon-is-coming-heres-everything-you-need-to-know/.

• NBC News: Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko let the martial law that he had extended over ten regions on Ukraine’s border in response to Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian vessels in the Kerch Strait expire on December 27, 2018 thirty days after its imposition; Poroshenko maintains that martial law was necessary for Ukraine’s security against the threat of Russia, but some are convinced it was merely a political move to boost his ratings in the polls before the upcoming election in Ukraine, and Russia has yet to release the approximately two dozen Ukrainian sailors it detained, whom it says will be tried under Russian law for unlawfully crosses Russia’s border.

Date: December 29, 2018.

From: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-s-martial-law-over-there-s-no-end-sight-n952211.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-martiallaw/martial-law-expires-in-ukraine-idUSKCN1OP0QV.

• Fox News: On December 27, 2018, a 1,400 page document of rules for Facebook’s content moderators leaked by a Facebook employee was published in the New York Times and included instructions such as how to identify hate speech and a spreadsheet of so called “hate figures,” all praise of whom must be censored; many experts have criticized the rules for errors and bias, and even Facebook’s own head of global policy management Monica Bickert admits that, due to the sheer scale of censorship operations, even if a high percentage of censored posts were malign, there would still be “a lot of mistakes.”

Date: December 28, 2018.

From: https://www.foxnews.com/tech/facebooks-massive-secret-rulebook-for-policing-speech-reveals-inconsistencies-gaps-and-biases?utm_source=samizdat&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=free.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators.html.

• NPR: A new law passed in June of 2018 by Vietnam’s National Assembly came into effect on January 1, 2018; it requires tech companies such as Google and Facebook to open offices in Vietnam to store user data which the new law gives the government on-demand access to as well as the power to remove content it deems indecent or “toxic.”

Date: January 1, 2018.

From: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/01/681373274/to-the-dismay-of-free-speech-advocates-vietnam-rolls-out-controversial-cyber-law.

Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/singer-raising-voice-vietnam-cyber-law-181231002449253.html.

• Space.com: At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington D.C. in December of 2018, planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory told Space.com about NASA’s Double Asteroid Deflection Test mission, which she is project scientist for, which aims to collide a car-sized spacecraft into the moonlet that orbits the asteroid Didymos to gather data that could potentially be useful in an attempt to redirect an asteroid threatening to collide with Earth, if scientists were given a warning ten-twenty years in advance; DART is NASA’s first mission conducted in the interest of planetary defense.

Date: January 2, 2018.

From: https://www.space.com/42853-dart-asteroid-impact-defense-mission-2022.html.

Read more: https://www.space.com/29427-asteroid-deflection-armageddon-test-aida.html.

• Science: Work published on BioRxiv in recent months by three groups of scientists details experiments that successfully generate sometimes intelligible speech from the brain signals of epilepsy patients who read aloud, listened to, or silently mouthed words by passing data collected from electrodes paced directly upon the brains of the patients through neural networks; attempts to recreate imagined speech were unsuccessful and even reproducing words read or listened to required tailoring of the neural networks to each individual patient.

Date: January 2, 2018.

From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/artificial-intelligence-turns-brain-activity-speech.

Read more: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/21/504522.

• Ars Technica: A group of scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana, made three separate genetic modification to tobacco plants in an effort to improve their productivity which is naturally hindered by problems with an important enzyme called RuBisCo which, basically, is responsible for turning carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars in the process of photosynthesis, the problems being that sometimes RuBisCo uses oxygen instead of carbon dioxide which produces a harmful, useless byproduct and even when it does use carbon dioxide, it is not an especially good catalyst; scientists replaced RuBisCo with genes from bacteria, pumpkins, and algae with varying success, i.e. one modification had no effect on productivity while another increased productivity by a little over ten percent and the third, a mix of pumpkin and algae genes coupled with the down-regulating of a natural gene made unnecessary by the modification that was responsible for transporting the toxic byproduct out of the chloroplast, increased productivity by between twenty and forty percent.

Date: January 3, 2019.

From: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/re-engineering-photosynthesis-gives-plants-a-40-growth-boost/.

Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077.

• Science: Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle reported on January 2, 2019 in the journal Science Translational Medicine a new, lasting method of neutralizing organophosphates, nerve agents like sarin as that are also found in pesticides, almost like a vaccine, which involved enveloping the organophosphate attacking enzyme OPH in polymer gel and injecting the nanometer-sized packets into the blood stream; rats given as little as one injection retained complete resistance to organophosphates for as long as five days.

Date: January 2, 2018.

From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/nanoscavengers-could-protect-people-sarin-gas-other-nerve-agents.

Read more: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/473/eaau7091.

• Science: Beatriz Orosa-Puente et. al. reported in the journal Science on December 21, 2018, that where new lateral roots sprout from existing tree roots is dependent on where resources in the soil can be found; for example, the gene responsible for beginning the process of growing a new root, ARF7, will be suppressed on the dryer side of a root while it will remain untouched on the damper side.

Date: December 21, 2018.

From: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6421/1407.

Read more: https://www.livescience.com/2331-roots-grow.html.

• Business Insider: On January 3, 2019, the US State Department issued a level two travel advisory for the People’s Republic of China which encourages US citizens travelling there to exercise increased caution due to concerns that they may be waylaid there for indefinite periods of time if China issues an “exit ban”; several other countries are on a level two travel advisory, as well, including Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Myanmar, Germany, Denmark, Algeria, and Antarctica.

Date: January 3, 2019.

From: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-china-travel-advisory-2019-1.

Read more: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/China.html