Abram Leyzorek
9/25/18
Current Events
- Science Alert: Eminent mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah delivered a lecture on September 24, 2018, explaining his proof of the Riemann Hypothesis which was posited in 1859 by Bernhard Riemann and states that the occurrence of every prime number, a number that is only divisible by one and itself, follows a pattern, which goes against the theory that prime numbers are randomly distributed which has been the historical view the refutation of which requires the mathematician to devise a method of predicting the occurrence of every single prime number (currently only ten trillion prime numbers have been shown to be consistent with an equation called the Riemann zeta function which the Riemann hypothesis states works for every single prime number, something that there has been no way to prove); if his proof holds up to peer review, he will win one of seven “Millenium Prizes” granted by the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, which is worth one million dollars.
Date: September 25, 2018.
From: https://www.sciencealert.com/top-mathematician-sir-michael-atiyah-solved-a-160-year-old-1-million-maths-problem-riemann-hypothesis.
Read more:
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/17NBICP6OcUSucrXKNWvzLmrQpfUrEKuY/view.
- https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/skepticism-surrounds-renowned-mathematician-s-attempted-proof-160-year-old-hypothesis.
2. Newsweek: A study conducted by researchers at the University of Austin led by Erick Motta, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, exposed healthy bees to the common weed-killer glyphosate at concentrations similar to those that they would encounter in the wild and then exposed them to the common pathogen Serratia marcescens and then compared the mortality rate of those bees to healthy bees not exposed to glyphosate and found that ten percent of the glyphosate-exposed bees survived, whereas fifty percent of the non-glyphosate-exposed survived, the reason being that glyphosate is designed to kill microorganisms, so it weakens the gut microbiome of bees and therefore their immune systems, so they are less able to fend off pathogens.
Date: September 25, 2018.
From: https://www.newsweek.com/bee-death-scientists-warn-common-weed-killer-harming-honey-bees-1137103.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/651618685/study-roundup-weed-killer-could-be-linked-to-widespread-bee-deaths.
3. BBC: The Indian Supreme Court has abolished a 158 year-old law against adultery which stated that men accused of adultery could face a fine and/or a five-year prison sentence, but wives could not accuse husbands and the wife couldn’t be seen as an abettor and the male was always the seducer; it did this in response to a forty-five-page petition submitted late in August of 2018 by forty-one year-old businessmen Joseph Shine who complained that the law discriminated against men and women and assumed women to be the property of men; the court had previously ruled that overturning the law would threaten the stability and sanctity of marriage.
Date: September 27, 2018.
From: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-45404927.
Read more: https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/why-india-needs-to-decriminalise-adultery/story-dEqNZRtDuSLa6jgMrC07pI.html.
4. Geek Wire: Japanese company ispace has commissioned use of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to deliver two payloads to the moon, a lunar orbiter/lander and lunar rovers, as part of their Hakuto-R, or white rabbit reboot, program and to be tentatively delivered in 2020 and 2021, respectively.
Date: September 26, 2018.
From: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/japan-ispace-spacex-moon/.
Read more: https://ispace-inc.com/.
5. The Guardian: According to a new study led by Jeremy Walsh of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research institute of Canada and published in Lancet Child and Adolescent Health that collected data from 4,520 children from twenty places in the United States, only one in twenty children in the U.S. meet the Canadian 24-hour Movement Guidelines for Children which has guidelines for sleep, exercise, and back-lit screen time, the sleep and exercise guidelines being concurrent with those of the World Health Organization; 30% met one guideline, 25% met two guidelines and 5% met all three and the more guidelines children met, the better their cognition was, although lack of exercise did not affect cognition and screen time was the most important factor, and half of children met guidelines for sleep, 37% met guidelines for screen time (no more than two hours whereas the average was 3.6 hours), and only 18% met guidelines for exercise.
Date: September 27, 2018.
From: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/27/us-children-sleep-screen-time-cognitive-skills-study.
Read more: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(18)30278-5/fulltext.
6. CNN: On September 27, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought suit against Elon Musk for alleged fraud involving a tweet made on August 7, 2018, saying that he was considering privatizing Tesla, an automaker, at 420 dollars per share and had secured funding to do so, but the SEC found that he had not actually secured funding or properly communicated with board members about his plans and he reconsidered just three weeks later, so Musk has agreed upon a settlement with the SEC that requires court approval, stipulating that musk will pay a twenty million dollar fine, step down as chairman of the board of directors within forty-five days, will not seek reelection for three years, and will remain CEO of Tesla, which also agreed to pay a twenty million dollar fine for not keeping track of Musk’s communications.
Date: September 30, 2018.
From: https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/29/technology/business/elon-musk-tesla-sec-settlement/index.html.
Read more: https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/27/news/companies/elon-musk-sec-tesla/index.html?iid=EL.
7. BBC: After undergoing a liver transplant, a fifty-six-year-old man from Hong Kong was diagnosed by researchers from the University of Hong Kong with the first known case of a rat disease called hepatitis E that he might have contracted from the rats infesting the refuse bins outside his residence, the researchers reported on September 28, 2018; he has been cured since.
Date: September 28, 2018.
From: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45677526.
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36480021.
8. New York Times: On September 30, 2018, Mexico, Canada, and the United States finalized a new deal set to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if all three countries adopt the deal, which is called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and includes major changes such as setting the percentage of car parts that automakers must make in North America in order to be exempt from tariffs to rise from 62.5% to 75% over time, requiring that 40% of car parts be manufactured in factories where the mean wage is sixteen dollars per hour by 2023, grants relief from any future US tariffs to 2.6 million passenger cars imported to the US from each country (more than both countries have exported to the U.S. in the past year), will gradually open the Canadian dairy market to American farmers, put American wines on shelves alongside British Columbian wines in British Columbia, dissolved an enforcement regulation, formerly in operation between all three countries, between Canada and the US that allowed investors to sue for reparations from losses caused by foreign countries, facilitated the formation of labor unions in Mexico, opened Mexican and Canadian markets to American financial institutions, and extended intellectual property protection for American pharmaceutical companies to Canada.
Date: October 1, 2018.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/trump-nafta-usmca-differences.html.
Read more: https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/united-states-mexico-canada-agreement/united-states-mexico.
9. RT: European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) team, a research team teasing out the differences between matter and anit-matter by studying the so called “beauty” quarks, researchers published results on September 27, 2018, showing the discovery of two unique particles belonging to the category of baryons along with the well-known protons and neutrons which are made up of even smaller particles called quarks, which can have six different “flavors,” bottom (b), top (t), up (u), down (d), strange (s), or charm (c), and both are made up of three quarks each, protons being uud and neutrons being udd; the two new particles are buu and bdd, and signs of a third new particle have been detected, one scientists are predicting to be made up of two quarks and two anti-quarks, making it a bizarre “tetraquark” particle.
Date: October 1, 2018.
From: https://www.rt.com/news/440061-cern-new-particles-discovered/.
Read more: http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/Welcome.html#LHCCCKM.
10. Science: Two researchers, Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University in Japan and James Allison of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, USA, shared the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine by each independently discovering a different protein that acts as a “brake” on the immune system’s response to cancer cells and developing methods of removing these proteins which both developed into effective new treatments for cancer patients.
Date: October 1, 2018.
From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/cancer-immunotherapy-pioneers-win-medicine-nobel.
Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/271/5256/1734?ijkey=242d36229231d0a478d89b75e834bd4679fe6cd2&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha.
11. BBC: Up to 180,000 Spanish citizens gathered in Barcelona on October 1, 2018 and clashed with police, to commemorate the anniversary of the failed Catalan referendum for independence from Spain which lead to brutal police intervention to prevent people from voting, but the Catalan people are, then as now, split approximately fifty-fifty over whether or not Catalonia should become and independent state.
Date: October 1, 2018.
From: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45710447.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-politics-catalonia/tens-of-thousands-gather-for-catalan-referendum-anniversary-idUSKCN1MB27L.
12. Reuters: For the opening of the Second National Land Conference in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, on October 1, 2018, Namibian President Hage Geingob advocated for changes to the Namibian constitution that would allow governmental expropriation and redistribution of land to Namibia’s black majority population.
Date: October 1, 2018.
From: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-namibia-land/namibian-president-wants-land-expropriated-to-boost-black-ownership-idUSKCN1MB2TM.
Read more: https://www.news24.com/Africa/News/namibia-follows-sa-with-land-reform-pledge-20181001.
13. BBC: This year’s Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine granted published in the Annals of Improbable Research went to Professor David Wartinger of Michigan State University ofr his discovery that certain roller coaster rides that involve significant up-and-down and side-to-side motion are effective at removing kidney stones.
Date: September 14, 2018.
From: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45513012.
Read more: https://www.improbable.com/ig/.
14. Science: Carlo Manara of the European Southern Observatory in Munich, Germany, led a team of astronomers that used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile to examine the thin disks of gas and dust around young stars, called protoplanetary disks, and calculated the mass of these disks to compare it to the mass of known exoplanets and found that the mass in the protoplanetary disks was one, in some cases two, orders of magnitude lower than that of the exoplanets, either showing that current theories on planetary formations must be false or that there are many pebble-sized particles in these protoplanetary disks slightly too large for ALMA to detect, which would account for the mass deficit between exoplanets and protoplanetary disks; one other theory could be that extra mass from the space between stars, or the interstellar medium, could be somehow attracted to and absorbed by the planets; their results will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Date: September 28, 2018.
From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/cosmic-conundrum-disks-gas-and-dust-supposedly-form-planets-don-t-seem-have-goods.
Read more: https://www.aanda.org/component/forthcoming/?Itemid=119%5d.
