It’s Friday: A happy end to the week, everyone, and a warm Indian Summer welcome to new readers Blanche, Jermaine, Marc, Ellen, and Ted. Happy to have you with us. It’s National Mammography Day, observed annually on the third Friday in October as part of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Today serves as a reminder to all women that the best defense is early detection.
Remember to look up tonight: The annual Orionid Meteor Shower peaks after midnight.
Needs work: The number of private-sector jobs on Long Island in September increased by about 8,500 over jobs reported in September 2016, according to the New York Department of Labor – but that year-over-year increase of 1.1 percent trailed the national increase of 1.4 percent, and the Island actually lost 8,300 private-sector jobs between August and September (mostly to seasonal staff reductions).
More work-related stress: Only four of Long Island’s nine private-industry sectors recorded year-over-year employment increases in September, with education/health services (+9,500), leisure/hospitality (+2,000), professional/business services (+1,200) and “other services” (+700) reporting gains.
Lighting it up: It took entrepreneur Stacey Foley some time to find the right path – but now, her profitable Massapequa startup Kelloley is spreading peace and tranquility, one Himalayan salt lamp at a time.
Beaming with pride: A special “beam-signing” event in Uniondale marked the progress Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has made since March, when construction began on MSK’s new 114,000-square-foot treatment facility adjacent to the Nassau Coliseum.
‘Master’ blaster: Where are New York’s top STEM instructors? Well, Long Island’s got a whole bunch, according to the NYS Master Teacher Program.
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ICYMI: “Sim baby” lives, the BrickHouse Brewing Co. is all growed up and the blind can (sometimes) see again.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Taking the pain out of the cloud: Now that nearly every business, whether it’s a media company or an automaker, also builds its own software for its website or employee sites, the pain of building and running that software is ubiquitous. Backplane, a startup that says it can help companies manage the complex software deployments of the cloud computing era, now has $5 million in seed funding – and a service it says can help those companies manage how their data flows, whether it ends up running on Amazon Web Services or some other cloud data center, internal data centers, or all of the above.
Still in the dark: The mysterious startup Magic Leap, thought to be developing an augmented reality device of some kind, raised over $500 million from investors including Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Alibaba, and Singapore’s state-owned investment company, Temasek Holding. The company has raised a total of nearly $2 billion as it develops a light-based computing technology known as silicon photonics.
The eyes have it: Dyslexia is often described as trying to read letters as they jump around the page. Because of its connections to reading difficulties and trouble in school, the condition is often blamed on the brain. But according to a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the so-called learning disability may actually start in the eyes.
The girls have it: L’Oreal has awarded fellowships to five science innovators. Candidates for the $60,000 awards were evaluated based on their intellectual merit, research potential, scientific excellence and commitment to supporting women and girls in science.
Easy crossing: A unique, 3D-printed bicycle bridge has opened in the Netherlands. The small-but-mighty structure is the first ever to be printed out of reinforced concrete.
BELOW THE FOLD
33-hit wonder: Billy Joel has made $35 million so far this year. Now 68, with child No. 3 on the way, there’s more to the Piano Man than his music.
Poe’s last stand: The Horse You Came In On Saloon, a 200-year-old bar in the Fell’s Point Historical District of Baltimore, claims to have served Edgar Allan Poe his final drink.
Related: Whiskey can be made anywhere in the world. But one distiller, in an extreme distilling experiment, sent barrels on a 4,000-mile journey to find out what makes Kentucky Bourbon so coveted.
It just won’t be the same: What will banana enthusiasts, or even occasional banana bread fans, do when the fruit as we know it vanishes? What would we make in a pinch if not banana bread? Because environmental science and botany experts believe this is a distinct possibility within our lifetimes.
And: What is ‘pumpkin spice,’ anyway? And why do we crave it?
Might we say: There’s really no such thing as “free” news. Please support great institutions like NYIT and awesome deans like Nada Anid.
Compiled by John Kominicki. Thanks for reading.
