Wednesday, December 3
In The NEWS
Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> Two female gymnasts file lawsuit alleging USA Gymnastics and Olympic sports watchdog failed to address sexual abuse by coach (More) | Antitrust trial against NASCAR begins, with fate of NBA star Michael Jordan's team at stake (More)
> "Zootopia 2" earns $556M internationally over Thanksgiving holiday, marking the highest-ever global opening for an animated film and the highest global opening for any film in 2025 (More)
> NFL announces Charlie Puth, Brandi Carlile, and Coco Jones as headliners for Super Bowl LX pregame show Feb. 8 (More)
Science & Technology
> China's DeepSeek debuts two new AI models challenging Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT (More)
> Engineers create artificial tendons that allow robots to pinch with 30 times more force and three times faster than before, potentially enabling advances in surgical tools and autonomous exploratory machines (More) | Want more? Sign up for our weekly science and technology deep dives (More)
> New DNA analysis suggests humans first traveled to Australia and New Guinea about 60,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 to 13,000 years earlier than previous genetic evidence indicated (More)
Business & Markets
> US stock markets close lower (S&P 500 -0.5%, Dow -0.9%, Nasdaq -0.4%) as December kicks off (More) | Bitcoin falls in largest daily drop since March (More)
> Nvidia takes $2B stake in chip-software designer Synopsys as part of expanded multiyear computing power partnership (More) | Eli Lilly cuts price for weight-loss drug Zepbound on direct-to-consumer site (More)
> Starbucks to pay over $35M to more than 15,000 New York City workers, along with over $3M in civil penalties, to settle allegations it violated labor laws (More)
Politics & World Affairs
> Tennessee voters head to the polls in special election to replace Rep. Mark Green (R, TN-7), who announced his resignation earlier this year (More) | Former Trump attorney Alina Habba disqualified as New Jersey's top federal prosecutor, appeals court rules (More)
> Son of Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán pleads guilty to two drug-related charges, months after his brother enters similar plea deal (More)
> Transportation Security Administration announces $45 fee for travelers without a federally compliant driver's license or identification card, known as a REAL ID, beginning in February (More) | What is a REAL ID? (More)
Space Visitors
EXTRATERRESTRIALS...
Do they exist? or not?
If they do exist, where do they live:
- On another planet,
- or on a spaceship,
- or In another dimension,
- or are they from another dimension?
Laser light coherence offers a consistent approach
Researchers at the University of Basel have developed a new approach to applying thermodynamics to microscopic quantum systems.
In 1798, the officer and physicist Benjamin Thompson (a.k.a. Count Rumford) observed the drilling of cannon barrels in Munich and concluded that heat is not a substance but can be created in unlimited amounts by mechanical friction.
Rumford determined the amount of heat generated by immersing the cannon barrels in water and measuring how long it took the water to reach boiling. Based on such experiments, thermodynamics was developed in the 19th century. Initially, it was at the service of the Industrial Revolution and explained, physically, for instance, how heat can be efficiently converted into useful work in steam engines.
Tuesday, December 2
Headlines
VCG/Getty Images
Robert Reich
Why We’re So Polarized (II)
Friends,
The publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary has named “rage bait” its phrase of the year.
Call it the monetization of rage. Rage has become a valuable commodity. (Always follow the money.)
A growing number of online creators are making rage bait. Their goal is to record videos, produce memes, and write posts that make other users furious: conspiracy theories, lies, combustible AI-generated video clips — whatever it takes.
The more content they create, the more engagement they get, the more they get paid.
The rage bait market is worldwide. Since X, Facebook, and Instagram pay certain content creators for posts that drive engagement, people all over the globe have a financial incentive to share material that feeds the anger of American users and will therefore get reposted.
Last week a new feature on X permitting users to see where accounts originate showed that a number of high-engagement MAGA accounts that claim to be those of patriotic Americans are in fact from Russia, Eastern Europe, India, Nigeria, Thailand, and Bangladesh.
At A Glance
White House gets festive with 51 trees and 120 pounds of gingerbread."Rage bait" among 2025's words of the year.
Teens pioneer groundbreaking Lyme disease research.
Could Homer Simpson support his family in today's economy?
Record-breaking 75-year-old albatross prepares to lay eggs.
The 20th-century giant sponge craze, captured in vintage photos.
... and the sticking power of the $13 lunch bowl craze.
No one—not even Santa—owns the North Pole, and other Arctic facts.
Clickbait: The real-life Krusty Krab.
Historybook: Abolitionist John Brown dies (1859); Scientists achieve first human-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction (1942); Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace born (1946); US Environmental Protection Agency is created (1970); Britney Spears born (1981); Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is killed (1993).
1440 Trivia: What's older: the United States or Jupiter's Great Red Spot? Check back tomorrow (or dig for it here) to see if you were correct.
In The NEWS
Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> Ole Miss Rebels coach Lane Kiffin leaves the team to accept position coaching LSU Tigers (More) | See rivalry week results (More)
> Oscar- and Tony-winning playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard dies at age 88; Stoppard wrote "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," "Leopoldstadt," and "Shakespeare in Love," among other works (More)
> Miss Universe Africa cuts ties with the organization amid ongoing allegations of vote rigging, with co-owners investigated for alleged drug ties (More)
Science & Technology
> Overheated data center forces the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world's largest derivatives exchange operator, to suspend global trading Friday for roughly 10 hours (More)
> Internal FDA memo claims at least 10 children died from complications due to the COVID-19 vaccine between 2021 and 2024; experts accuse agency of not providing details, misusing data from the unverified VAERS reporting platform (More)
> Genetic analysis suggests domesticated cats originated in North Africa and spread to Europe and East Asia roughly 2,000 years ago, more recently than previously believed (More)
Business & Markets
> Markets rise Friday (S&P 500 +0.5%, Dow +0.6%, Nasdaq +0.7%) during shortened holiday trading week; analysts peg possibility of coming Federal Reserve interest rate cut at 80%-85% (More)
> US online sales hit an estimated $11.8B on Black Friday, up more than 9% from last year; order volume down 1%, with higher average sales prices (More) | The best resources we found researching Black Friday (1440 Topics)
> Switzerland rejects 50% inheritance tax for gifts and assets exceeding about $62M; wealthy entrepreneurs threatened to leave country (More)
Politics & World Affairs
> US halts all asylum decisions, pauses visas for Afghan citizens after Afghan who was granted asylum shoots two National Guard members in Washington, DC, one fatally (More) | See previous write-up (More)
> Hondurans vote in presidential election as US President Donald Trump threatens to cut aid to the country if right-wing candidate Nasry Asfura loses (More) | The US gave Honduras $194B in aid in 2023, the last fully reported year (More)
> Twelve young Muslim girls freed after abduction in Nigeria's northeastern Borno state, near hideout used by Islamist militant group Boko Haram (More)
The Radical Left
Democratic Socialists or the radical left as they are sometimes called, are meticulous, patient, and annoying. They are playing the LONG GAME and hoping no one is paying attention.
The long game to them, is planting several people in various districts in RED STATES and have these people run for the State Legislature. Once inside the State Legislature, they can begin to convince other politicians of their political views that would turn this country farther and farther into SOCIALISM.
Not just State Legislature seats but Mayoral seats as well, like what has recently happened in NYC.
The OLD DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS DEAD... The new Democratic party is comprised of DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS who want government to own the MEANS OF PRODUCTION.
What does that mean?
Example:
All the farms are owned by individuals or by large corporations, so they for the most part control production and control the prices of the food they produce.
Now, if the government owned those farms, they could reduce the prices because the govternment has no reason to make a profit.
ERGO - CHEAPER FOOD.
The same logic can be applied to:
- Housing
- Apartments
- Clothes
- Furniture
- Automobiles
- Computers
- Cell phones
- WIFI
- Artificial Intelligence
- Robots
Graphene’s Superconductivity
Scientists studying ‘magic-angle’ graphene have captured the clearest evidence yet of the electronic signature behind its superconductivity, cutting through years of speculation over what actually drives its exotic behaviour.
‘When superconductivity was first discovered in magic-angle graphene, it was surprising,’ says Jeong Min Park at Princeton University. ‘Graphene by itself was not a superconductor, yet simply twisting layers turned it into one.’
This is because when two or more graphene layers are twisted at a very specific angle – the magic angle – electrons in the system slow down dramatically. ‘When [this happens], they interact with each other much more strongly, and this gives rise to … new behaviours that don’t exist in the individual layers,’ says Park.


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