In The NEWS

Oscar Pistorius, the South African former Olympic and Paralympic runner, will be released from prison today after serving half of his over 13-year sentence for the 2013 murder of his model girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.



“Newly energized cells may provide many more years of healthy life to people'' concludes a recent publication in top scientific journal Nature Metabolism, revealing the critical link between cellular energy and enduring health. As we age, cellular energy production naturally declines and, like a “speed limit,” restricts cellular function setting the stage for diminished health.



ESPN and NCAA sign eight-year, $920M broadcast rights agreement; deal includes rights to broadcast 40 NCAA championships over the next eight years (More)



Glynis Johns, Tony-winning and Oscar-nominated actress known for starring role in "Mary Poppins," dies at 100 (More)

The 81st Golden Globe Awards to be presented Sunday (8 pm ET, CBS); see predictions for each category (More) | Elvis Presley holographic concert to debut in London in November (More)



OpenAI to launch its online store featuring third-party GPTs next week; expected to be similar to Apple Store, with ChatGPT-based programs instead of apps (More) | Google begins phasing out the use of cookies, small autogenerated files that track user history on websites in between visits (More)




New study finds genetic variant associated with male bisexuality also linked to higher rates of self-described risk-taking, fathering more children; findings may suggest the evolutionary advantage of the variant (More)




Alzheimer's drug combined with targeted ultrasound found to be about 30% more effective in attacking brain plaques (More)




US stock markets close mixed (S&P 500 -0.3%, Dow +0.0%, Nasdaq -0.6%); Nasdaq falls for fifth consecutive trading session, its longest losing streak since October 2022 (More) | Peloton shares up 14% after company announces new fitness hub partnership with TikTok (More)




Walgreens beats earnings and revenue expectations; shares close down 5% after drugstore chain nearly halves quarterly dividend payout (More) | Ford reports 7.1% increase in US new vehicle sales in 2023, its best US sales year since 2020 (More) | French grocery giant Carrefour drops PepsiCo products over price hikes (More)




US weekly jobless claims drop to 202,000; figure from last week is lowest level since October (More) | December US private payrolls rose for fourth consecutive month (More)




US airstrike in Baghdad, Iraq, kills commander of Iran-backed militia group, comes amid rising tensions in the Middle East (More) | Islamic State claims responsibility​​​​​ for Wednesday's cemetery bombings in Iran that killed at least 84 people (More) | See previous write-up (More)




Former President Donald Trump's properties and hotels reportedly received at least $7.8M in foreign payments (including $5.7M from China) during his presidency, per new report from House Oversight Committee Democrats (More) | See the report (More)




Weekend storm expected to bring significant snow to the US East Coast, with areas stretching from central Appalachia to the upper Northeast to see between 6 and 12 inches (More)

SOURCE:  1440 News

Survival of the Fittest

 Our WORLD is filled with more people that want war than there are people who want peace.

Why is this.

Years ago, Charles Darwin made the claim that evolution was predicated upon the concept of "survival of the fittest."  By definition, this lays the foundation for WAR not PEACE.

We can see this clearly in our elementary schools where older or bigger students bully the younger or smaller students.  In some cases the teachers try to stop this but in other cases they let it play out because they know it is a normal part of growing up.  It forms for the foundation for mental and physical toughness.

I high school and college we see this play out in sports where the stronger bigger team most always wins both in female and male sports.  Trans athletes who could not win against other biological males and now winning against biological females.  

Over time, trans females will replace most of the biological females in female sports because survival of the fittest results in them always winning.

There is no reason for us to debate this because it is happening whether we like it or not.

In the early years of the United States, Americans showed Native Americans that they were stronger and better able to survive.  The results of WWI and WWII showed the world what countries were in a better position to survive.

Again survival of the fittest.

Russia invades Ukraine because they perceive themselves to be stronger but they encountered such intense resistance that they are now questioning their own ability to conquer.  But, it is not that Ukraine is stronger, it is because other countries came to the aid of Ukraine to help them survive.

SO...  survival of the fittest has changed and is no longer based upon one person against one person or one country against one country but a coalition of countries against a coalition of other countries.  All of whom are trying to have power and control over the weaker coalition.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST will never die...  we will always, in some way, want to have power and control over someone else, so that we survive and they do not.

What we fail to see is the potential superior intelligence of those over whom we have power and control...  and, it is just a matter of time before that superior intelligence  defeats the FITTEST...

Mother Panda

 

Self-Control and Will Power

A scientific squabble over how to define self-control draws from an unlikely source: A story from Greek mythology.

Sailing home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, Odysseus longed to hear the Sirens’ legendary song. But he knew that was a very bad idea. The Sirens, the goddess Circe had warned, lured passing sailors to their island to kill them. 

So Circe helped Odysseus form a plan. As his boat approached the Sirens’ island, Odysseus handed crew members balls of wax to plug their ears, and he ordered the men to tie him firmly to the boat’s mast. He told the crew to tie him tighter if he begged and pleaded to heed the Sirens’ call. His plan in place, Odysseus was able to both hear the Sirens and live to tell the tale.

The science is clear. Proverbially tying oneself to the mast — or crafting strategies in advance to thwart temptation — is the optimal way to meet one’s goals. But not all agree that such preemptive strategies constitute self-control.

Social psychologists say Odysseus utilized exemplary self-control. That’s because they tend to distinguish between strategic self-control — that is, the Odysseus approach — and willpower. Willpower would be akin to Odysseus resisting the Sirens’ call in the moment without rope and muscular crewmen.  READ MORE...

Warthogs

 

Help From Friends

 

In The NEWS

At least 95 people were killed and more than 210 wounded yesterday after a pair of bombings at an Iranian cemetery in the southeastern city of Kerman. The attack took place during a memorial near the gravesite of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the former leader of the country's Revolutionary Guard. Soleimani was killed by a targeted US drone strike four years ago.

Names of numerous people who interacted with or had ties to deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein were released yesterday, detailed in newly unsealed documents produced from a 2015 lawsuit.

The gross US national debt surpassed $34T earlier this week for the first time, according to a Treasury Department announcement Tuesday, an increase of $1T since September and $14T since early 2020. The US currently adds roughly $5B to its debt each day, and recent estimates suggest the debt will reach $50T by 2033. See an explainer here.



TV executive Nigel Lythgoe faces two new sexual assault lawsuits just days after Paula Abdul filed a similar lawsuit (More) | Rapper TI and wife Tiny accused in lawsuit of 2005 sexual assault (More)



Francoise Bornet, subject of Robert Doisneau's iconic Kiss by the Hotel de Ville photo, dies at 93 (More) | See history behind the photo (More)



England's Luke Humphries tops 16-year-old Luke Littler to win 2024 World Darts Championships (More)



SpaceX deploys first Starlink satellites with direct-to-smartphone capabilities; company says it will work with carriers to expand coverage, complementing its space-based Wi-Fi service (More)



Neuroscientists find uncommon phrases or complex sentence structures cause the brain's language processing center to fire rapidly, while nonsense phrases generate little to no neural activity (More)



AI models, satellite imagery combine to create the most detailed map of human activity across the Earth's oceans to date (More)



Xerox to cut around 3,000 workers, or 15% of its workforce, amid operational and organizational restructuring (More) | US job openings drop to 8.8 million, the lowest since March 2021 (More)



General Motors sales jump 14% year-over-year in 2023, led by a more than 60% increase in sales of its Buick brand vehicles (More)



Cracking the Case of Seven Doe
Associated Press | Sophia Tareen. How cold case investigators linked the death of an elderly woman with no memory of where she came from to a missing persons report from the 1970s. (Read)



Inner Thoughts Revealed
Undark | Fletcher Reveley. Brain-computer interfaces capable of decoding a subject's thoughts are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In the future, will anything be truly private? (Read)

SOURCE:  1440 News

US Scored Low on Human Rights

Americans like to think their country is exceptional — an unequaled bastion of freedom and opportunity. However, when it comes to human rights, a new report suggests the United States is anything but exceptional. Compiled by the Global Rights Project (GRIP) at the University of Rhode Island and the CIRIGHTS data project, the 2023 GRIP Annual Report assesses and ranks 195 countries on their dedication to 25 individual human rights. 

These are divided into four categories:

• Physical integrity: the right of citizens to not be unnecessarily harmed by state agencies
• Empowerment: the right to live and speak freely
• Worker rights: the right to decent-paying and safe work
• Justice rights: the right to fair laws

READ MORE...

Somewhat Political

 

USA Politics is DEAD

 My first encounter into politics was as a Democrat (because of my parents influence) and I became engaged because of JFK Jr.  He had the right attitude and mentality when he said:  "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country."

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.

Politicians on both side of the aisle whether in the House or in the Senate, no longer give a RAT'S ASS about the USA, although that is not what they claim.

Why do I think this?

Because we have the same problems today that we had in the 1960s and all the years in between.  NOTHING HAS CHANGED.  And yet, politicians are re-elected and spend twenty years or more in WASHDC getting nothing accomplished.

In 2024, the only politician that I really trust to do what he says he is going to do is DONALD TRUMP and I don't want him elected again because the Democrats will do everything in their power to DESTROY him and nothing else will get accomplished.

If you have read previous posts by me, you are no doubt aware that I am AGAINST:

• Illegal Immigration
• Increasing the National Debt
• A weak economy
• Ending fossil fuels
• Mandating EV without infrastructure
• Silencing the conservative voice
• Not seeing China as our ARCH ENEMY

I am also against illegal drugs but the reason why there are so many of them coming into our country is because AMERICANS WANT THEM...  Americans are not being forced to use illegal drugs they want to use illegal drugs.  Once the drug desire is there, it is difficult to eliminate.  More often or not they die eventually of an overdose.

American Politicians have fiddle farted around so much, I don't believe that they know how to get anything done, except spend money.  They certainly don't care about blue collar workers since neither side is doing much of anything to STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.

Why do we keep electing these politicians?

• Are Americans that indifferent/apathetic?
• Are Americans that politically stupid/ignorant?
• Do Americans just want the government to take care of them?

Just Walking

 

Magma Tunnel to Unleash Unlimited Power

ICELAND is one of the most boring countries in the world. That is meant as a compliment, not an insult. The island nation is dotted with thousands of boreholes drilled deep into the rock to extract geothermal energy. They will soon be joined by another, which will be anything but boring. “We are going to drill into a magma chamber,” says Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson at the Geothermal Research Cluster (GEORG) in Reykjavík. “It’s the first journey to the centre of the Earth,” says his colleague Björn Þór Guðmundsson.

Well, not quite the centre. Some magma chambers – underground reservoirs of molten rock – lie just a few kilometres below Earth’s surface, putting them within reach of modern drills. They occasionally leak magma to the surface, where it spews out as lava. That is exactly what was starting to happen, to spectacular and devastating effect, around the town of Grindavík in southern Iceland, as this story went to press. The trouble is, we don’t normally know where magma chambers lie. “No geophysical technique has been shown to satisfactorily locate magma reservoirs,” says John Eichelberger at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  READ MORE...

The Byrds & Dylan

 

Revealed

 

In The NEWS

Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned yesterday, stepping down amid mounting claims of plagiarism and criticism over recent congressional testimony on campus antisemitism. It marks the shortest presidential tenure in the university's history.



Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’ political leader in the West Bank and a founder of its military wing, was killed in an explosion outside Beirut in Lebanon Tuesday alongside two senior commanders, an assassination reportedly carried out by Israel. The attack marks the first such killing of a Hamas leader outside the Palestinian territories since the start of the war.



Five crew members on a Japanese Coast Guard aircraft were killed after it collided with a passenger plane yesterday that was landing at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. All 379 passengers and crew onboard Japan Airlines flight JAL-516 from Shin Chitose Airport near Sapporo were evacuated safely before the plane was engulfed in flames; the other plane's pilot survived with injuries.


Women's World Cup star Jenni Hermoso testifies against former Spanish soccer chief Luis Rubiales at Rubiales' sexual assault trial (More)


ABC's "Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve" special haul's in 22.2 million viewers, a 35% increase over last year (More) | Universal tops Disney at 2023 global box office; first time since 2015 that Disney wasn't highest-earning studio (More)


Melissa Hoskins, two-time Australian Olympic track cyclist, dies at 32 after being hit by car; Hoskins' husband reportedly charged with driving car that killed her (More) | Ken Bowman, three-time NFL champion, dies at 81 (More)


Dutch firm ASML, the world's leading supplier of tools needed to make advanced computer chips, barred from exporting deep ultraviolet lithography machines to China (More) | How the tech industry relies on ASML (More)


Tomato plants produce a waxy substance known as suberin during times of drought, which lets them ration water intake, new study finds (More)


Libido in male mice linked to single brain circuit; researchers say the structure likely developed early in the evolution of mammals, findings may shed light on the development of human sexuality (More)


South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung stabbed in neck during public appearance in the city of Busan; motive of attacker not yet identified, Lee expected to survive attack (More)


Armed suspect enters, fires shots inside Colorado's Supreme Court; no injuries reported or motive revealed, suspect surrendered to police (More)


Tesla meets sales target, selling more than 1.8 million vehicles in 2023; figure for the Elon Musk-led company is up almost 40% from 2022 (More) | Fidelity marks down its shares of Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter), estimating the company's value has dropped by almost 72% since October 2022 (More)


Shipping giant Maersk halts cargo transit through the Red Sea until further notice due to attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels operating out of Yemen (More)

SOURCE:  1440 News

AI Development Will Explode in 2024

Artificial intelligence made a big splash with consumers and regulators alike in 2023, with experts believing the continued development of the technology will reach even greater heights in 2024.

"I think that in 2024, AI will move a little closer to what is in the public imagination, but we remain years from AI being autonomous in the way people are imagining it," Christopher Alexander, chief analytics officer of Pioneer Development Group, told Fox News Digital.

Alexander's comments come after 2023 saw a noticeable leap in the development and availability of AI tools, with popular language learning model (LLM) platforms such as OpenAI's ChatGPT gaining huge popularity and energizing other tech giants to come along for the ride.  READ MORE...

Somewhat Political

 

Northerners Migrating South

 It does not surprise me that there are a multitude of northerners from the east coast to the west coast that are moving to SOUTHERN STATES because of the mild winters or no winters at all.

As our population ages, cold weather negatively impacts the human body and the desire to be warm all year long increases.

Today, just over 34 percent of the US population is aged 50 and over, and their numbers are rising rapidly with the aging of the baby-boom generation.     SOURCE:  Joint Center for Housing Studies

The number of Americans age 60 and older increased by 34% from 55.7 million to 74.6 million. In 2019, 30 million women and 24.1 million men were age 65 and older. That's 125 women for every 100 men.     SOURCE:  Administration for Community Living

What does this mean?

• It means that northerners, who earn more money annually than southerners and whose homes are valued higher, are moving down south (with their money) and inflating housing values that will increase the cost of living.
• It also means that they are bringing their northern attitudes down south which are going to BUTT HEADS with southern attitudes.
• It means they are going to make traffic conditions worse and attempt to change southern values so that they mesh with their own.
• It means that the states they are leaving will LOSE TAX REVENUES.
• It means that visiting northern cities will cost more for southern families on vacation.

This migration from the North to the South is not something that can be stopped.  It is a natural evolution of age, and after living in the south all my life, I understand why wants to live down here.  It is a SIMPLE, NATURAL, way of life without the crime and violence of the big cities.  We are laid back and take life slowly.  We respect each other and receive respect in return.  We are old fashioned neighbors to those living around us.

In my opinion, it is the NORTHERNERS who will change their attitudes, not the southerners...  and, that transformation will be a wonder to see.

Skulls

The Dark Side of Biology

Life on the primordial Earth got started early. The oldest microfossils—found by a British team in Canada—may date back as far as 3.8 billion years and were probably living on the ocean floor at a volcanic vent. Other organics rained from the sky, brewed by lightning or solar radiation. © Michael Carroll

Gene Roddenberry populated his Star Trek universe with a wide variety of aliens. Budget constraints dictated that most were variations of humans, with skin tinted odd colors or antennae sticking out from their heads. Even the silicon-based Horta appeared to be a stagehand lurking under a decorated carpet. George Lucas treated us to a similar menagerie of off-world inhabitants in Star Wars, especially in his Mos Eisley Cantina. Aliens—and our concept of them—became more sophisticated as budgets soared and science grappled with the great question posed by Enrico Fermi: “Where is everybody?” Some were terrifying, like the creatures in the Alien movie series or H. G. Wells’s conspiring Martians in War of the Worlds. Perhaps our propensity for seeing extrasolar life as terrifying is our natural fear of the unknown. But others were far more benign and advanced, as witnessed by Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Steven Spielberg’s cuddly E.T., Edmund H. North’s guardians of the worlds in The Day the Earth Stood Still, or the time-jumping beings of Eric Heisserer’s Arrival. But at the heart of a good story is a good conflict, and aliens provide natural fodder for such a plot device.     READ MORE...