Brittney Griner's freedom ultimately hinged on the release of a convicted Russian arms dealer whose life story inspired a Hollywood film.

    Expect volatility as supply constraints mean central banks won't be able to pivot as soon as investors would like.

    27-year-old Jarrett Fields is originally from Graves County, but deputies believe he could be in the Paducah area. According to the release, he is wanted on a felony warrant, bench warrant, and parole violation warrant.

    It seems like you can't go anywhere these days without colliding headfirst into another ominous prediction of imminent recession. CEOs, portfolio managers, politicians, news pundits, second cousins and even Cardi B are sounding the alarm: Hear ye! Hear ye! Economic downturn awaits all who dare enter 2023!

    Paul Whelan ain't happy that he's still behind bars in Russia ... saying Thursday he's "disappointed" with Joe Biden and his administration after he wasn't included in the Brittney Griner deal. Whelan spoke with CNN from a penal colony in Russia…

    Kanye West has lost friends, business deals and billions of dollars for his hatred, and now he can add losing an honorary college degree to his woes ... cause the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has taken it away. According to a school…

    Courtney Clenney, the OnlyFans model accused of murdering her boyfriend, has been denied bond ... mostly because the court doesn't buy her claim that she killed him in self-defense. According to legal docs, obtained by TMZ, a Florida judge isn't…

    Kanye West has lost friends, business deals and billions of dollars for his hatred, and now he can add losing an honorary college degree to his woes ... cause the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has taken it away. According to a school…

    Paul Whelan ain't happy that he's still behind bars in Russia ... saying Thursday he's "disappointed" with Joe Biden and his administration after he wasn't included in the Brittney Griner deal. Whelan spoke with CNN from a penal colony in Russia…

    Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter is being sued for sexual battery, after an alleged incident with a minor back in 2001 ... an incident our Carter sources say is totally false. According to legal docs, obtained by TMZ, Shannon Ruth -- who says she…

    A House committee report criticized the Washington Commanders, as well as the National Football League as a whole

    'We would be in a much different position if we'd bought office buildings or enclosed shopping malls,' says BlackStone's Jonathan Gray on Thursday, in defense of withdrawal limits on the $69 billion BREIT fund.

    Gold notches a third straight gain on Thursday, with prices settling back above $1,800 an ounce for the first time in four sessions.

    U.S. stocks advance on Thursday as the S&P 500 attempted to end a five-day losing streak, after weekly data showed continuing jobless-benefit claims rose to the highest levels since February, suggesting economic growth may be slowing and inflation moderating ahead of next week's Federal Reserve policy meeting.

    Meta is facing a showdown in court over its attempt to buy VR fitness app maker Within.

    Seven tornado survivors and three victims' estates have filed a new lawsuit against Mayfield Consumer Products, where nine people died in the tragic December 10 tornado of 2021.

    27-year-old Jarrett Fields is originally from Graves County, but deputies believe he could be in the Paducah area. According to the release, he is wanted on a felony warrant, bench warrant, and parole violation warrant.

    We are over halfway to our goal of collecting 8,000 Christmas gifts for children and teens in our region. Can you help us reach it in 7 days?

    Over 5,000 Christmas gifts have been collected for children and teens in our Local 6 Spirit of Giving Toy Drive. Can you help us reach 8,000 by Dec. 16?

    Former Judge Jamie Jameson has filed a lawsuit against his election opponent Andrea Moore following his loss in the 2022 general election, asking for the election to be voided on the grounds that Moore engaged in "unfair, untrue, and misleading…

    An interview of Dr. Paul Hertz, a senior leader in the Science Mission DirectorateBy: Anna Ladd McElhannon, Summer 2022 Intern, Office of the Chief ScientistDr. Paul Hertz is a leader of NASA and had served as the Astrophysics Division Director since 2012 until 2022. Throughout his career, he remained a well‐respected and admired leader who accomplished things that an undergraduate physics student like me could only dream of.  We met for the first time on a summer day full of sudden, fierce storms. On the way to a quiet meeting place (a video conference meeting, of course), the previously blue sky started pouring rain. I was surprised my laptop still worked when I finally came indoors. Paul, though, was sitting in his home office with a grin on his face, perfectly content to ignore my soaking shirt and dripping hair.  “I was going to have balance, and I wasn’t going to be a world‐famous scientist.” Considering what I had been told, his easygoing kindness and immediate friendliness was no surprise.  We started by bonding over our shared love for all things astrophysics. His passion began during the Apollo missions.  “I remember John Glenn’s flight, and I must have been in second grade. From that point on, I was following everything that happened.” He would watch all the astronauts on TV, and he kept a scrapbook of any newspaper clippings he could find on the space program. “I remember when Armstrong walked and, my parents used to let me stay home from school whenever the astronauts were walking on the Moon.”His passion for space did not end there. With undergraduate degrees in math and physics from MIT, he proceeded to earn his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard. Like most students going into the sciences, he assumed he would become a professor at a university. He realized, though, that professorship wasn’t the life for him. “I made a choice early on when I had young kids and a family, that I was going to have balance, and I wasn’t going to be a world‐famous scientist.”  As a NASA intern interviewing the Paul Hertz, one of my newfound idols, I found this comment amusing. But the sentiment still stood. “I made the choice not to be a professor but to stay as a government scientist.”Somehow, though, he was able to become a famous scientist with a prestigious job and still feel satisfied with his personal life. Naturally, I asked him for advice on how to obtain this sort of balance without letting either side of one’s life fall onto the backburner.  He jumped at the opportunity to teach me these life lessons with a list of six rules he titled: How to Survive in a Government Organization.6. Train your successorWhen he first told me this rule, I applied it to my life. At my university, there is a Society of Physics Students. Every few years or so, we have incredible leadership that wins awards and involves students all over campus. Then the next election rolls around, and all the hard work dissipates. Paul says, "There's all your institutional knowledge walking out the door every year."  “Train your successor” immediately propelled me into planning mode: how can we incorporate a system at my school where the previous leaders sufficiently train their successors every year?Paul was happy about this application, but it wasn't what he originally intended by the rule.  "What I was thinking is that when people who are highly successful at their job start talking about getting another job, their boss says, 'Sorry, you can't go. I need you too badly.'"As someone who has never worked in a similar system, I was appalled. Fortunately, this has not yet happened to him."I have been very successful in every job. I've had people around me say, 'What are we going to do without you?... Nobody can replace you.' I hate hearing that nobody can replace you because it’s patently untrue."“Sometimes it turns out that the answer to your research is uninteresting. You realize, oh my‐ there was no ‘there’ there.”5. Delegate“A lot of us competent people think that we can do it better than anybody else. And so we want to hold on to it and do it ourselves because we know it'll be done best… I used to do everything myself, and I was bad at teaming. You'll kill yourself that way.”As the Director of Astrophysics at NASA, I assumed he would have to be the best of the best. Regardless, as he said before, there is always someone who could replace him. While this sounds a little sad, it can come as a relief to someone trying to find peace in their work life.“People like that want to do the part of their job that they could easily hand off. They are overworked and overwhelmed because they want to do it all themselves. They think they can probably do it better— but that’s not the point.”As Paul says, the point is to do your job efficiently and not perfectly.  4.  Don't Make Work“A lot of times you get choices.” He began, “We could do it this way or that way, and this way is a lot more work.”  Most bosses strive for perfection, but Paul understands how to balance perfection with importance. Asking, “How do I do it perfectly?” can cause problems and lead to employees feeling overworked.[They say] ‘I’m just drowning.’  [I say] ‘You only have three assignments. You’re making too much work, you’re not delegating, and it’s taking twice as long. Don’t do it this way.’Paul believes that if you can make your project better by a small amount, but it takes twice the time, the extra mile just isn’t worth it.  “If it increased my chance of surviving surgery, then I would take that extra 10%.”  If you’re level of perfection is plateauing over time, as it inevitably will, just accept it.“If you insist on perfection… that’s making work.”3. Don’t break it“Don’t break it” was one of the first rules he came up with. It simply means “don’t make it worse.”It goes hand in hand with “Don’t make work.” Sometimes people can be perfectionists to the point where it impacts their personal life, and sometimes it can impact their professional career as well. That is the secret to finding balance.“People feel overwhelmed because they’re not practicing these rules… You keep them in mind and then you use them to help prioritize. You must have a feel for what’s the most important thing and then for what’s the most important thing to do very, very well.”2. Don't Take It Personally“You should accept 90% of your projects are going to work.” He asserts, “You should not expect it to always go right. And you should keep it in context when failure happens.”  That raises the question: what context?It is difficult to imagine someone as successful as Paul to go through failure. But he has had his fair share of rough times in his own research. “Sometimes it turns out that the answer to your research is uninteresting. You realize, oh my ‐there was no ‘there’ there.”Even when projects are cancelled, or someone else publishes their results before you can, your time isn’t waisted. There is a certain magic that comes with conducting scientific research, and it makes even failed projects worth the time and effort. “To me, the excitement is the hunt. It’s doing the research. It’s collecting the data and analyzing it. It’s looking for the signal that no one has ever seen before.”“…if something goes wrong, I’m going to hear about it. I want to hear about it from them—I want to hear their view on it and I want us to solve it together.”1. Don’t Surprise the Boss“Somebody probably told me this rule when I showed up at NASA. You can Google it and find out that it was a rule back in the Roman Empire—or something like that.”When asked how long he has considered himself a leader, he began at high school. “Every club that I joined, I ended up being president… I ended up being added to the yearbook. When I went to college, I was president of clubs. When I was a researcher, I put together collaborations to do research… I wasn’t a supervisor or boss, but I was a leader; that’s been true at all stops along my career.”As for the importance of the number one rule, Paul says it’s important to be transparent so that issues can be solved quickly and efficiently. “I don’t want my team to sugarcoat things. I want them to tell me. If something goes wrong, I’m going to hear about it from someone. But, I want to hear about it from them—I want to hear their view on it, and I want us to solve it together.”News Article Type: Homepage ArticlesPublished: Thursday, December 8, 2022 - 12:14

    Portal origin URL: NASA’s Retired SOFIA Aircraft Finds New Home at Arizona MuseumPortal origin nid: 484510Published: Thursday, December 8, 2022 - 12:00Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: NASA’s now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) aircraft will find a permanent home in the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. The airplane is expected to make its final flight from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, to Tucson on Tuesday, Dec. 13.Portal image: sofia

    Portal origin URL: NASA’s Webb Indicates Several Stars ‘Stirred Up’ Southern Ring NebulaPortal origin nid: 484461Published: Thursday, December 8, 2022 - 11:00Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: Some of the first data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has shown there were at least two, and possibly three, more unseen stars that crafted the oblong, curvy shapes of the Southern Ring Nebula.Portal image: An image of the Southern Ring Nebula. The image shows one star at the center, a large translucent pink-and-red irregular oval, and wavy patterns that extend all around the edges.

    Portal origin URL: Hubble Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar SystemPortal origin nid: 484456Published: Thursday, December 8, 2022 - 10:00Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: Astronomers sorted through 200,000 Hubble images and made tens of thousands of measurements on them to look for any residual background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called SKYSURF.Portal image: Yellow Sun at center. Ovals denoting the orbits of the planets -- specifically Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the Kuiper Belt -- surround the Sun. A bright-white cloud of dust surrounds the Sun.

    Mizuna plants growing from a seed (A) to a seedling (B, on ISS) in a ground environmental chamber (C) or within an ISS Veggie unit (D).After 908 days in low Earth orbit, a small package on board the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-6 has come home to the delight of some biological scientists. Soon they will open an aluminum alloy container that holds samples of plant seeds that they hope can be used to sustain astronauts on long duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.Officially, it is known as a SEER experiment, short for Space Environment Exposure Research, a pathfinder mission supported by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division (BPS) in collaboration with the US Air Force.Unofficially, they’re referred to as the “Thrive in Space” experiments – a way to underscore the stepping-stone research that scientists are undertaking to help advance their fundamental understanding of what it takes to grow and protect plants beyond our planet.Space Biology Scientists Dr. Ye Zhang and Dr. Howard Levine, with NASA’s BPS Division, will advise a team of researchers who will begin to study these seeds shortly after their arrival.Q: What kinds of plant seeds did you send into orbit?Zhang: “We chose seeds from 12 plant species or subspecies, including thale cress and purple false brome, which will serve as model organisms. For crops, there were seeds from mizuna mustard, pak choi, lettuce, tomato, radish, chili pepper, Swiss chard, onions, dwarf rice, dwarf wheat, and cucumber.”Q: Many of those plant seeds have already been germinated, grown, and studied on board the International Space Station. What new information are you trying to get from this mission?Zhang: “We want to see what happens to these seeds after they’re exposed to a variety of space radiation over a long period of time. As a basis of comparison, we’ve examined how seeds react to high levels of radiation; we’ve conducted a number of seed experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory where we’ve observed how they change behaviors as a result of being subjected to controlled radiation exposure. And, we’ve seen how they react to a lower radiation dose for a limited time on board the space station. But we’ve never subjected them to the multiple types of space radiation bombardment that you’ll find in space over a long period of time. Remember, when we have a round trip to Mars, we’ll be traveling for two or maybe three years, so we want to determine how long these seeds can be stored and still be viable.”Q: What are the challenges to growing Is crops in space?Levine: “The biggest challenge is the room you need to grow these edibles. Just to give you a general number, it would take about 50 square meters of soil to provide enough food for one person. So, as we transport our crew members to Mars, the plants we grow will provide them with a token amount of their nutritional needs. That said, there’s an often overlooked or minimized aspect to growing plants in space and that’s the psychological benefit to our crew members; they’ve often told us when they’re able to take care of the plants on board the space station, they really appreciate it as gives them a remembrance of what it’s like on Earth.Also remember, you don’t just grow plants for food: They also suck up carbon dioxide which we normally have to do by chemical means. Plants purify the water that’s passed through them. Oh, and by the way, they also produce oxygen.”Q: Are there any potential benefits from your experiments that could benefit current horticultural methods on Earth?Levine: “We’re now in what we call the ‘omics’ era, where we look at how genes are differentially expressed under microgravity conditions and eventually under partial gravity. We’re learning about which genes are turned on more, or less, or the same amount as they are on Earth. And all that has great implications for the metabolism and physiology of the plants. That can be very enlightening for horticultural applications on Earth.”Q: To sum up, what are the top things you’d like researchers to know about your seed radiation experiments?Zhang: “First, we’re working on deep-space crop production capabilities, and that includes testing space exposure impact. Second, we may be able to share some of these seeds with the science community. Certainly, the data we collect from our experiments will be transparent for anyone to see. But, in certain circumstances, I’m hoping we’ll be able to share the actual seeds with other researchers to further our knowledge about growing seeds in inhospitable or extreme conditions.”Levine: “Once the seeds return, there are three primary areas we’ll want to explore. First is germination; the beginning of growth. We want to know if there’s a reduced germination percentage of the seeds that have spent many long months being bombarded with higher levels of radiation compared to our ground control experiments. Next is the morphology – the seed’s form and structure. Once we get seedlings, we want to see how they differ from the ground control group. We’ve already radiated seeds at our Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island and have seen a number that developed mutations, so we’ll be looking for that from our seeds exposed to spaceflight conditions for a prolonged interval. Third, we’ll be conducting ‘omics’ analyses of the seedling tissues obtained from the germinated seeds, to see which plant genes may have been under expressed or overexpressed.”Planning for Future MissionsWhen this small container of seeds returns, the first SEER experiment will increase our knowledge about the impact of space radiation, one of the major risks associated with crop production.  By developing ways to mitigate this risk, scientists will enable plants to “Thrive in Space”, a critical undertaking for the success of future interplanetary missions and establishing permanently inhabited bases.Stay informed on other exciting BPS research initiatives at: https://science.nasa.gov/biological-physicalNews Article Type: Homepage ArticlesPublished: Wednesday, December 7, 2022 - 12:33

    Penguins defenseman Kris Letang returned to practice just 10 days after suffering the second stroke of his career.

    We bring you one key factor and one player to know ahead of the matchups, plus predictions.

    Real Madrid have agreed a deal to sign Brazilian wonderkid Endrick on a five-year contract from Palmeiras, sources have told ESPN.

    The Los Angeles Dodgers have signed former All-Star Jason Heyward to a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training.

    Former Cowboys coach Jason Garrett and Sacramento State coach Troy Taylor are among the finalists for the Stanford job, sources told ESPN.

    Thousands of previously banned Twitter users, including members of the far-right and users sharing blatant misinformation, have begun to have their accounts restored to the platform, according to an independent analysis.

    Some 300 quality assurance workers at Microsoft-owned gaming studio ZeniMax are in the process of voting to form what would be the first union at the tech giant, organizers confirmed to CNN Business.

    Amazon faces a new lawsuit from the attorney general of Washington, D.C. that alleges the e-commerce giant used customer tips meant for delivery drivers to reduce what it owed in driver wages.

    A movement toward greater use of telemedicine is widening the spectrum of care doctors can provide from afar and enabling more outsourcing of services overseas.-The Washington Post

    The mouse clicked in Indiana, but the gun that fired the shot heard 'round the Internet sits on a game preserve in Texas. Now, 14 states and an influential congressman want to ban online hunting. -Robert MacMillan

    Brittney Griner's release followed months of negotiations between the Biden administration and Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime.     

    The exoplanet 55 Cancri e goes by several names, but the rocky world located 40 light-years from Earth is most known for its reputation as a "hell planet."

    Peru's new President Dina Boluarte ruled out early elections on Thursday, her first day in office following the dramatic ousting and arrest of her predecessor Pedro Castillo.

    WNBA star Brittney Griner on Thursday was freed from Russian detention after a prisoner exchange for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout.

    Netflix's "Harry & Meghan" documentary sheds light on the origins of the couples' relationship, including when Harry first laid eyes on Meghan.     

    A must-pass defense bill now being negotiated in Congress includes new sanctions designed to trip up Russia's war machine by targeting Moscow's mountain of gold.

    In the darkest moments of her toughest training sessions, professional marathon runner Mary Ngugi likes to lean on her trackside audience for motivation.

    Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting Saudi Arabia this week for the first time in nearly seven years, during which he is expected to sign billions of dollars of deals with the world's largest oil exporter and meet leaders from across the Middle East.

    Indonesia has released on parole Umar Patek, a bomb maker in the deadly 2002 Bali attacks, the Ministry of Law and Human Rights said on Wednesday.

    The UK has greenlit a controversial plan to open the country's first new coal mine in three decades, a little more than a year after the nation tried to convince the world to ditch coal at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow.