An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

Eww.

Mr. Matzneff’s story is one, many have said, that could happen “only in France.”

From Voltaire to Hugo to Zola to Sartre, the writer has been regarded as sacred in France. In Paris, countless streets named for writers serve as a physical reminder of their outsize influence. Every Wednesday, a major network devotes 90 live minutes of prime time to discussing books on “La Grande Librairie.”

Although not one of France’s greatest writers, Mr. Matzneff still benefited fully from this tradition. He wrote nearly 50 novels, essay collections and diaries that never would have made it to bookstores in an industry more concerned with the bottom line.

French publishers dutifully accepted even diaries that sometimes overlapped and amounted to little beyond bookkeeping. But those works also hold meticulous details about the individuals who helped him and the teenage girls he seduced, including Ms. Springora.

Since the authors were unable to obtain the remainder of the slimming products from the family for a toxicology analysis, they bought similar Herbalife products from the same seller in Kerala, India, and from online stores. In total, eight products were subjected to gas chromatography, mass spectroscopy, and other methods for chemical and microbial analysis.

The chemical analysis detected heavy metals, including cadmium, mercury, and lead, as well as other toxic chemicals in all eight products. In addition, 16S rRNA gene sequencing revealed a range of bacterial contaminants in most of the products.

The authors describe similar case reports of other Herbalife-using subjects with hepatotoxicity, and raise the possibility that the heavy metals and bacterial contamination of these unregulated Herbalife products — maybe in combination with unknown toxic phytochemical constituents — could have contributed to these morbidities.

The Chinese research does not appear to have progressed beyond the laboratory stage yet, and it’s unknown if the US Navy has continued Project Combo. Laws such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 have given rise to regulatory efforts aimed at controlling the amount of noise humans generate in the oceans, and military organizations such as NATO have standards for underwater sounds. But a military could still conduct such experiments secretly without notifying anyone, Diamant points out: “Just because you can’t read about it anymore doesn’t mean they don’t do it, right?”

It’s not just your storage unit that’s packed to the gills. According to a new study, the mass of all our stuff—buildings, roads, cars, and everything else we manufacture—now exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet. And the amount of new material added every week equals the total weight of Earth’s nearly 8 billion people.

“If you weren’t convinced before that humans are dominating the planet, then you should be convinced now,” says Timon McPhearson, an urban ecologist at the New School who was not involved with the research. “This is an eye-catching comparison,” adds Fridolin Krausmann, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, who also was not involved in the work.

An international team of researchers says that small lasers could be used to guide lightning strikes — much like Thor’s legendary hammer Mjölnir.

“It turns out that to deliver particles, you do not need high-intensity lasers, even low intensity like your laser pointer will be already enough,” Andrey Miroshnichenko, a researcher at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia, told Agence France Presse of the work.

The team says it’s already tested the concept in labs using devices known as hollow lasers, which in effect create a pipe of light. These lasers can short circuit storm clouds and trigger lightning strikes by heating micro-particles in the air.