YOU HAVE TO WATCH NASA'S HIGH-TECH PUMPKINS IN ACTION

TOP OF THE NEWS (HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!):

- You Have to Watch NASA’s High-Tech Pumpkins in Action (Wired)

BUSINESS:

- Google and Facebook contribute zero economic value. That’s a big problem for trade. (WaPo) "To pick just one telling data point, according to the most recent report from Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker, 12 of the 20 most valuable Internet company in the world are U.S. based, with nearly all of the rest coming from China. Other than Apple, none of these companies even existed in 1995, yet they now have a combined market value close to $3 billion. The scale of that success may not make enough of an impression on U.S. policymakers, but our innovation surplus hasn't been lost on some of our largest trading partners, particularly the deeply troubled European Union."

- Twitter earnings: Three top take-aways for those who tweet (WaPo)

ENTERTAINMENT:

- Adam Curtis and the Secret History of Everything (NYT)

HEALTH:

- Future medical breakthroughs may come from an unexpected industry (WaPo) "The technology industry has entered the field of medicine and aims to eliminate disease itself. It may well succeed because of a convergence of exponentially advancing technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, sensors, and genomic sequencing. We’re going to see more medical advances in the next decade than happened in the past century."

- Soylent Says It Will Remake Two of Its Meal Replacers After Customers Became Ill (NYT)

NEWS:

- A Scandal Too Far? Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, and a Test of Loyalty (NYT)

- No Kegs, No Liquor: College Crackdown Targets Drinking and Sexual Assault (NYT)

- Parallel universes, even among the young (WaPo)

- Is Trump Fit For an Intelligence Briefing? (Ozy)

SCIENCE:

- Molten Salt Reactors Could Soon Help Power Earth—And One Day Mars (Wired) "The basic idea is this: The first batch of molten salt is full of a thorium compound, which eventually decays into uranium as neutrons bombard the mixture. That uranium goes into the second batch of molten salt and circulates into the reactor’s graphite-filled core."

SPORTS:

- How Power Hitting Returned in the Post-Steroid Era (Ozy) "They were part of a power season that saw MLB players tag 5,610 home runs, which works out to 1.155 bombs per team per game. For fans raised in our modern long-ball era, that stat may not sound too impressive, but it’s actually second only to the year 2000 for the all-time highest per-game total."

- Unhittable? Aroldis Chapman and His 105-M.P.H. Fastball (NYT) "Of his 26 pitches in the regular season that reached at least 104 m.p.h., just one was a swinging strike. Eleven were balls, 10 were fouled off, two were called strikes, and two were put in play — one for a single by Pittsburgh’s Francisco Cervelli and the other for a groundout by Baltimore’s Ryan Flaherty, who said there was no way to prepare for a pitch that fast."

- No One Is Looking at This Headline (NYT) "It was a few minutes before midnight when Mr. Olympia, the top bodybuilder in the world, finished his workout at a nondescript gym in a tired strip mall. He lifted one of his 22-inch biceps and flipped the light switch, tapped the alarm panel and turned the key to lock the glass front door."

TRAVEL:

- The Golden Age of Havana Is Now (Outside Magazine) "Bad news: everybody but us is already there. Cuba’s 60,000 hotel rooms are booked solid by more than two million tourists each year, mostly Canadians and Europeans who spend their visits at wrist-band beach resorts that have precisely zero correlation to unspoiled anything."

TECHNOLOGY:

- Obama Brought Silicon Valley to Washington (NYT) "In many ways, Obama is America’s first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity. Those efforts were in part led by a founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, who believed in the Illinois senator’s campaign so much that he left the start-up to join Obama’s strategy team. After he was elected, he created a trifecta of executive positions in his administration modeled on corporate best practices: chief technology officer, chief data scientist, chief performance officer."

- We Built a Fake Web Toaster, and It Was Hacked in an Hour (The Atlantic) "I switched on the server at 1:12 p.m. Wednesday, fully expecting to wait days—or weeks—to see a hack attempt. Wrong! The first one came at 1:53 p.m. Matthew Prince, the cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare, said anyone hooking up a poorly secured IP device to the internet can expect to see that gizmo hacked within a week, if not much sooner. 'Assuming it’s publicly accessible, the chance [of being hacked] is probably 100 percent,' he said."

WATCH THIS:

- Red Obsession

- Tesla (PBS American Experience)

BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:

- This flashlight is strong enough to start a fire and cook breakfast (Mashable)

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