Samantha Rodriguez, a 20-year old woman was overwhelmed as a deputy uncovered a picture of a Nissan Versa and said that the car was hers.
The woman has been taking care of her 5 younger siblings for almost 3 years. She kept them fed, clothed, and going to school. Their parents died from cancer in the past 5 years.
"When they told me the car is for us, I remember thinking, 'They just took away all these worries and stresses.'" she told CNN. "It was such a big weight off my shoulder and will help so much."
A policeman said that overweight cops will be forced to shake off their excess fat made of durian and bubble tea. These fatty cops will be sent to a special belly-adjustment camp and will be participating in the “Belly Destruction Program.”
“There are so many problems if you’re a fat cop. You work slow and move slow as you go tumbling about. That’s unacceptable if you’re an officer tasked with arresting criminals, since you have to be deft and go quickly,” said Senior Sgt. Maj. Sornpetch Chantarak, a dietary enforcer in the new program.
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Police stations nationwide will nominate two to three of their fattest cops to participate in the program at a time.
Most fat policemen, according to the Senior Sergeant, are assigned to doing paperwork — in charge of filing records. Sornpetch also states that these cops do not exercise and eat too much.
(Image Credit: Love Police / Facebook / Khaosod English)
The teaser (and the title!) for Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker debuted this afternoon at Star Wars Celebration Chicago, giving fans our first look at the conclusion of the Skywalker saga, and our first glimpse was a thing of beauty. From Rey igniting her mended lightsaber to face off against a TIE fighter chasing her in the desert to Lando Calrissian back at the helm of the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, the short teaser had us cheering, gasping, and will keep us talking.
What that title means to the story is up to our imaginations (and will be the subject of endless speculation on the internet) until the movie hits theaters in December.
Ronnie and Reggie Kray (aka The Kray Twins) may have owned many nightclubs and intermingled with celebrities, they also committed the most shocking murders gangland London had ever experienced.
The wildfire that devastated Paradise is still fresh in everyone's memory but it has only begun as an analysis showed that several other towns and communities in California are at risk of having the same fate as Paradise.
Impoverished towns in the shadow of Mount Shasta. Rustic Gold Rush cities in the Sierra Nevada foothills. High-dollar resort communities on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Ritzy Los Angeles County suburbs. They all could be the next Paradise.
A McClatchy analysis reveals more than 350,000 Californians live in towns and cities that exist almost entirely within “very high fire hazard severity zones” — Cal Fire’s designation for places highly vulnerable to devastating wildfires.
It's one of the most sensitive subjects regarding mental health but it's something that we need to talk about, to empathize with, and to find ways to prevent. But we don't have as much understanding about the suicidal thought process or triggers which would help us devise methods of helping people who struggle with it.
But there’s been some encouraging progress in recent years, both in understanding the suicidal thought process and in developing individual and societal interventions to better assist those caught in the crucible of such a crisis. Instead of encouraging people to sign no-suicide contracts, clinicians now are more likely to work with a patient to design a personalized prevention plan to use when suicidal thoughts flare.
In trying to formulate prevention methods, we look first into how a person gets from one point to another, that is, how suicidal thoughts lead to an attempt. The Three-Step Theory is especially useful in giving insight on how this happens.
The gist of the Three-Step Theory is that it starts when a person feels a sense of hopelessness from emotional or physical pain.
That may not be enough to push someone to the edge but the second step, not having a tether or someone that a person deeply connects or resonates with, might provide the basis for a person to take the third step, which is to make an attempt.
This leads to the discourse on trying to prevent the act by removing the means as well as providing intervention plans that would help the person look for another way to deal with their situation.
But there is a surprising safety net for all potential suicide victims: time. It’s on their side if they can be kept away from guns or other immediately lethal means. Research shows again and again that the window of peak suicide risk is narrow, frequently just an hour or so, and sometimes less than 20 minutes. “The choice to take one’s life is rarely a long-term stable choice,” Klonsky says. “It’s usually made in the moment of crisis that’s not as bad even five or six hours later.”
People going through this struggle need to know that there is hope and that there are people who care about them. Go and show someone you care. For those who are on the verge of crisis, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is open 24/7, 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255).
There is still so much we don't know about how our brain works, especially with regard to how memories are formed, how we are able to learn something new, and how our cognitive processes affect our emotions.
Recently, scientists have discovered the structure of a critical part in the brain, something they referred to as the "electrical switch" in the brain. These are the AMPA receptors.
"These are the fundamental electrical switches of the brain," said senior author Eric Gouaux, Ph.D., senior scientist and Jennifer and Bernard LaCroute Term Chair of neuroscience in the OHSU Vollum Institute and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "If these switches don't work right, then the brain doesn't function. It can lead to seizures, memory loss, and neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's disease."
These AMPA receptors play a critical role in keeping our brain functioning properly and when they start to decline, they may be linked to neurodegenerative diseases. So scientists want to compare the differences between healthy ones and damaged or compromised ones.
The new discovery comes by way of a technique that's revolutionizing the field of structural biology.
The ability to use cryo-EM vastly improves the scientists' ability to discern individual receptors in their true natural, or native, state. Cryo-EM enables scientists to see molecules in near-atomic detail.
The whole world erupted with excitement in anticipation of the first few images of an actual black hole and people took their reactions to the internet.
The guys at Interesting Engineering compiled a list of some of the interesting tweets from scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. Read them here.
Most spinal cord injuries are believed to be permanent and irreversible. Not this time. Doctors Ren Xiaoping and Sergio Canavero claim that they were able to repair fully severed animal spinal cords.
From South China Morning Post:
Ren Xiaoping and Sergio Canavero said the new work they published in a scientific journal showed that monkeys and dogs were able to walk again after their spinal cords were “fully transected” during surgery and then put back together again. The neurosurgeons described the results as medically “unprecedented”.
The highly experimental procedures took place at Harbin Medical University in China. Both studies were supported by video evidence and published in Surgical Neurology International, a peer-reviewed medical journal based in the United States.
This concept, however, will raise ethical concerns. See the full story here.
(Image Credit: Ooom/ Canavero / South China Morning Post)
People sure say "it" a lot. We hear supercuts of different people saying the same things over and over, but when Eclectic Method does it, the result is a catchy song. There's a list of the people who appear in it, and the lyrics, at the YouTube page. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The first reported sighting of a flying saucer was in 1947. The Air Force invited the public to contact them about sightings, and between 1952 and 1969, there were over 12,000 reports. Were they alien invaders, or could this be new Russian technology for spying on us? The Air Force sometimes tried to reassure frightened people that those saucers were classified military technology, but they were cagey about the details. There was some media coverage now and then about the Air Force's new Avrocar, which was a real flying saucer project. It was definitely top secret, since even the man behind it had an obviously made up name.
It’s mastermind, Jack Frost, was bit of a legend. The British engineer had pioneered many supersonic aircraft designs, specifically what are called “vertical take-off and landing” (VTOL) vehicles that can hover, take off, and land vertically.. Most notably, he worked on fighter jets whose speed and agility earned nicknames like, “the Hornet” and “the Vampire”. So if anyone was going to cook up the next ferocious fighter aircraft, it was Frost…
As we saw recently with The Abominable Dr. Phibes, the film was so successful that it spawned an immediate sequel. This was also the case with Tales From the Crypt, which spawned The Vault of Horror, another horror film inspired by the EC comic of the same name and of the same style as its predecessor. EC horror comics were known for their sly albeit dark humor, and in this sequel we are treated to Glynis Johns and Terry-Thomas in the segment 'The Neat Job', wherein the obsessively neat Arthur Critchit (Terry-Thomas) marries Eleanor (Glynis Johns), a "young" trophy wife who is not quite the domestic goddess he hoped for. His constant nagging about the mess she makes eventually drives her mad. Upon his shouting at her, "Can't you do anything neatly?", she kills him with a hammer and cuts up the corpse, putting all the different organs into neatly labeled jars. Again, this film is an anthology and there are five independent segments, with poetic justice aplenty.
As was the case with its predecessor, this is NOT a film suitable for children.
For an extra fee, you can pick your own letter/number combination for your license plate. People pony up to express themselves in odd ways. These plates can tell a joke about the car, or maybe a pun connected with the car's make and model.
The Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon posted a 911 call and body cam footage of the Beaverton Police responding to a burglary call. Two men were housesitting, and when they came back from walking the dog, they heard noises in the bathroom, but the door was locked.
Just seven minutes later, law enforcement surrounded the callers' house. They waited outside the bathroom with a trained K-9 and heard banging from inside the room. Police told the Washington Post that the suspect might have forced a window open as a last ditch effort to escape.
Officers brought a dog in to take down the intruder, which turned out to be a diligent Roomba banging against the shower. The house sitters did not know the home had a programmable Roomba. A good laugh was had by all.
Scientists who study astronauts and the effect of space flight on their bodies had found some odds things over the years. NASA had a unique opportunity to study long-term effects a few years ago when they used identical twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly to compare an astronaut's (Scott's) physical condition during and after a year on the International Space Station with his twin (Mark, who had retired) on earth. The comprehensive results of that study have been published in the magazine Science. The results are not pretty.
Scott’s immune system was generally turbulent during his year in space: Many of his immune-related cellular pathways were disrupted, including the adaptive immune system, innate immune response, and the natural killer-cells that protect the body from cancers like leukemia and viruses. (The result confirms a shocking study published in January that compared the immune systems of eight astronauts who completed spaceflights longer than six months with healthy adults on Earth: Just 90 days into their flights, the astronauts’ natural-killer cells were 50 percent less capable of fighting leukemia cells.) Scott’s cognitive function was also whacked: He got dumber on the ISS.
The human body is wonderfully adaptive, and almost all of these changes were transient: Scott returned to normal within six months of returning to Earth. He became his old self, except for the ordinary depredations of age. But some of the effects of spaceflight left their mark. Scott got dumber on the ISS, but he stayed dumber, too. The decline in the speed and accuracy of his mental functions persisted six months after his mission.
