The Senate floor has been occupied with Booker’s anti-Trump speech for 16 hours
Senator Cory Booker broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest speech by a senator with his speech lasting over 25 hours on Tuesday. Thurmond had said, “I’ve been hearing from people all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling uponFolks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognise the urgency, the crisis of the moment.”
There are first genetic profiles of people who lived in the lush Sahara
Researchers have found that the earliest signs of Saharan civilization in North Africa are more than 8,000 years old. The researchers said the evidence at the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya is the highest-ever evidence of Saharan DNA from North Africa. “The findings suggest that Saharans have been an important part of the early history of North Africa,” they added.
The United States would be badly affected by a brain drain
The Dutch government has asked the National Research-funding Council to set up a fund to lure scientists who are looking to move because of the changing climate. It said that there were special opportunities for US scientists at universities in France and Belgium. The fund was first proposed by the Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte last year.
3 more things from Trump’s week have been reported
A federal judge has ordered the US administration to preserve records of a text message chat in which national security officials discussed plans for a US military strike against Yemen’s Houthis. The judge barred administration officials from destroying messages that were sent on the encrypted messaging app Signal earlier this month. US District Judge James Boasberg has been at odds with the administration over a separate case.
A coronaviruses assembly blocker is meant to target the viral virulence factor
Cells were infected with SARS-COV-2–mNeonGreen virus (At a final MOI of 0.1 TCID50 per cell) and compounds were added 0.5, 0, 2, 4, 6 and 8 h after infection. The samples were prepared in a 384-well plate with 0.5 mg ml1 purified recombinant SARS-CoV-2 M and 100 M of JNJ-9676 in 20 mM HEPES pH 7.5, 150 mM 0.05% GD, 0.0001% CHS, and 1% DMSO.
A human brain map of respiratory capacity
A study has shown the human brain’s mitochondrial capacity and diversity. Researchers used a tool usually used for woodwork to create 703 cubes from the brain of a 54-year-old donor who died of a heart attack. The brain’s mitochondrial capacity and diversity were compared with standard 3D images of the brain. The brain accounts for 20% of the human body’s energy usage.
The research publishing gender gap is slowly getting better
A study by Nature Index and OpenAI has shown that the gender gap in chemistry and physical sciences is widest in countries with the highest percentage of female authors. It uses chatbot ‘ChatGPT’, created by OpenAI, to infer author genders on the basis of their most likely country of origin and the name–gender association trends in that country.
Foreign spies working for Donald Trump: Opinion
There wasn’t any classified information shared in the chat group on Signal, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard has said. This comes after The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that a top Trump administration official mistakenly added him to the group chat on an app with plans to bomb Yemen. “The meetings of Principals Committee are held in the White House Situation Room,” Gabbard added.
Security experts saw the Signal attack plan being violated
US President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, in a letter to the Congress, said the White House didn’t share classified information on a chat group with a US lawmaker. This came after Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, claimed a top Trump administration official mistakenly added him to a group chat about highly sensitive plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.
The Israeli Police released a Palestinian director after the West Bank incident
The director of the Oscar-winning film ‘No Other Land’, Hamdan Ballal, has been detained by Israeli police over a reported attack by Israeli settlers in West Bank’s Moussaoui village. Ballal was questioned along with two other Palestinians on suspicion of hurling stones, property damage and “endangering regional security”, police said. All three deny the accusations, their lawyer said.