Researchers have identified the key role of sodium channels arrayed in nerve cells in experience of pain. They were able to visualize at a single molecular level how sodium channels and electrical impulses they generate are distributed. This research could help pave the way towards the creation of newer, more effective, non-addictive painkillers.
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Addiction can come in many different forms. Some are addicted to video games, while others are addicted to alcohol.
One type of addiction is being addicted to shopping. While there are a lot of books written about shopaholics (there is also a movie), very little is written with regards to the serious side of the subject. It is, after all, not a laughing matter, especially for those who suffer with that kind of addiction.
What do we have to do when we realize that we are addicted to something? We get help. The same goes for being a shopping addict — it is not an exception.
Find out more about this topic over at The Sydney Morning Herald.
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NASA is planning to send a golf-cart sized robot to the moon surface in 2022 as preparation for the planned human return to the moon in 2024. The robot will search for deposits of water below the surface of the moon. If there really is water there, humans can possibly use that for drinking and for making rocket fuel.
The VIPER robot will drive for miles (km) on the dusty lunar surface to get a closer look at what NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has touted for months: underground pockets of “hundreds of millions of tons of water ice” that could help turn the moon into a jumping-off point to Mars.
See more details over at Reuters.
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ช้าก่อนอานนท์🙏🏻 #ไฉ่ซิงเอี้ย pic.twitter.com/1grDaSa2KJ
— lilpariizlil (@lilpariizlil) October 23, 2019
The Chinese god of wealth Caishen, or "Cai Shing Ia", as Thais call him, must have been trending not just here on Earth, but also on the heavens, as this deity took over Thailand’s social media feed and mobile screens on Thursday. Some people have changed their profile pictures into Caishen believe that by doing so they will become prosperous. Others do the same thing, but they do it for the lolz.
“I don’t believe in this. You need to work to get money,” says the first comment. The second says, “People these days are so superstitious, what a shame. I feel sorry for our country.” Both have Caishen profile pics.
How did this trend start? Find out over at Khaosod English.
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Wearing a kimono looks nicer compared to wearing a shirt and pants. On the downside, it is less practical and more time-consuming.
You might see people wearing kimonos in fancy restaurants that serve Japanese cuisine, as the waitresses there are required to wear kimonos while on the job, as part of their appeal that comes from the culinary and gastronomic traditions of old.
What’s the annoying part about wearing a kimono as a waitress? Find out over at SoraNews24.
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The said moment was captured via a dashcam. The unfortunate officer can be seen falling face first as he flipped over his handlebars and dove into the ground in a rather spectacular fashion.
Thank God he had a helmet, but I’m sure it hurt a lot.
As he picks himself up from the ground, the red-faced PCSO can be seen motioning to his colleague, instructing him to chase after the suspect who pedalled off into a car park.
The owner of the dashcam footage, who wishes to remain anonymous, today revealed it made her laugh so much she 'watched it over and over again'.
(Image Credit: Solent News & Photo Agency/ Daily Mail)
Kelly Bachman, 27, knew she had to speak up. She went onstage with her heart pounding.
“I’m a comic,” she said to open up her routine. “It’s our job to name the elephant in the room. Does anybody know what that is?”
A few nodded in affirmation, while most of the crowd was dead silent.
“It’s a Freddy Krueger in the room, if you will,” she said. “I didn’t know we had to bring our own mace and rape whistles.” At that point, a handful of people in the back of the room started booing her. One yelled, “Shut up!”
But Bachman didn’t need to say more for the crowd to notice who she was talking about: Sitting in a green velvet booth was Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul accused of sexually abusing or harassing more than 80 women.
More details about this news over at The Washington Post.
(Video Credit: Kelly Bachman/ Instagram)
Erica Lugo was driving to work one October morning last year. Suddenly, she began to sweat profusely and the color drained from her face. When she spotted a parking lot, she immediately decided to pull into it. Suddenly, she couldn’t hear and she started seeing in “tunnel vision”. Recalling her story, Lugo said that she felt three big bumps as she drifted out of consciousness, and, moments later, a man pulled her from her wrecked car.
“I am so thankful for that stranger,” Lugo, 32, told TODAY.
Lugo recalled that at the hospital, the doctors were puzzled as to why a 31-year-old athletic girl would pass out while driving.
After an MRI, they found a lump deep in the right side of her neck. A month later, a biopsy revealed that Lugo had stage 2 papillary thyroid cancer and she was told she needed to have her thyroid and 33 lymph nodes removed, plus radiation treatment.
She had just signed a lease for a new gym space in Dayton, Ohio, to grow her athletic training business. She was also a single mom. The news left her stunned.
“You think that everything is over,” she said. “No one could prepare you to hear you have stage 2 anything.”
In January of this year, Lugo had her thyroid and lymph node removed. Doctors warned her that most people gain weight afterwards, but Lugo was determined not to let that happen again.
Lugo weighed 322 pounds six years ago. After she began to exercise four days a week, that’s where she began to lose weight.
Now with her thyroid removed, she states that she still wanted to continue. Things, however, were not the same as before. Before, she can do her high intensity interval training all the time. Now, she can do it at least twice, or at max, thrice, a week.
She is one of the newest trainers on USA’s Biggest Loser, and Lugo says that she uses the lessons she learned from her weight loss experience, and cancer experience.
(Image Credit: ericafitlove/ Instagram)
Kaitlyn Tiffany was greeted with an email from Influencer Intelligence last Tuesday morning. Influencer Intelligence is an analytics company that works with people who desire to hire influencers and celebrities to advertise things.
“Authenticity is the most critical attribute to building influence,” the company’s website reads. The email was about, as emails often are, a recently compiled report about the business of selling things on Instagram, which promised to “tackle the concept of what authenticity really means today.” The PDF’s cover was an image of a beautiful white woman wearing pink eye shadow and putting her hand to her mouth—which was, needless to say, open.
Inside, Kaitlyn found advice on how to determine the authenticity of an influencer.
Request Google Analytics information from her (to prove that her numbers “add up”), ask for quantitative results of previous “brand campaigns,” map her audience demographics—all told, fairly standard stuff. The report also suggested the use of “soft metrics,” which apparently entails looking at a person’s Instagram profile and taking note of the tone and frequency of her responses to her “audience,” judging how “natural and authentic the content feels,” and deciding whether the influencer really “lives and breathes what they are presenting.”
For Kaitlyn, it’s a weird question to ask a person if she’s authentically living and breathing what she’s presenting. After all, what she’s presenting is herself. “That’s literally how our body works.” But then again, what she’s presenting is not herself, and “that’s literally how Instagram works.”
Coincidentally, this email arrived the same day as a new essay collection by the New York fashion and culture writer Natasha Stagg, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, from Semiotext(e). Stagg is best known for her fashion work—particularly as an editor at V magazine—but Sleeveless also touches on her brief tech career. She remembers working on an app that could “recommend all the ways to become beautiful,” then an app that took “mood selfies.”
But the most interesting thing, at least perhaps for Kaitlyn, is that Stagg zones in on the question of what the modern “It Girl” is like.
But why is loneliness “the hottest trend in Instagram”? Find out over at The Atlantic.
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With frightening and vivid images that seem all too real, nightmares terrorize us in the dead of night, making our hearts pound with fear and our bodies drip with sweat. For kids, it might be terrifying images of monsters or ghosts, while it can be horrifying images of harmful events which can be real or imaginary. For those who have experienced traumatic events, nightmares force them to relive the tragic events they have experienced, such as a car accident, or memories of war, to name a few examples.
“Occasional nightmares are a normal part of dreaming and can provide valuable insight into our psychological and spiritual lives,” Rubin Naiman, psychologist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, writes in the paper “Dreamless: the silent epidemic of REM sleep loss.”
For others, frightening dreams are a chronic condition.
Trauma survivors — specifically those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — are more likely to experience nightmares. In fact, while only 2.5 to 10 percent of adults experience nightmares, according to the Sleep Health Foundation, up to 90 percent of those with PTSD have reported “disturbing dreams with some degree of resemblance to the actual traumatic event,” according to a report co-authored by Anne Germain, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience Center at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Head over at Fox News to know more details about this one.
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The most senior Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, has urged the government to investigate TikTok, stating that the China-owned social media app is “a potential counter-intelligence threat we cannot ignore.” He also warned that it could be used to interfere in the US elections.
TikTok, which allows users to share short videos online, has enjoyed wild success since it launched in 2017, and has been downloaded more than 1bn times.
Schumer and Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, co-wrote a letter to the acting director of national intelligence on Wednesday. The pair said they were writing “to express our concerns about TikTok … and the national security risks posed by its growing use in the United States”.
Know more details about this news over at The Guardian.
What are your thoughts about this one?
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It has been seven years ever since the release of Tinder, the app where you swipe right if you want to meet a person, and swipe left if you don’t want to. Tinder is, by far, the most used dating app in the UK and the US. The app is download 300 million times and has over five million paying subscribers, making it the highest-grossing app of any kind in the world, according to the analysts App Annie.
For Americans, apps and online dating are the most common way to meet a partner. “It’s an amazing responsibility, and an amazing privilege,” says Elie Seidman, Tinder’s 45-year-old chief executive. If he finds it less daunting than others might, that’s because, before he took over Tinder in 2018, he was in charge of OkCupid, the Tinder of the 2000s. He has spent much of his working life helping people to find love.
“The vast majority of our employees are energised by that very mission,” he says. “We’re not selling plumbing supplies, right? Obviously, plumbing is really important, but ours is a really noble and exciting mission. So, when we’re taking new risks – new challenges, new chances – we know that, if we’re successful, it’s about helping members connect.”
At times, however, the app seemed to chase that goal with too much passion. As it launched on college campuses before it expanded to New York, London, and then to everywhere, Tinder became less of a dating app, and more of a “hook-up” app.
In its early days, Tinder leaned into this reputation. Perhaps the most notorious feature was the introduction of a secret “Elo ranking”, a term borrowed from the chess world to describe a way to score people based on their previous matches. With the Tinder version, your score went up a lot if hot people swiped right on you; if ugly people swiped left on you, it went down just as much. Whether your matches were hot was based on their own Elo ranking, and so on.
For Seidman, this feature was a big mistake.
Find out more about this topic over at SCMP.
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Djazator, Russia — One of the most endangered animals on the planet is the Altai snow leopard. Thanks to the three decades of hunting and poaching, the elusive cats in the remote mountains of Southern Siberia were almost wiped out from existence.
In the village of Djazator, CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer met former poacher Boris Markov, who said just one pelt used to fetch him enough cash to buy a car.
Palmer and her team traveled off road, even on horseback, to get deep into Russia's Sailugemsky National Park, where they met the park's biologist and researcher Alexei Kuzhlekov. He's part of an innovative program to bring the leopards back.
Their goal is to shoot animals, not with guns, but rather with motion-triggered cameras, which are hidden everywhere across the Siberian backcountry.
The results are astounding; intimate photos of incredibly shy animals that will do just about anything to avoid human beings.
Even Alexei, who studies the animals and knows as much about them as just about anyone, has only seen a snow leopard once.
But what did people like Alexei do that made poachers stop poaching?
Find out on CBS News.
(Image Credit: World Wild Fund For Nature)
On a recent Friday evening, two dozen men and women gathered to a backyard patio. Most of them are heavily tattooed and wore several beaded bracelets, while some of them wore tie-dye tank tops. All of them carried a steel water bottle.
The people listened attentively as celebrity chef Seamus Mullen conducted a cooking lesson and discussed the importance of food as “nourishment” while pointing to a bouquet of squash. They then were divided into four groups. Each group was tasked to cook an assigned dish.
This is but one of many events at Haven Coliving, a fully furnished adult dorm in Venice dedicated to wellness. When these residents aren’t sleeping in a pod-style room with up to half a dozen strangers, they’re treated to a full lineup of Goop-friendly activities.
Check out more about this dorm over at the Los Angeles Times.
(Image Credit: Dania Maxwell/ Los Angeles Times)
Over the course of three days alone, San Francisco has already faced down 600 wildfires. Emergency workers in California hurried to evacuate rural areas of Northern California on Thursday. They warned residents that the high winds that propel the out-of-control blaze could become stronger in the coming days.
The Kincade fire, the largest fire to ignite this week, raged through the steep canyons of northern Sonoma county, racing through 10,000 acres within hours of igniting. The wind gusts made it worse, as it propelled the fire through forests like blowtorches, which left firefighters with little opportunity to stop, or at least slow down, the fires.
Aerial footage showed homes engulfed in flames. But beyond the destruction, which appeared limited on Thursday to a relatively small number of buildings, hundreds of thousands of people were affected, both by the fires and a deliberate blackout meant to prevent them. Schools and businesses closed and thousands of people evacuated their homes.
It has been three consecutive years of record-breaking fires, and researchers say that these are to continue as the world warms. In light of all this, how, then, should we live in an ecosystem that is primed to burn?
More of this over at The New York Times.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Image Credit: Noah Berger/ Associated Press)
