June, 2019

resident Donald Trump began his most consequential overseas trip of the year on Thursday with a warm dinner with the prime minister of Australia, a friendly opening act before the impending gauntlet of negotiations on international crises, trade wars and a growing global to-do list.

As told in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, scientists from Columbia University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution spent 10 days on a research ship towing electromagnetic sensors from New Jersey to Massachusetts. By measuring the way electromagnetic waves traveled through fresh and saline water, researchers mapped out fresh-water reservoirs for the first time.

It turns out the subterranean pools stretch for at least 50 miles off the US Atlantic coast, containing vast stores of low-salinity groundwater, about twice the volume of Lake Ontario. The deposits begin about 600 ft (183 m) below the seafloor and stretch for hundreds of miles. That rivals the size of even the largest terrestrial aquifers...

The acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection will step down next week in the wake of reports that hundreds of detained migrant children are being housed in squalid and unsafe conditions at one of the agency’s centers in Texas...

“We’re going to go big [on alternative meat], using our size and market access. We’re going to be able to bring the best of health and taste together just by virtue of our scale,” Justin Whitmore, Tyson executive vice president of alternative proteins and chief sustainability officer, told Yahoo Finance in an interview...

We’ve created MuseNet, a deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles. MuseNet was not explicitly programmed with our understanding of music, but instead discovered patterns of harmony, rhythm, and style by learning to predict the next token in hundreds of thousands of MIDI files. MuseNet uses the same general-purpose unsupervised technology as GPT-2, a large-scale transformer model trained to predict the next token in a sequence, whether audio or text...

Samples:

The White House will host “digital leaders” for a meeting next month amid President Donald Trump's escalating attacks on Google, Facebook and Twitter.

The Social Media Summit set for July 11 will focus on the “opportunities and challenges of today’s online environment,” White House spokesperson Judd Deere said.

Deere did not answer questions about who is invited to the event...

The billboard was altered before the sun came up Wednesday by a group of conservative artist-activists who go by the name The Faction. They are best known as the secretive troupe that laid down dozens of Donald Trump stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last year to more than replace the president's real star, which has been destroyed many times by protesters.

Chlorpyrifos, a chemical used to treat pest infestations, was banned from residential use in 2000 but is still used in agriculture...

California announced in May it was moving to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that is linked to brain damage in children and is sprayed on almonds, citrus, cotton, grapes, walnuts and other major crops.

The Golden State’s prohibition is a stand against the Trump administration, which has supported continued use of the chemical. Central valley organizers are now pushing California to prevent hazardous materials from replacing chlorpyrifos. They’re hoping their movement can be a blueprint for grassroots activists across the US of how coalitions can tackle environmental dangers – and the systems that enable their spread.

“This is a lot bigger than banning chlorpyrifos,” said Rivera, who is part of the Coalition Advocating for Pesticide Safety (Caps). “We have so much on the line, and we’re tired … Children are being poisoned.”...

The justices have yet to issue opinions in five different cases, and are expected to release their final opinions on Thursday. Here are the opinions left on the court's docket before they wrap up for the summer recess:

• Census citizenship question
• Partisan gerrymandering in Maryland
• North Carolina gerrymandering
• Carpenter v. Murphy death penalty case
• Mitchell v. Wisconsin blood-drawing case

The DIY network relies on "mesh" routing. The concept is quite simple. Your home wifi router provides internet to anyone with a wifi-capable device in your home. But routers also have the ability to connect to and talk to each other. By "meshing" them, or connecting them together, you are creating a larger wifi zone. As long as one of the routers is connected to the internet in some way, it's possible for anyone within range of any of the routers to get onto the internet. You could, theoretically, connect many routers together to create a giant wifi hotspot that covers huge parts of New York City or any other geographical area...

Currently, NYC Mesh has about 40 "nodes," or routers on the network (they are mostly smattered around Manhattan's East Village and Williamsburg in Brooklyn), with more than 100 people waiting for an install. The network is also capable of "meshing" through the internet, meaning that if two routers are independently connected to the internet, they can also talk to each other to be part of the same network, which is why there are various pockets of meshes in the NYC network...

The human body naturally forms a protein called alpha-synuclein which is found, among other places, in the brain in the endings of nerve cells. However, misfolded forms of this protein that clump together are linked to damage to nerve cells, a deterioration of the dopamine system and the development of problems with movement and speech – hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease.

The latest findings, which are based on studies in mice, back up a long-held theory that abnormally folded alpha-synuclein may start off in the gut and then spread to the brain via the vagus nerve – a bundle of fibres that starts in the brainstem and transports signals to and from many of the body’s organs, including the gut...

Senators voted 84-8 on their $4.5 billion bill, which includes nearly $3 billion in humanitarian aid... Though the House and Senate largely align on the top line figure for their border bill, they are divided over several hot button policy issues including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Republican candidate for Queens district attorney, who is expected to take on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-backed left-wing Democrat Tiffany Cabán in November, admitted to The Post on Wednesday that he hasn’t raised any money and may not even go through with the campaign. “I don’t have much of … I don’t expect it will be much of a campaign on my behalf,” said candidate Daniel Kogan, 61, a private attorney in Ozone Park.“I haven’t decided to make an active campaign yet. It was an honor to be nominated, but I haven’t started an active campaign”... Cabán — who is running on a social justice platform of closing jails and decriminalizing low-level offenses such as turnstile-jumping and sex work — seemed to upset Democratic Party-backed hopeful Melinda Katz in a too-close-to-call primary.

If you want to know more about these radical totalitarian socialists, read our report THE NEO-PROGRESSIVE MACHINE – The Trojan Horse Infiltrating The Left

Looking to address the challenges of elderly loneliness, Accenture has developed a solution that uses conversational AI to let people capture memorable stories for future generations while providing companionship. Powered by Google Voice Assistant, Memory Lane initiates conversations by asking someone who is lonely to tell their life story. This is then turned into a physical book and podcast.

“Elderly people are facing two important challenges, the first of which is the loneliness and isolation from society. Some of them have very few interactions per week and have a lot of free time. What Memory Lane can offer is a ‘daily objective’ where they can share their life and best memories. This is a meaningful activity since they can share those memories for future generations,” says Christian Souche, director of Accenture’s Interactive Innovation Center.

“The second problem is sharing who they are and their learnings from their experiences. Memory Lane can gather these memories and generate a biography–this could be a book or a piece of digital content. Memory Lane enables connections between one generation with a lot of time and a lot of stories and a second generation who is very active with little free time.”...

Russia is withdrawing its military "technicians" from crisis-stricken Venezuela on Wednesday, the Caracas embassy said, as President Vladimir Putin gears up for talks with US leader Donald Trump later this week. The move comes three months after Moscow drew US ire by deploying around 100 military experts in Venezuela after Washington indicated it could use force to oust beleaguered President Nicolas Maduro, a Russian ally.

New documents released by the Chicago Police Department in actor Jussie Smollett's case shed light on the browsing history of those involved in the attack. They googled the actor's name over 50 times. The released documents include electronic data from Smollett and the brothers Ola and Abel Osundairo, who were reportedly paid USD 2500 to attack the actor. The actor's attorneys have said that these web searches belong to the Osundairo brothers. The recently released web history includes visits to articles from several outlets pertaining to Smollett's case and an article about how a Post reporter found a bottle of hot sauce that reeked of bleach at the scene of the alleged crime.