BC's Alsberry exuding confidence in final seasonIt’s Tuesday, December 10, and the Dallas Mavericks (16 - 8) and Oklahoma City Thunder (18 - 5) are all set to square off from Paycom Center in Oklahoma City. The Mavericks are currently 7-5 with a point differential on the road of 8, while the Thunder have a 7 -3 record in their last ten games at home. We’ve got all the info and analysis you need to know ahead of the game, including the latest info on the how to catch tipoff, projected starting fives, odds, recent team performance, player stats, and of course, our predictions, picks & best bets for the game from our modeling tools and staff of experts. Listen to the Rotoworld Basketball Show for the latest fantasy player news, waiver claims, roster advice and more from our experts all season long. Click here or download it wherever you get your podcasts. Game details & how to watch Mavericks vs. Thunder live Tuesday Date: Tuesday, December 10, 2024 Time: 21:30 pm EST Site: Paycom Center City: Oklahoma City, OK Never miss a second of the action and stay up to date with all the latest team stats and player news. Check out our day-by-day NBA schedule page , along with detailed matchup pages that update live in-game with every out. Game odds for Mavericks vs. Thunder The latest odds: Odds: Mavericks (+150), Thunder (-185) Spread: Thunder -4.5 Over/Under: 231.5 points That gives the Mavericks an implied team point total of 114.21, and the Thunder 116.29. Want to know which sportsbook is offering the best lines for every game on the NBA calendar? Check out the NBC Sports’ Live Odds tool to get all the latest updated info from Draftkings, FanDuel, BetMGM & more! Expert picks & predictions for Tuesday Mavericks vs. Thunder game Please bet responsibly. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call the National Gambling Helpline at 1-800-522-4700. Our model calculates projections around each moneyline, spread and over/under bet for every game on the NBA calendar based on data points like recent performance, head-to-head player matchups, trends information and projected game totals. Once the model is finished running, we put its projections next to the latest betting lines for the game to arrive at a relative confidence level for each wager. Here are the best bets our model is projecting for today’s Mavericks & Thunder game: Moneyline: NBC Sports Bet is staying away from a play on the Moneyline. Spread: NBC Sports Bet is leaning towards a play ATS on the Mavericks. Total: NBC Sports Bet is staying away from a play on the Game Total of 231.5. Want even more NBA best bets and predictions from our expert staff & tools? Check out the Expert NBA Predictions page from NBC Sports for money line, spread and over/under picks for every game on today’s calendar! Important stats, trends & insights to know ahead of Mavericks vs. Thunder on Tuesday The Mavericks have won 3 straight games at the Thunder The Over is 13-7 in the Thunder’s and the Mavericks’ last 10 games combined The Mavericks have covered the Spread in 8 of their last 10 matchups against Western Conference teams The Mavericks have won 4 of their last 5 at Western Conference teams If you’re looking for more key trends and stats around the spread, moneyline and total for every single game on the schedule today, check out our NBA Top Trends tool on NBC Sports! Bet the Edge is your source for all things sports betting. Get all of Jay Croucher and Drew Dinsick’s insight weekdays at 6AM ET right here or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Follow our experts on socials to keep up with all the latest content from the staff: - Jay Croucher (@croucherJD) - Drew Dinsick (@whale_capper) - Vaughn Dalzell (@VmoneySports) - Brad Thomas (@MrBradThomas)
Trump's 25% Tariffs Would Hit These EVs The HardestRepublicans rally around Hegseth, Trump’s Pentagon pick, as Gaetz withdraws for attorney general
What will Elon Musk’s “DOGE” mean for America’s social safety net? That was the question on the minds of many as Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to present their vision for the “Department of Government Efficiency” to Congress. Billed as a bipartisan meeting to which all senators and representatives were invited, it was in reality mostly attended by Republicans. But the short answer to what DOGE means after Thursday: Nobody knows. Musk and Ramaswamy of the House GOP as well as Marjorie Taylor Greene, chair of the to-be-formed “DOGE” subcommittee in Congress, ahead of the presentation Thursday afternoon. The two were tight-lipped as they passed reporters, with Musk answering just one question — turning and giving an emphatic “yes!” to a shouted question from the pool regarding whether he wanted to see more Democrats join the effort. That was a general theme of the day. Republicans who talked to a large scrum of reporters gathered outside of the closed-door meetings gave little in the way of details as to how the federal budget would be reduced, instead pivoting towards expressing their excitement at the arrival of Musk, the newest member of Donald Trump’s inner circle. The most frequently cited example of “waste” was a survey out this week reporting that the vast majority of federal workers are now in hybrid or primarily work-from-home roles. Speaker Mike Johnson at a scheduled presser ahead of the presentation by Musk and Ramaswamy, but even he said that there would be little in terms of real substance released to the press today. “They're innovators and they're forward thinkers, and so that's what we need right now,” Johnson said of Musk and Ramaswamy. “We need to make government more efficient. And that is what this whole objective is. It's what the DOGE effort will be about. You're going to see a bicameral cooperation, and it will be, by the way, bipartisan.” He pointed to he said had already come forward to join the effort. But he dodged a question regarding whether it was truly feasible to make such deep cuts to the federal budget without touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, the bulk of America’s medical and financial safety net for low-income and older citizens. Other Republican committee chairs who filed in and out of both meetings similarly dodged such questions, though a few were willing to address the question of the safety net and entitlement reform directly. “If we don't reform them, then potential retirees will not have them,” said Rep. Kevin Hern, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee’s sub-panel on Health. Alabama senator Katie Britt gave a quick rundown of her own frustrations with the federal government, which included failures to pay down the national debt and delays on the passage of major pieces of legislation including the Farm Bill. “I’m excited for him to be here,” Britt told reporters of Musk as she entered. Greene told reporters that she and Musk had spoken about how Congress could work to address national debt, which she called “unsustainable.” “To quote Elon, he said something extremely important. Every single payment that the federal government pays out, we need to be checking those payments to see if they're legitimate and that’s something that hasn't been done,” she said on Thursday after her meeting with the Tesla/Twitter CEO. “I am looking forward to exposing every single unelected bureaucrat, every single agency that is wasting the American people's money, and the big government departments that need to be exposed for how they're not serving the American people,” she added.As part of a national “moonshot” to cure blindness, researchers at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus will receive as much as $46 million in federal funding over the next five years to pursue a first-of-its-kind full eye transplantation. “This is no easy undertaking, but I believe we can achieve this together,” said Dr. Kia Washington, the lead researcher for the University of Colorado-led team, during a press conference Monday. “And in fact I’ve never been more hopeful that a cure for blindness is within reach.” The CU team was one of four in the United States that received funding awards from the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health , or ARPA-H. The CU-based group will focus on achieving the first-ever vision-restoring eye transplant by using “novel stem cell and bioelectronic technologies,” according to a news release announcing the funding. The work will be interdisciplinary, Washington and others said, and will link together researchers at institutions across the country. The four teams that received the funding will work alongside each other on distinct approaches, though officials said the teams would likely collaborate and eventually may merge depending on which research avenues show the most promise toward achieving the ultimate goal of transplanting an eye and curing blindness. Dr. Calvin Roberts, who will oversee the broader project for ARPA-H, said the agency wanted to take multiple “shots on goal” to ensure progress. “In the broader picture, achieving this would be probably the most monumental task in medicine within the last several decades,” said Dr. Daniel Pelaez of the University of Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, which also received ARPA-H funding. Pelaez is the lead investigator for that team, which has pursued new procedures to successfully remove and preserve eyes from donors, amid other research. He told The Denver Post that only four organ systems have not been successfully transplanted: the inner ear, the brain, the spinal cord and the eye. All four are part of the central nervous system, which does not repair itself when damaged. If researchers can successfully transplant the human eye and restore vision to the patient, it might help unlock deeper discoveries about repairing damage to the brain and spine, Pelaez said, as well as addressing hearing loss. To succeed, researchers must successfully remove and preserve eyes from donors and then successfully connect and repair the optical nerve, which takes information from the eye and tells the brain what the eye sees. A team at New York University performed a full eye transplant on a human patient in November 2023, though the procedure — while a “remarkable achievement,” Pelaez said — did not restore the patient’s vision. It was also part of a partial face transplant; other approaches pursued via the ARPA-H funding will involve eye-specific transplants. Washington, the lead CU researcher, said she and her colleagues have already completed the eye transplant procedure — albeit without vision restoration — in rats. The CU team will next work on large animals to advance “optic nerve regenerative strategies,” the school said, as well as to study immunosuppression, which is critical to ensuring that patients’ immune systems don’t reject a donated organ. The goal is to eventually advance to human trials. Pelaez and his colleagues have completed their eye-removal procedure in cadavers, he said, and they’ve also studied regeneration in several animals that are capable of regenerating parts of their eyes, like salamanders or zebra fish. His team’s funding will focus in part on a life-support machine for the eye to keep it healthy and viable during the removal process. InGel Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based Harvard spinoff and the lead of a third team, will pursue research on 3-D printed technology and “micro-tunneled scaffolds” that carry certain types of stem cells as part of a focus on optical nerve regeneration and repair, ARPA-H said. ARPH-A, created two years ago, will oversee the teams’ work. Researchers at 52 institutions nationwide will also contribute to the teams. The CU-led group will include researchers from the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University and Johns Hopkins University, as well as from the National Eye Institute . The teams will simultaneously compete and collaborate: Pelaez said his team has communicated with researchers at CU and at Stanford, another award recipient, about their eye-removal research. The total funding available for the teams is $125 million, ARPA-H officials said Monday, and it will be distributed in phases, in part dependent on teams’ success. U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat who represents Denver in Congress, acknowledged the recent election results at the press conference Monday and pledged to continue fighting to preserve ARPA-H’s funding under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. The effort to cure blindness, Washington joked, was “biblical” in its enormity — a reference to the Bible story in which Jesus cures a blind man. She and others also likened it to a moonshot, meaning the effort to successfully put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon nearly 50 years ago. If curing blindness is similar to landing on the moon, then the space shuttle has already left the launchpad, Washington said. “We have launched,” she said, “and we are on our trajectory.”None
Miami Fair Asks Gallery to Remove Portrait of Trump
By Patricia Zengerle WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two of President-elect Donald Trump's most controversial nominees, Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, sought support from U.S. senators on Monday, but it remained uncertain whether they would get the near-unanimous Republican backing they will need to win confirmation. Former Fox News personality Hegseth held a second meeting with Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor seen as a key to the decorated Army National Guard veteran's hopes for becoming secretary of Defense. Ernst's statement afterward seemed to open the door to voting for Hegseth. She said the nominee had committed to completing a Pentagon audit and selecting an official who would address the issue of sexual assault within the ranks. "As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources," Ernst said. Hegseth faces concerns about allegations of misconduct in his professional and personal life, including accusations of sexual assault, which he denies. Several of his supporters have called for his accusers to come forward publicly. Trump has kept his support strongly behind Hegseth, predicting he will be confirmed. Hegseth told reporters the meeting with Ernst had gone well, saying, "The more we talk, the more we are reminded that we are two combat veterans and we are dedicated to defense." Trump's fellow Republicans will hold only a slim 53-47 Senate majority next year, meaning nominees can afford just three Republican no's and still be confirmed, if Democrats unite against them. Former Representative Gabbard, Trump's choice for director of national intelligence, arrived for Senate meetings as the abrupt fall on Sunday of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad prompted renewed scrutiny of her 2017 visit to Damascus. Gabbard, a former Democrat who lacks significant intelligence experience, is also seen as soft on Russia, although her supporters say she has a healthy skepticism about foreign U.S. military involvement, in keeping with the America First policies of Trump, whom she endorsed this year. Her selection to be director of national intelligence in November sent shock waves through the national security establishment, adding to concerns that the intelligence community would become increasingly political. Gabbard did not respond on Monday when reporters at the Capitol asked her to respond to events in Syria. (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton receives Nobel Prize in physics in proud moment for U of T
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Out-of-date data and a disconnected state affects our fisheries’ managementUN envoy urges soil, water action
Cinemark stock soars to 52-week high, hits $34.31In a massive blow to the Northern Territory's ambitious space program, Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA) has ceased operations of the Arnhem Space Centre and announced it would relocate the spaceport to a new site in Queensland. or signup to continue reading The ELA-run spaceport saw NASA launch rockets from Arnhem Land in 2022 - for the first time from a commercial port outside of the US. Now, ELA has laid the blame on the Northern Land Council for having been "forced" to make its decision to abandon the NT site on Gumatj land near the town of Nhulunbuy. "This decision has been forced by the inability of the Company to finalise a lease for the expansion of the Arnhem Space Centre," the company said in a statement. "The decision came after the Northern Land Council (NLC) failed to meet its own specified deadline for the approval of the Head Lease for the fourth time over the last 12 months in October 2024." ELA claims it had made "desperate appeals", together with the Northern Territory Chief Minister's Department and the Gumatj Corporation since February 2024, but the NLC "would not issue a Head Lease or provide any official reasons for the delays". "Accordingly, Management and the Board of ELA were left with no option other than to act in the best interest of its customers and shareholders, abandon negotiations, and seek an alternate equatorial site in Queensland." But the Northern Land Council has hit back to "set the record straight on falsehoods shared by Equatorial Launch Australia". "ELA provided inaccurate, unrealistic timelines and unfairly blamed the NLC for delays as the reason for their decision," the Land Council said in a statement. "The NLC has engaged proactively and positively to facilitate a substantial, swift and, most crucially, safe agreement being made between ASC and Traditional Owners." Under its statutory obligations, the NLC is required to facilitate land use agreements between Aboriginal people and entities wishing to conduct business on their land, across the Top End of the NT. The Land Council said since September 2023 it had been in negotiations with ELA in regards to the planned space centre expansion in Arnhem Land, "consistently request(ing) essential information and terms to be provided, so that it could facilitate informative consultations with all Traditional Owners affected, including progressing the work of independent expert consultants". The NLC said negotiations had been "complicated", alleging ELA's "attempts to circumvent sacred sites protection requirements, breaches of previous agreement conditions, requiring confidentiality agreements, and significantly delaying responses to crucial correspondence". Matthew Ryan, NLC Chair, said it was "vital for Countrymen, and in the interest of all Australians", that sacred and cultural sites are protected and at the same time Aboriginal people are included in and benefit from economic developments on their Country". "Our people will not be pushed into cutting corners for outside business timelines, nor can we jeopardise cultural obligations, our Country, or the hard-won Land Rights of our people," he said. "We stand with our East Arnhem-based Council Members and all the clans of East Arnhem Land, when we say that we are very disappointed with how ELA has handled this. Especially the false timeline they are sharing and how they have obviously been working behind-the-scenes with Queensland - where they don't have the Aboriginal Land Rights Act to make sure Aboriginal Lands are respected and protected, and where they already have that appointed coordinator to dangerously rush things through." Mr Ryan said the NLC had "worked hard" to keep the Arnhem Space Centre's agreement moving, acknowledging the "opportunities the ASC could present to Aboriginal people across the Top End in terms of economic development and education". ELA said it had worked with the Queensland Government to move its spaceport to Weipa, hoping it will have regulatory clearances for contracted launches in late 2025. Meanwhile, the NT Government - a financial supporter of the space port - said it was "exploring legal options regarding our 5 per cent shareholding in ELA", which is believed to be worth about $5 million. I am an award-winning media and communications professional with experience across print, digital, social and radio broadcast, as well as photography and videography. I am the NT Correspondent at Australian Community Media and I write for my hometown newspaper, the Katherine Times. I love telling people's stories, and I am passionate about giving those a voice who may otherwise remain unheard. When I am not busy putting pen to paper, I spend time in my garden, go bushwalking or travel across the Northern Territory, Australia or the world. In my spare time I write, illustrate and publish books. I am an award-winning media and communications professional with experience across print, digital, social and radio broadcast, as well as photography and videography. I am the NT Correspondent at Australian Community Media and I write for my hometown newspaper, the Katherine Times. I love telling people's stories, and I am passionate about giving those a voice who may otherwise remain unheard. When I am not busy putting pen to paper, I spend time in my garden, go bushwalking or travel across the Northern Territory, Australia or the world. In my spare time I write, illustrate and publish books. Advertisement Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date. 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