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Promising New Bed Net Strategy To Zap Malaria Parasite In Mosquitoes Progress against malaria has stalled. Now a team is trying a new tactic. Read more on NPR

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos dreams of creating a new space race of humans across our solar system – with a population of one trillion. from FOX News https://ift.tt/2SoUJBr

A mysterious "dark energy event" billions of years ago may have sped up the universe – and could rewrite history as we know it. from FOX News https://ift.tt/2IC52SN

President Trump started a second day of high-stakes talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un by playing down the need for a rapid breakthrough on Pyongyang’s nuclear program. from WSJ.com: What's News US https://ift.tt/2EhFF3y

Everyone involved in the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Wednesday needed a good lawyer. Michael Cohen, the convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and former fixer to Donald Trump, needed a trial lawyer to rein in his mugging for the camera, his tendency to take cheap shots at his detractors, and to remind him of the limits of his own credibility. He needed a stern counselor to elbow him in the ribs, tell him not to bait the politicians even if they deserved it, and to hiss at him stop quibbling over what lobbying for Khazakh banks means, stop it this instant. [ Read: The day Trump lost control over the conversation ] House Democrats needed a good trial lawyer too, to teach them how to handle a morally bankrupt cooperating witness. As a former prosecutor, I know that your tone has to be stern and your questioning methodical. You have to convey to your audience that although the witness is nobody to admire he can still offer useful information. If you’re friendly, the jur...

The key to Donald Trump’s political career has been his ability to keep control of the news conversation. Sometimes that involves positive stories; more often, it involves outrageous or negative ones. But either way, the effect is to keep Trump at the center. The president’s control of the conversation is not absolute. He has sometimes been shoved aside—by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s filings, by authors like Michael Wolff and Bob Woodward, or by natural disasters. But on Wednesday, something different happened: One of his political opponents was able to grasp control of the story. Not only was the man who grabbed the spotlight Michael Cohen, whom Trump has called a “rat.” All the more upsettingly for the president, it happened while he was out of the country, at a summit in Vietnam, and in the middle of the night his time. Throughout the day on Wednesday, Cohen held the media’s attention, and he did it to great effect—creating new problems for Trump on multiple fronts. Most of ...

“ A Racist … A Con Man … A Cheat. ” Those were the words etched in the chyron as Michael Cohen testified. Yet that litany somehow fails to do justice to Cohen’s moral portrait of Donald Trump. At the beginning of this presidency, the great fear was “ normalization .” The shock of Donald Trump’s election, this theory held, would eventually dissipate. Once he sat behind the big desk, surrounded by oil paintings and heavy curtains, he would be bathed in the incantatory power of his office. The nation would absorb the shock of his misogyny , racism, venality, and dangerous vainglory, and then move on. Perhaps the fact that normalization has slipped from discourse is evidence that there was something to this fear. Cohen, unabashedly self-servingly, describes his own time with Trump as a microcosm of this same experience. In his telling, Trump’s morality drags down everyone surrounding him, so that a “good person” like Cohen ends up committing terrible misdeeds. “Lying for Mr. Trump was ...

Michael Cohen’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee was uncontradicted. The former personal attorney of the president of the United States today accused him of a litany of crimes, improprieties, immoralities, and betrayals of national security. And not one Republican member of the committee breathed one word in defense of the leader of their party. Those Republicans have learned the hard way never to trust President Donald Trump’s denials. [ Read: Eight striking moments from Michael Cohen’s testimony ] Did he direct payoffs to a porn star? Trump denied it. It was true . Was the Trump Organization pursuing a hotel project in Moscow while he was running for president? Trump denied it. That was true too. Did his campaign meet with someone claiming to be an agent of the Russian state to seek dirt on Hillary Clinton? Denied. True . Was there fraud at the Trump Foundation? Denied. True . Who wants to be the member of Congress recorded for posterity rejecting Cohen’s testimony ...

Updated at 5:52 p.m. ET on February 27 In his long-awaited testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Michael Cohen summed up his former employer this way: “I know what Mr. Trump is: He is a racist, he is a con man, and he is a cheat.” The comment from President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer was one of many striking moments in Wednesday’s hearing, Cohen’s first public appearance before Congress. His opening statement touched on the Russia investigation, Roger Stone’s connection to WikiLeaks, Cohen’s payoff of the adult-film star Stormy Daniels, and Trump’s very character itself. He also took hours of questions from lawmakers: Democrats focused their inquiries on the president’s conduct while Republicans zeroed in on Cohen’s record of previously lying to Congress. Below, Cohen’s most noteworthy exchanges with members of Congress: 1. Cohen explains what business as usual looks like in Trumpland. Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York: In you...

The only thing that Democrats, Republicans, and Michael Cohen seem to agree on in his appearance before the House Oversight Committee is that Cohen has lied repeatedly in the past. Cohen kicked off the hearing on Wednesday with an explosive series of claims and revelations in his prepared testimony. But in the hours since Cohen finished reading those remarks, the members of the committee have barely wrung any more new information out of him. Democrats have asked Cohen to speculate about Donald Trump, and Cohen has demurred. Republicans, meanwhile, have mostly stuck to reiterating information already in the public record—in Cohen’s guilty pleas and in sentencing memos—in a frenzied effort to defend Trump, Cohen’s boss turned nemesis. The result has been a series of heated exchanges between Cohen and Republican members, as they try to impeach his credibility and criticize Democrats for inviting him to testify. The Republicans have a point: Cohen lied to Congress; he lied to banks ; an...

Over the course of more than 15 years, Andrew Wyeth created 250 secret paintings. He hid them from everyone—including his wife, who was also his business manager—in the loft of a millhouse near his home in rural Pennsylvania. When they were discovered, in 1986, they generated a media frenzy that extended well beyond the art world. The Helga paintings, as they came to be called, all depicted a single subject: Helga Testorf. Testorf opens up about her unique relationship with Wyeth for the first time in Jesse Brass’s moving short documentary, Helga . “Helga is private—very careful with who she talks to and what she says,” Brass told me. Brass’s co-director Bo Bartlett had been a longtime friend of Wyeth’s and connected the filmmaker with Testorf. “When he reached out to me,” Brass recalled, “he said, ‘Helga told me she’s ready to talk.’” In the film, Testorf describes how she felt the first time Wyeth painted her. “Overnight, I was reborn,” she says. “Somebody was really looking at...

What was most revealing about the first day of President Donald Trump’s summit in Vietnam with Kim Jong Un wasn’t the president’s characterization of his private conversation with the North Korean dictator (“Boy, if you could have heard that dialogue, what you would pay for that dialogue”). It wasn’t his refusal to respond to shouted questions about the fact that, back in Washington, D.C., all eyes were on his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was assailing the president’s character and conduct. Instead it was what was left unsaid: As Trump sought to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, enticing his young “ friend ” with visions of a disarmed North Korea as an “ Economic Powerhouse ,” India and Pakistan were trading blows in a case study of what conflict looks like when countries successfully obtain nuclear weapons despite international opposition. The two developments were particularly striking because, as former U.S. officials and experts who have negotiated with Pyongyang ...

Fermentation-powered brewing has been getting people drunk for thousands of years. Soon, it could be getting them high, too. In research announced on Wednesday by the University of California at Berkeley, a team of synthetic biologists modified brewer’s yeast to produce a range of cannabinoids, which are compounds in cannabis that affect the brain and body. The technique opens up the possibility of circumventing the need for large-scale plant cultivation, and the findings could conceivably make high-quality, reasonably priced cannabinoids much more accessible for pharmaceutical development and recreational consumer products. For longtime cannabis advocates, though, this new technology might bring corporate interests one step closer to controlling a market they’re fighting to keep democratic. To brew cannabinoids—the most famous of which are tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol, or THC and CBD—the operation looks much like a traditional brewery, says Jay Keasling, the Berkeley profes...

Better Things has always been a television show that’s interested in the varying indignities and heartbreaks and wounds of being a woman, from the physical (sex, blood, depilation) to the abstract (identity, career, memory). Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon) is a single mother and an actor in Los Angeles, and between those two roles she’s constantly being asked to do the same thing over and over. Say lines. Put on zombie makeup. Appease people. Draw boundaries when they’ve gone too far. The semi-autobiographical-ish FX series, which Adlon co-created with Louis C.K. in 2016, unfolds in dreamy, fragmented interludes, which layer together to form a singular, candid illustration of Adlon’s life—a rich tapestry of shitty experiences that’s somehow beautified by the way she pulls it all together. Never is this exemplified better than in the first episode of the third season, which airs February 28, when Sam goes on a feverish drugstore sweep for her eldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison), who’s startin...

The title of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind , an inspirational true-story film based on a memoir by the Malawian engineer William Kamkwamba, is a bit of a spoiler. This isn’t exactly a complaint, but it’s useful to know going in. As a teenager, Kamkwamba built a wind turbine for his famine-stricken town in Malawi, helping to power small appliances and eventually irrigate crops. But though the film points toward that technological breakthrough, it spends much of its running time depicting its hero’s community and avoids many of the damaging tropes that tend to accompany pop-cultural portrayals of poverty or strife in African countries. This nuanced approach is what makes the movie, out Friday on Netflix, much more engrossing than other such docu-dramas. Chiwetel Ejiofor, an English actor of Nigerian descent, is making his feature debut as a writer and director to draw attention to Kamkwamba’s story—but he’s just as focused on depicting the boy’s family life and the perils of farming i...

Over the past several years, toxic masculinity has become a catchall explanation for male violence and sexism. The appeal of the term, which distinguishes “toxic” traits such aggression and self-entitlement from “healthy” masculinity, has grown to the point where Gillette invoked it last month in a viral advertisement against bullying and sexual harassment. Around the same time, the American Psychological Association introduced new guidelines for therapists working with boys and men, warning that extreme forms of certain “traditional” masculine traits are linked to aggression, misogyny, and negative health outcomes. A predictable conflict has accompanied the term’s rise. Many conservatives allege that charges of toxic masculinity are an attack on manhood itself, at a time when men already face challenges such as higher rates of drug overdose and suicide . Many progressives, meanwhile, contend that the detoxification of masculinity is an essential pathway to gender equality. Amid th...

For several decades, the work of happiness researchers has consistently pointed to an unintuitive conclusion: Having children doesn’t tend to make people happier, and might even make them less happy. “That never made any sense [to me],” says David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth College. If having kids makes people less happy, why do so many people do it? Why would people have more than one child after the supposed misery brought by their first? And most puzzlingly of all, why would evolution produce a disincentive to procreate? Blanchflower has long sought to resolve this mismatch between research and human behavior, and he recently made some headway. In a new working paper , he and his co-author, Andrew Clark of the Paris School of Economics, detailed the importance of a single factor: parents’ financial strain. Subtract the stress of struggling to pay bills from the equation, and the presence of children tends to bring parents happiness. [ Read: ‘Intensive’ parenting is...

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET on February 27 In written testimony ahead of a hearing conducted by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen delivered a series of bombshells that could transform the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Cohen’s testimony , at less than 4,000 words, doesn’t change the fundamental picture so much as fill in essential gaps. Cohen said that Trump was informed of conversations with WikiLeaks about releasing emails related to Hillary Clinton—something the president has denied. Cohen presented a copy of a check reimbursing him for hush money, dated August 2017. While Cohen has already implicated Trump in a violation of campaign-finance law in court pleadings, that check places the crime during Trump’s presidency. Cohen alleged that he lied to Congress at Trump’s direction, though by his own account the direction was implicit. Finally, Cohen claimed that Trump was aware of a meeting at Tr...