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Javier E

UFO Report Says 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' Defy Worldly Explanation - WSJ - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON—U.S. intelligence officials reviewing dozens of reports of mysterious flying objects found 18 in which the objects displayed no visible propulsion or appeared to use technology beyond the known capabilities of the U.S. or its adversaries, according to an intelligence report released Friday.
  • The objects “appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion,” the report stated. Some of them released radio frequency energy that was picked up and processed by U.S. military aircraft.
  • Of the 144 unidentified aerial phenomena sighting reports, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence placed only one of the cases into any of categories—a large, deflating balloon. “The others remain unexplained,” the report read.
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  • Friday’s report encompasses 144 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena from 2004 until this year and offers almost no conclusive interpretation for the sightings. “They very clearly demonstrate an array of aerial behaviors, which makes it very clear to us that there are multiple types of unidentified aerial phenomena that require different explanations,” one of the officials said.
  • “The potential of this report was actually significant,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “It could have come up with something that was incontrovertible evidence for extraterrestrial flight. That was the implicit promise here. But in the end, it didn’t go any farther than reports made in the 1950s. We can explain some of these things, but we can’t explain them all.”
Javier E

Genetic testing is changing our understanding of who fathers are - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • What is a father? Close to 40 million at-home DNA tests have been sold, and hundreds of thousands of people, by my estimate based on population research, have gotten the news that the man they thought of as Dad is not their genetic father.
  • In an era of home DNA testing, secrets about paternity no longer stay secret.
  • even when one’s genetic father doesn’t show up in a database, DNA results combined with solid genealogical research can often reveal his identity. Without quite realizing it, we’ve begun a grand experiment in intergenerational reckoning.
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  • The scale of this phenomenon is contributing to the emergence of mental health professionals who specialize in DNA-related discoveries, and strengthening a growing movement advocating everyone’s right to know his or her genetic identity.
  • In the tug between a person’s right to know her genetic origins and her parents’ right to privacy, which should prevail? Mothers may not want to share how their children came into the world.
  • Maybe a child was donor-conceived during an era when experts encouraged parents not to disclose this truth to their children. Or perhaps the circumstances involved coercion or violence
  • The reality of our genes may collide with the narratives we hold dear. We construct stories about who we are and what we value; about our parents’ characters and our spouses’ loyalties. The results of consumer genetic testing can serve as Rorschach tests for our beliefs about family, morality and the past.
Javier E

Covid Didn't Start the Mental-Health Crisis - WSJ - 0 views

  • There’s a consensus that the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns have created a mental-health crisis, as increasing numbers of children and adolescents suffer with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. It’s more accurate to say that Covid exacerbated a crisis that was already building.
  • the way to protect children’s mental well-being in the long term is strong parental care from an early age.
  • Many stressors play a role in the current mental health crisis: academic and social pressure, unrealistic parental expectations, political and financial instability, the overpowering presence of social media and other technology, and the loss of community in favor of individualism.
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  • Previous generations faced poverty, unemployment, war and racial injustice. So why is the current adversity causing so much mental distress?
  • A major reason is that we have devalued the work of parents. Mothers and fathers are less present for their children physically and emotionally, starting in early childhood and throughout adolescence, and this diminishes a child’s resilience and emotional fortitude throughout life
  • Children aren’t born resilient but neurologically and emotionally fragile.
  • Neuroscience research over the past 30 years has demonstrated how vulnerable an infant’s developing brain is to stress. Studies suggest that early maternal care has long-term effects on stress regulation and resilience, and that attachment patterns formed in early childhood are enduring and long-lasting.
  • Children acutely need parents more than ever in the first three years, and daycare is usually a bad environment for this age group.
  • Building resilience to stress is a slow process of ensuring that children develop emotional security through the constant presence of their primary attachment figure, usually the mother, to withstand incremental amounts of frustration and loss.
  • As a society we have abandoned the care of children to institutional or group care, we have exposed them to early separation from parents’ physical and emotional presence, and we have prioritized financial success and careers over children
  • The government has promoted and pushed the importance of economic productivity and working outside the home and devalued nurturing.
  • We have put less emphasis on caring for and being present for children while simultaneously expecting more from them academically, socially and in all of their extracurricular interests.
  • That’s why it’s a mistake to blame Covid for the children’s mental-health crisis. Covid merely magnified existing family dynamics. If a family was healthy and emotionally secure, Covid tended to bring it together. If a family was struggling, in conflict or dysfunctional, Covid magnified those difficulties.
Javier E

YOU ARE NOT A RACIST TO CRITICIZE CRITICAL RACE THEORY. - It Bears Mentioning - 0 views

  • The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country.
  • 1. Young children should not be taught if white to be guilty and if black to feel a) oppressed and b) wary of white kids around them (and if South Asian to be very, very confused …).
  • "What we are interested in here might be termed “critical pedagogy.” “Critical pedagogy” names — without exhaustively defining — the host of concepts, terms, practices, and theories that have lately taken hold in many public and private schools. This term alludes to a connection to CRT — it might be thought of as critical race theory as applied to schooling — but also to “critical studies” and “critical theory,” a broader set of contemporary philosophical ideas that have been particularly influential in certain circles of the modern Left."
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  • In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry “Critical Race Theory,” what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school’s curriculum.
  • what most of us (as opposed to the Establishment in schools of education) think, and are correct about, is this:
  • it is no tort to call it "CRT" in shorthand when:1) these developments are descended from its teachings and2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.
  • 2. Young children should not be taught that the American story is mainly (note I write mainly rather than only, but mainly is just as awful here) one of oppression and racism. Not because it’s unpleasant and because sinister characters want to “hide” it, but because it’s dumb.
  • 3. While there is room for the above ideas to be presented to children as some among many – maybe; I’m bending over backwards here – this kind of thought should certainly not be the fulcrum of a school’s entire curriculum, as has been reported at schools like Dalton and others in New York.
  • 1) Criticizing Critical Race Theory as it operates in 2021 does not require perusing the oeuvre of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the critique is not invalidated by the differences between what articles like that contained and what’s happening in our schools now.
  • 2) Criticizing Critical Race Theory does not mean teaching students that America has been nothing but great.
Javier E

Dengue Mosquitoes Can Be Tamed by a Common Microbe - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Dengue fever is caused by a virus that infects an estimated 390 million people every year, and kills about 25,000; the World Health Organization has described it as one of the top 10 threats to global health.
  • It spreads through the bites of mosquitoes, particularly the species Aedes aegypti. Utarini and her colleagues have spent the past decade turning these insects from highways of dengue into cul-de-sacs. They’ve loaded the mosquitoes with a bacterium called Wolbachia, which prevents them from being infected by dengue viruses. Wolbachia spreads very quickly: If a small number of carrier mosquitoes are released into a neighborhood, almost all of the local insects should be dengue-free within a few months
  • Aedes aegypti was once a forest insect confined to sub-Saharan Africa, where it drank blood from a wide variety of animals. But at some point, one lineage evolved into an urban creature that prefers towns over forests, and humans over other animals.
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  • The World Mosquito Program (WMP), a nonprofit that pioneered this technique, had run small pilot studies in Australia that suggested it could work. Utarini, who co-leads WMP Yogyakarta, has now shown conclusively that it does.
  • Carried around the world aboard slave ships, Aedes aegypti has thrived. It is now arguably the most effective human-hunter on the planet, its senses acutely attuned to the carbon dioxide in our breath, the warmth of our bodies, and the odors of our skin.
  • Wolbachia was first discovered in 1924, in a different species of mosquito. At first, it seemed so unremarkable that scientists ignored it for decades. But starting in the 1980s, they realized that it has an extraordinary knack for spreading. It passes down mainly from insect mothers to their children, and it uses many tricks to ensure that infected individuals are better at reproducing than uninfected ones. To date, it exists in at least 40 percent of all insect species, making it one of the most successful microbes on the planet.
  • The team divided a large portion of the city into 24 zones and released Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in half of them. Almost 10,000 volunteers helped distribute egg-filled containers to local backyards. Within a year, about 95 percent of the Aedes mosquitoes in the 12 release zones harbored Wolbachia.
  • The team found that just 2.3 percent of feverish people who lived in the Wolbachia release zones had dengue, compared with 9.4 percent in the control areas. Wolbachia also seemed to work against all four dengue serotypes, and reduced the number of dengue hospitalizations by 86 percent.
  • Even then, these already remarkable numbers are likely to be underestimates. The mosquitoes moved around, carrying Wolbachia into the 12 control zones where no mosquitoes were released. And people also move: They might live in a Wolbachia release zone but be bitten and infected with dengue elsewhere. Both of these factors would have worked against the trial, weakening its results
  • The Wolbachia method does have a few limitations. The bacterium takes months to establish itself, so it can’t be “deployed to contain an outbreak today,” Vazquez-Prokopec told me. As the Yogyakarta trial showed, it works only when Wolbachia reaches a prevalence of at least 80 percent, which requires a lot of work and strong community support
  • The method has other benefits too. It is self-amplifying and self-perpetuating: If enough Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are released initially, the bacterium should naturally come to dominate the local population, and stay that way. Unlike insecticides, Wolbachia isn’t toxic, it doesn’t kill beneficial insects (or even mosquitoes), and it doesn’t need to be reapplied, which makes it very cost-effective.
  • An analysis by Brady’s team showed that it actually saves money by preventing infections
  • Wolbachia also seems to work against the other diseases that Aedes aegypti carries, including Zika and yellow fever. It could transform this mosquito from one of the most dangerous species to humans into just another biting nuisance.
lucieperloff

How the 'Alpha' Coronavirus Variant Became So Powerful - The New York Times - 0 views

  • British researchers discovered that a new variant was sweeping through their country.
  • tended to become more common in its new homes as well
  • Alpha disables the first line of immune defense in our bodies, giving the variant more time to multiply.
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  • . “Any successful virus has to get beyond that first defense system. The more successful it is at doing that, the better off the virus is.”
  • A lot of researchers focused their attention on the nine mutations that alter the so-called spike protein that covers the coronavirus and allows it to invade cells
  • They found that lung cells with Alpha made drastically less interferon, a protein that switches on a host of immune defenses.
  • It’s making itself more invisible,”
  • They found that Alpha-infected cells make a lot of extra copies — some 80 times more than other versions of the virus — of a gene called Orf9b.
  • dampening the production of interferon and a full immune response. The virus, protected from attack, has better odds of making copies of itself.
  • people infected with Alpha have a more robust reaction than they would with other variants, coughing and shedding virus-laden mucus from not only their mouths, but also their noses — making Alpha even better at spreading.
  • . They may have independently evolved their own tricks for manipulating our immune system.
  • But studies on people who recover naturally from Covid-19 have shown that their immune systems learn to recognize other viral proteins, including Orf9b.
  • “It’s quite a tricky enterprise, but becoming more possible as we learn more,”
lucieperloff

On the Verge of Extinction, These Whales Are Also Shrinking - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Most of the 360 or so North Atlantic right whales alive today bear scars from entanglements in fishing gear and collisions with speeding ships and, according to a new study, they are much smaller than they should be.
  • they are much smaller than they should be.
  • suggests that human-induced stressors, primarily entanglements, are stunting the growth of North Atlantic right whales, reducing their chances of reproductive success and increasing their chances of dying.
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  • scientists have been monitoring the dwindling population of right whales in the North Atlantic.
  • the animals’ lengths have declined by roughly 7 percent since 1981
  • “We saw 5 and even 10-year-old whales that were about the size of 2-year-old whales,” Dr. Stewart said. In one case, an 11-year-old whale was the same size as a 1½-year-old whale.
  • Entanglement in fishing gear is an ever-present threat for the mammals and one of the primary drivers of their decline.
  • Whales who don’t drown or starve right away will often drag gear for several years.
  • “What we think is going on here is that dragging these big trailing heaps of gear is creating all this extra drag, which takes energy to pull around, and that’s energy that they would probably otherwise be devoting to growth,
  • ​Smaller right whales are less resilient to climate change as they do not have the nutritional buffer they need to adapt during lean food years,”
  • the species can hardly afford declines in its birthrate.
  • “this population has recovered from very small numbers before, so it’s not completely grim.
  • “If we all were to demand these management changes of our elected officials the situation would change dramatically.”
lucieperloff

Sharks Nearly Went Extinct 19 Million Years Ago From Mystery Event - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Analysis of the fossil record shows a mysterious mass extinction that decimated the diversity of sharks in the world’s oceans, and they’ve never fully recovered.
  • these events give scientists an intimate look at how life recovers after a cataclysm
  • This extinction event transpired in the world’s oceans and decimated shark populations
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  • but sharks slough off about 100 denticles for each tooth they lose, making them common in the fossil record.
  • The reddish clay, extracted from two sediment cores that had been drilled deep into the Pacific Ocean seafloor, contained fish teeth, shark denticles and other marine microfossils.
  • Nineteen million years ago, the ratio of shark denticles to fish teeth changed drastically:
  • sharks suddenly became much less common, relative to fish, during an era known as the early Miocene,
  • “We had a lot of them, and then we had almost none of them,”
  • “We wanted to know if the sharks went extinct, or if they just became less prominent.”
  • The reduction in shark diversity suggests that they experienced an extinction around that time,
  • “There were just a small fraction that survived into this post-extinction world,”
  • uggest that this was truly a “global event,”
  • Sharks never fully recovered from this incident, and they have been declining in abundance in recent decades because of overfishing and other human-caused pressures,
lucieperloff

Opinion | Why the Latest Republican Assault on L.G.B.T.Q. Rights Is Different - The New... - 0 views

  • Last month, Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed into law a discriminatory bill to prevent transgender people from using restrooms aligning with their gender identity at any business or place of public accommodation.
  • hese new laws are the latest in a series of unprecedented legislative assaults aimed at trans people that have swept state houses t
  • are not simply living in a state of emergency; we are living in many states of imminent danger
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  • Anti-equality extremists are clearly targeting transgender people again to score political points by demonizing marginalized communities and mischaracterizing movements like Black Lives Matter.
  • We need to take action now to prove the anti-trans arguments are wrong and unjust, and to draw maximum attention to what Republican leaders in these states are trying to do.
  • there simply is not a sudden population explosion of trans people, nor any sort of demand for special or new rights. This is about fairness and equal treatment.
  • which requires businesses with “formal or informal” policies of allowing transgender people to use the appropriate restroom to post offensive and humiliating signage
  • This includes laws like those in Arkansas, where legislators have banned critical, gender-affirming medical care for transgender children,
  • Active resistance is needed from administrators within the education system who are tasked with enforcing discriminatory trans sports bans, which isolate and prevent trans students from playing sports on teams consistent with their gender identity.
  • t has significant health and safety consequences, especially for trans youth.
  • So far in 2021, we are on track to exceed the number of trans and gender-nonconforming people murdered in 2020
  • extremist legislators continue advancing measures at a breakneck pace
  • Sometimes we have to make uncomfortable decisions because we are pushed to the fringes.
lucieperloff

Federal Government Preps For A Million Workers To Return To Office : NPR - 0 views

  • The nation's largest employer, the federal government, is beginning to plan for bringing many of its workers back into their offices,
  • the safe reentry of employees to the physical workplace" by July 19.
  • "It is not as easy as flipping a switch and just saying everybody back."
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  • it is our hope that the federal government will follow the science and reopen facilities to taxpaying Americans."
  • Neal said it's probably going to be a hybrid
  • I think ... you're probably going to see more people working remotely.
  • Many, including TSA and Border Patrol officers, had no choice but to remain on site.
  • managers have already been calling some employees back into the office on a voluntary basis.
  • We're nowhere near herd immunity. And we don't want the vulnerable populations that we serve exposed to packed lobbies where people are going to literally have to wait post-pandemic like they did pre-pandemic for hours just to turn in documents."
  • Neal said there are other concerns for managers, including employee morale.
  • "Lots of people connecting remotely probably presents far more risk of hacking than than a bunch of people connecting on a network in a government building," Neal added.
  • "It's an opportunity to fundamentally reimagine what it means to work for the federal government,
lucieperloff

Some Of Bitcoin Ransom Paid By Colonial Pipeline Recovered By U.S. Government : NPR - 0 views

  • The government has recovered a "majority" of the millions of dollars paid in ransom to hackers behind the cyberattack that prompted last month's shutdown of Colonial Pipeline, officials announced Monday.
  • investigators discovered that the criminal group and its affiliates have been digitally stalking U.S. companies and intentionally targeting victims that are "key players in our nation's critical infrastructure"
  • The ransom was paid in bitcoins by Colonial Pipeline on the same day it was demanded by DarkSide
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  • he money has been recovered by the department's recently launched Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force.
  • "The sophisticated use of technology to hold businesses and even whole cities hostage for profit is decidedly a 21st century challenge
  • "The threat of severe ransomware attacks pose a clear and present danger to your organization, to your company, to your customer, to your shareholders and to your long-term success."
lucieperloff

Model Of Red Flag Law For States Shared By Justice Department : NPR - 0 views

  • part of the Biden administration's ongoing effort to curb U.S. gun violence.
  • e welcome the opportunity to work with communities in the weeks and months ahead in our shared commitment to end gun violence."
  • combines two distinct approaches adopted by states where red flag laws already exist.
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  • gives law enforcement an immediate vehicle with which they can seek to seize a person's guns once a court has determined that the individual presents a danger to themselves or others.
  • provides for longer-term prohibition of a person's access to firearms.
  • combines the two approaches and would authorize the courts to more quickly issue a prohibition on a person's right to possess firearms
  • The department said it was not endorsing any specific implementation of an ERPO law, but the Monday guidelines were instead meant to provide a framework
  • they enable a person's loved ones to reach out to law enforcement and report dangerous behavior before a gun owner is able to endanger themselves or others.
  • the rules are too arbitrary and can be weaponized against gun owners during personal disputes.
  • "By allowing family members or law enforcement to intervene and to petition for these orders before warning signs turn into tragedy, 'extreme risk protection orders' can save lives,"
  • a proposal that would strengthen restrictions on individuals' ability to convert pistols into "short-barreled rifles,"
  • In April, Biden unveiled a series of executive actions, aimed at what he called the nation's "international embarrassment" of gun violence.
lucieperloff

Mexico's President Appears To Hold Key Majority In Elections : NPR - 0 views

  • but fell short of a two-thirds majority as some voters boosted the struggling opposition, according to initial election results.
  • will have to rely on votes from its allies in the Workers Party and Green Party,
  • The results give the president sufficient budgetary control to continue his train and refinery-building plans and cash handout programs,
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  • Those would be gains for those parties, which have often appeared rudderless in the face of López Obrador's popularity.
  • López Obrador's critics had depicted the elections as a chance to stop the still-popular president from concentrating more power and weakening checks and balances.
  • Representatives of the major parties speaking at the electoral institute's general council meeting applauded the conduct of Sunday's vote amid the pandemic
  • he might try to subjugate courts and regulatory agencies created during Mexico's decades-long transition to full democracy.
  • hree dozen candidates were killed during the campaigns; almost all of the victims were running for one of the 20,000 local posts including mayors and town council up for grabs in 30 states.
  • López Obrador has raised minimum wages and strengthened government aid programs like supplementary payments to the elderly, students and training programs for youths.
  • The elections represent the first mass public events since the coronavirus pandemic hit the country over a year ago,
lucieperloff

Supreme Court Won't Hear Challenge To Men-Only Draft Registration : NPR - 0 views

  • The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to consider a challenge to the men-only military draft.
  • women were not eligible for combat roles, a situation that has dramatically changed in modern times.
  • recommending that draft registration include both men and women between the ages of 18 and 26.
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  • a broader registration requirement will be "incorporated into the next national defense bill."
  • The organization argued that a men-only draft was outdated and unconstitutional.
  • "The sex discrimination inherent in the Military Selective Service Act is a vestige of a bygone era,"
lucieperloff

Jeff Bezos Is Going To Space (For A Few Minutes) : NPR - 0 views

  • Bezos will climb aboard a rocket made by his space exploration company Blue Origin.
  • Blue Origin's rocket is called New Shepard, and it's reusable – the idea being that reusing rockets will lower the cost of going to space and make it more accessible.
  • The flight is scheduled for July 20 — the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
lucieperloff

Kamala Harris Tells Guatemalans: Don't Come To The U.S. : NPR - 0 views

  • Harris said the Biden administration wants "to help Guatemalans find hope at home."
  • I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come."
  • The humanitarian challenge has created a political problem for the Biden administration.
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  • Harris announced the formation of an anti-corruption task force,
  • She also said the administration will provide 500,000 COVID-19 vaccines
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