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Many are calling decentralized finance, or DeFi, the “Wild West of finance.” This fast-growing industry aims to provide automated banking services for cryptocurrencies to everyone, with no middle men. But DeFi is still in its early stages, which means there are risks. WSJ explains. Photo illustration: Tammy Lian/WSJ

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The Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment for the most common cause of dwarfism Friday, a drug that has proved to increase children’s height but has been polarizing among adults with short stature.

The treatment, developed by BioMarin Pharmaceutical, is a once-daily injection for children with achondroplasia, a rare genetic disorder that results in dwarfism and can lead to serious medical complications. In a pivotal clinical trial, patients who got the drug, called Voxzogo, grew 1.6 centimeters more over the course of a year than those who received placebo. That means patients who take Voxzogo throughout childhood are likely to reach heights similar to their peers who don’t have achondroplasia, according to BioMarin.

“It’s the difference between being able to drive a car or not, reaching stuff in closets, being able to take care of your hygiene,” said Jean-Jacques Bienaimé, BioMarin’s CEO. “It would make a huge difference for those patients. There’s no question about it.”

Skyrocketing demand for boxes and packing materials during the pandemic has slashed paper production across North America, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for retail companies.

“We’re starting to hear, ‘We’re out of paper,’” said Polly Wong, president of San Francisco-based direct-marketing firm Belardi Wong, noting that some of her clients already missed their fall advertising campaigns due to issues at the printers. Wong estimates that 100 million catalogs will not be printed or reach U.S. homes in time for the year’s biggest spending season as a result. “It kind of put our industry up in a panic.”

With some mills converting to cardboard to meet the spike in e-commerce deliveries and others shutting down altogether, more than 2.5 million metric tons of North American printing and writing paper capacity — or nearly one-fifth of 2019 levels — has come offline since the start of last year. That’s according to Kevin Mason, managing director for ERA Forest Products Research, a financial research company that specializes in paper and forest products.

A small team of researchers from Benemérita Universidad and Universidad de las Américas Puebla, in Mexico and Université de Poitiers, in France, has found a “triple Leidenfrost effect” in dissimilar drops in a hot pan. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes a type of “bouncing” they observed with different types of drops hovering over a hot surface.

Prior research has shown that the reason drops of water zip around in a hot pan, is because water at the bottom of the drops is vaporized—thus, the drops hover like air-hockey pucks. This phenomenon has come to be known as the Leidenfrost effect. In this new effort, the researchers have found another drop behavior associated with the Leidenfrost effect.

The work involved dropping two types of liquid onto a hot surface and then tilting the surface to force the drops to run into each other. They wanted to know if the two drops would merge. Instead they found that sometimes one of the drops would start bouncing off of the other.

The properties of a complex and exotic state of a quantum material can be predicted using a machine learning method created by a RIKEN researcher and a collaborator. This advance could aid the development of future quantum computers.

We have all faced the agonizing challenge of choosing between two equally good (or bad) options. This frustration is also felt by fundamental particles when they feel two competing forces in a special type of quantum system.

In some magnets, particle spins—visualized as the axis about which a particle rotates—are all forced to align, whereas in others they must alternate in direction. But in a small number of materials, these tendencies to align or counter-align compete, leading to so-called frustrated magnetism. This frustration means that the spin fluctuates between directions, even at absolute zero temperature where one would expect stability. This creates an exotic state of matter known as a quantum spin liquid.

Summary: A new technology that measures the movement of facial muscles is 73% accurate at detecting when a person is telling a lie.

Source: Tel Aviv University.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University detected 73% of the lies told by trial participants based on the contraction of their facial muscles – achieving a higher rate of detection than any known method.

Amazon is planning a satellite internet constellation that could rival SpaceX Starlink, touted by CEO Elon Musk as a means of getting more people online.

Transforming CT: Naeotom Alpha is the world’s first photon-counting CT scanner. (Courtesy: Siemens.

NASA scientists have issued a warning about a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid” (PHA) that will fly close to earth in mid-December. The asteroid is larger than 90 percent of asteroids, according to Daily Record, but still smaller than some of the larger reported asteroids. Thankfully, the asteroid won’t come close enough to our planet to do any damage. Near passes like these happen somewhat frequently. But the term “near” is relative when you’re talking about the infinite vastness of outer space.

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NASA predicts that the massive asteroid will pass by Earth on December 11, just a month and a few days from now. The asteroid has been classified as 4,660 Nereus, and NASA does consider it very hazardous. The organization says that the asteroid is almost three times the size of a football pitch — roughly the size of the Eiffel tower.