September, 2019

Bloomberg has obtained video from a private meeting between President Trump and about 50 American diplomats where a freewheeling, free-speaking President Trump cracked jokes about Adam Schiff and Joe Biden, and declared that whoever leaked the information about the Ukraine call to the whistleblower is "close to a spy."

In his typically off-the-cuff style, Trump vented to his audience about the whistleblower and the scandal they've unleashed, at one point accusing them of being "highly partisan" and declaring "we're at war," before adding that "these people are sick. they're sick."...

"That's close to a spy."

WATCH: Trump demands to know who gave information to the whistle-blower in the #UkraineTranscript that has spurred the #Impeach45 drive. More @business: https://t.co/lmgTALLGsi pic.twitter.com/WTFeEX7K96

— Bloomberg TicToc (@tictoc) September 27, 2019

The crypt-keeper wasp seeks out oak galls and lays an egg inside them. The crypt-keeper larva then attacks the gall wasp larva. Infected gall wasps still start chewing their way out of the gall, but they stop when the hole is small and then remain where they are with their head blocking the exit, thus protecting the larva growing inside them – “keeping the crypt”.

How the crypt-keeper larva makes the gall wasp stop chewing at such a precise point isn’t clear.... When the crypt-keeper larva turns into an adult wasp after a few days, it then chews through the head of the gall wasp to get out of the gall...

The Shapeshifter robot is intended to head to Saturn's moon Titan, which is the only other place in our solar system known to have liquid in the form of methane lakes, rivers and seas that are on its surface... Nasa has already learnt about Titan through the flybys that were carried out by the Cassini mission... But researchers still want to learn more about what is happening on that surface.

[...]
In order to examine that surface, Agha and the rest of the Shapeshifter team build a concept for a robot that is actually made out of a host of other smaller robots, called "cobots". Thoe cobots would include a small propeller and would be able to fly around the world independently, but also connect up to create long chains to dive deep under the surface, or group together into a ball to roll across and save energy.

The cobots are currently semi-autonomous, but Nasa will need to build cobots that can stick themselves together without being directed to do so from Earth...

The camera's resolution is five times more detailed than the human eye, and it is also equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition, real-time monitoring and cloud computing technology, designers say. All this means it can detect and identify human faces or other objects and instantly find specific targets even in a crowded stadium... He said this device — dubbed the "super camera" by local media — can capture both still images and record video...

The FBI confirmed to ABC 7 agents raided McCook Village Hall and conducted a raid in the village of Lyons about a mile away, and were present at the Village of Summit offices. All three villages are within Village of McCook Mayor and Cook County Commissioner Jeff Tobolski's 16th district.

Investigators are looking into allegations Sandoval used his official position to steer business to at least one company in exchange for kickbacks, a source with knowledge of the case told the Chicago Tribune.

Facebook has confirmed (yet again) that it’s building augmented reality glasses, and it announced a project called “Live Maps” that will create 3D maps of the world... According to a video, it will produce “multi-layer representations of the world” using crowdsourced data, traditional maps, and footage captured through phones and augmented reality glasses...

In a move immediately decried by immigrant advocates as an affront to the nation’s humanitarian commitments, the administration said it had to shift focus to processing a backlog of hundreds of thousands of asylum claims, most of which are filed by migrants from Central America crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. “The current burdens on the U.S. immigration system must be alleviated before it is again possible to resettle large number of refugees,” the State Department said in a statement.

Mitt Romney’s national security advisor in his 2012 campaign -- a career CIA spook who rose to its top levels -- sits on the board of directors of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that formerly paid Hunter Biden $50k a month despite his complete lack of credentials or qualifications.

And it also an odd coincidence that Mitt has as CNN puts it “been a lone Republican voice expressing concern about President Donald Trump's July phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Ukraine's President to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family.”

Still more oddly coincidental is the background of Mitt’s adviser deep in the CIA, part of the intelligence community that has “six ways from Sunday” in foiling a mere president who might oppose them, according to Chuck Schumer...

Private donations of $17 million have been pledged for the new Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, which opened this month in Baltimore. For almost 20 years, a small group of scientists have been studying mind-altering drugs and their potential to unlock the human mind after research screeched to a halt in the 1970s during the Nixon administration.

"It's incredibly exciting as the largest single donation or investment into psychedelic research,"...

The UK National Health Service (NHS) is investigating drugs that are used to block normal sexual development among children and teens who are "transitioning" to the opposite sex that when used in other applications have been linked to 6,000 deaths... The use of these drugs in other areas of medicine, to combat prostate cancer, for instance, has been associated with serious medical conditions, including cases of nervous system and psychiatric disorders, heart failure, seizure, joint pain, bone deterioration, and dozens of other adverse events.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) listed over 41,000 adverse reactions between 2004-2019 associated with Leuprolide, which includes Lupron and similar drugs used by gender clinics. Almost 26,000 of these were classified as “serious cases,” which included over 6,000 deaths.

President Trump is barring Cuban Communist leader Raúl Castro and his children from entering the United States, citing human rights abuses and his regime’s support for Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. “Castro is complicit in undermining Venezuela’s democracy and triggering the hemisphere’s largest humanitarian crisis, forcing 15 percent of the Venezuelan population to flee the country and precipitating a food shortage and health crisis of unprecedented scale in this region,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a Thursday announcement.

Altering people's looks to cheat cameras has become increasingly popular with artists and designers in recent years, as the use of facial recognition has grown more pervasive, raising fears over privacy, according to fashion experts. From sunglasses to face masks, numerous wearable devices promising a veil of anonymity are making their way into the mainstream... "If someone steals your credit card, you can cancel it and get a new one ... (but) most of us are not going to do plastic surgery to rearrange our identity"...

...while you might assume that your tea bags are made simply from tea and paper, in actual fact an estimated 96 per cent contain polypropylene – a substance used to seal them and ensure they hold their shape... But, as others continue to work on finding a solution, this still means that many of our favourite brands of tea bags still contain plastic.
[...]
Reporting in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, researchers from McGill University wondered whether plastic teabags could be releasing micro and nanoplastics into the beverage during brewing. Using electron microscopy, the team found that a single plastic teabag at brewing temperature released about 11.6bn microplastic and 3.1bn nanoplastic particles into the water. The researchers state that these levels are thousands of times higher than those reported previously in other foods. ...

Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative... The memos raise troubling questions:

1. If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma's American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?"
2. If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?

Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws. First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Some juicy tidbits:

Mr. Scalia, a son of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, was chosen by President Trump in July,days after Mr. Trump’s first labor secretary, R. Alexander Acosta, announced that he would resign. The Senate confirmed Mr. Scalia by a 53-to-44 margin.