It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse! It’s another edition of your Weekly Reader! As always, if you have something you’d like to share, drop a link in the comments! The more articles, the better! Because “to share is to care”, as the Quintessons once said by accident. Maybe they had the Christmas spirit. 😉
Stone Age chewing gum holds clues to the life of a young girl who lived 5,700 years ago (from CNN): “By extracting DNA from the birch pitch, the researchers learned that it had been chewed by a female genetically closely related to hunter-gatherers from the European mainland, rather than those in central Scandinavia. Specific genes told them about her hair, skin and eye color, similar to that of other European hunter-gatherers.”
Google Is Going to War Against Its Own Workers [Update] (from Gizmodo): “Google’s firing of Spiers is the latest in a string of employee terminations apparently based on their internal activism—an escalation that portends a fierce ongoing conflict between workers and management within one of the world’s most influential corporations.”
The First Study on the Long-Term Effects of Vaping Is Finally Here, and the Results Aren’t Great (from Vice): “The study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that while e-cigarettes might be safer than smoking cigarettes, people who vaped were about 30% percent more likely to have developed a chronic lung disease like asthma or emphysema. The study looked at 32,000 adults who were lung-disease free in 2013 and checked in with them in 2016.”
There’s a conservative civil war raging — over porn (from Vox): “The fight over pornography is emblematic of a larger fissure within movement conservatism, one centered on crucial questions over how the powers of the state should be used or what the point of conservatism even is. Should conservatism focus on advancing individual freedoms — even the freedom to make bad decisions — or on advancing the “common good” and family values?”
McDonald’s black franchisees are leaving the chain as cash flow disparity between them and white counterparts grows (from CNBC): “The average cash flow of black franchises is much less than the average cash flow of all of the chain’s restaurants, the report said, citing franchisees, former corporate employees and internal documents viewed by Business Insider.”
Report: Social media networks fail to root out fake accounts (from Politico): “The findings — based on analysts purchasing social media manipulation tools and then testing how the companies responded — stand in stark contrast to public statements from Facebook, Twitter and Google that claim they have all significantly clamped down on such activities since the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Why Racists (and Liberals!) Keep Writing for Quillette (from The Nation): “Asked whether he didn’t think he had a responsibility to read these articles in the publication he’s now championing, Elliott said, “That would take, like, real research on my part.””
BREAST CANCER LINKED TO PERMANENT HAIR DYE AND CHEMICAL HAIR STRAIGHTENERS IN STUDY OF ALMOST 50,000 WOMEN (from Newsweek): “A study based on the medical records of more than 45,000 women found a positive correlation between permanent hair dye and breast cancer—particularly among those who are black.
While the paper is based on patterns and trends and, as such, doesn’t confirm a direct cause, it adds to research suggesting there may be carcinogens lurking in commonly-used beauty products.”
Meet the bone-crunching dinosaur that replaced its teeth every two months, study says (from CNN): “Majungasaurus was around 21 feet long and reigned supreme at the top of the food chain on Madagascar. It’s sharp teeth could slice like knives through the flesh of its prey. It also had a short snout and a horn jutting up from the top of its head.”
I Resurrected My Dead Friends As Sims To Watch Them Live The Lives They Never Will (from The Huffington Post): “The last last time I spoke with her, when she was slipping in and out of consciousness and every word was a great effort barely audible over the oxygen mask, she made eye contact with everyone gathered around her bed — most of us strangers to each other, but some of us connected in that vague way that queers and punks and weirdos are — and said, “Take care of each other.” And then her voice took a stern tone, despite its weakness: “No. Isolationist. Bullshit.”
It was 2005; I was 22. From then on, she would always be 25. She was dead and I was devastated.”
A Once-a-Month Birth Control Pill Is Coming—Here’s How It Works (from Wired): “To picture how this works, Traverso suggests imagining a six-armed starfish that has folded itself up into a cylinder. Except each arm is made of a body-friendly silicone polymer bonded with levonorgestrel—the hormone used in IUDs like Mirena. The arms are cut with little repeating windows that allow the drug to gradually detach itself from the surrounding polymer matrix. They connect to each other via an elastic core, and when the whole thing is folded up, it fits inside a standard-size capsule. Once swallowed, the capsule dissolves, allowing the arms to spring back into rigid starfish shape.”
You Cannot Conceive of the Hugeness of This Black Hole (from Gizmodo): “The black hole sits in the center of Holm 15A, the brightest galaxy in the cluster of hundreds galaxies called Abell 85, 700 million light-years away. It’s a bright galaxy with a faint central region—the faintest center of any known galaxy, evidence that there might be a large black hole present. The researchers studied this galaxy using the Fraunhofer Telescope at the Wendelstein Observatory in Germany as well the multi-unit spectroscopic explorer (MUSE) instrument of the Very Large Telescope in Chile.”
That’s all for now. Drop by again for more information on the esoteric, scientific, political, and more. Until then, happy reading and Happy Holidays to all of you!
Iacon East 