A Charlie Brown Grinch; Ze Oxford; Macy's Planned Parenthood; Spaghetti Bolognaise to the Rescue!; Venezuela's Currency Yank; Aleppo Falls; Anti-Israel Missiles; Sound Fridge; and Painless Patch

Society

Texas school gets in trouble with [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton over 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' dallasnews

The 6-foot poster causing all the fuss was taped to a door at a middle school and shows Linus, Charlie Brown's best friend, citing Scripture about the birth of Christ. [Luke 2:8-12]

NK's Nuclear ICBM; Russia's Nuclear Drone; Syria Before; Impeached Park; South Seal; Park War; Compromise for Peace; The $10 Viola; The Fake Fake; Companies Go Big on LGBT; 20 Week Ban; India's Lack of Compassion; Quasicrystal; Stopping CRISPR; Replacing People; Chip; Tagged Dementia

North Korea

North Korea Close to Having Nuclear-Armed ICBM: Official defensetech.org

North Korea now has an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, armed with a nuclear warhead capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, but they have yet to solve the “re-entry problem” that would burn up the warhead as it hits the atmosphere, a senior military official said Thursday.

Oldest Alphabet; Metal Attack; The Law of Heatbeats; Unborn Test Extension; Robotic Galago; Light Energy; Predicting Materials; Robot Glove; Shortening Giraffe; Saturn Dive Images; Robo Cop; Hype Over Mind; Unstaffed Bank; Sappy AI Music; and Forcing the Peace Issue

Archeaology

Expert claims inscriptions from Egyptian exodus proves Hebrew is world’s oldest alphabet jpost

While critics argue that the original alphabet likely derived from a grouping of Afro-Asiatic languages – including Akkadian, Aramaic, Phoenician, Ethiopic and Hebrew – [professor] Petrovich claims that an inscription discovered on an ancient Egyptian stone slab in 2012 proves his case.

Petrovich said he subsequently translated 16 more Hebrew inscriptions from four other ancient slabs discovered in Egypt and Sinai, including one from 1446 BCE, which describes Moses as a figure heralded by the ancient Jews shortly before he led the exodus from Egypt.

Pentagon's Wasted $125 B; Hate Speech Pull; Augmented Peep; Drop, Shop, and Roll; Try This and Call Me in the Morning; Growing Clusters; Jacob's Sheep Return; Burqa Merkel; and Syrian Truce Vetoed

Government

Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste washingtonpost

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

Baptist Unity; Shanty Embassy; Philippines Split; Anti-EU Italy; Austria's Right; Russian Crash; Uber Buys into AI; and Emotional Car

Apostasy

British Baptists Issue Call For Unity Over Same-Sex Marriage christiantoday

An introduction on The Courage to be Baptist website says: "This Baptist way of being church allows us to maintain unity even when we disagree about certain issues. We believe this is a gift of God, allowing us to witness to our true unity in Christ even when we disagree about serious matters."

Thought Monitor; Gilead Balm; Cleansing in South Sudan; Gambia's Defeat; Fly Me to Moon; and the Gig Economy

Brain

Fast fMRI tracks brain activity during human thought for first time medicalxpress t

By significantly increasing the speed of functional MRI (fMRI), researchers funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) nibib.nih.gov have been able to image rapidly fluctuating brain activity during human thought. fMRI measures changes in blood oxygenation, which were previously thought to be too slow to detect the subtle neuronal activity associated with higher order brain functions. The new discovery that fast fMRI can detect rapid brain oscillations is a significant step towards realizing a central goal of neuroscience research: mapping the brain networks responsible for human cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and awareness.

...standard fMRI can only detect the blood flow coming to replenish an area of the brain several seconds after it has performed a function. It was generally accepted that this was the limit of what could be detected by fMRI—identification of a region in the brain that had responded to a large stimulus, such as a continuous 30 second "blast" of bright light.

Things Change Periodically; Building a Memory Catcher; Parental Group; Fat Bankers; UK Tries to Tango with Three; LGBT Goes to the UN; Working the Gender; Colombia's Peace; Globalist Fear: Italy's Nationalist Turn; More Power for Erdogan; And No Hollande in France

Science

It's official: Your Periodic Table is now obsolete sciencealert

Get ready to ring in 2017 with a brand new Periodic Table iupac.org, because four more elements have officially been added to the seventh row: nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og).

Also see Periodic table expands with elements named after Japan, Moscow, Tennessee phys.org