Dear Readers,

I thank you for subscribing to Abram's News Anthology, but soon you will be thanking yourselves; it more important now than ever to be informed about the current, chaotic world events that are changing world, in good ways and in bad ways, as we speak. 

The first 20+ reports that you are receiving today date back to September 21, 2017. You will receive updates biweekly from now on. Each Report will feature 4 or more news stories from a variety of sources. Links to sources will be provided, although are unavailable on most earlier reports. Each report is a one-sentence summary of a particular news story.

Many of the reports may not focus on politics, but on scietific breakthroughs and advances, an equally important sector.

This newsletter will not distract you with useless, sensational factoids like many others. Only the most interesting and important stories will be delivered to your mailbox. 

Stay informed,

Abram.

Abram Leyzorek

21 September 2017

Current Events

1. NBC News: Magdiel Sanchez, 35, was a deaf man in Oklahoma City before he encountered Lt. Matthew Lindsay who came to his house to investigate a car crash involving Sanchez's father and saw Sanchez holding a 2 foot metal pipe, that they later learned was for warding off stray dogs, and called for backup, which when came Sanchez walked toward the policemen with his pipe whereupon neighbors shouted that Sanchez could not hear the commands of the policemen telling Sanchez to drop his weapon and get on the ground, but the backup tazed and shot Sanchez simultaneously in a fatal attack on Tuesday at about 8:15 pm.

2. DIRECTEXPOSE: 5 miles from the seashore of Roi-Namur in the Marshall Islands, world renowned underwater photographer Brandi Mueller discovered 150 feet beneath the sea over 150 outdated airplanes in excellent condition for having lain on the sea floor for seventy years after, Brand I later learned, they had been dumped there intentionally to avoid unreasonable maintenance costs on outdated models left over from World War II, dumped by the Japanese.

3. RT: Foreign diplomats visiting New York City have incurred a 700000 dollar debt in unpaid parking tickets since 2002 when a memorandum was issued saying that diplomatic parking privelages can be revoked if a diplomat accumulates more than three parking tickets, but dating back from before then, the biggest debtors are China ($398,736), Iran ($184,987), Russia ($104,231), North Korea ($156,000), and Syria ($362,550).

4. RT: A new Swiss company sells seven liter containers of Swiss mountain air for $21, enough for 10 minutes of use, to polluted places like China and India, but CEO Danny Wurr isn't the first as those places had already been buying from Canada, Britain, and Australia.

Abram Leyzorek

2 October 2017

Current Events

1. NBC News: Late Sunday, Stephen Craig Paddock, 64, opened fore on 22000 people at a Mandalay Bay concert in Las Vegas, Nevada, from the 32nd floor of a hotel, killing fifty and injuring over 400, apparently not directed by any affiliated terrorit organization.

2. Science: Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash of Brandais Universityin Waltham Massachusetts, and Michael Young from Rockefeller University in New York City, won the physiology/medicine Nobel Prize for their discovery of 3 genes in the human body that regulate the circadian rhythm, an internal clock that regulates blood pressure, blood viscosity, body temperature, brain function, and many other biological processes in a daily rhythm.

3. RT: the Islamic State claims that it directed Paddock to perpetrate the Las Vegas shooting, though FBI denies that Paddock had any ties to IS.

4. RT: A man climbed onto telephone wires over a four-lane highway 196 feet above the ground, from the nineteenth floor of a hotel in Panzhou, Western China, to avoid paying the bill, but was later rescued by firemen and arrested without injury.

Abram Leyzorek

30 October 2017

Report on Current Events

1. RT: Professor Sir Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington, Cambridge University scholars, published in the journal Astronomy and Geophysics, that a description of an event in the Old Testament book of Joshua, referred to also by the Merneptah Stele (a block of granite inscribed in the fifth year of the reign of Egyptian rulerRamesses II's son Merneptah), actually recorded a real solar eclipse on October 30, 1207 BC, in the afternoon.

2. Science: Abigail Geisinger, widow of iron mill magnate George Geisinger, opened in 1915 a hospital called Geisinger Hospital in Pennsylvania where the enterprise has grown to a network of 13 hospitals today, that as of October 1 has run a study on 166000 volunteers, that in involves analyzing the subjects' DNA for mutations in order to discover genes with the potential to initiate cancer growth and cardiovascular health risks, so that these conditions can be diagnosed early and treated, as part of a push for DNA analysis on a nation wide scale, in order to provide better health care for patients.

3. Science: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory materials scientist Yinmin Wang and colleagues have improved 3D printed stainless steels from prone to fracturing material much weaker than stainless made by the conventional heating, cooling, and rolling method, to up to three times the strength of conventional material and still ductile enough to shape.

4. BBC: 16 million American adults are illiterate.

Abram Leyzorek

2 November 2017

Current Events 4

1. BBC: After 20 years of study, researchers from the universities Zurich and Liverpool John Moores, including some from the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme published a paper in the journal Current Biology about a new species of great ape: an orangutan in Sumatra that were determined to have “split off” from ancestors 700000 years ago, that was determined to be a new species through discovery of subtle variations in the call of the males and in skull shape from the other three known orangutan species, that were discovered after a 20 year analysis of the only known group made up of only 800, critically endangered individuals.

2. BBC: A research group called ScanPyramids has used a technology called muography that relies on the detecting muons scattered by cosmic rays in the atmosphere that penetrate through stone and give a map of the density of the material to a muon detector on the other side of it, to determine beyond all doubt that there is a space in the Great Pyramid at Giza at least thirty meters long and 3 meters high that lies in the same vertical plane as the Grand Gallery chamber and lies above it.

3. RT: Thursday, Siberians posted pictures and videos of a giant, glowing ball in the sky, caused by the Russian test launch of a Topol M Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.

    

   Inverse: Harvard Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics explains this phenomenon as the uniform expansion of gases expelled by the missile in space, that caught sunlight at just the right angle to reflect light down to Siberia.

4. RT: While presiding over a Russian Human Rights Council, on 30 October, when he announced that someone is professionally and purposefully gathering genetic material from Russian people. Russian Federation Council’s Committee for Defense and Security, Franz Klintsevich, said that, however unlikely, it should be acknowledged that the U.S. Could be developing a bio-weapon that targets Russians only. Back in July, the US Air Force Air Education and Training Command requested 12 samples of Russian RNA and 7 samples of Russian synovial fluid for unknown purposes.

Abram Leyzorek

13 November 2017

Current Events

1. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Orthodenticle, one of many genes responsible for the arrangement of features on a scarab beetle's head during developement, was reduced in its capacity to respond to stimulus by RNAi, causing the growth of a compound eye structure between the two naturally developing compound eyes of the scarab beetle that possessed ommatidial lenses, crystaline cones, and tissue resembling neural tissue, capable when these two natural eyes were removed, of responding to visual stimuli.

2. BBC: Today along the mountainous Iran-Iraq border a 7.3 magnitude earthquake killed four hundred and thirteen Iranians and injured seven thousand, as well nine Iraqis were killed and more than four hundred were injured.

3. Science: Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, et al., developed a material composed mostly of polyethyline plastic with tiny holes through it that blocks visible light but passes infrared radiation (IR), but inside has a layer of IR absorbing or emitting black carbon alongside a thin layer of copper that functions like the carbon but more weakly, that is closer towards one side of the material than the other; forty microns thick, it is designed to be a clothing material capable of either heating or cooling the body; when worn with the carbon-cpper layer closer to the skin, the carbon absorbs the IR from the body heat and re-radiates it outwards, the copper reflecting any IR going the wrong way, but when this layer is farther away from the skin and the carbon is facing the skin, the reverse happens and the material becomes an effective insulator, capable of heating and cooling the body over a 6.5 degrees celcius range.

4. New York Times: Abilify Mytex, a new medication recently approved by the FDA, contains sensors that release a signal when the pill hits stomach acid at which time a corresponding patch that the patient must wear n the left rib cage sends a signal to the doctor and up to four other people that records when and where the pill was ingested.

5. Fox News: 200 construction workers were killed by the collapse of an underground tunnel they were inside at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site on October 10th where on September 3rd

   North Korea conducted their sixth and most powerful nuclear test which caused a 6.3 magnitude earthquake, that most likely damaged the tunnel causing it to later crumble.

Abram Leyzorek

November 16, 2017

Current Events

1. New York times: Published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, a study on 177 members of an Amish community in Berne, Indiana by 40 researchers headed by cardiologist Douglas Vaughn from Northwestern medical school that began two years ago, revealed that some of them carried a mutation that lowers the levels of Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), a blood clotting agent also associated with increase of diabetes risk and early death, that made the carriers immune to diabetes and live to an average age of eighty five years and have twenty eight percent lower insulin levels due to their lack of diabetes, without suffering any consequences hemophilia resulting from complete lack of PAI-1; a drug has already been developed by Dr. Toshio Miyata at the Tohoku University in Japan to try and replicate the effects of this mutation.

2. New York Times: Breast feeding children has been shown to increase their IQ, the health of their immune systems, and lower the incidence of obesity in them and now, a study published in The American Journal of clinical Nutrition measured the telomere length of a nearly homogenous group of San Francisco Latino children of four to five years by examining their leukocytes, and found that those children who were verified to have been fed exclusively on breast milk, had five percent longer telomeres the length of which is associated with longevity, but the study only measured once and the babies were not tested at birth, so the babies could have just been healthy, proficient breast-feeders from birth, or mothers who breast feed children just take better general care of them.

3. CNN: Brian Madeux, a sufferer of Mucopolysaccharidoses II (MPS II) of Hunter's syndrome, which is a lack of an enzyme that digests Mucopolysaccharides allowing theses to gather inside cells and cause progressive damage to bones, joints, the nervous system, the respiratory system, and the heart that causes death normally at about twenty years and that 1 in 100000-170000 boys suffer from (girls nearly never have the syndrome), on Monday underwent a potential treatment at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland, California that attempts to replace the single gene responsible for the syndrome with the proper gene using a new technique developed by Sangamo Therapeutics called Zinc Finger Technology that relies on natural proteins called zinc finger DNA-binding proteins and was injected by a simple IV into Madeux who has not exhibited any changes yet, but will continue to be monitored and in the meantime he has become the first ever human to undergo gene-editing.

4. RT: iPTF14hl is a star discovered three years ago that is at least fifty times the mass of the sun was observed to supernova fifty years ago and fade but then grow brighter again only to explode again in 2014; this discovery upends current theories on the life cycle of stars.

Abram Leyzorek

27 November 2017

Current Events 7

1. 1. 1. BBC: NASA has developed a plan to slowly, over hundreds or thousands of years, cool the Yellowstone super volcano located in Yellowstone National Park that the eruption of which poses a higher danger to humanity than an impact of extraterrestrial origin, in order to eliminate the threat which could be accomplished by circulating water through the magma chamber, generating geothermal energy in the process.

      2. RT: The Center for East European and International Studies is a research organization based in Berlin, Germany, that conducted between March and May 2017 individual, in-person interviews with 1800 18+ residents of the Crimean peninsula of various ethnicity, asking whether or not they would vote “yes” to become one with Russia, were another referendum held like in 2014, and only 2.4% said “no,” 6.8% not responding; of the people who said they are thinking about moving to a different country, almost 70% would move to Russia.

      3. RT: The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution November 16 introduced by Anatoly Viktorov, Russian representative, to combat the glorification and white-washing of Nazism around the world, the US and Ukraine being the only states out of those that voted to vote against it.

      4. Science: Stone carvings found in North Western Saudi Arabia that could date back 9900 years, depict humans with bows accompanied by dogs, some of which appear to be on leashes, making this the earliest documentation of the domestication of dogs on record, if the date is proven via a connection to a well documented archaeological site.

Abram Leyzorek

2/19/2018

Current Events

1. BBC: In 1962, a Soviet submarine sank 1500 miles Northwest of Hawaii in the Pacific ocean and rested for six years three miles under the sea, while the CIA devised an intricate plan to retrieve the sub in order to learn the precious secrets of the Soviet Union; dubbed project Azorian, it involved an enormous propaganda campaign about the almost unheard of prospects of deep sea mining with eccentric and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes as the public facade, in order to create a a convincing back story for the launch of an enormous, odd ship six years later with the alleged purpose of mining the sea bed for nodules of manganese that were actually discovered, but instead it lowered three miles of steel tubing down to the wreck of the submarine and extended a claw that gripped it, and despite, as a CIA operate involved in the project, Dave Sharp, would later reveal, many breakages of cables and such, they managed to raise the wreckage halfway to the ship before disaster struck: part of claw gave way and most of the submarine sank back to the sea bed where it rests to this day with all of the Soviet secrets on the nuclear ballistic missiles that the sub was carrying, and the secret code books; when the real reason behind the expedition and six years of disingenuous promoting of the deep sea mining industry, the public was shocked and the mining companies that had grown around this idea were rocked, but valuable metals in high demand and low supply today do exist in vast quantities in some areas of the ocean floor and today a controversy has arisen between biologists and miners about how possibly the area with the greatest biodiversity in the world, the abyssal plain, should be handled, as if mining were to go forward, many unique species that have the potential to cure Alzheimers and other diseases would be wiped out and the overall impact on the ocean ecosystem could spread far behind the abyssal plain as clouds of sediment and toxic chemicals, but as the situation stands today, no mining will go forward until biologists understand the ecosystems around geothermal vents and the abyssal plain better.

2. BBC: Tom de Castella made a bet with his Dad that his twenty three year old gasoline burning car made less harmful emissions than his Dad's 8 year old diesel because he was hearing in the news almost everyday how bad the pollution from a diesel engine is, but it wasn't easy to find a cheap way to get an emissions test; he searched and searched until he found a company called Emissions Analytics that agreed to evaluate the vehicles and after two days of testing with a strange apparatus, he obtained results with wider implications than just for the bet; the diesel was emitted much less Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), the worst of a harmful group of Nitrogen oxides, .798 g/km versus .260 g/km, and less carbon monoxide, 3.804 g/km versus .014 g/km, and has a higher mpg value, 34.0 mpg vesus 50.5 mpg, but the really interesting values came from the database of the company which revealed that many cars that claim to meet emissions standards based on tests in the lab that do not reflect actual driving conditions, do actually meet those standards in actual driving conditions and will actually produce 10-20 times the amount of harmful emissions that they claim and it is very rare to find a car that really complies with the standards of the EU, which are getting tougher.

Abram Leyzorek

2/20/2018

Current Events

1. JAMA: A new study published the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that tested a randomized group of 609 overweight adults to determine the difference between a Healthy Low Fat (HLF) diet and a Healthy Low Carbohydrate (HLC) diet but did not set any caloric guidelines or exercise regimens and only stressed that participants must eat whole, nutritious, unprocessed foods and avoid processed foods containing refined flours and sugars, showed that their was only a small difference between the diets and that both groups lost on average about 5.7 kg, but weight loss varied very much and some even gained a little weight, but the main take away from the study is that it doesn't necessarily matter how much you eat, as long as what you eat is healthy.

2. News Week: Neurologist Claudia Kawas and her team at the University of Rochester have been studying since 2003 the habits, diets, nad medical histories of people in the 90-99 year old age group in the hope of discovering trends associated with high longevity, and they found an unexplained link between daily consumption of alcohol and longevity, but these results do not go far to offset the growing body of studies that show the very damaging effects of alcohol, such as memory loss, DNA damage, increased risk of several types of cancers, etc, but does add to a body of research that shows some benefits to alcohol such as the possible removal of toxins in the brain.

3. BBC: The World Health Organization has reported on huge measles outbreaks throughout Europe in 2017 that have killed thirty five and infected 20,000, and could be linked to less than routine immunization by MMR vaccine which twenty years ago was demonized by researh showing a possible link between it and autism, which has since then been discredited, although the old wounds in people's trust haven't healed.

Abram Leyzorek

2/22/2018

Current Events

1. RT: From 1948 to 1996, the Japanese government sustained a eugenics program that sterilized approximately 25,000 people dubbed unfit for reproduction with the consent of only a tiny fraction of victims, ninety percent of whose files have been destroyed, and the government has never apologized or offered compensation, but a woman in the Miyagi predecture of Japan has sued for compensation of 101,000 USD for her forced sterilization as a teenager.

2. RT: The ninth largest city of Hungary, Székesfehérvár, submitted a short video to compete in the contest to become the 2023 capital of European culture, but they were quickly removed from the running after judges deemed their video to have too many happy white people and not enough poor, miserable migrants, according to the city mayor Cser-Palkovics; one judge, a Belgian politician, denounced the video as a “propaganda film for white Christian Europe,” with “too many crosses and churches.”

3. Nature: The submarine Kikai caldera that was left by a submarine, super-volcanic eruption 7.3 ka ago that spewed the Dense Rock Equivalent of 500 km^3 of magma, is located South West of Kyushu Island in Japan and contains in the center a lava dome of volume 32 km^3 that is a sign that the Kiikai caldera is preparing for another eruption and, although the chances of that are only one percent for the next century, could wipe out 100 million people in the worst case scenario.

4. Washington Post: A thirty one year old Indian man, Santlal Pal, recently had a successful surgery in Mumbai's Nair Hospital by head neurosurgeon Trimurti Nadkarni to remove a 4 pound 8'' by 12'' by 12'' tumor that had been growing on the back of his head for years, and is now recovering.

Abram Leyzorek

2/26/2018

Current Events

1. Tech Times: Florida Institute of Technology assistant professor Toby Daly-Engel participated in a study published in the journal Marine Biodiversity , of 1,310 mitochondrial base pairs belonging to what to what was verified to be the atlantic six-gill shark, Hexanchus Vitulus,, a new species that can grow up to six feet in length.

2. RT: CCTV footage captures a boy in China urinating on the buttons of an elevator while inside in Chingqong City, causing the elevator to stop functioning and trapped him inside, but he was later rescued.

3. RT: According to the Russian defense ministry, a daily five hour pause in fighting will be held after February 27 in East Ghouta, Syria,, to allow citizens to flee the area.

4. Science Magazine: Fully developed hornworm moth, Langia zenzeroides, caterpillars show impressive defenses against adult, caterpillar hunting Calosoma beetles, including squeaks, vomit, striking, and even throwing assailant beetles; in a new study the caterpillars were tested twenty five times against Calosoma beetles, one vs. one, and the caterpillars were victorious every time.

Abram Leyzorek

2/28/2018

Current Events

1. Science: A new study published in PLOS biology by lead author Kirsty Graham, a comparative psychologist at the University of York in the UK, examined the gestures used by bonobos and chimpanzees, humans' closest great ape relatives, and found that there was ninety percent overlap between them, suggesting that the gestures are biologically inherited from a common ancestor.

2. Nature: Wu, A. G. et. al. Published a new study in Nature, received on November 15, 2016, revealing that Citrus trees originated from the foothills of the Himalaya mountains and radiated out into South East Asia during the late Miocene epoch when the monsoons weakened noticeably.

3. New York Times: President of China, Xi Jinping, has suspended term limits on the presidency, allowing himself to hold office indefinitely.

4. A Harvard educated epidemiologist and CDC official, Timothy Cunningham left work early on February 12 telling co-workers that he was feeling sick; earlier that day he had called his sister, who said he sounded odd, and his mother who didn't respond right away, but when she called back later, Cunningham gave no response and a relative went to check on him, but found that he was missing but had left his car, his dog, and his cell phone, he seemed to have evaporated and there is a 10,000 dollar reward for information.

Abram Leyzorek

3/2/2018

Current Events

1. News Week: A new study published in the journal Science, published by lead author and Columbia University computer scientist Yaniv Ehrlich, compiled a pedigree of 13 million individuals out of 86 million downloaded public genealogy profiles from geni.com, that after manipulation and organization using computer programs, showed the migration patterns of Europeans and North Americans for the past two centuries, and showed that even when transportation advanced and people were able to find spouses on average up to sixty miles away, instead of six miles, they still ended up marrying a fourth cousin equivalent on average, and this only changed when such practices became socially unacceptable.

   From: http://www.newsweek.com/worlds-biggest-family-tree-contains-13-million-people-and-it-shows-when-827893.

2. BBC: A study published by lead author Robert Boyle in the journal PLOS Biology that obtained data from over 15,000 participants, showed a 3.1% decrease in food allergies for the children of mothers who daily consumed fish oil pills during pregnancy and for a few months during lactation, and that probiotic intake during pregnancy decreased eczema risk for children by 22%, but avoiding foods such as eggs and nuts had no effect.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43228242.

3. Science: Palm Cockatoos have been observed to use tool such as sticks and seed pods to beat branches in order to create a rhythm, something that has also been detected in their songs, making them the second known species, alongside humans, to use tools to make music.

   From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news?_ga=2.131591887.1102420238.1520019253-1505237668.1519841668.

4. Researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland and the Lund University Diabetes Centre in Sweden, have published a study in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, that revealed five subgroups of diabetes patients instead of the normal type one type two classification that is known to be broad and imprecise; This will, according to the authors of the study, usher in an era of personalized medicine based on more precise diagnoses, because there may turn out to be more than 500 different kinds of diabetes, when ethnic variations are accounted for.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43246261.

Abram Leyzorek

3/6/2018

Current Events

1. BBC: During a dinner in Pyongyang hosted by Kim Jong Un, he told South Korean envoys that he has no need for nuclear weapons as long as the safety of his regime is ensured another way.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43296671.

2. BBC: The Illman family from Perth, Australia, were walking on the beach when they found and carried home a message in a bottle that was later verified to be from a German oceanographic experiment and was thrown overboard of the German ship Paula on June 12, 1886; it now holds the record for the message in a bottle with the longest interim between dropping in water and reception, almost 132 years.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-43299283.

3. Reuters: On Tuesday, the U.K. warned Russia that it would be met with a “robust response” if Russia could be linked to an unknown but seriousness illness currently effecting Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia; Skripal was a double agent for the UK for years during the Cold War, leaking the names of Russian spies in the UK to M16. But Russia has denied any connection to the illness and there is no evidence for a connection as of yet, and the Kremlin has offered its assistance in the investigation if requested.

   From: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-russia/britain-warns-russia-over-double-agents-mysterious-illness-idUKKBN1GH2V6.

4. Science: A new study of more than 900 infants over a ten year period found no link between vaccination before the age of two and increased risk of infection from ages two-four.

   From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/vaccines-won-t-overload-your-child-s-immune-system-or-increase-their-risk-other.

Abram Leyzorek

3/8/2018

Current Events

1. The New York Times: Sergei Skripal's, the ex Russian spy for Brittain, and his daughter's illness of unknown origin has stabilized, according to a statement to lawmakers by British home secretary Amber Rudd's issued on Thursday.

   From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/world/europe/uk-russia-spy-sergei-skripal.html.

2. Time: David Sinclair, co-founder Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School, says that a compound currently being studied called nicotinemide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) that was shown in a March 2017 study published in Nature to make two year-old mice look like four month old mice, is the closest thing scientists have to the elixir of life, and compounds that are known to elevate its levels in the body are being tested on humans, including sinclair, by sinclair and a company called Elysium that already sells NAD+ elevating compounds as a supplement, and personal accounts say that it makes skin smoother and elevates energy levels, but they have not proven that it lengthens life span, although without it a human would die in thirty seconds.

   From: http://time.com/5159879/is-an-anti-aging-pill-on-the-horizon/.

3. The New York Times: On Wednesday, a gun control bill for the state of Florida that will among other things ban bump stocks, elevate the legal gun ownership age to 21, creates a three day waiting period for any gun purchase, allocates 400 million dollars to school security and mental health research, and allows superintendents and sheriffs to arm school personnel if they choose to, passed the legislature and is awaiting Governor Rick Scott's signature.

   From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/us/florida-gun-bill.html.

4. Miami Herald: The Florida legislature has passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which requests of Congress to allow Florida to remain on daylight savings time year-round.

5. New York Post: A scientist form the Keio Uiversity in Tokyo has discovered a new species of tardigrade called Macrobiotus Shonaicus marked by short legs and protrusions from its eggs that may help them stick to surfaces; it was found on a piece of moss in a parking lot and the discovery of another species to add to the thousand other known tardigrade species was published in the journal PloS One.

   From: https://nypost.com/2018/03/05/new-species-of-water-bear-discovered-in-japanese-parking-lot/?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_2659993.

Abram Leyzorek

3/14/2018

Current Events

1. BBC: Stephen Hawking, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Oxford University in Brittain and world renowned astrophysicist, died at the age of 76, peacefully at his Oxford home.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43396008.

2. BBC: Three political activists, Brittany Pettibone (American), Martin Sellner (Austrian), and Lauren Southern (Canadian), were barred from entering the UK, the former two, in a relationship, were detained for two days and then deported when they flew into Luton airport near Calais on Monday; Pettibone tweeted an image of the document she received, that states that her planned activities would pose a serious risk to the “fundamental interests of society,” Southern was handled similarly and posted her concerns about the UK’s value on free speech after the incident; all three have large social media followings and support far-right agendas.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-43393035.

3. The Guardian: A study of 259 bottles of water of eleven different brands from nineteen different locations in nine different countries conducted by the Sate University of New York in Fredonia as per the request of Orb Media, a journalism project, found that ninety percent of the bottles tested contained microplastic fibers, an average of 325 plastic particles per liter of water, the most common plastic being polypropolene, and were identified using Nile red dye; this study and others prompted a world Health Organization review of the subject which has not yet been completed, and the effects of microplastics on human health are still unknown, but is very important to know because they are also found, although in lesser concentrations, in tap water and all over the ocean, meaning also inside the seafood that we eat.

   From: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/15/microplastics-found-in-more-than-90-of-bottled-water-study-says.

4. New York Times: Oklahoma announced a plan, on Wednesday, to asphyxiate inmates on death row, the current number in Oklahoma is 49, using nitrogen gas.

    

Abram Leyzorek

3/15/2018

Current Events

1. BBC: Toronto has become the first city to put up new buildings that are bird friendly, in an attempt to diminimsh the very large number, in the millions, that represents the number of birds killed each year by collision with buildings, which happens because many modern buildings are mostly glass and reflect images of trees, for example, or they are invisible to the bird because of the transparent glass, or they are drawn to inside lights; so the new buildings are made with only about thirty percent glass, giving them much better insulation, and the windows are recessed so as not to create relfections, or if not they are made visible by dots placed on them, and the impact of all that is hard to measure, but on one Toronto facade, before the bird-proofing, about 100 birds were killed per year, and after only one to two were found, and this is especially important for Toronto as it is in the path of a major bird migration route.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-43407634/how-to-stop-birds-smashing-into-windows.

2. BBC: While living in Minnesota with her boyfriend Pedro Riuz, 22, Monalisa Perez, 20, (at the time pregnant with the couples second child) attempted a prank on their quest for internet fame, that ended with the death of Ruiz; he held a 1.5 inch think encyclopedia in front of his chest while Perez, at his request, fired a Desert Eagle handgun from just inched away into his chest, the bullet pierced the book and fatally wounded Ruiz; The Minnesota judge ruled that Perez was guilty of second-degree manslaughter and would be sentenced to 180 in days in prison over the course of year, 10 days in and 10 days out alternately (the last ninety days being in home confinement in her new South Dakota home), to 10 years of supervised probation, banned her from ever owning firearms again, and decreed that she shall make no financial gain from the case; the incident was last June.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43410816.

3. IFL Science!: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) of Australia partnered with Deakin University to synthesize a unique protein responsible for platypus lactation that is composed of ringlets, and is called the Shirley Temple protein due to its unique, curley structure, which has potential to fight superbugs, as was first discovered in 2010, because platypus milk has developed antibacterial properties due to the unique way in which platypi lactate; they lack teats, so the milk just comes out of their abdominal skin to be lapped up by the young, but this means that it gets exposed to outside bacteria and has for that reason developed its potentially useful antibacterial properties.

   From: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-the-milk-of-the-humble-platypus-could-help-us-beat-antibioticresistant-superbugs-/.

4. Tass: A Russian airplane belonging to Nimbus airlines, was lifting off from a Yakutsk airport runway in Siberia on March 15, when the cargo hatch snapped off, releasing 3.4 tones of prescious dore, a gold-sliver alloy, in the form of 40 lb ingots belonging to Chukotka Mining and Geological Co, all of which have been recovered after the area was sealed off by police.

   From: http://tass.com/society/994256.

Abram Leyzorek

3/20/2018

Current Events

1. NBC News: Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, was euthanized Monday after certain “age related” conditions worsened and he could not stand where he was being researched in Nairobi Kenya in attempts to save the subspecies, of which two females are still alive, one his daughter, the other his granddaughter, but the conservancy effort by Ol Pejeta Conservancy, based in Kenya, is not over as genetic material form both males and females has been preserved, waiting for the day when in vitro fertilization techniques will be developed.

   From: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/africa/sudan-world-s-last-male-northern-white-rhino-dies-n858171.

2. Aljazeera: Trump issued an executive order Monday banning all U.S. citizens and entities from engaging in any transactions with any digital “currency, coin, or token” that provide financing for or benefit the Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro, in response to Venezuela's creation of Petro, a cryptocurrency backed by oil that Venezuela says it will continue to develop.

   From: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/trump-bans-purchases-venezuela-cryptocurrency-petro-180320094506428.html.

3. New York Daily News: The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, based in California, said in a press release that the Asteroid Bennu which is 500 meters in diameter, has as of now a 1 in 2700 chance of hitting the Earth on September 25, 2135, but cautions that this figure will almost certainly change for better of for worse, and is busy preparing for that event right now and has created a concept spacecraft for deflection purposes called HAMMER, or Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response, that is nine meters long and weighs nine tons, and could deliver a nuclear device or merely act as a battering ram, but the longer the delay before action is taken, the difficulty of deflection will rise exponentially.

   From: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/conceptual-spacecraft-asteroid-strike-2135-article-1.3885695.

4. Phys.org: Scientists from Harvard, MIT, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created a material that resembles an ancient Japanese basket weaving technique called Kagome that consists of a repeating pattern of highly symmetrical, interlaced corner-sharing triangles, but although this structure is ideal for baskets, the large spaces left by this pattern would form an unstable crystal structure because crystal structures are usually designed for maximum packing density, but the researchers managed to create this material by overlapping layers of iron and tin atoms, each resembling the Kagome pattern; they heated iron-tin powder to about 750*C so that it would form lattice-like crystal structure would form, and then dipped it in an ice-bath to stabilize the crystal structure at room temperature, the key was having the tin atoms fill the voids between the iron atoms, and they successfully created the material in the form of 1 mm wide crystals,which physicists had long thought would exhibit bizarre electrical properties, and it did; when researchers induced an electric current, the electrons flowed not straight through the material, as was expected, but veered and bent back, confining themselves to the edges, which was the three dimensional relative of a two dimensional quantum effect called the Quantum Hall effect that causes electrons flowing through a two dimensional material to follow tight, circular paths around the edges, without the loss of energy, and the researchers believe that they will be able to develop materials with perfect conduction in the future, enabled because of the intrinsic magnetism of the iron, which allows the effect to go on at room temperature, and the properties of the iron and tin atoms which can be described as follows: spectra of the electrons showed the presence of Dirac particles, nearly massless, electrically charged photons, that gained a relativistic mass in the crystals, due to the chirality induced by the magnetic field of the iron atoms and the heavier nuclear charge of the tin atoms which produces a large local electric field, the result of which is that as an external current flows by, it sees the electric field around the tin atoms as a magnetic one and bends away.

   From: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-physicists-quantum-electronic-material.html.

5. The Verge: Google is developing a world wide program under the umbrella term The Google News Initiative which it explains in positive, non-specific rhetoric as “fighting misinformation and bolstering journalism,” it says it will “adjust” search results toward displaying the most accurate information to prevent “conspiracy theories” from mounting to the top of trending lists as has happened after events such as the Las Vegas shooting, it also plans to develop a “disinfo lab” and create an app for young people to increase their “media literacy” called Media Wise, and make an app to make it easier to subscribe to online publications.

   From: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17142788/google-news-initiative-fake-news-journalist-subscriptions.

6. Washington Post: A Russian scientist, Leonid Rink, who helped develop the nerve agent that was used to poison ex Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, dubbed Novichok in the West, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti on Tuesday that the agent was developed in Russia under a different name and that the West could easily have synthesized the agent any time after Russian chemical expert Vil Mirzayanov emigrated to the USA and revealed the formula.

Current Events

3/23/2018

Current Events

1. CNN: Amy L. Wax, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, stated in an interview on The Glenn Show, by Brown University professor of economics Glenn Loury, last Fall, that she didn't believe that any black students in her classes over her long teaching career had finished in the top quarter of the class, and rarely in the top half; Dean of law at Upenn Ruger contradicted her statements saying that blacks have in indeed been in the top of the class, in a statement also relieving Wax of her duties of teaching first year required courses at Upenn, in response to a petition by Penn Law Black Law Students Association.

   From: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/16/us/penn-removes-professor-for-racial-remarks-trnd/.

2. NPR: The Israeli Defense Forces revealed on March 21, 2018, that they had bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in the making on September 6, 2007, and released a video of the operation.

   From: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/21/595727058/israel-acknowledges-having-bombed-a-suspected-syrian-nuclear-reactor-in-2007.

3. Washington Post: On the night of March 21, 2018, police received a 911 call about a man over six feet tall who was breaking windows in Sacramento and they went to investigate; they chased a suspect into the backyard of Stephan Clark, a 22-23 year old black man who was short according to his grandmother, who happened to be standing there with a white iphone his hand that the officers mistook for a weapon and, before identifying themselves as police, opened fire on him, waiting five minutes and sixteen seconds before administering any first aid on the immobilized Clark, who died at the scene.

   From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/03/21/police-shot-a-man-20-times-in-his-back-yard-thinking-he-had-a-gun-it-was-a-cellphone/?utm_term=.55f228fbccd4.

4. The Wall Street Journal : The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 700 points on March 22, 2018 because of decreasing confidence in technology stocks and concerns about a trade war between America and China.

   From: https://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-stocks-rise-after-fed-rate-increase-1521684233.

5. YouTube: YouTube has prohibited certain firearm related content, content related to the sale of firearms or accessories and instructional content showing how to build homemade silencers, do full auto conversions, etc.

   From: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en.

6. The Washington Post: In 2018, a 55 year-old women who had been receiving apitherapy for two years before hand somewhere in Spain, died in a hospital some weeks after her last session which induced a severe allergic reaction leading to a coma and multiple organ failure.

   From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/03/21/woman-dies-after-acupuncture-session-that-used-live-bees-instead-of-needles/?utm_term=.f97888a4ddb7.

    

Abram Leyzorek

3/28/2018

Current Events

1. Science: Kristen and Joachim Jakobsen were piloting an advanced submersible designed to record deep sea ocean life arount Portugal's Azores Island in 2016, when a “funny form” caught Kristen's eye that they followed for twenty five minutes; it was a sixteen centimeter long fan fin angler fish at a depth of only 800 meters (they usually live at depths of 100s of 1000s of meters) that had a dwarf male sperm provider permanently attached to its underside and the mating pair had ascended as part of their life cycle which most anglers do not survive and around the female the researchers observed long, seemingly bioluminescent tentacle that hadn't been observed previously, presumably acting like cat whiskers and detecting predators and prey alike; she wasn't moving very much, presumably to conserve energy for herself and the permanently fused, dependent male, who was able to move more than was expected; the footage only now released to the public adds to the mere handful of other angler fish recordings and is a very important contribution to the study of this order, a study primarily conducted on dead bodies dragged up in nets.

   From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/exclusive-i-ve-never-seen-anything-it-video-mating-deep-sea-anglerfish-stuns-biologists.

2. CNN: A study published in the journal Scientific Reports on March 27, by Dr. Niel Thiese et. al., professor of pathology at NYU Langone Helath, New York,,, provides new insight into the interstitial tissue and fluid which comprise widespread, fluid-filled pockets in between other tissues throughout the body that have a unitary function and a unitary structure, making it a previously unrecognized organ, the interstitium, in the eyes of the researchers, the largest organ, in fact; even larger than the skin.

   From: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/27/health/new-organ-interstitium-study/index.html.

3. Space.com: China's Tiangong-1 satellite laboratory will crash to Earth on April 1, plus or minus a day and a half, but the chances of a person being hit are less than one in one trillion, or about one in one thousand that one person will be hit, however this figure may be closer to one in 43,000, because some estimate the odds to be one in three hundred trillion that an individual will be hit.

   From: https://www.space.com/40115-china-space-station-crash-chances-debris-strike.html.

4. NPR: Following the fatal crash of a self-driving car, owned by Uber, in Tempe Arizona last week, Uber will not attempt to renew its permit from the California DMV to test its self-driving cars on California roads.

   From: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/27/597331608/arizona-suspends-ubers-self-driving-vehicle-testing-after-fatal-crash.

5. Associated Press: Win Myint was elected president of Myanmar on Wednesday, and as a long time loyalist to state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, he is expected to continue doing what she says, as his predecessor did.

   From: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/urgent-myanmar-parliament-elects-suu-kyi-loyalist-as-new-president.

6. ExtremeTech: NASA has again delayed the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, intended successor to the twenty five year old Hubble, due to a perceived need for even more testing which is extremely important, because it will orbit at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, to far away to be easily serviceable if something does go wrong; so the new launch date is May of 2020.

   From: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/266521-nasa-delays-james-webb-space-telescope-may-2020.

Abram Leyzorek

4/2/2018

Current Events

1. Forbes: Mike Hughes, a 61 year old flat Earther, finally managed to launch himself, in the afternoon of March 31 in the Mojave desert, in a homemade, steam powered rocket in an attempt to prove that the Earth is flat after he obtained approval from the Bureau of Land Management that hadn't approved his previous flight path, but he only reached a height of 1,875 feet before parachuting to the ground and says that he will next try to launch into space.

   From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/03/27/flat-earth-rocket-man-finally-blasts-off-in-homemade-rocket-to-prove-earth-is-flat/#3645c13a9b6f.

2. Washington Post: Thousands of Oklahoma teachers did not show up to school today in order to protest spending cuts on education; they plan to travel to the capitol.

3. The New York Times: On April 1, Mr. Alvarado Quesada, former labor minister and novelist and in favor of the Inter-American court Court of Human Rights' ruling(based in San Jose) to force it signatory nations to legalize same-sex marriage, beat his main rival Fabricio Alvarado Munoz, singer and evangelical and opposed to same sex marriage, and became president of Costa Rica with 61 percent of the votes.

   From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/world/americas/costa-rica-election-alvarado-quesada.html.

4. Tech Times: A study conducted by Ambry Genetics a diagnostics company, shows how many direct to consumer (DTC) genetics testing labs, such as those provided by 23AndAe and Direct DNA, produce up to 40% false positives; if your genome is a book, then your genes are chapters and the DNA sequences are letters, but the DTC genetics testing labs use a technique called SNP array which only reads individual letters without discerning which chapters they belong to, which creates the false positives and this phenomenon highlights the importance of getting the raw data from DNA testing kits analyzed by professionals before any conclusions are draw from them.

    

Abram Leyzorek

4/7/2018

Current Events

1. BBC: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has acknowledged that “stingray devices” that mimic mobile phone towers and collect identity and location information from intercepted calls and nearby phones, are used domestically, by whom the DHS claims to be unaware.

   From: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43639709.

2. Nature: A new study, lead author Charles Hailey, says that everything we know about stellar dynamics predicts that up to 20000 stellar mass black holes have settled near the center of the galaxy around the giant black hole Sagittarius A, because we know that the concentration of stars increases toward the center of the Milky Way, it is logical that more black hole forming events would occur, and the researchers developed a method to detect these black holes and the researchers detected 15 quiescent, isolated black holes within one parsec of Sagittarius A.

   From: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25029.

3. Physics Review: Using some very advanced physics and mathematics, Andreasson et. al. Have calculated an expiration date for the standard model 10^139(+102 -51) years in the future, but it has enormous uncertainty due equal parts to uncertainty over top quark mass, strong coupling constant, and “theory uncertainty from threshold corrections,” and it does not account for dark matter and dark energy.

   From: https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.056006.

4. Forbes: The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a main sequence star 9 billion light years away , the furthest away main sequence star to ever have been observed; the observation was made possible by gravitational lensing of the lights and what is called an Einstein ring which occurs when a star moves into our line of sight to the star that we are trying to observe, and focuses the light towards us and when these two effects combined it made the star, informally called Icarus, appear 2000 times brighter than it actually is, or was because it has long expired.

   From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2018/04/04/astronomers-have-captured-the-image-of-an-invisible-star/#47795bf17a90.

5. NBC News: The CDC tried a new approach for screening for bacteria that carry antibiotic resistance genes, and they found that eleven percent of people screened carried the superbugs without any visible symptoms, meaning that the superbugs can pass on their resistance genes to other bacteria through plasmids without our knowledge of any of it.

   From: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nightmare-bacteria-are-trying-spread-u-s-cdc-says-n862436.

Abram Leyzorek

4/9/2018

Current Events

1. 1. 1. Christian Science Monitor: A new German law, in effect since January 1, labeled NetzDG aims to curb the proliferation of hate speech in the internet age; proponents claim that this new law was needed to update old hate speech laws written before the internet, and it does so by requiring large social media companies, e.g. Twitter and Facebook, to delite “hate speech,” often with a 24 hour deadline, or be fined heavil; a post by far right party “Alternative for Germany” member Beatrix von Storch on January 1 that was deleted on Twitter, where it was posted first, and then on Facebook was as follows:“What the hell is wrong with this country? Why is the official police page in NRW tweeting in Arabic? Do you think it is to appease the barbaric, gang-raping hordes of Muslim men?,” in response to a tweet of New Year's Day well wishes from the police in North Rhine Westphalia, posted in German, Arabic, and English.

         From: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2018/0408/Is-Germany-s-bold-new-law-a-way-to-clean-up-the-internet-or-is-it-stifling-free-expression.

      2. Christian Science Monitor: The 1979 Convention of Bern prohibited the killing of wolves since, by 1940, wolves had disappeared from French territory due to a law calling Italian Alpsor their extermination passed in 1882, but after 1979 wolves naturally migrated over the Italian Alps back into France, and the wolf population has exploded in recent years, with 360 wolf sightings in 2017, and the ensuing great sheep slaughter, 10,000 killed in 2017, has unsettled many rural sheep farmers who feel pitted against conservationists and who feel like the government is not adequately reimbursing them for losses and the government only allows forty wolves to be killed per year between the November and December and will only reimburse losses if the farmer can prove that his flock was indeed attacked by wolves and only if he had protective measures in place such as fencing or guard dogs, and the situation pressures the farmers to move elsewhere , but they are concerned that with no one left to tend the land, it will go back to wilderness and tourism will be lost in those areas; the entire sheep farming business is threatened by the resurgence of wolves and the conflict of interest between farmers and conservationists, although some farmers would prefer to live peacefully with the wolves.

         From: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2018/0404/France-s-wolves-are-back.-Now-can-it-protect-its-farmers.

      3. Science: At the Al Wusta archaeological site, a site that was once at the edge of a large freshwater lake discovered in 2014, in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert, at which archaeologists had been working for two years prior, Iyad Zalmout of the Saudi Geological Survey, Jeddah, found what was later identified as a human intermediate phalanx, probably from a middle finger, lodged in the sediment which was dated to 88,000 years ago using uranium series dating, but some scientists doubt the accuracy of the identification from a single finger bone, because there is a very large degree of anatomical overlap between humans and other hominins such as neanderthals, but if the findings hold up it will lend credence to the theory that there were multiple migrations out of Africa by modern humans between the dates 120,000 and 60,000 years ago, and force scientists to reconsider the widely held view that there a single mass migration about 60,000 years ago, which allows for one possible earlier migration 120,000 years ago that “ultimately failed.”

         From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/human-finger-bone-points-early-exodus-out-africa.

      4. Gizmodo: An experiment designed at Washington State University called the axion dark matter experiment (ADMX) is, the designers say, finally sensitive enough to detect a theorized, ultra-light particle called an axion, which was predicted in the 1960s by the Peccei-Quinn theory that was invented to solve the strong-charge parity (CP) problem, a problem that arose when the theory that if the handedness and charge of a particle were reversed, then the physics governing it would be the same as before was disproved by the observation that this did not hold true for the weak nuclear force, and some believed that the same had to apply to its companion force, the strong nuclear force, and the Peccei-Quinn theory was developed to explain this, and then they realized that the axion could also explain dark matter; it could be the dark matter particle, but the ADMX only became sensitive enough to detect axions, if they exist, recently; its basic design is a radio receiver inside a strong magnetic field, because the axion is predicted to emit microwaves or radiowaves when it passes through a strong magnetic field.

         From: https://gizmodo.com/if-tiny-dark-matter-particle-exists-this-experiment-is-1825105012.