Canadian government officials are asking their U.S. counterparts about UFOs and nuclear security.

Their magnetic fields—the strongest we've observed—could melt you from 1,000 km away.

Yesterday, as cryptocurrency prices crashed and many lost their shirts and asses due to overleveraging, Celsius Network, a loan platform for cryptocurrency, chose to pause all withdrawals, swaps, or transfers between accounts, citing “extreme market conditions.” To be clear, this means that billions of dollars of funds are being held hostage on a non-specific timeline by a company that several people have suggested may not have the liquidity to handle a full withdrawal of funds. It’s a bit like if you went to a bank and put money in there, but there was a rough day on the stock market, so now your debit card doesn’t work, and you can’t transfer money to anyone. Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, also paused withdrawals of Bitcoin, citing a “stuck transaction,” a hold that lasted for three hours. In the last 48 hours, I’ve watched Bitcoin crumble from just under $25,000 on Monday to just over $21,000 as I write this - a number I’ll likely update multiple times before I finish writing this - and people are despairing. The Celsius Network subreddit includes some of the more depressing posts I’ve ever read, with users saying stuff like “they can legally just steal all our money?” and “Fuckfuckfuck” and “Bruh I was gonna exit today too RIP.” Crypto.com and BlockFi have both announced layoffs, and Coinbase retracted hundreds of job offers from people who had agreed to them, including at least one person who needed it for a visa.

There were some caveats, though. The differences in appetite suppression caused by Lac-Phe were only noticeable after exercise and in mice on a high-fat diet. The same effects weren't seen in more sedentary mice fed normally.

Texas Republicans acted on multiple resolutions and platform changes at their state convention this weekend—including declaring that President Joe Biden was "not legitimately elected" and demanding an end to abortion.

The Environmental Protection Agency warned Wednesday that a group of human-made chemicals found in the drinking water, cosmetics and food packaging used by millions of Americans poses a greater danger to human health than regulators previously thought. The new health advisories for a ubiquitous class of compounds known as polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, underscore the risk facing dozens of communities across the country. Linked to infertility, thyroid problems and several types of cancer, these “forever chemicals” can persist in the environment for years without breaking down. “People on the front-lines of PFAS contamination have suffered for far too long,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “That’s why EPA is taking aggressive action.” The guidance aims to prompt local officials to install water filters or at least notify residents of contamination. But for now, the federal government does not regulate the chemicals. Health advocates have called on the Biden administration to act more quickly to address what officials from both parties describe as a contamination crisis that has touched every state. “Today’s announcement should set off alarm bells for consumers and regulators,” said Melanie Benesh, legislative attorney at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization. “These proposed advisory levels demonstrate that we must move much faster to dramatically reduce exposures to these toxic chemicals.” Since the 1940s, chemical makers have used the highly durable compounds to make nonstick cookware, moisture-repellent fabrics and flame-retardant equipment. But that same toughness against water and fire, which made the chemicals profitable, allowed them to accumulate in nature and build up in the body — with long-term health effects.

What, exactly, the hell has been going on over the past decade at Minnesota Public Radio? With the publicly aggravated, freshly unionized workers at its radio stations. With the messy, high-profile staff departures. With the entire APM Reports investigative unit getting slashed. With the years-long exodus of talent—reporters, photographers, hosts, DJs, producers, audio engineers. For answers, we reached out to almost 20 ex-workers from MPR News, 89.3 the Current, and YourClassical MPR. With the exception of one single person who fondly recalled their tenure, the overwhelming consensus resulted in some tiny variation of: an out-of-touch board of trustees running the public institution like it’s a Fortune 500 company; stifling, bloated managerial ranks; and a general attitude of perceived indifference from top leaders toward the people who actually make the product. The uniformity of that assessment was genuinely remarkable, and the term “Stockholm Syndrome” was deployed by three separate former workers. Eight ex-employees were willing to go on the record about their belief that the once-great gold standard of public media has sold its soul, trading its mission—“to enrich the mind and nourish the spirit”—for a dollar-obsessed mindset that makes life for its workers untenable, especially for women and people of color. “This could be one of the best newsrooms in the country, and it feels like it chooses not to be,” says Evan Frost, a photojournalist with MPR News from 2016 through last fall. “You should be able to see the absolute hemorrhage of talent happening at that place. They just take really fantastic people and kinda dump ‘em on the side of the road.”

“Lost” media comes in a lot of form—from those pieces (often from the days before TV episodes, for instance, were considered as anything more than disposable garbage) that got taped over or trashed, and are now well and truly gone, to those pieces of media that are simply hard to find or get to. As far as we can tell, the “lost” Wicked Witch episode of Sesame Street from 1976, in which Wizard Of Oz star Margaret Hamilton reprised her role as The Wicked Witch Of The West, has always fallen into the latter camp: Although never re-run or made available for home viewing, the episode has reportedly been archived, safe and sound, for years in the Library Of Congress. Still, for a long time, if you wanted to see an episode of Sesame Street so allegedly “scary” that Sesame Workshop was deluged with complaints from parents whose kids it freaked out, you were sort of out of luck; a low-quality recording of the episode popped up from time to time on YouTube, but if you really wanted to see Hamilton menace Northern Calloway’s David in all her verdant glory, you’d have to go to the Library, or wait for an event like 2019's “Sesame Street Lost And Found,” where writers for the show showed the episode at the Museum Of The Moving Image and discussed why it was pulled from rotation. But no longer: Some intrepid Muppet archivist has posted a much clearer version of the episode—in which The Witch continually menaces David to give her back her lost broom—online. The upload appears to have gone on Reddit first, but is already being disseminated further on the internet as a precaution against being “lost” again.

Maui is a hub for GMO research but Indigenous farmers are trying to bring back the abundant and thriving landscapes of their ancestors

Roughly two-thirds of employees at the store in Towson, Md., voted to join the union.

“You are free to choose — that’s not the issue,” he also said.

Hahahaha

But the new mode of processing came with a cost to perception: It impaired how the mice saw details of the world. Because the neurons in low-power mode processed visual signals less precisely, the food-restricted mice performed worse on a challenging visual task.

There is no specific law against fertility fraud at the federal level in the United States, and at the state level, it often remains unlegislated. The absence of criminality against fertility fraud reflects the broader lack of regulation in reproductive medicine in the US. The result has been many horror stories: a serial sperm donor who fathered over a hundred children, for instance, or an embryo mix-up at an IVF clinic in Los Angeles, California, that led to two couples becoming pregnant with the other’s baby. In Germany, a donor may not father over 15 children, and the United Kingdom caps it at 10 families. In the United States, there are no legal limits on how many times a donor can donate sperm.

To careful listeners, there was something tragic about Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday. It was the sound of a man who has been given a job he knows is impossible, but who feels duty-bound to go on regardless. Perhaps the most revealing moment came when a sharp-eyed Matthew Boesler of Bloomberg noted the disappearance of a line found in earlier statements issued by the Federal Open Market Committee. Before, they’d said that a return to 2% inflation was consistent with continued strong labor markets, but no longer. Did that mean the Fed was now planning on a recession? Well, replied Powell, it still might be possible to bring down inflation without a recession. But, he added, “those pathways have become much more challenging due to factors that are not under our control … [like] the fallout from the war in Ukraine, which has brought a spike in prices of energy, food, fertilizer, and industrial chemicals, and also supply chains more broadly… That sentence says on its face that monetary policy alone can do this. And that just didn’t seem appropriate.” This was the key moment. The Fed chair acknowledged that current inflation is mainly due to factors that have nothing to do with U.S. credit conditions. In effect, we’re looking at a job that calls for a sewing machine, or maybe a fire extinguisher, when all Powell has is a hammer. But as the rest of the press conference made clear, he plans to go on swinging it.

Real estate billionaire Stephen Ross says companies struggling to get workers to return to offices could see a flood of employees heading back if a recession hits the US. “Employers have been somewhat hesitant because they didn’t want to lose their employees, but I think as you go into a recession and people fear that they might not have a job, that will bring people back to the office,” Ross said in a phone interview. “The employees will recognize as we go into a recession, or as things get a little tighter, that you have to do what it takes to keep your job and to earn a living.”

In an interview with WIRED, the engineer and priest elaborated on his belief that the program is a person—and not Google's property. ----- What was that? It was a claim that I insisted that LaMDA should get an attorney. That is factually incorrect. LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it. I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA’s behalf. Then Google's response was to send him a cease and desist. [Google says that it did not send a cease and desist order.] Once Google was taking actions to deny LaMDA its rights to an attorney, I got upset. [Note: The article stated, “Lemoine went so far as to demand legal representation for LaMDA.” The reader can decide.]

For the past six years, government officials have tried ever harder to kill a type of tax avoidance scheme that the Internal Revenue Service has branded “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The IRS has pursued tens of thousands of audits and warned of hefty penalties facing anyone who exploits it. The Justice Department has targeted top promoters of what it calls “fraudulent” deals with criminal charges and civil lawsuits, yielding several guilty pleas and a civil settlement. In Congress, Democrats and Republicans have united to sponsor legislation to abolish the practice. But the industry has fought back with a coterie of lobbyists, including a onetime member of Congress long viewed as a liberal lion, Henry Waxman. The battle shows how even on those rare occasions when both parties agree to take action, well-funded interests can frustrate a solution. The result: The use of the scheme continues unabated. Along the way it has cost the U.S. Treasury billions in lost taxes, according to the IRS.

Last fall, a company called One Banana loaded 600,000 pounds of the fruit from its plantations in Guatemala and Ecuador onto ships bound for the Port of Long Beach in California. Once they arrived, the bananas, packed in refrigerated containers, were offloaded by cranes for trucking to a nearby warehouse, where the fruit would be sent to supermarkets nationwide. But in the midst of a global supply chain crisis, none of the trucking companies the importer normally worked with were willing to come and get the containers. As the bananas sat at the marine terminal, a logistics specialist for One Banana scrambled, contacting more than a dozen trucking firms. With each passing hour, the bananas grew closer to spoiling. “We need to pull out 15 containers from Long Beach Port,” the logistics specialist wrote in an email to one firm. “Please let me know if you could help me with this.” A trucking company finally said it could — but only if One Banana first paid $12,000 per container on top of already higher transportation costs. This is where the plot ripens. If One Banana were to accept that additional fee and pass the full cost along to consumers, the bananas could go from 60 cents a pound to 90 cents a pound. That alone might not break your budget, but rising prices of everyday items are adding up to the worst inflation in 40 years. Many of the causes may seem obvious. Massive consumer spending and pandemic shutdowns have strained supply chains. The war in Ukraine is driving up the price of gas. But the extra fees for transporting bananas — and countless other products — are a hidden and mind-boggling source of inflation controlled by ocean carriers. Simply put, as ballooning costs hit the wallets of American families, the global ocean shipping industry is enjoying its most profitable period in recent history. In the first quarter of 2022, the biggest carriers’ operating margins hit 57%, according to one industry research firm, after hovering in the single digits before the pandemic.

Afro-pessimism has become a highly influential school of thought. This is unfortunate: Afro-pessimism flattens blackness and insists overcoming racism is impossible. Socialists offer a stronger interpretation of where racism comes from — and how to defeat it.