Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Sign language:
• Remembering 18 politically engaged people who died in 2015.
• Two rare bees on the verge of federal protection:
When most Americans think about bees, they think about the honeybee — a European immigrant. But almost all of the 4,000 species of bees native to North America are ignored by Americans. Some of them are pretty quirky. Take the blue Calamintha bee, which collects pollen on its head, or the rusty patched bumblebee, which has figured out how to bite into the back of a flower when it wants to claim a tasty nectar treat without helping the flower reproduce. But advocacy groups fear both of these bees may be on the brink of extinction — and now, the U.S. government is considering protecting both bees as endangered species.
• Doctors use Google Cardboard to save a life:
Four-month-old Teegan Lexcen was born in Minnesota with a small, malformed heart, no left lung, and the faintest chance of seeing her first Christmas. Now she's recovering after open-heart surgery at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami, Florida, where a team of enterprising doctors used a smartphone and Google's Cardboard VR headset to peer into her chest and save her life.
Tackling such a delicate operation would've been harrowing even if the patient were an adult, but Teegan's situation was made trickier by her fragile frame. A successful surgery would have required an astute understanding of the shape her tiny heart was in, and 2D MRI scans could only tell part of the story. The answer? Dr. Juan-Carlos Muniz, head of Nicklaus Children's MRI department, converted those 2D scans into stereoscopic images, loaded them onto an iPhone and stuck it inside Google Cardboard for his colleague, cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Redmond Burke to peek at. The experience, Burke told UploadVR, was like "standing in the operating room" two weeks prior to surgery.
• Dean Skelos, convicted former leader of the New York state Senate, will collect $95,000 pension.
• Media Matters—The 15 most ridiculous things conservative media said on climate change in 2015:
From Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, to the establishment of the first-ever federal limits on carbon pollution from power plants, to a landmark international climate agreement, 2015 has been full of major landmarks in national and global efforts to address global warming. Yet you wouldn't know it if you inhabited the parallel universe of the conservative media, where media figures went to ridiculous and outrageous lengths to dismiss or deny climate science, attack the pope, scientists, and anyone else concerned with climate change, and defend polluting fossil fuel companies.
• American Indian graphic novel makes list of year’s best:
The stereotype-smashing graphic novel Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection (AH Comics, 2015) has been anointed, taking its place on the School Library Journal’s prestigious Best Books list for 2015.
It was chosen for its ability not just to entertain, but also enlighten.
“Moonshot is a wonderful teaching tool,” said Pamela Vanderberg, Métis, Native Studies teacher at East Northumberland Secondary School, in Brighton, Ontario. “We need more up-to-date resources like this.”
The dark web continues to spread, but still in 2015 not a day goes by without a sensationalist article screaming about the horrors of a space apparently beyond the reach of investigators, where the most depraved parts of humanity reside.
The truth, naturally, is a lot more nuanced. While illicit marketplaces continue to garner attention, this year the dark web has also entered into another stage and gained recognition as a tool with legitimate purposes too
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up 2016 news. Luntz happy to profit from the Trumpster fire. Christie has more plane troubles. Adelson’s fake journo. Joan McCarter on next pointless Congressional session, the nutter caucus for Cruz, and Idaho’s NYE potato drop!
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