LAST UPDATE December 31, 2023

News and information culled from the internet

Big list of Public Domain works rolling into public domain on January 1, 2024 – Duke Law Online

Each year, I create this guide to the works that will be entering the US public domain. This year is especially symbolic because of Mickey Mouse’s long-anticipated entry into the public domain. Each year’s site is a celebration, but once again it is a bittersweet one."

Mickey Mouse heads into public domain on January 1, 2024 – Variety

“There will be some legitimate public domain uses,” Hughes said. “But people will have to be very careful that they don’t trigger a legitimate trademark claim by Disney.”

Magazine rack see enlarged

MEDICAL EQUIPMENT & RISKS

Link to blood cancer seen in study about the effects of CT scans – Eleftherostypos [Greek]

MEDICINE FOOD

Pomegranates found effective in treating opioid addiction

Story at Athens News Agency [in Greek - read with translation]

DEPRESSION

Study demonstrates that inflammation has important link to depression – UPI Press

Research study focused on groups of young people but seems to correspond to basic information about the link also found in adults experiencing depression via "cytokines."

Researchers said that when inflammation happens in the body, proteins called cytokines are released into the blood. Earlier studies have documented that higher amounts of cytokines are tied to depression in adults, but its relationship with young people was unclear.

AI ART

Ranking the "free" AI art engines – Gizmodo

Comparison of image generation with discussion of the programs Artbreeder, ModelScope, Zeroscope, Pixray, Runway TNight Cafe, Shutterstock AI Image Generator, Dream Studio, Hotpot, Runway, Stable Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP, StarryAI, Dall-E Mini, Deep Dream Generator, Dall-E 2, Wombo Dream, Stable Diffusion 2.1, Bing Image Creator, Leonardo AI, CatBird AI.

The article briefly talks about the formerlly free Midjourney AI .

MOON

A colony on the moon in ten years? – Space.com

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is seeking rapid develop of technologies to support the foundation for an integrated lunar infrastructure. The 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) capability study will attempt to unite what the agency sees as isolated efforts within the scientific community in order to produce a diverse technological framework to facilitate activities in space around and on the surface of the moon in the coming decades.

The "race" to get to the moon is accelerating – India landed a craft onto the moon successfully on August 22, and Japan tried, but an altitude miscalculation ran the craft out of fuel and it crashed, destroying the lander on May 25, 2023. Israel also crashed the Bereshit lander onto the moon on April 12, 2019.

Successful moon landings:

The Soviet Union / Russian Luna 9 landed on the moon in 1966.

The United States Apollo mision (11,12,14,15,16 and 17) made successful landings from 1969-1972. There have been other Surveyer missions with moon "soft landings", too.

China's Chang 3 landed in 2013, and Chang 4 also landed, and Chang 5 brought back surface samples.

India on August 22, 2023.

ART

Secrecy, threats and conspiracies at the Orlando Florida Museum of Art

Story at Orlando Sentinel MSN

The museum says [new director] De Groft began acting in opposition to his ethical and fiduciary responsibilities to the museum "almost immediately after being hired" in January 2021. As the Basquiat exhibition started moving forward, OMA staffers were quick to raise questions — especially about the work’s convoluted origin story and the trail of ownership, or provenance, critical to authenticating art.

DC METRO HOME

Need a Home in Northern Virginia/Metro DC? See 1990 Winslow in Woodbridge Virginia

CANCER

The problem of T cell exhaustion/dysfunction in fighting cancer

Story at Medicalxpress

When T-cells go and fight mutating cancer cells, scientists have believed that T cells get "exhausted" which is why remission of cancer may not last long. New research observes that in a very short period of time, 6 to 12 hours, T cells dealing with tumors begin to radically change. The article talks of dysfunctional gene expression patterns in the T cells and that this dysfunction gets imprinted onto more T cells. However, when dealing with inflammation from a virus, etc., the T cell remains aggressively active, and so now the goal is to develop a way to get T Cells to interact with cancer long-term like it does with inflammation.

...our research suggests that T cells in tumors are not necessarily working hard and getting exhausted. Rather, they are blocked right from the start. This is because the negative signals cancer cells send out to their surrounding environment induce T cell dysfunction, and a lack of positive signals like inflammation results in a failure to kick T cells into high gear.

ARMED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

US Air Force experimenting with AI fighter plane pilots

Story at Sandboxx

PLACES

Times Square Live Stream on You Tube

DEMENTIA

Eli Lilly announces study of drug Donanemab slowed the progression of symptoms by 35% over 18 months in participants – MSN UPI Press

BRAINS

Study sees important link of Lipid Omega-3 to health of myelin sheaths which happen to protect nervous systems in body – Technology Networks

This opens up potential avenues to develop therapies and dietary supplements based on LPC omega-3 lipids that might help retain myelin in the ageing brain—and possibly to treat patients with neurological disorders stemming from reduced myelination."

PLACES

White House Live Stream on You Tube

REAL ESTATE

Private Scottish island for sale: $188K

Address: Kirkcudbright DG6 4UD, United Kingdom

Details at United Press Int'l

Downside: electrical power is a bit iffy, to say the least.

Upside: 25 acre island.

RECORDINGS

385K 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings at Archive.org – Archive.org

BUT IS THAT PARTIALLY DIGITAL ONLY?

Public domain collection of the Smithsonian now at 4.5 Million Objects – Kottke

PEOPLE

James Smithson

Origin of the Smithsonian

James Smithson, the English chemist and mineralogist who bequeathed the funds to establish the Smithsonian Institution, was born in 1765 and died on June 27, 1829.

Smithson's reasons for leaving his wealth for this purpose in a land he had never visited has been explained as a reaction by the man to his life experience. A "natural" son to the Duke of Northumberland, he petitioned the Royal Court for the use of his father's name, and it took some time before that was granted. Though Smithson was a respected scientist (and gambler) in Britain, his own career reached it's peak fame only as vice president of the Royal Society. These two events, to bring fame to his name (he is quoted to have stated "My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and Percys are extinct and forgotten"), and to enlarge scientific work in a place not governed by the institutional powers that he found to be inhibiting, are thought to be his rationale for funding a scientific institute in the United States

COSMOLOGY

The New (and Old) Astronautical suits – Business Insider

There's new suits designed for the moon-return project at NASA

The Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit suits, or AxEMUs, will be delivered to NASA by the summer. The dark gray and orange version unveiled in March 2023 is a prototype, and the final version will be white.

LANGUAGES

It is estimated there are 7,000 languages spoken around the globe, though it is considered by experts that there are many languages that are undocumented and some on the brink of extinction.

The Ethnologue database of world languages lists 7,117 living languages in the world. How many people actually speak each language varies from millions of users to just a hundred, or even less: Ainu, an indigenous language spoken primarily by the Ainu people on the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido with an estimate of only a handful of speakers. (Efforts are being made to preserve and revitalize the Ainu language).

In counting the number of languages spoken one must also consider languages that are spoken in multiple dialects. Linguists estimate that between 50 and 90 percent of the world's languages are expected to become extinct in the coming century due to the phenomenon of globalization, with dominant languages (such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc) spreading by being necessary for commercial enterprise, but lesser used languages falling into disuse from those same conditions.

Writing Language

The majority of languages in the world are written from left to right, with the characters or letters appearing in sequence from left to right. This is the case for many of the world's most widely spoken languages, such as English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Russian, etc.

However, there are also several languages that are traditionally written from right to left, with the characters or letters appearing in sequence from right to left. These languages include Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu, etc.

And there are languages that are written vertically, with characters or letters appearing in columns from top to bottom, such as traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

In recent times, many vertical-writing languages have also adopted horizontal writing systems for digital communication or print media. For example, modern Japanese is often written horizontally in electronic media, while traditional vertical writing is still used for many formal documents and publications.

Time to go to Disney World? Goofy 4 Mickey