In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today!

(I am leaving news about the shutdown out of this round-up. There are threads about the shutdown here and here and here and here and here.)

[Content Note: Rape culture; sexual assault; misogyny] Jess has another important post on the gang rape case involving multiple Vanderbilt football players.

[CN: Infant death; racism] Here is an interesting, ahem, article that talks about the practice of sharing a bed, or "co-sleeping," with an infant, which breaks down the habit by race, but fails utterly to break down the habit by class, despite the fact that poverty is probably the number one reason that parents end up sharing a bed with their babies.

A team of engineers led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language that could soon enable chemists to "use a structured set of instructions to 'program' how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell." The hope is that it "will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as 'smart' drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level." Whoa. That is so cool!

Would you like to see a new banner and the new trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug? I will definitely see this, but, I have to be honest, I kind of wish The Hobbit had just been one tight, great, rollicking movie! OH WELL.

NASA has "mapped the 'cloud' structure of an alien world for the first time using its Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes, an early step towards finding planets with human-compatible atmospheres." Neat! Reached for comment, Mitt Romney was quoted as saying, "I do not believe people are entitled to food, nor do I believe in funding science, but I do believe that the One Percenters are entitled to this wonderful Project Elysium. Gold-plated moon planet with human-compatible atmosphere mansions for everyone!" Romney's spokesperson, Will Ardromney, later clarified that the former presidential candidate meant "everyone in the One Percent, obviously." In all seriousness, that's really cool news. I hope we find some great planets to visit and maybe even colonize. We've definitely done a terrific job with this one.

The global population is getting older, and it turns out that most places don't have a good plan for that.

10.3 million: The number of people who tuned in to the Breaking Bad finale. Were you one of them?! That is a lot of viewers!

Finally! National Geographic is having a photo contest about dogs, and there are SO MANY GREAT PHOTOS OF GREAT DOGS and you should go look at them, if that's something you think would make you happy!

I love this picture of a dog curled into a heart, while probably licking its butt. That pretty much sums you up, dogs!