Short Takes – 9-21-24

Trump’s shutdown push falls flat with Republicans. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: ““Everybody knows that I’m certainly comfortable with fighting and having a shutdown to force the question on whether or not we’re gonna fund government at the right levels, which means cutting spending, and make sure that we ensure that only citizens vote,” said Roy, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. “I’d be happy to do that. But you got to have the votes to go do it.””

The radical intervention that might save the “doomsday” glacier. TechnologyReview.com article. Pull quote: “But Moore readily acknowledges that such efforts will face vast challenges. Much more work needs to be done to closely evaluate how the flow of warm water will be affected, how well the curtains will hold up over time, what sorts of environmental side effects could occur, and how the public will respond. And installing the curtains under the frigid, turbulent conditions near Antarctica would likely require high-powered icebreakers and the sorts of submersible equipment used for deep-sea oil and gas platforms.”

First Israel’s Exploding Pagers Maimed and Killed. Now Comes the Paranoia. Wired.com article. Pull quote: “Creating distrust of communication devices within Hezbollah may well be Israel's purposeful tactic of “preparing the battle space” ahead of impending Israeli military operations against Lebanon, says Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of Active Measures, who specializes in disinformation and influence operations. He compares the operation to cyberattacks or physical attacks on “command-and-control” infrastructure at the beginning of a conflict, such as the United States' efforts, documented in former NSA chief Michael Hayden's book Playing to the Edge, to destroy the Iraqi military's fiber-optics-based communications in 2003 in order to “herd” the enemy's military toward more easily intercepted radio-based communications.”

Strange Visual Auras Could Hold the Key to Better Migraine Treatments. Wired.com article. Pull quote: “Nouchine Hadjikhani, a Harvard neuroscientist who has been researching auras for three decades, says the research is “probably the biggest advance” in 10 to 20 years about how migraines happen. Around the turn of the millennium, we learned that auras occur during a temporary shutdown of neuron activity, known as a cortical spreading depression (CSD). Hadjikhani’s team was the first to show this in humans on fMRI scans, as a slow-moving wave of cells activating anomalously, rippling across the cerebral cortex. “Imagine you throw a stone in water and you see the waves going out,” she says. Most aura symptoms are visual because more than a third of the brain is dedicated to visual processing.”