A POX ON CHICKENS: Doctor Discovers Mysterious Chicken Virus That May Cause Obesity.

ANDREW MALCOLM: Mysterious missives to distant strangers.

In an age of instant communications, we get annoyed if we must wait 30 minutes for a reply. I’m still awaiting replies to messages I launched decades ago – in bottles.

One day around 1950 on a ferry far off the New England coast, my father suggested we write a note, slip it into a bottle and toss it into the North Atlantic to see what might happen.

That was the first of many times we did that. We called it “doing a bottle.” It became an avocation I continue to this day.

Back at home after a bedtime story, Dad would reach to turn off the light. Just before darkness captured my room, he’d say, “I wonder where our bottle is tonight?”

Do yourself a favor and read the whole, lovely thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to open a Champagne bottle with a steak knife.

This is particularly useful for those belonging to the non-saber-owning community.

GOOD ADVICE FOR MOMS: Cut Yourself Some Slack. Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions.

Unless it’s a resolution to open a bottle of red and watch Bad Moms, which was by no means great, but cuter and more entertaining than my wife or I expected.

THE YEAR IN PREVIEW: All the Biggest Space News to Look Forward to in 2017.

AIR SAFETY: Pilot fired in Indonesia after alleged attempt to fly drunk.

EXERCIZE: Mouse Study Hints at Why Obese People Struggle to Exercise.

“There’s a common belief that obese animals don’t move as much because carrying extra body weight is physically disabling. But our findings suggest that assumption doesn’t explain the whole story,” Kravitz said.

Kravitz has theorized that the brain chemical dopamine is key to inactivity in mice.

“Other studies have connected dopamine signaling defects to obesity, but most of them have looked at reward processing — how animals feel when they eat different foods,” Kravitz said.

“We looked at something simpler: Dopamine is critical for movement, and obesity is associated with a lack of movement,” he said. His team wondered if problems with dopamine signaling alone could explain the inactivity.

For the study, researchers fed normal and high-fat diets to mice. The mice on the high-fat plan put on weight and slowed down. But they slowed down before adding pounds, raising questions about why things happened in that order.

One possible answer: The researchers found that the obese and slow-moving mice had less of a “receptor” that processes dopamine.

Further research suggested that weight gain was compounded by their inactivity.

That’s a nasty catch-22 to overcome, a natural tendency towards inactivity triggering a weight gain which causes even less activity.

HEALTH: One Breath Into This Breathalyzer Can Diagnose 17 Diseases.

Researchers invited about 1,400 people from five different countries to breathe into the device, which is still in its testing phases. The breathalyzer could identify each person’s disease with 86 percent accuracy, the researchers said.

The technology works because “each disease has its own unique breathprint,” the researchers wrote in the study.

The breathalyzer analyzes microscopic compounds — called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — to detect each condition. Testing for VOCs isn’t a new approach; in 400 B.C., physicians learned that smelling a patient’s bodily emissions could help with diagnoses. For instance, doctors used to smell the stools and urine of infant noblemen daily, the researchers said.

But while excrement and other bodily substances, such as blood, contain VOCs, examining exhaled breath is the cheapest, easiest and least invasive way to test for the compounds, the researchers said.

Get the regulators out of the way so that these things are both affordable and available over the counter, and bundle them with a free mobile app which can share data with your healthcare provider.

MARK STEYN: License to Dye.

Let’s just run that again: In Illinois, if you don’t do your domestic-abuse training course every two years, you’ll lose your hairdressing license – and your livelihood.

As I write in After America, in the Fifties one in 20 members of the workforce needed government permission to do his job. Now it’s one in three. The original justification for requiring a government permit to cut another person’s hair is that a salon contains potentially dangerous chemicals such as coloring products. Making the license conditional upon acing sexual-assault training courses is not just the usual Big Government expansion but the transformation of the relationship between a private business and the state:

The rule was inspired by the spirit of camaraderie in hair salons, said State Senator Bill Cunningham, one of the chief sponsors of the amendment. For some women, those salons are a safe space, where they can sit among other women, drop their guard and confide about life as their hair is braided or colored, or their nails trimmed and painted….

As Ann Althouse comments:

So, it’s a great place for government to plant informants…

Just so. Just as the Stasi turned neighbors and relatives into spies, the State of Illinois is making your stylist one.

Read the whole thing.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Obama to huddle with Hill Democrats on saving Obamacare.

President Barack Obama will head to Capitol Hill Wednesday to meet with congressional Democrats about how to shield Obamacare from Republican efforts to dismantle it, a Capitol Hill source told Politico.

But:

Still, if the pillars of Obamacare are successfully dismantled, moderate Democrats — particularly those senators up for reelection in 2018 — could come under considerable pressure to help Republicans replace the law and are already openly entertaining that option.

And here’s the big but:

Democrats reeling from a devastating election face a daunting task: the 2018 Senate map.

It favors Republicans in a big way. The GOP will be defending just eight seats, while Democrats must fight for 23 — plus another two held by independents who caucus with Democrats.

What’s worse is the fact that many of the seats they must defend are in states won by Republican Donald Trump.

If Democrat Senators Bill Nelson (FL), Joe Donnelly (IN), Claire McCaskill (MO), Jon Tester (MT), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Sherrod Brown (OH), Bob Casey (PA), Joe Manchin (WV), and Tammy Baldwin (WI) are smart, they’ll pay better attention to their constituents next year, than Senate Democrats did in 2009 before voting for ObamaCare.

FLAILING: Twitter Seeks a Little Help From Its Users.

Twitter Inc., in the midst of an identity crisis, has turned outward to its millions of users for ideas.

Over more than six hours Thursday, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey tweeted with users about what they hope to see from the social-media service, opening the discussion with, “What’s the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?”

Users came back with thousands of replies. Mr. Dorsey responded to some of the concerns expressed, shedding light on the company’s plans and underscoring his promise last week to play a more active role in engineering and design decisions at Twitter.

Twitter’s most immediate problem is cultural, not technological. The company could start to clean up its corporate culture by firing Dorsey and disbanding the Orwellian “Trust & Safety Council.”

SO IT’S COME TO THIS: At Lawmaker’s Behest, Painting of Cops as Pigs Graces U.S. Capitol.

The congressman in question is Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO).

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Amazon’s patent for a flying warehouse.

An Amazon patent available through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office details plans to create an “airborne fulfillment center.” Basically, a flying warehouse. According to CNBC, Amazon was awarded the patent on the fulfillment center in April.

The patent says the warehouse could remain at a high altitude, and drones “with ordered items may be deployed from the AFC to deliver ordered items to user designated delivery locations.”

The patent also says shuttles could deliver more inventory to the warehouse, as well as transport employees.

Drones and airdrops would be nice, but if you want real speed, you’ll have to wait for ballistic deliveries.

CHECKMATE:

Good, but as with so much else, better years ago. Any Obama statue should read "too little, too late". https://t.co/okX5zc9Td0

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) December 29, 2016

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Obama Finally Wakes Up to Join the SpyWar at the 11th Hour. Well, when it was just a threat to America, Russian spying was no big deal. But now that it might be a threat to the Democrats, well, that’s serious.

ALL LIVES MATTER: Ambushes in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and other shootings around the country led to a sharp increase in the number of police killed in the line of duty this year.

EMERGING? The left’s emerging ‘fake news’ problem.

Last week, many news organizations published stories about a man who claimed he was kicked off a Delta Air Lines flight solely because his speaking Arabic made other passengers uncomfortable. The story went viral.

Many outlets, however, negated to note an important fact: The individual in question was a YouTube prankster known for pulling similar viral stunts. Only after the prankster’s claims were disseminated across all corners of the internet did his past enter the picture in a meaningful way. Delta eventually denied his claim.

In recent days, such incidents have caused some observers to scrutinize those on the left.

“It baffles me how anyone on the left combatting ‘fake news’ can turn a blind eye to the clickbaiting within its own ranks,” CNN host Jake Tapper tweeted toward the end of last week. “HEAL THYSELF.”

And it wasn’t just Tapper. Some on the left also expressed concern with the trend of false stories being circulated in their political sphere.

If so, that would be a welcome change from pushing “fake but accurate” stories which fit the progressive narrative far better than they describe reality.

QUESTION ASKED: How should blockchain be regulated?

This month, the Federal Reserve joined a long list of government institutions across the world in releasing its views on blockchain. This distributed ledger technology, which underpins the well-known and controversial bitcoin cryptocurrency, is essentially a recordkeeping system that can replace a periodically-updated central database—a design that underlies most financial systems used today—with a clever distributed database that updates in near real time.
…
Yet regulators have struggled to strike a suitable posture in response to blockchain developments. On one hand, there is nothing yet to regulate, with no known commercial-scale financial blockchain applications. On the other hand, it is still unclear why or how regulation should change in anticipation of technological development.

Do you care to imagine the state of software today if in 1979 “the Federal Reserve joined a long list of government institutions across the world” seeking to regulate VisiCalc?

BRUTAL: Ralph Peters Sums Up Obama’s Mideast Policy in Six Words.

EIGHT YEARS DISTILLED DOWN TO 140 CHARACTERS OR LESS:

Barack Obama is a smart man who's been educated in our finest universities to a high level in things which are simply not true, indeed false

— John Schindler (@20committee) December 30, 2016

OUCH: Britain, edging towards Trump, scolds Kerry over Israel.

In an unusually sharp public rebuke of Obama’s top diplomat, [Prime Minister Theresa] May’s spokesman said that Israel had coped for too long with the threat of terrorism and that focusing only on the settlements was not the best way to achieve peace between Jew and Arab.

London also took particular issue with Kerry’s description of Netanyahu’s coalition as “the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements.”

“We do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically-elected government of an ally,” May’s spokesman said when asked about Kerry 70-minute speech in the State Department’s auditorium.

That’s been a hallmark of this administration.

UPDATE: Australia, too.

JAYVEE: Child Jihadists Hunt Down, Execute Bound Prisoners in New ISIS Video.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s Not the Settlements, Stupid.

Rick Richman:

Here is how [White House deputy national security advisor Ben] Rhodes quantified the administration’s “grave concerns”:

[S]ince 2009, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has increased by more than 100,000 to nearly 400,000. … There are now nearly 900,000 — I’m sorry, 90,000 settlers living east of the separation barrier that was created by Israel itself. And the population of these distant settlements has grown by 20,000 since 2009.

The figure of 100,000 sounds significant until you realize that 80 percent of it has been in the settlement blocs “everyone knows” Israel will retain in any conceivable peace agreement. The 20,000 person increase east of the separation barrier, established to stop the wave of Palestinian mass murders against Israelis, translates into less than one percent of the population in the disputed territories, over a period of eight years.

It is ludicrous to argue that the settlements are an “obstacle to peace,” because they were not an obstacle to offering the Palestinians a state on three separate occasions: (a) in July 2000 at Camp David; (b) in the Clinton Parameters six months later; and (c) in the Olmert offer at the end of the one-year Annapolis Process in 2008. Each time, the Palestinians rejected a state on substantially all of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in Jerusalem. Since then–as Rhodes’ numbers show–the vast majority of Israeli settlement activity has been within settlement blocs that no one can realistically expect Israel to dismantle.

It’s not the settlements, indeed. It’s Obama and the rest of the elite’s Marxian deep thinkers expressing anti-colonial outrage against a people returned to their own land after a 2,000-year diaspora and a six-million person Holocaust.

CURRENCY MANIPULATION: China Hits Reset on Yuan Fixing.

Starting Jan. 1, the central bank will expand the number of currencies in the basket uses to calibrate the yuan’s value to 24 from 13 and reduce the weighting given to the U.S. dollar to 22.4%, from 26.4%, according to an announcement by the central bank’s China Foreign Exchange Trade System late Thursday.

By diluting the dollar’s share and bringing in currencies from the Korean won to the Saudi riyal and Swedish krona the People’s Bank of China is giving itself more room to maneuver to keep the yuan from falling too fast, analysts said.

In recent weeks, the yuan has buckled under uncertainty about China’s economic performance, a surging U.S. dollar following Donald Trump’s presidential-election victory and escalating flows of Chinese currency moving offshore.

The potential for faster U.S. interest-rate increases could add even more downward pressure on the yuan, with some analysts and investors predicting that the currency could break the psychologically important seven-yuan-per-dollar level as soon as next month.

Remember, this is China trying to prop up the value of the yuan.

HUH: States that legalized marijuana saw a drop in traffic deaths.

“Instead of seeing an increase in fatalities, we saw a reduction, which was totally unexpected,” said Julian Santaella-Tenorio, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.

Since 1996, 28 states have legalized marijuana for medical use.

Deaths dropped 11 percent on average in states that legalized medical marijuana, researchers discovered after analyzing 1.2 million traffic fatalities nationwide from 1985 through 2014.

The decrease in traffic fatalities was particularly striking – 12 percent – in 25- to 44-year-olds, an age group with a large percentage of registered medical marijuana users, the authors report in the American Journal of Public Health.

Though Santaella-Tenorio was surprised by the drop in traffic deaths, the results mirror the findings of another study of data from 19 states published in 2013 in The Journal of Law and Economics. It showed an 8 to 11 percent decrease in traffic fatalities during the first full year after legalization of medical marijuana.

Correlation is not causation, of course, and the story also notes that after an big initial drop, fatalities in some states began to rise again. But concerns about stoned drivers making the roads radically more dangerous haven’t materialized, which ought to (but probably won’t) put a stop to some of the Reefer Madness-level panicmongering over legalization.