The coronavirus has indeed been the talk of the town. Nay, it has been the talk of the whole world as the virus claims people’s lives, and as thousands get infected by the virus. In order to keep us safe from the virus, health experts tell us that we should disinfect high-touch surfaces, and that we should wash our hands frequently. While the latter activity is good for most people, it’s not good when it comes to those who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

… to be warned they must scrub to protect themselves from an invisible enemy, and to do so in a ritualistic way with internal musical accompaniment, is akin to inviting a demon to come for tea. Some of these people have spent years trying not to wash their hands, often as a prescribed part of their treatment.

“It’s definitely put a lot of the internal OCD dialogue back into my life. It’s being reinforced by outside, authoritative voices,” says Erica (not her real name), a long-term OCD patient. “It’s a lot harder to tell yourself that the urge to wash your hands is irrational when everyone on your Twitter feed or on the news is saying: ‘Wash your hands. Nobody is washing their hands correctly.’”

The worsening outbreak affects people with OCD in other ways, too. Chiefly, the spike in anxiety about the virus can fuel existing obsessive fears of contamination and trigger destructive compulsive actions.

Head over to The Guardian to know more about this story.

I personally feel bad for these people.

(Image Credit: zukunftssicherer/ Pixabay)

The coronavirus has now been declared a pandemic. Across the world, tens of thousands of people have now been infected by the virus, and thousands have become casualties to it. With this in mind, countries now race to create a vaccine against this deadly pathogen.

Researchers around the globe are trying different approaches to make a vaccine for the virus known as Sars-CoV-2. They include the conventional use of dead or weakened pathogens and others that are genetically modelled. It is unclear how long the development will take. The previous Sars epidemic happened 17 years ago, but no vaccine has been developed.

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Technical advances have dramatically reduced laboratory research time and made it much faster to leap to the important stage of clinical trials – the first test of a possible Sars vaccine was conducted more than a year after the outbreak 17 years ago. It took only about four months for Covid-19.

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The DNA or RNA-based vaccine technology, however, saves a lot of laboratory time by using a copy of the genetic code of the virus instead of the actual virus. This work was made possible after Chinese scientists released the genome sequencing of the new coronavirus on January 11.

More details about this story over at the South China Morning Post.

(Image Credit: Pettycon/ Pixabay)

The coronavirus has indeed spread across the globe. Around the world, there’s a growing number of people who get infected with the virus, and there is also a growing number of people who had close contact with a person who has the virus. While the former are isolated because they have the virus, the latter, who had close contact with them, are being told to self-quarantine. The question is, how exactly do we do this self-quarantine?

Dr. Tara Narula, a CBS News medical contributor gives her advice on self-quarantine. These are only some of them:

• Use your own dishware, utensils and cups.
• Disinfect all devices.
• Open windows if you can.

See her other tips over at CBS News.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient religious texts discovered in a series of caves at Qumran beginning in 1947. While most of the scrolls are housed at a museum in Israel, some fragments have been circulating through private owners. Between 2009 and 2014, Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby, bought 16 fragments for the Museum of the Bible, which he founded. In 2016, doubts began to form about the fragments' authenticity, and an investigative team was consulted.  

In a report spanning more than 200 pages, a team of researchers led by art fraud investigator Colette Loll found that while the pieces are probably made of ancient leather, they were inked in modern times and modified to resemble real Dead Sea Scrolls. “These fragments were manipulated with the intent to deceive,” Loll says.

The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.

“Once one or two of the fragments were fake, you know all of them probably are, because they come from the same sources, and they look basically the same,” says Årstein Justnes, a researcher at Norway’s University of Agder whose Lying Pen of Scribes project tracks the post-2002 fragments.

National Geographic follows the investigators and the methods they used to determine the authenticity of the scroll fragments. It's a fascinating story. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

Oh look at this cute little white finch riding a skateboard! But the description says it is a Java sparrow. Which I looked up, and it is a finch. Finches are adorable birds, with the cutest little voice. This one is well-trained, too, or else he is just having fun! (via Digg)

Every Star Wars fan has their own favorite bounty hunter, with many switching from the original fan-favorite, Boba Fett, to either The Mandalorian or IG-11 once Baby Yoda fever swept the internet. But while favorites are totally subjective, when you look at the bounty hunters from a legal perspective, Boba Fett is clearly the best bounty hunter in Star Wars, at least, according to San Diego defense lawyer Peter Liss. A short bit of his reasoning:

Boba’s insistence that Han be kept alive also means he is following the law to the letter unlike Greedo by not using deadly force unnecessarily. In fact, Boba even argues against freezing Han in carbonite despite Darth Vader’s insistence on it out of fear that his target could be harmed. While many people unfamiliar with the law like to argue that this would be false imprisonment, it would actually be a legal citizen’s arrest by a bounty hunter...

Wonder where Greedo, IG-11 and the Mandalorian fit into this attorney's rankings and who is the least law-abiding bounty hunter among the group? Then check out: The Best Star Wars Bounty Hunter from a Legal Perspective

Image: Boba Fett's Fugitive Recovery Service by ArtistXero

That little plastic tripod that comes inside a box of pizza is called a "pizza saver". It helps protect your pizza from damage caused by a cave-in of the top of the box. It looks like a little table.

That's especially true if you produce a version that's several times larger than the original. The Drum tells us that the ad firm Ogilvy Hong Kong created this joint venture between Ikea and Pizza Hut.

I'd like to eat a pizza that uses this table as its saver.

-via Core77

To artist Marianne Eriksen Scott-Hansen, making tissue paper flowers isn't just a craft, but "paper couture." As she sees it, she is weaving living flowers together from paper until the grow so large that they can fill rooms.

Scott-Hansen describes her creative process to My Modern Met:

Numerous little individual parts that make up a whole, from cell to organism,” she says, “micro to macro. Contrasts, symmetry, harmony. By my hand, the paper is returned to the organic material from which it originates. It is given the tactility and texture to resemble wood, plant parts, papyrus. I treat the paper firmly as it were rope, bark, branches. Or delicately like dried grass or porous petals.

I say that because it may not be obvious that there is a human inside each of the four large, colorful objects in the photo.

The foundation concept is the puffer jacket. It's practical in cold weather and fashionable. So British fashion designer Craig Green, working with the design house Moncler, wondered how far the concept could be pushed. Dornob explains:

Green’s collaborations with Moncler, now in their sixth season, have always been heavy on superfluous flaps and straps, but the 2020 collection is more conceptual than ever. The designer took inspiration from samurai armor and vivid inflatables to create a series of outfits that make their wearers look a bit like enormous exotic insects. [...]

“I have always explored ideas of protection and functionality within my work, something that is also at the core of Moncler’s heritage. I thought it would be interesting for these ideas to be pushed further, interpreting Moncler’s performance-based history and developing designs with their years of technical knowledge and expertise,” says Green.

It's been 75 years since Anne Frank died in a concentration camp. When her father found her diary after the war, he read it and realized he never really knew his daughter. The published version of her notebooks was not the entire diary. When I read it in elementary school, a blurb gave me the idea that some passages were excised because they were about sex. Later, it was revealed that Otto Frank deleted passages that were disrespectful of Anne's mother. But the editing and deletions were varied and changed over time.

Anne herself had begun editing large swathes of her diary with publication in mind after hearing a radio broadcast that called on Dutch people to preserve diaries and other war documents. Otto respected some of those editorial decisions, but overlooked others ­– for example, he included material about Anne’s crush on annexe dweller Peter van Pels.

Otto made his own cuts, too: he removed passages in which Anne was critical of her parents’ marriage, and expurgated sections about sexuality and her often brutal comments about friends, family members and acquaintances. In an early passage from the diary that Otto eliminated completely from the first editions, Anne describes her classmates as everything from “a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip” to “pretty boring.”

The unpublished passages that contained judgmental comments and musings about sex came to light in bits and pieces, and make Anne seem all the more relatable as a young girl trying to grow up in extraordinary circumstances. Read about how the full account is being gradually revealed at History Extra. -via Damn Interesting

Nope. Nope. Nope. This compilation video of electrical workers in China is not for anyone who gets vertigo from a video. The young men have safety cords, but I wouldn't trust them with my life. Knowing they are being recorded, they get a little rowdy at times. -via Boing Boing

The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, is a very dangerous virus that attacks cells responsible in helping the body fight infection. With these cells compromised, the person’s body then becomes vulnerable to other diseases. Unfortunately, as of the moment, there are no cures for HIV, so once you have it, you have it for the rest of your life. However, there are HIV medicines which help in suppressing the virus. Across the world, much progress has been seen in preventing the spread of the virus. But this trend is not the case in Russia, where HIV denialism thrives.

Experts say HIV conspiracy theories — a thing of the past in many other countries — continue to thrive in Russia and significantly hinder efforts to combat the virus.

Head over to Los Angeles Times to know more about this story.

(Image Credit: Valeriy Klamm / For The Times)

Jake Sweet just wanted to have fun with his friends, and so he began making videos in November 2018. However, when he saw that his videos have garnered tens of thousands of views, Jake threw himself into the addictive social media platform. But when he isn’t making videos for TikTok, he’s your regular student working to earn a degree.

TikTok is a Chinese-owned social media app that allows you to share short videos. The international version of the app has more than one billion users. In 2019 it was the second-most downloaded app globally, after WhatsApp.

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What sets TikTok apart from other social media platforms is the way it finds videos for you. As well as seeing videos posted by friends, users are recommended videos by the company's software algorithm.

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And this explains a big reason for TikTok's appeal. In theory anyone can become "TikTok famous" - you don't have be a reality-TV star, or celebrity sportsperson to make viral videos.

On other social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, it is already guaranteed that you can earn money through advertising revenue and paid promotions. But can the same thing be said if you’re an influencer on TikTok? Can it make you rich? Here’s a short answer from BBC’s article:

Jake earns a small but steady income from TikTok which helps him at university - it's enough for things like groceries. But most of the money he makes gets spent on props for his next videos, he says.

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But he gets lifestyle perks like party invites, and the experience of being a social media celebrity.

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Influencers can generate an annual income close to £20-25,000 ($26-$32,000) if they build a following of more than two million on TikTok, Armoo reckons, from paid content, appearances and merchandising.

And there goes our answer. We can earn money from TikTok, but don’t expect it to be as big as the influencers in YouTube are making.

(Image Credit: BBC)

Does fish oil really improve our health? This question has been around for centuries, and up to this day, this is still a subject of debate. A new study published in the Beitish Medical Journal may give us an answer to that.

The latest volley is a new study linking regular use of fish oil supplements to a lower risk of premature death and cardiovascular disease (CVD) such as heart attacks and strokes.

"With regard to fish oil and CVD the data for the most part have been positive, albeit with some wobbling among studies. The latest study adds to the database suggesting effectiveness," said Alice Lichtenstein, the Gershoff professor of nutrition science and policy, and director and senior scientist at the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at Tufts University. She was not involved in the research.

Lichtenstein, however, says that the study does not state a specific dose of fish oil in order for it to become effective. She also stressed that we should not treat these fish oil tablets as “magic bullets”.

As an observational study, it can only show an association and we can't know for sure if it was the fish oil supplements alone that lowered the risk of stroke, or if other changes to people's diets or lifestyle contributed.

More details about this study over at CNN.

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You’ve probably seen or have been into upside down rooms before. But have you ever been in a house completely turned upside down? You probably haven’t. But if you want to go in one, you might want to consider this one in South Africa.

Located near Hartebeestpoort, about 75 kilometers (47 miles) north of Johannesburg, the house is inverted on the outside and inside. Visitors take pictures of themselves in rooms that have sofas and chairs hanging from the ceiling. The kitchen is also upside down with appliances appearing to defy gravity.

Wow!

(Image Credit: AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)