A third CRISPR baby may have already been born in China – Another genetically edited baby is due, but the world may never learn of its birth if the Chinese government decides to keep it a secret…
July 3, 2019
China is planning to launch a constellation of 192 remote sensing satellites by 2021. Artificial intelligence technology will process the images captured by the satellites, which will have sensors with multiple resolutions…
July 3, 2019
After 6-Year Battle, Florida Couple Wins The Right To Plant Veggies In Front Yard After a new Florida law legalized such gardens statewide….
July 3, 2019
Sixty-three-year-old Hermine Ricketts and her 60-year-old husband Tom Carroll planted jalapenos, green bell peppers and other vegetables on Monday when the bill went into effect. Miami Shores previously made such front yard gardens punishable by a daily fine of $50 on grounds they were unsightly and violated zoning codes. Miami Shores told Ricketts to remove her garden in 2013, prompting their lengthy lawsuit. An appeals court backed the village, but then the Legislature stepped in to legalize the gardens. Republican state Sen. Rob Bradley sponsored the bill.
Trump Says US Should Join “Great Currency Manipulation Game” By Devaluing Dollar…
July 3, 2019
Trump's warning also comes less than two weeks after Bank of America warned that direct intervention to weaken the dollar would be possible by a few avenues, some directly involving Trump (jawboning), some involving the Treasury and the Fed (direct intervention by the NY Fed's New York markets desk).
Whatever the administration decides, it's becoming increasingly clear that the dollar is unsustainably overvalued compared with its long-term real effective exchange rate value. BofA's analyst calculated that the dollar is 13% above its long-term average.
According to tradition, the dollar and its value have long been the exclusive purview of the Treasury Department. But Trump has never been one to unquestioningly adhere to precedent. And back in May, the Treasury Department declined to name any country to its list of currency manipulators, though it added some to a 'watch list'...
Florida Democrat says those ‘making fun’ of members of Congress online should be ‘prosecuted’…
July 3, 2019
Democrat Rep. Frederica Wilson (FL) says that people who are “making fun of members of Congress” online “should be prosecuted” pic.twitter.com/f69KwOeJ0n
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 2, 2019
Russian oligarch says he spent $20M after McCabe asked him to help free retired FBI agent from Iran…
July 3, 2019
... the Russian’s admission casts a shadow on McCabe, a former FBI deputy that was fired by President Trump, and Mueller himself over the effort to bring back Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent captured in Iran back in 2007 during a CIA mission. Deripaska told The Hill that he spent over $20 million of his own money between 2009 and 2011 on an operation to free Levinson. He claims he paid for the mission because the FBI, then under Mueller’s leadership, with McCabe, then-FBI supervisor and a supposed colleague of Levinson, asked him for the help.
45,000 barrels of bourbon are fueling a major fire at a Jim Beam warehouse, which may have been sparked by a lightning strike…
July 3, 2019
A major fire is raging at a warehouse in Kentucky that stores Jim Beam bourbon. The fire broke out late Tuesday, around 11:30 p.m., Woodford County emergency management director Drew Chandler told WKYT. The fire started in one warehouse, but soon spread to a second warehouse. As of about 7 a.m. on Wednesday, Chandler said they had put out the fire in the second warehouse, but the fire in the first warehouse was still going and would likely take until Wednesday evening to put out, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
Trump Slaps 400% Tariff On Vietnamese Steel…
July 3, 2019
The department said in a statement that it had found corrosion-resistant steel products and cold-rolled steel produced in Vietnam using substrate of South Korean or Taiwanese origin. It said that Hanoi had thus circumvented US anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties...
Fireball that lit up South Florida was likely space junk, expert says…
July 3, 2019
Mike Hankey, the operations manager for AMS, said he is "100 percent sure" the lights were space debris breaking up in the atmosphere. According to the website Satview.org, a piece of space junk was expected to reenter the atmosphere at about 7 a.m. this morning.
"The reentry time difference from estimate to fireball was just four hours and the distance from estimate to actual about 300 km, so this is the likely candidate," Hankey said. "The reentry estimates are really just educated guess, so they are not exact."
More than 20 people in Florida from St. Augustine to Key West reported seeing the fireball on the AMS website...
iran issues new nuclear ultimatum warns it may increase enrichment of uranium by “any amount”
July 3, 2019
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani issued a fresh ultimatum Wednesday over its civilian-use nuclear program, saying the country would on Sunday "take the next step" toward increasing its enrichment of uranium unless European powers are able to find a way to offset the impact of the Trump administration's sanctions on its economy.
Pentagon Eyes Military Space Station: The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit wants options for an unmanned orbital outpost to support space experiments and operations — a logistics hub that might even grow, DIU’s solicitation suggests, to a larger manned space station…
July 3, 2019
Could Lab-Grown Brains Develop Consciousness?…
July 3, 2019
This week, a Japan-led study in Stem Cell Reports is raising some serious red flags. For the first time, a team carefully characterized the electrical chattering of neurons grown from a brain organoid and found that they spontaneously formed long-distance connections that allowed them to fire in synchrony. “Fire together; wire together” is a fundamental testament of learning in neuroscience. Because neurons in lab-grown minibrains can sync up their activity, analogous to how neurons hook up in our brains, it’s possible that the brain nuggets have the capability to support higher cognitive functions when they’re more mature.
To be clear, this does not mean the organoids are conscious, or even that they’re “thinking.” Rather than measuring neural activity from whole mini-brains, the team chemically dissected them to further grow individual neurons in a dish before doing any assays. In other words, they took neurons from a mini-brain, “flattened” their organization onto a plate, and teased out their wirings and chattering in that setup...
Trump Update on the Citizenship question…
July 3, 2019
The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2019
Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are ‘being buggy,’ users report outages around the world…
Check Down Detector to see what other sites are affected...
July 3, 2019
If you're having issues with Facebook and Instagram on your smartphone, you're not alone. Early Wednesday, people around the globe began reporting app issues, according to DownDetector, a web service that offers a real-time overview of bugs and outages online. About 8:45 a.m. EST, thousands of Instagram users began reporting that they were having problems. A live outage map shows that users in the Northeast region of the U.S., as well as London and Berlin, are having issues with the photo-sharing app. Other hotspots include Florida, Georgia and parts of South America, according to DownDetector.
MSNBC Guest Compares Betsy Ross Flag to Swastika, Burning Cross…
July 3, 2019
Autonomous Shuttles Begin Passenger Service in Montréal…
July 3, 2019
The service is the result of an ongoing test project run by a partnership of Transdev Canada and the city of Montréal. Two EasyMile EZ10 shuttles will operate between Maisonneuve Market and the Olympic Stadium through Aug. 4. The 12-passenger vehicles will operate on the 1.4-km (0.87-mile) route at an average speed of 15 km/h (9.3 mph), taking six minutes to complete a trip in one direction. Even though the vehicles will run by themselves and are equipped with GPS, cameras and LIDAR to detect obstacles, the minibuses will have operators on board to take control should the situation require it.
HP, Dell & Amazon Join Manufacturing Exodus Leaving China…
July 3, 2019
"The damage has already been done..."
Amazon plans to build 43-story skyscraper in Bellevue to accommodate thousands of employees…
July 3, 2019
The company on Tuesday began the formal permitting process for the proposed building, referred to as Bellevue 600. The site is the east half of the Bellevue Corporate Plaza property at 600 108th Ave. N.E. that it bought in April for $195 million... Bellevue 600 would be Amazon’s first construction project in the city where the commerce giant was born 25 years ago and where it is moving an entire corporate division
Citing ‘massive risks,’ House Democrats ask Facebook to halt its cryptocurrency plans…
Read the Letter...
July 3, 2019
The letter to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, CFO Sheryl Sandberg and David Marcus, CEO of Facebook’s Calibra digital wallet, was signed by committee chair Maxine Waters, D-Calif., along and Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., Lacy Clay, D-Mo., Al Green, D-Texas, and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass.
“The scant information provided about the intent, roles, potential use, and security of the Libra and Calibra exposes the massive scale of the risks and the lack of clear regulatory protections,” the letter read. “These vulnerabilities could be exploited and obscured by bad actors, as other cryptocurrencies, exchanges, and wallets have been in the past.” “It appears that these products may lend themselves to an entirely new global financial system that is based out of Switzerland and intended to rival U.S. monetary policy and the dollar . This raises serious privacy, trading, national security, and monetary policy concerns for not only Facebook’s over 2 billion users, but also for investors, consumers, and the broader global economy,” the lawmakers said.