“A secret tomb has been discovered underneath Al-Khazneh – the Treasury building at the World Heritage Site of the ancient city Petra in Jordan. The unexpected find includes the remains of 12 skeletons. Petra (originally known to inhabitants as Raqēmō) is an entire city carved by hand into the walls of a desert canyon. It was built possibly as early as the 5th century BCE by the Nabataeans – a nomadic Arab people. People have lived in the region around Petra for at least 9,000 years … The hidden tomb was discovered when researchers conducted a remote sensing scan with electromagnetic conductivity and ground-penetrating radar to look for structures beneath the surface. ‘The main purpose of the survey was to assess the condition of the areas around the Treasury, courtyard, the plaza, the exit of the Siq and the wadi into which they all feed, in advance of potential future works to divert and better control flood waters,’ says team member Richard Bates, a geophysicist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. ‘The discovery is of international significance, as very few complete burials from the early Nabataeans have ever been recovered from Petra. The burials, their goods, and the human remains can all be expected to help fill the gaps in our knowledge of how Petra came to be and who the Nabataeans were,’ Bates adds … ‘The tomb was most likely built as a mausoleum and crypt in the Nabatean Kingdom at the beginning of the first century AD for Aretas IV Philopatris,’ (Geologist Tim Kinnaird) says. ‘Few remains have ever been found in the tombs due to their subsequent use and reuse over the last two millennia.’'“ (Evrim Yasgin/Cosmos Magazine)
“An artificial-intelligence tool honoured by this year’s Nobel prize has revealed intimate details of the molecular meet-cute between sperm and eggs 1 . The AlphaFold program, which predicts protein structures , identified a trio of proteins that team up to work as matchmakers between the gametes. Without them, sexual reproduction might hit a dead end in a wide range of animals, from zebrafish to mammals. The finding, published 17 October in Cell , unravels the previous notion that just two proteins — one on the egg and one on the sperm — would be sufficient to ensure fertilisation, says Enrica Bianchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, who was not involved in the study. ‘It’s not the old concept of having a key and a lock to open the door anymore,’ she says. ‘It’s more complicated.’ Despite its critical role in reproduction, the fusion of egg and sperm in vertebrates is a molecular mystery that has proved difficult to crack. The union of the two cells involves proteins that reside in greasy membranes and that are hard to study using standard biochemical methods.AlphaFold predicted that three sperm proteins work together to form a complex. Two of these proteins were previously known to be important for fertility. Pauli and her colleagues then confirmed that the third is also critical for fertility in both zebrafish and mice, and that the three proteins interact with one another. The team also found that, in zebrafish, the trio creates a place for an egg protein to bind, providing a mechanism by which the two cells could recognize one another. ‘It’s a way to say, ‘Sperm, you found an egg’ and ‘Egg, you found a sperm’,’ says Andreas Blaha, a biochemist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology and co-author of the paper. The findings might one day yield a way to screen people struggling with infertility, to find out whether problems with this complex could be the cause, says (biochemist Gavin) Wright.” (Heidi Ledford/Nature)
“The case of a deaf Black man with cerebral palsy is under investigation in Phoenix after police body-camera footage showed officers punching and Tasering him during his arrest. Tyron McAlpin, 34, faces charges of resisting arrest and two counts of aggravated assault on a police officer over the events in the Aug. 19 footage, which his attorney shared with media outlets including The Washington Post this week. McAlpin is not charged with any other crime. The body-camera footage shows two officers, Benjamin Harris and Kyle Sue, repeatedly punching McAlpin in the head and shooting electric currents through his body with a Taser while he lies on his stomach, screaming. He is repeatedly told to put his hand, which is folded at his side, behind his back. McAlpin did not obey the officers’ verbal commands because he is deaf, said Jesse Showalter, who is representing McAlpin in a potential civil rights lawsuit against the city of Phoenix … The Justice Department found in June, after an almost three-year federal civil rights investigation, that the Phoenix police routinely use excessive force and discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people. Showalter said McAlpin’s case shows ‘there’s been no change on the ground.’” (Frances Vinall/WashPost)
“Today, dear readers, your Freakshow guide leads you inside a tent that puts the F in Freak, in a corner of the state that political strategists predict will decide the election in a few weeks. For years I’ve heard of a cult based in Pennsylvania that worships the AR-15, an offshoot of the Unification Church founded by rabid anti-communist Korean expat Sun Myung Moon. The Moonies became famous for holding mass weddings. They also own the right-wing paper, the Washington Times. Old Moon, known to his cult as ‘True Father,’ has sailed into his rest but his son Sean grew up to start his own schismatic nominally Christian sect, which he calls Iron Rod Ministries. He preaches that Rambo Jesus is the messiah son of an armed Old Testament God known by the Hebrew name for ‘the lord of armies.’ Pastor Moon’s flock is smaller than the one started by the man he calls True Father but it does also engage in group weddings, with couples in traditional American wedding attire, with the addition of an AR-15 strapped on. Needless to say, the clan is rock solid MAGA. This year a few former Trump officials graced the Rod of Iron’s annual ‘Freedom Festival,’ an event sometimes referred to as Gunstock. The two-day event celebrates the gun in all its forms as a tool of God, with speakers, vendors selling Trump and NRA swag, musical performances (a ‘European choir’ and ‘Korean dance’), and even an art show of Pastor Moon’s paintings of Satan and Trump triumphant. The festival happens each fall in deep rural northeastern Pennsylvania, near the grounds of Pastor Moon’s small arms manufacturing company, Kahr Arms.” (American Freakshow/Nina Burleigh)
“Years ago, in my former life as a TV anchor, I learned that the first question sets the tone. Interviewers make a choice every time they begin talking with a newsmaker. Do they start by warming their subject up or go straight for the jugular? Fox's Bret Baier chose the softball way when interviewing Trump last year, and the hardball way when interviewing Harris earlier this week. I reviewed both segments and found that Baier 1) challenged both candidates; 2) generated lots of newsy clips; and 3) treated Harris differently than Trump. Baier interrupted Harris a lot more often and interrogated her from the get-go. Read all about it here. >> The ratings were remarkable: Harris' first ever formal sit-down on Fox ‘drew an estimated 7.1 million viewers,’ Deadline's Ted Johnson wrote. That's more than three times the average audience for Baier's program. >> ‘She got exactly what she wanted out of it,’ Dan Pfeiffer said on MSNBC, noting that the #1 local market for the interview was Pittsburgh.” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“The United States has imposed sanctions on two China-based drone suppliers and their alleged Russian partners, the first time it has penalized Chinese companies for supplying complete weapons systems to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Washington has long accused China of supporting Russia’s war effort by supplying dual-use goods and components that could be used in the manufacture of weapons, which Beijing denies. But in an announcement Thursday, the US Treasury Department accused the Chinese firms of direct involvement in arms supplies to Moscow. The Chinese companies had collaborated with Russian defense firms in the production of Moscow’s ‘Garpiya series’ long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, the department said in a statement. The drones were designed, developed and made in China before being sent to Russia for use in the battlefield, it said. ‘The Garpiya has been deployed by Russia in its brutal war against Ukraine, destroying critical infrastructure and causing mass casualties,’ it said. ‘While the United States previously imposed sanctions on (Chinese) entities providing critical inputs to Russia’s military-industrial base, these are the first U.S. sanctions imposed on (Chinese) entities directly developing and producing complete weapons systems in partnership with Russian firms.’” (Nectar Gran/CNN)
“China's economy sank into a deeper funk in the third quarter, testing the leadership's resolve to rev up demand. Gross domestic product rose 4.6% on the year in the three months through September, the National Bureau of Statistics said Friday. That was down from the second quarter's 4.7% growth, marking the slowest pace since the first quarter of 2023, when the country was emerging from three years of strict COVID-19 restrictions. On a quarter-to-quarter basis, the economy grew 0.9%, versus a revised 0.5% the previous quarter. The figures come as authorities strain to reach an annual growth target of around 5%, set in March. President Xi Jinping called on officials to strive to reach the goal last month as fresh signs of economic weakness piled up. China faced ‘new circumstances and new problems in the domestic economic operation,’ the NBS said in comments published alongside the data. However, it also said that ‘most production and demand indicators improved in September.’ The July-September result of 4.6% was in line with a forecast by economists recently polled by Nikkei and Nikkei Quick News. For the full year, they projected that China's GDP would expand 4.8%, down from a 4.9% forecast compiled in July.” (Stella Yifan Xie and Wataru Suzuki/Nikkei Asia)
“Had lunch with an old boss of mine today, Ed Kosner, who edited me for six years at New York Magazine. He was the best editor I ever had when it came to figuring out how to cover big running stories, like political campaign—he always had an uncanny sense of where I should go, what I should think about, what readers were curious about—in the very moment. We were a weekly magazine and the turnaround could be quick. It was exhilarating work. So I asked him today, if we were covering this campaign, now, what would he be wanting me to write about—right now, this week? And he said, ‘Trump—how on earth is he doing this?’ We both knew Trump back in the day, back in the 80s…and he was then as he is now, a brilliant fraud. The other real estate developers in New York thought he was a showboat, a huckster, a con artist—and a failure, who kept going bankrupt. Ed had—as he often did—tweaked something in me, a realization that was so obvious that we tend not to think about it anymore: The reason why so many people like Trump is that he just doesn’t sound like other politicians. He can sound crazy, but his crazy is real. His racial disdain and hatefulness is real, too. His disgust with ‘the system’ is real for a people so coddled they don’t understand how rare and lucky their prosperity is. The thing with Trump, ever since he called John McCain a failure for having gotten shot down, you just don’t know what he’s going to say next. With other pols, you do. And that is the most important fact about Trump’s career as an American politician: he changed the paradigm and the ‘pros’ don’t seem to have noticed yet. Politics is a long story. It has evolved over more than 200 years. It has certain traditions, ceremonies, parameters. It does change, over time, and it has changed rapidly in my lifetime, mostly due to developments in the media … And, over time, the game calcified. The market-tested language sounded all the same. People began to understand sound bites, talking points—it all seemed phony. And then Donald Trump blew it up. He did not sound like any other politician in 2016; he doesn’t sound like any other politician now. He lied through his teeth, but—if I can take a bit of a leap here—they sounded like honest lies, things he really believed.” (Joe Klein/Sanity Clause)
“Dave Weigel recently wrote a post detailing all the ways that Kamala Harris’ campaign is to the right of Biden’s 2020 run, both in terms of tone and rhetoric and in terms of actual policy. Harris and other Dems have touted their tough stances on the border, abandoned big new spending programs, stopped talking about a public option for health insurance, trumpeted their support for Israel, embraced oil drilling, and gone tough on crime. Harris’ policy agenda includes plenty of pro-business and deregulatory ideas. She even brags about owning a gun and being willing to shoot intruders. If this all gives you a sense of whiplash after the seeming ascendancy of the left in the 2010s, you’re not alone. The shift has come so quickly that I think a lot of people haven’t even processed it yet — Harris is running as a centrist, but the majority of Americans still say she’s to their left. Perceptions of the parties probably take several cycles to adjust — Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale ran as centrists in the 80s, but America didn’t believe Democrats were really moderate until Bill Clinton in 1992. But I don’t think the shift is a cynical election-year ploy on Harris’ part — I think it’s here to stay. The fact is, on issue after issue, the progressive project has been stymied, either by the realities of American political opinion or by its own failures. In 2012 or 2019, progressivism felt like it had forward momentum; now it feels adrift. None of this makes me support the Democrats any less, of course — quite the opposite.” (Noah Smith)
The memo from one of the American president’s counsellors could not be clearer: immigration, the aide writes, is a ‘no win issue.’ Another adviser says bleakly: ‘Nothing short of a Berlin Wall’ can keep ‘illegals’ out. ‘Good lord,’ observes the president as discussion in a meeting turns again to this thorny issue. ‘We’re back to immigration already!’ You might imagine these quotes shed light on the thinking of President Joe Biden’s inner circle on this most delicate of issues ahead of November’s election. They also read as a timely echo of the dilemmas if not failures of many policymakers in the EU, where just last weekend anti-immigration parties surged in the elections for the European parliament. The quotes are not in fact contemporary. Rather, they date back to when Ronald Reagan was president in the 1980s. But they could conceivably have come from any White House in the intervening years, for they encapsulate four decades of tangled, sometimes hard-headed but also complex decision-making in Washington over immigration and its 1,900-mile southern frontier. At the heart of that debate is a big question: how should the government of a wealthy liberal democracy balance its moral and legal obligations to asylum-seekers and its belief in the economic benefits of immigration with domestic political pressures over security and constrained resources? … Immigration has increasingly overshadowed politics in Europe since 2015-16, when 2.3mn people came to the EU, mainly fleeing the civil war in Syria. All the while, European policymakers have become more hardline, increasingly trying to outsource their responsibilities for asylum-seekers to countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey, and all but resiling from their international obligations as they seek to offset the siren allure of the populists. Yet populist and far-right parties did better than ever before in elections for the European parliament, with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National winning 31.4 per cent of the French vote. Among their arguments was that the continent needs to tighten up policies to reduce the numbers of immigrants, whether economic migrants or asylum-seekers. In part their success reflects their seizing on myths, but they have also capitalised on a widespread perception that the establishment has not levelled with the broader population about the scale of the numbers of migrants and the consequent pressure on public services. There is a similar story in Britain, where the debate over immigration, which influenced its vote in 2016 to leave the EU, is bubbling away again ahead of a general election, to be held on July 4. Successive governments have skirted public concern over the issue and failed to plan for it by, say, building many more new homes and expanding transport.” (Alec Russell/FT)
“As the years have gone by, Election Betting Odds has tracked the chances of hundreds of candidates and ever greater sums. The proprietors believe that their work is journalistic, in that bettors are impressively accurate election predictors: ‘Better and more convenient and more useful than listening to polls and pundits,’ per Stossel. ‘When I was at ABC and I interviewed James Surowiecki, who wrote the book The Wisdom of Crowds, we discussed that crowds could be mobs—but how, when it comes to the futures market, their wisdom is usually better than any individual so-called expert.’ Lately, reporters have viewed election betting as an increasingly useful proxy for public opinion—or simply interest—in electoral politics. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have made recent references to the campaign’s market odds, which drove coverage; Nate Silver—the former editor of FiveThirtyEight, who now has a Substack called Silver Bulletin—is an adviser to Polymarket and regularly cites betting-market data. Siladitya Ray, a breaking-news reporter at Forbes, began reporting on political betting after June’s Trump-Biden debate, when the markets moved substantially in ways that suggested Kamala Harris would rise to the top of the Democratic ticket. ‘Polls don’t have immediate movement, so if you wanted some sort of quick reaction around what the sentiment is,’ he said, there it was: ‘the state of the market’s reaction to it.’” (CJR/Meghnad Bose)
“While watching hummingbirds buzz around me, I recalled a fantasy every child has: that I could win the trust of wild animals and they would willingly come to me. I imagined tiny avian helicopters dining on my palm. To lure them, I bought Lilliputian hummingbird feeders, four for $10. Hope came cheap enough, but I was also realistic. It might take months to gain a hummingbird’s interest in the feeder and for it to lose its fear of me. Yesterday, I set a little feeder on the rail near the regular hummingbird feeders on the patio and then sat at a table about ten feet away. Within minutes, a hummingbird came to inspect, a male with a flashing red head. He hovered, gave a cursory glance, and then left. At least he noticed it. A good beginning … June 20, 2018. Alarm cheeps! Four newly hatched California Quail were wandering alone next to our garage. Marcia and the kids next door noticed them first. When we approached, they froze and quieted … We figured the parents must be nearby. They live within the bushes and bamboo hedges of a quadrant of houses, including ours. I see the covey occasionally in the yard, several blue males and about eight brown females. Is this a family or a harem? We placed the babies underneath a shrub and stood to the side to see what would happen. The quail adults came out immediately from a bush just ten feet away and sounded the urgent cry, Ooo-OOO-oo! Ooo-OOOO-ooo! Kidnappers have stolen our children! Soon four fluffballs raced out and joined their parents and a dozen other siblings. They moved quickly and smoothly together as a unit, as if on invisible roller skates. I wonder how many of these chicks survive. Unlike other birds, they are born capable of walking with those humongous feet, and they can peck the ground and forage. But they are still utterly defenseless. They cannot fly. Even adult quail are vulnerable because they are relatively slow fliers, no match against a hawk. Their best defense is subterfuge: to go under bushes and pretend to be inanimate objects. Babies, like the wandering four, are probably born with this instinct to freeze in place. A quail’s cry is always a message of great urgency.” (Amy Tan/ The Paris Review)