Mon: Junk Science Is Sending Grieving Women to Prison

Einstein vs Euler: Two Men Enter. One Man Leaves.

Gravitational distortion of time helps tell modified gravity apart from a dark force

With his theory of General Relativity in 1915, Albert Einstein revolutionized how we think about our universe. Rather than the cosmos simply providing the room for the planets and stars to orbit each other, space and time themselves were now dynamical entities in one ever-evolving play with matter and light.

Einstein’s equations described how stars, galaxies and all other matter curve or warp space and time. The galaxies and the light rays then travel in this distorted space-time according to the equation provided by the 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

With the help of modern telescopes, we can watch this dance and compare it to the choreography scripted by the two giants of science, Einstein and Euler. But can we differentiate a universe where Einstein’s equations were violated from a universe where Euler’s equation were modified? In other words, if what we observed with telescopes disagreed with what Einstein and Euler prescribed, would we be able to tell which one of the two was wrong?

We Got $45 Million ... What?  Nevermind!

Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign reported third-quarter receipts of $24.5 million to the Federal Election Commission on Sunday — a little more than half of the $45.5 million number it bragged about earlier this month.

The discrepancy may suggest that it is becoming more expensive for the coup-attempting former president’s fundraising committee, which sends cash to both his presidential campaign and to a separate entity covering many of his legal bills, to collect donations from his millions of followers.

Meanwhile, In the Real World ...

Biden and the DNC raised $71 million in the third quarter, the president's campaign said, as Democrats grow their war chest heading into 2024.

The groups, and their joint fundraising committees, finished the quarter with $91 million on hand, $14 million more than what they had going into it, the Biden campaign said. That sum came from nearly 500,000 donors.

The campaign also said that 97% of the groups' donations came from small-dollar donors, people giving less than $200 -- matching the same rate as in quarter two. The Biden campaign said the average donation was $40.

I Don't Have Much Sympathy for a Guy Going 35 MPH Over the Limit

AGeorgia man was left reeling after receiving a $1.4-million speeding ticket, but city officials say the figure was just a placeholder, not the actual fine.

Connor Cato told WSAV-TV in Savannah that he received the citation after getting pulled over in September for driving 90 mph in a 55-mph zone.

He called the court thinking the figure was a typo but said he was told that he had either to pay it or appear in court in December.

Savannah officials say anyone caught exceeding the speed limit by more than 35 mph has to appear in court, where a judge will determine the actual fine.

The $1.4-million figure Cato received reflected a “placeholder” that was automatically generated by citation software used by the local Recorder's Court, said Joshua Peacock, a spokesman for Savannah's city government. The actual fine cannot exceed $1,000, plus state-mandated costs.

“We do not issue that placeholder as a threat to scare anybody into court, even if this person heard differently from somebody in our organization,” Peacock told the Associated Press.

He added that the court was “currently working on adjusting the placeholder language to avoid any confusion.”

The Discovery on This Case Could Get Interesting. Steele Could Look Into Financial Ties Between Previous Guy and Russians.

A lawyer for Donald Trump told a London judge Monday that the ex-president plans to prove that a discredited report by a former British spy that contained “shocking and scandalous claims” that he was compromised by Russians in his first bid for the presidency was wrong and harmed his reputation.

Trump has sued the company founded by Christopher Steele, who created a dossier in 2016 that contained rumors and uncorroborated allegations about Trump that erupted in a political storm just before he was inaugurated.

Trump is seeking damages from Orbis Business Intelligence for allegedly violating British data protection laws. Steele's company is seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed during two days of hearings at London's High Court.

Trump is claiming he “suffered personal and reputational damage and distress" because his data protection rights were violated.

Steele, who once ran the Russia desk for the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, was paid by Democrats to compile research that included salacious allegations that Russians could potentially blackmail Trump for activity with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Trump said the dossier was fake news and a political witch hunt.

Tomlinson said it "contained shocking and scandalous claims about the personal conduct of President Trump” and included allegations he paid bribes to Russian officials to further his business interests. Trump's case “is that this personal data is egregiously inaccurate,” he said.

Tomlinson said Trump plans to vindicate himself in court by providing evidence that the report's claims were false.

Orbis wants the lawsuit thrown out because it said the report was never meant to be made public and was published by BuzzFeed without the permission of Steele or Orbis. It also said the claim was filed too late.

Orbis attorney Antony White said Trump has a “deep and intense animus against” Steele and the firm and a “a long history of repeatedly bringing frivolous, meritless and vexatious claims for the purpose of vexing and harassing perceived enemies and others against whom he bears a grudge.”

Trump had called for Steele to be “extradited, tried, and thrown into jail” and has called him a “lowlife” and “sleazebag” involved in the "Russian collusion hoax” who produced “a total phony con job” dossier, White said in a court filing.

In two previous High Court cases, a judge ruled Orbis and Steele were not legally liable for the consequences of the dossier's publication.

Is This the Going to Be a Great Cancer Treatment?

Once we find bacteria that can colonize a tumor, we need to somehow instruct those bacteria to promote the death of the tumor. We’ve gotten a lot better over the past few decades at engineering bacteria to do sophisticated things. And we’ve also gotten a lot better at understanding how the immune system targets things for destruction, and what signals it responds to in order to do that.

The culmination of all of this is starting to bear fruit. In the October 13 issue of Science, Dr. Tal Danino and crew at Columbia University describe how they engineered both a probiotic bacterium and human T cells to team up for tumor destruction.

So what is it that we want bacteria to do once they colonize a tumor? The simple answer would be: Have them produce a poison! Right? But we don’t want something that is deadly to human cells leaking out of the tumor and doing harm to the rest of the body. We’d like to be a bit more sophisticated than that. A better strategy would be to get the bacteria to sound an alarm to the immune system letting it know to come and attack the tumor.

Bacteria can selectively infiltrate solid tumors and clearly mark them as invaders