[lush]

Church Pastor Pockets Millions through Crypto Scheme Fraud, Claims God “Told Him to Do It
012624*

A Colorado pastor accused of conning his own congregation out of millions of dollars by promoting a useless crypto coin claims that God Himself told him to do it.

Eli Regalado and his wife Kaitlyn are being investigated for fraud after allegedly launching and peddling a useless cryptocurrency as a a low-risk, high-profit investment pegged to the average value of the top 100 cryptocurrencies. In reality, INDXcoin was “illiquid and practically worthless,” according to the Colorado Division of Securities, and only available through the Regalados’ proprietary crypto exchange, called Kingdom Wealth Exchange, which the pastor shut down last year, making the coin virtually useless. Now Regalado claims that the whole thing was God’s idea, although he admits that he may have “misunderstood” his message.



“It was last October [20]21 that the Lord brought this cryptocurrency to me,” Eli Regalado said in a video update to INDXcoin “investors”. “The Lord said, ‘Take this to my people for a wealth transfer, I want you to build this.” We took God at his word and sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit.”

Apparently, God actually insisted that Regalado build and promote INDXcoin to his followers despite his reluctance to do so. He told the Division of Securities that he had no previous experience with cryptocurrencies, but that didn’t make a difference to the Lord.

“I said: Lord, I don’t want to do this. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t have any experience in this industry. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to be caught up in something,” Regalado recalled. “God is in the business of doing new things and breaking seals. And he did tell us to do this.”



Eli and Kaitlyn Regalado are accused of advertising INDXcoin through presentations at his church and at others he found through other pastors and raking in $3.2 million from gullible investors who believed it was God’s creation. Although he claimed that it was an exchange malfunction that spelled the end of INDXcoin last year, investigators found that the Regalados had used at least $1.3 million for personal benefit.

“Out of the $1.3 [million], half a million dollars went to the IRS, and a few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel the Lord told us to do,” Eli Regalado recently explained in a video, but investigators claim that they have evidence of other personal expenses from investor funds, like a Range Rover, luxury handbags, jewelry, boat rentals, and snowmobile adventures.

“We allege that Mr. Regalado took advantage of the trust and faith of his own Christian community and that he peddled outlandish promises of wealth to them when he sold them essentially worthless cryptocurrencies,” Colorado Securities Commissioner Tung Chan said.



Regalado, who reportedly found God 20 years ago, while serving a prison sentence for boosting cars. He began preaching for the online-only Victorious Grace Church, where he and his wife are listed as the only employees, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking about the violations of Colorado’s anti-fraud, licensing, and registration laws that he and his wife stand accused of, Eli Regalado told his followers that he may have misinterpreted God’s message, but that a miracle is still possible.

Either I misheard God, and every one of you who prayed and came in — you as well. Or two, God is still not done with this project,” Regalado said. “What we’re believing for still is that God is going to do a miracle. God is going to work a miracle in the financial sector.”



A pastor scamming his parishioners isn’t that crazy if you really think about it, but you know what is? The reaction of Regalado’s followers to the situation. In the comments to a video of him bemoaning his situation and invoking God’s will, dozens of people continue to reassure him that God will “turn the situation around.”

dude looks exactly how i would imagine this bozo would look like

Purple Planets Could Be The Signs of Alien Life We've Been Looking For


(Cappi Thompson/Moment/Getty Images)

In the search for extraterrestrial life, scientists already know that we might be looking for a world that's very different from Earth's verdant, plant-dominated biosphere.

Exactly how different is hard to know, but our own planet can still offer us some clues. There are, for example, organisms that can live in environments very inhospitable to most other life on Earth.

But what would an alien equivalent of plant life look like?

Well, life here on Earth offers another possibility for that, too. While a significant proportion of producers here contain green-hued chlorophyll for survival, photosynthetic bacteria that thrive in low-light conditions tend to be colored purple to make the most of infrared radiation.

"Purple bacteria can thrive under a wide range of conditions, making it one of the primary contenders for life that could dominate a variety of worlds," says astrobiologist Lígia Fonseca Coelho of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute.

"They already thrive here in certain niches. Just imagine if they were not competing with green plants, algae and bacteria: A red sun could give them the most favorable conditions for photosynthesis."

The most abundant stars in the Milky Way galaxy are not like the Sun; rather they are smaller, redder, emitting significantly less heat and light than our own star. Up to 75 percent of all stars in the galaxy are red dwarf stars, which leads scientists to speculate whether life can emerge on a red dwarf exoplanet, what it might look like if it did, and – most importantly – how we could detect it.

The Carl Sagan Institute has been on a quest to catalog different forms of life, and work out what they might look like from afar if we were viewing them on another world.

Here on Earth, the photosynthetic pigment seen most often in plants is chlorophyll-a. This is also found in cyanobacteria, which is no accident. The chloroplast in plant cells that contains the chlorophyll pigment is actually a symbiotic cyanobacteria that was taken up into the ancestors of modern plants a long time ago, and co-evolved to allow their hosts to photosynthesize.

Around a star with different light conditions, a life form with a very different hue might rise to dominance in a similar fashion, so Coelho and her colleagues collected more than 20 species of bacteria which use biopigments called carotenoids to harvest light energy.

These organisms thrive on red and infrared light, using light-harvesting systems are somewhat simpler than those seen in plants, using bacteriochlorophylls that absorb wavelengths of light not used by plants or cyanobacteria and don't produce oxygen.

The researchers carefully measured the pigments of the different bacteria, and created models of alien worlds with different surface and atmospheric conditions, to determine what they would look like. In all cases, the bacteria caused the planet to produce intense hues that could potentially be detected.

Depending on the species of bacteria, carotenoids may make the microbes look more orange, red, or brown. Yet just as variation among plants and algae still blurs into forests, grasslands, and mangroves of stunning greenery, a spread of cooler hues further down the electromagnetic spectrum could still represent some form of photosynthesis.

This means that, if another world evolves a rich covering of life that has similar biology to the purple bacteria here on Earth, we have a means for spying it out.

"We are just opening our eyes to these fascinating worlds around us," says astrobiologist Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute. "Purple bacteria can survive and thrive under such a variety of conditions that it is easy to imagine that on many different worlds, purple may just be the new green."

The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. (open access)

[Zbignieww]

Vikings Filed Grooves Into Their Teeth as an Unusual Form of ID



Humans have modified their bodies in various ways throughout history, tattooing, piercing, scarring, implanting, or even deforming parts of their anatomy. In spite of its ubiquity, it's not always clear why. Cultural traditions are a strong factor, as are beauty standards, which vary across time and place.

A new analysis of remains of individuals who lived in Viking Age Gotland around a thousand years ago suggests that their own body modifications reinforced social identities.

Archaeologists Matthias Toplak of the Viking Museum Haithabu and Lukas Kerk of the University of Münster in Germany found that horizontal grooves filed into the teeth may have been the mark of a group of merchant men.

Meanwhile, the only instances of an intentional reshaping and elongation of the skull associated with the Viking Age have been found in three Gotland women. The origin and meaning of that particular modification has been difficult to resolve.



"While both forms of body modification have received wide attention in other cultural contexts," the researchers write in their paper, "the specific expressions of these customs in Viking Age society still lack systematic investigation in terms of their social implications."

Tooth and skull modification have appeared in various forms for various cultures across thousands of years. Vikings have been known for some time to have practiced tooth modification, with masterfully filed horizontal grooves found on the teeth of Viking Age men from what are now Sweden and Denmark in a practice that seems to have persisted for centuries.

The largest concentration of remains with filed teeth were found in Gotland, which could suggest the practice originated there… but it also makes the region an excellent case study for understanding what the filed teeth were for. Did the Vikings just think they looked snazzy, or did they serve a deeper purpose?

Previous research suggested the bodies with filed teeth might belong to a specific group of people. In an analysis of the bones of around 130 such men, Toplak and Kerk note that the remains were deposited in places known to support trading, and that all individuals with filed teeth appear to be adult men.

In addition, the remains with filed teeth in one Gotland cemetery were all found in one spot, many face down, lending support to the possibility that it was the burial place for non-local individuals that stayed in the town periodically.

"We therefore theorize that the custom of tooth filing might have been linked to trading activities of larger groups of professional merchants," they write.

"According to this theory, they might have functioned as a rite of initiation and sign of identification for a closed group of merchants, as some kind of precursor to the later guilds."



Though possible it was an identifying feature of Gotland merchants, the practice itself was by no means restricted to this one location. With variations in the number of teeth filed and the number of lines per tooth, tooth filing could have had different purposes in different parts of Viking Age Sweden and Denmark.

As for the three women with skull modification, the grave of one had few surviving goods, but the other two were buried with the rich jewelry and clothing associated with Gotland burials, suggesting that they were accepted and valued members of their communities.

Although skull modification has not previously been associated with cultures in this region, previous DNA analysis found that one of the women was from Gotland, and another from the Baltic region, which means the practice can't be confidently placed outside Gotland, as has been seen in other cemeteries.

It's possible that the woman from Gotland was born elsewhere, however, to Gotlandish parents, underwent skull binding in early childhood, and then returned home to Gotland. Either way, all three women seem to be linked somehow. They all lived at around the same time, and the same method seems to have been used to shape their skulls.

Since their body modifications were not more broadly adopted by the Viking communities in which they lived, the researchers believe it had little meaning there, and therefore must have been performed somewhere other than Gotland.



Tooth filing and skull shaping represent two different approaches to body modification in Viking Age Gotland, the researchers say.

"The society of Viking Age Gotland utilized the custom of tooth filings as an internal sign system in their social communication. As a conscious and actively chosen embodiment of adults, predominantly male, we have argued that tooth filings were primarily intended for endogenous interpersonal communication – members of a certain social group could identify each other," they write.

"The skull modification, on the other hand, was imposed on the three females during their earliest childhood to express their affiliation to a certain social group. This embodiment also expressed a form of endogenous interpersonal communication, that is as communication within a larger cultural group. On Gotland, however, this sign was probably unknown to the wider society."

It's impossible to know with certainty what function body modification practiced by our long-dead forebears served. However, by approaching it in the context of communication and community, we may be able to glean the beginning of understanding.

The team's research has been published in Current Swedish Archaeology.

https://www.sciencealert.com/vikings-fi ... form-of-id

[johngriffen]

I sometimes get REALLY DEPRESSED reviewing the news these days.
It's always about a global pandemic threatening life as we know it,
protests around the world, stupid politicians, natural disasters,
or some other really bad story.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Welcome to The mobi weekly news magazine
IN OTHER NEWS
MONDAY APRIL 22
What is it?
Here is your chance to become an "ACE REPORTER" for our weekly news magazine.
It is your job to fine weird, funny or "good feel" stories from around the world and share them with our readers in our weekly magazine

How do you play?
Just post a story that you have come across that made you smile, laugh, feel good...
BUT NOTHING DEPRESSING

EXAMPLE POST

​Naked sunbather chases wild boar through park after it steals his laptop bag

A naked sunbather was seen chasing wild boar through a park after it stole his laptop bag.
Amusing photographs from Germany show the man running after the animal to try and claim the plastic bag back.
But the cheeky boar and its two piglets appear to be too quick for the sunbather, who can't keep up with their speedy little trotters.
As the incident unfolds, groups of friends and family sat on the grass watch on and laugh.
Heads are seen turning in surprise and amusement in the hilarious photographs.
The incident happened at Teufelssee Lake - a bathing spot in the Grunwell Forest in Berlin, Germany.

Rules:
Each Edition of IN OTHER NEWS will be open for 7 days...
You can post as many stories as you like, but you will only get paid for One Story in any 24 hour period
So in other words, you can only earn WRZ$ once a day.
Each news day will start when I post announcing it
OR at:
9:00 AM CHICAGO TIME (UTC -5)
3:00 PM GMT (UTC -0)
on those days I space out and forget to post or can't due to Real Life
Stories may be accompanied with images - but No big images, please! 800x800 pixels wide maximum
Videos are allowed, but please keep them short, and post a short summary for those that don't like to click on videos
No Duplicate stories - Where a post has been edited resulting in duplicates, then the last one in time gets disallowed.
And please limit this to reasonably family friendly stories

Reward:
Each news story posted that I feel is acceptable (must be a real story, too few words or simply a headline are not considered acceptable) will earn you 50 WRZ$
If you post multiple stories on any given day, you will only earn 50 WRZ$ for the first story of the Day
All payments will be made at THE END of the weekly news cycle.
Special Bonus - Each week I will award "The Pulitzer Prize" for the best story of the week
The weekly winner of the "The Pulitzer Prize" will receive a 100 WRZ$ bonus
It's just my personal opinion, so my judgement is final

So help bring GOOD news to the members of mobi, and join our reporting team...

IN OTHER NEWS



NOTE: THE RECAP AND REWARDS WILL BE DONE LATER

[ozswede]

Mum praises stranger’s kindness after he gifts her sick daughter, 5, a Barbie doll

A mum has praised a stranger after he gifted her sick daughter a Barbie doll in a random act of kindness.

Lianne Bealey was shopping at Asda in Gillingham with her daughter Grace on Friday when the man approached her at the self-checkout.


Grace with her new Barbie toy gifted to her by a stranger in Asda

The 40-year-old told KentOnline: “Grace has been in and out of hospital the past couple of weeks and it was the first time we’d gone out since she got back.

“We just popped to Asda for a couple of bits and when we went to pay a lovely man who was shopping with his wife came up to us with a Barbie.

“He said ‘it looks like your little girl’s had a tough time and we’d really love to buy this for her’.

“It was just really lovely of him. We didn’t catch his name or anything, he was a complete stranger.”

When Grace was born she suffered an extensive stroke and has since had after effects.


Lianne Bealey, from Chatham, with daughter Grace

During the pandemic, the now five-year-old went into a seizure that doctors were unable to get her out of and she was induced into a coma.

Lianne, who lives in Chatham, explained: “She was very very poorly then, we nearly lost her.

“She’s been relatively well until recently.

“In the last couple of weeks she’s had a sudden onset of a lot of seizures and her legs just keep giving way so she’s now in a wheelchair a lot of the time.

“Her mobility has been massively affected.


Grace has recently been in and out of hospital after a sudden onset of seizures

“She’s now got a hole in her brain which is just slightly bigger than a tennis ball where the brain has started to disintegrate.

“We’re just waiting on some more test results but it could mean quite major surgery in the next year.”

In March, Grace participated in a fundraising 5k walk for Medway-based charity Step and Learn. She has raised more than £2,000 and donations can be made here.

Lianne added: “She wasn’t able to finish it because of how unwell she’s been so this really has cheered her up at a time when she’s been feeling really low.


The five-year-old has been doing a fundraising event for Step and Learn

“It was just so lovely of him to do that, it has been quite a tough time.

“I’d love to find him to thank him properly, I was just so shocked in the moment.

“When children witness random acts of kindness like that it inspires them to do the same.

“Being in and out of hospital all the time with a poorly child can be lonely and isolating sometimes.

“So to know that someone wanted to do something nice for her just restores your faith in humanity.”

(A reminder that ozswede can - sometimes, when the wind is in the right direction - post nice things ).

[Alessa9]

Google is combining its Android software and Pixel hardware divisions to more broadly integrate AI



Google will combine the software division responsible for Android mobile software and the Chrome browser with the hardware division known for Pixel smartphones and Fitbit wearables, the company said Thursday. It's part of a broader plan to integrate artificial intelligence more widely throughout the company.

In a letter to employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the changes will “turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems” while helping to spur innovation.

The decision will place both operations under the oversight of Rick Osterloh, a Google executive who previously oversaw the company's hardware group. Not long ago, Google insulated Android development from the hardware division, saying it wanted to avoid giving its phone designers an unfair advantage over the other major smartphone makers who used Android — including Samsung and Motorola, as well as Chinese companies such as Oppo and Xiaomi.

Then a few years ago, Google started to position the Pixel as a flagship for demonstrating what AI could accomplish and leaned heavily into developing features that could demonstrate its potential. That meant more integration of AI hardware and software to power those features on mobile devices.

In an interview with The Verge, a tech publication, Osterloh noted that AI is the primary reason for bringing together Google's consumer hardware and software engineers. He argued that phone technology is already growing more dependent on AI, citing the development of the Pixel camera, which among other things uses the technology for features that enhance nighttime photos or automatically choose the best of several closely timed shots.

Combining the teams, Osterloh added, is a way for Google to move even faster on infusing AI into its features. Designing the Pixel camera several years ago, he said in the interview, required deep knowledge of not just the complex hardware and software systems involved, but also the then-early AI models used for image processing.

“That hardware-software-AI integration really showed how AI could totally transform a user experience,” Osterloh said. “That was important. And it’s even more true today.”

“What you’re now starting to see Google do is flex its core AI innovation engines,” said Chirag Dekate, an analyst with Gartner. “Google wants to dominate the AI, the commanding heights of the emerging AI economy, both on the consumer side as well as on the enterprise side, essentially by infusing AI everywhere and by connecting it.”

Meanwhile, the chief of Google's software division, Hiroshi Lockheimer, is left without a title and, according to Pichai's letter, will be starting some other unnamed projects. Lockheimer did join Osterloh for the Verge interview, though, and the two men insisted the changes weren't the result of a power struggle.

Google is also reorganizing its AI research and responsibility groups, although those changes mostly won’t directly affect consumer products — at least not for now.

[midgemental]

Highs and lows of the summit...
Inside the high-stakes, death-defying world of scaling Mt. Everest



A new book details the elaborate industry that has developed around Mt. Everest and the hundreds of climbers who attempt to scale it each year.

In April, 2013, a group of Sherpas, the iconic Nepalese mountain guides, hung off the side of the mountain they call Sagarmatha, installing 3,000 feet of the 12 miles of fixed ropes added to Everest each year to aid inexperienced climbers.

Because it was dangerous work, the Sherpas carried hundreds of pounds of rope, ice screws and carabiners — most Western climbers took a rest day so the experienced crew could complete their task in relative safety.

Three experienced Europeans didn’t rest though, and their climbing eventually led to a shower of snow and ice landing on the rope workers below.

The Sherpas angrily converged on the Europeans, the insults flying.

Then a European climber foolishly called one Sherpa a “machikne,” a severe slight in Nepali referring to a person who enjoys sexual congress with his mother.

"Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World" is written by Will Cockrell.

The Sherpas packed up and silently went down the mountain, leaving the job unfinished.

But when the three Europeans returned to camp, a crowd of some 400 Sherpas wearing face coverings and holding baseball-sized rocks descended on their tents.

Some of the younger Sherpas believed the European climbers deserved to die, but their more experienced elders preached calm.

Instead a simple ultimatum was delivered to the interlopers.

“They told us if we were not [off the mountain] in an hour they would kill all three of us,” one of the guilty Europeans recounts in Will Cockrell’s “Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World” (Gallery Books, out now).

Climbing Mount Everest had long been an obsession of Westerners, beginning in the early 1920s when a Brit named George Mallory attempted the ascent numerous times.

His motivation for conquering Everest was famously “Because it’s there.”

But on his final try to summit the world’s tallest mountain, Mallory and his climbing partner went missing, never to be seen alive again.

Everest wasn’t summited until 1953, when with the able help of the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, a New Zealander named Edmund Hilary finally reached the top of the world.

For the next 40 years that achievement was rare, accomplished by under 400 people.

Since the early 1990s though, with the help of first Western and now Nepali guiding companies, nearly 12,000 people have summited Everest.

The shift from experts climbing Everest unaided to amateurs using guide companies to ascend the world’s tallest mountain began in the 1980s.

A gregarious businessman and inexperienced climber named Richard Bass was asked in 1982 to join an Everest expedition (mostly because he could fund the entire trip for the whole group).

Then, aided by Sherpas, the neophyte outdoorsman and 55-year-old Bass reached Everest’s peak.

“No mountain guide had ever brought someone to Everest before, bearing explicit responsibility for the person’s success and safety,” Cockrell writes.

Richard Bass’ success was especially impressive because climbing Everest could be fatal.

By Bass’ ascent only 119 people had summited while 63 died trying.

The dead had plummeted off ice cliffs, were swept away by avalanches, fell into and were buried alive in 150-feet-deep crevasses.

Others succumbed to exhaustion or oxygen deprivation in the mountain’s “death zone” above 28,000 feet, no more than 400 meters below the 29,031 foot summit.

Often the deaths occurred dramatically. In 1996 one Western climber was lost in a snowstorm that fell “like a piano on a cartoon character,” and it was too late when he was found by a searching Sherpa.

Today it’s believed as many as 200 bodies remain frozen atop Everest.

“The base camps on both sides of the mountain have dozens of makeshift memorials to dead climbers, many … have seemingly vanished into thin air,” the book recounts.

Still, with the amateur, middle-aged Bass reaching Everest’s peak with the aid of professional guides, seasoned climbers saw an opening.

“A few entrepreneurial-minded mountain guides sensed an opportunity,” Cockrell says. “There were careers to be made.”

By the mid-90s the Everest guiding business was controlled by a “big 5” of Western-owned companies: International Mountain Guides, Himalayan Kingdoms, Himalayan Experience, Adventure Consultants, and Alpine Ascents International.

Working Everest soon became big business.

While there were 0 official guided tours up Everest in 1989, by 1995 there were 40, with business nearly doubling each year.

Some companies at the mountain’s base camp sold supplies, like ladders or bottled oxygen, while the guide companies led inexperienced climbers by providing logistics and routing, supervision and hand-holding.

The guides dramatically improved the success rate of Everest expeditions, with only 10% of climbers summiting prior to their existence but nearly 70% after.

Not everyone loved the ease with which professional guides allowed amateurs to reach Everest’s peak.

While once Everest’s base camp was home to a select community of the world’s best climbers, today it can be filled with some 1,500 people each spring.

All enjoy bean bag chairs and high-speed Internet, masseuses and baristas, full bars and movie screens.

In 2006 the camp hosted a rock concert featuring the The Fixx, Stray Cats and Squeeze.

Later concerts in the Everest region included the Finnish band Ancara.

On the Tibet side of the mountain, it’s said Chinese government officials get rich running a racket of “whorehouses” and casinos.

There’s overcrowding on Everest now, too, including the famous 2019 photo showing as many as 200 climbers standing in a traffic jam on the mountain’s highest ridge, each standing in the “death zone” while waiting to summit.

If climbing Everest led to many Western profits, so has it helped the Sherpas.

When Westerners first began attempting to ascend Sagarmatha, Sherpas flooded their camps to secure jobs as porters lugging supplies up the mountain.

With nearly half of Nepal living below the poverty line, the work was much welcomed.

Still, the locals who helped so many Westerners scale Everest were never seen as equals.

When seven Nepalis died in an avalanche in 1922, for example, news reports glossed over the tragedy to emphasize “all whites are safe.”

But a newer generation of Nepalis, raised in a country home to a 10-year Maoist revolution from 1996 to 2006, weren’t willing to accept the status quo.

In 2014 when a chunk of falling ice “as big as a 50-foot ocean wave” swept down the mountain and killed 16 Nepalis, the Sherpas went on strike, ending the season.

“If there were no Sherpas working, there was no Everest industry,” Cockrell writes. “Period.”

After the 2014 season was canceled by the strike and 2015 doomed by a devastating earthquake that killed nearly 10,000 Nepalis, when climbing resumed again in 2016 the dominance of the “Big 5” Western guiding companies was done.

Instead Nepali-owned outfits like Asian Trekking and Seven Summits Treks (started by 3 Nepali brothers) began to dominate.

In the last 10 years about 90% of the Everest guiding market has been taken over by locally-owned companies, many Sherpa-owned.

After nearly a century of being lackeys to their Western employers and clients, the Sherpas were at last leveraging their skills and experience on Sagarmatha to control the narrative.

That’s as it should be, as even many Westerners concede.

“There is only one Everest,” the American climber Conrad Anker says. “And it’s really for the country of Nepal.”

https://nypost.com/2024/04/21/lifestyle ... t-everest/

[rflash8]

A new Lennon-McCartney collab has dropped — but this time, it's by the Beatles' sons



When two musicians with famous fathers co-create a song, it's bound to attract attention. That goes double when the names attached to the song are Lennon and McCartney.

"Primrose Hill" is a gently nostalgic ditty by James McCartney, with cowriting credit to Sean Ono Lennon. They are the youngest offspring of one of the most famous songwriting duos in history.


https://youtu.be/8ntPFNFbPb0

In a picture McCartney posted on Instagram, the two musicians strikingly resemble their famous Beatles fathers. Lennon was born in 1975, five years before his dad's murder, and has carved out a respectable, if uneven, career as a musician since the 1990s, performing with his mother, Yoko Ono, as well as bands such as Cibo Matto. (Earlier this year, Rolling Stone described his new album, Asterisms, as "a genreless wash of instrumental music.")

James McCartney, whose mother was the late Linda McCartney, is two years younger. He began his recording career by making contributions to music by his parents in the late 1990s, but didn't begin releasing his own recordings until a decade later. On Instagram, he said the song was inspired by an idyllic boyhood memory.

"I had a vision as a child in Scotland, on what was a lovely summers day," he enthused. "Letting go, I saw my true love and saviour in my mind's eye. Primrose Hill is about getting the ball rolling with me & finding this person."

Paul McCartney promoted the song on his Facebook page, writing he was sending "lots of love to Sean Ono Lennon." Those who might be reflexively cynical about nepo-baby collabs will not be shocked to learn that the song has not performed particularly well on Spotify, where it earned fewer than 40,000 listens in the five days after its release. But while no one will mistake James McCartney for his father with this single, the song shares his affable spirit. It's a recognizable tribute to a legendary lineage, and perhaps no more than it's intended to be: a sweet and modest little thing.

[Fatima99]

Stunned Couple Finds 14th-Century Medieval Gargoyle Hidden Behind Their Toilet



A British couple was left stunned when they found a medieval gargoyle hidden inside their bathroom.

Tracy and Rory Vorster were cleaning their bathroom when they made the “grotesque” discovery—a stone-carved sprite concealed under a wooden panel.

The couple searched for answers after removing the shelf in their Grade-I listed rental home (a building or site listed as having exceptional national, architectural, or historical importance).

Experts at Lincoln Cathedral believe the ghoulish figure forms part of a historical drainage system dating back to the 14th century.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said the father of three. “I shouted up to my wife and said ‘I’ve found a thing’.

“The whole of the house has kind of a hollow walling, so we immediately thought there could be more. In fact we’re almost certain now.

“The previous occupant had been here for over 20 years, so surely they knew, but we had absolutely no clue it was there.”



The couple just moved in on March 1 and Tracy just thought it was a shelf, and wasn’t sure why people decided to cover it up.

Their home on Vicars Court is owned by Lincoln Cathedral and is believed to be the home of a former vicar.

“It was well documented (back) to the 14th century but not that many people around here know it. It would have been for a vicar (and) I think it was like a kitchen sink.”

A Survey of Ancient Houses in Lincoln Vol. II says: Houses to the South and West of the Minster in 1887 first recorded the carving as a “grotesque mask which forms the drain.”

“Because we don’t own the house we can’t just pull down the wall.

“My plans for it are to just enjoy it, because of how interesting it is. I have a desire to upkeep it.

“It makes it even more special. The house is so interesting.”

Cancer Breakthrough Found to Boost Immune Cells Without Harmful Side-Effects By Directing Protein Cytokines


Cancer research team gathers around Luminex 200 machine used to analyze tumor cytokine levels – Virginia Tech / SWNS

A new way to safely boost immune cells to fight cancer—avoiding harmful side-effects such as hair loss—has been developed.

Scientists at Virginia Tech devised the ground-breaking immunotherapy to localize cancer-killing cytokines in tumors, improving the effectiveness of current treatments.

Immunotherapy involves harnessing the power of the body’s immune system to fight potentially deadly cancer cells. The researchers at the school’s College of Engineering have found a way to revamp a treatment procedure into an innovative practice.

Their approach involves activating the immune cells in the body and “reprogramming” them to attack and destroy the cancer cells.

The method is frequently implemented with the protein cytokine. Cytokines are small protein molecules that act as “intercellular biochemical messengers” and are released by the body’s immune cells to coordinate their response.

“Cytokines are potent and highly effective at stimulating the immune cells to eliminate cancer cells,” explained chemical engineering Professor Rong Tong (pictured above, left).

“The problem is they’re so potent that if they roam freely throughout the body, they’ll activate every immune cell they encounter, which can cause an overactive immune response and potentially fatal side effects.”

Unlike previous methods, the new technique ensures that the immune cell-stimulating cytokines effectively localize within the tumors for weeks while preserving the cytokine’s structure and reactivity levels.

Stimulating the body’s immune system to attack tumors has been for years a promising alternative to traditional cancer treatments, like chemotherapy, which can’t distinguish between healthy cells and cancer cells

Prof. Tong says the delivery of cytokines can “jump-start” immune cells in the tumor, but overstimulating healthy cells can also cause severe side effects.

“Scientists determined a while ago that cytokines can be used to activate and fight against tumors, but they didn’t know how to localize them inside the tumor while not exposing toxicity to the rest of the body.

“Chemical engineers can look at this from an engineering approach and use their knowledge to help refine and elevate the effectiveness of the cytokines so they can work inside the body effectively.”

The team’s goal was to strike a balance between killing cancer cells while sparing healthy cells, by creating specialized particles with distinctive sizes that help determine where the drug is going.

The micro-particles are designed to stay within the tumor environment after being injected into the body.

Materials science and engineering Professor Wenjun ‘Rebecca’ Cai and her students worked on measuring the particles’ surface properties.

“Surface engineering and characterization, along with particle size, play important roles in controlled drug delivery, ensuring prolonged drug presence and sustained therapeutic effectiveness,” explained Prof. Tong.

“Our strategy not only minimizes cytokine-induced harm to healthy cells, but also prolongs cytokine retention within the tumor. This helps facilitate the recruitment of immune cells for targeted tumor attack.”

She says the next step involves combining the new, localized cytokine therapy method with commercially available, FDA-approved checkpoint blockade antibodies, which reactivate the tumor immune cells that have been silenced—so they can fight back the cancer cells.

“When there is a tumor inside the body, the body’s immune cells are being deactivated by the cancer cells.

“The FDA-approved checkpoint blocking antibody helps ‘take off the brakes’ that tumors put on immune cells, while the cytokine molecules ‘step on the gas’ to jump-start the immune system and get an immune cell army to fight cancer cells. These two approaches work together to activate immune cells.”

Engineering a target to take down cancer cells

Combining the checkpoint antibodies with the particle-anchored cytokine proved to successfully eliminate many tumors in the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances.

The team believes the new approach of attaching cytokines to particles also could be used to deliver other types of immuno-stimulatory drugs.

“The whole class of drugs that are employed to jump-start the immune system to fight cancer cells has largely not yet succeeded. Our goal is to create novel solutions that allow researchers to test these drugs with existing FDA-approved therapeutics, ensuring both safety and enhanced efficacy.”

Prof. Cai views their project as “a perfect marriage between chemical engineering and materials science”.

“This collaboration not only accelerates immunotherapy research, but also has the ability to transform cancer treatment.”

[PennySerenade]

Twins who topped Canadian females at Boston Marathon began running on northern Ontario dirt roads



Kim and Michelle Krezonoski started their running careers on the dirt camp roads of Shuniah Township near Thunder Bay, Ont.

This week, the 30-year-old twins crossed the finish line to become Canada's top two female Boston Marathon finishers.

In their first Boston event, Michelle completed the 42.2-kilometre race in 2 hours 38 minutes and 23 seconds (2:38:23). Kim was just a couple of minutes behind her with a time of 2:40:50. Hellen Obiri of Kenya successfully defended her title, becoming the first woman to win back to back since 2005.

Michelle and Kim are from northwestern Ontario but now live in Toronto.

"That's a rare opportunity to have your twin sister line up with you at a world major in the pro field," said Michelle.

There were about 30,000 participants, including over 1,500 Canadians, from over 100 countries in the 128th Boston Marathon, the world's oldest and among the six World Marathon Majors.

The race, held April 15, was Michelle's second ever marathon and Kim's third.

As they were escorted from their accommodations by police to a coach bus, hotel staff lined the hallway to cheer them on before they were driven to the start line.

"I had tears in my eyes because I realized how much this race means to the city, how much that we've worked to get into that field and then to board a coach bus with some of the best athletes in the world," said Kim.

"To think that we came from somewhere without street lights in the middle of northern Ontario is really cool," Michelle added.

"This is one of those moments you'll always remember for the rest of your life."

The sisters have early memories of track meets and fun runs in Thunder Bay. Their first big road race was the city's annual Ten Mile Road Race in 2018.

"It was such a special memory because we grew up watching that race, and then to have our parents watching, to have our family watching and friends in the Thunder Bay community just made it really a proud moment," said Kim.



After that, they worked their way up to half-marathons in graduate school and then started doing full marathons. The Krezonoskis say their parents have always supported them and their father is a key figure in Thunder Bay's running community.

"They flew from Thunder Bay [to Boston] and walked over 12 miles [about 19 km] to go to the top of Heartbreak Hill, cheer us on for five seconds and then walk all the way back," said Michelle.

Heartbreak Hill — a steep uphill portion of the race at mile 20, or about 32 km — is known as one of the hardest parts of the Boston Marathon. That's where Kim says she lost some steam and fell behind her sister.

'Find the joy in running'
During the race, the twins settled with a group of five or six others. They all passed around water cups and the sisters recall one racer who offered their cup to someone who dropped theirs.

"To feel that sportsmanship amongst complete strangers who were all competitors — but we want the best for each other. That's always a special moment where kindness is out there and you feel it," said Michelle.

The training was tough, with Michelle recovering from a partial Achilles tear. In January, they began the "marathon build" — her sister described it as "slowly stacking little bricks" and being strategic with their workouts.



The two wore matching bracelets they made with the word "patience" on them as a reminder to be kind to themselves on the long, daunting road ahead.

"I think the key to marathon running is to not focus all the time on running, but to really embrace the environment you're in because that environment, the cheering, just being with other runners that you're normally not running with — that's the experience you come for," said Michelle.

Now the twins have their sights set on the five other World Marathon Majors on the road to receiving the Six Star Medal.

Their advice to others, no matter the distance, is to work hard and dream big.

"It's important to find the joy in running, and that's the number one reason why you should run," said Michelle. "Find the joy in the sport and it'll carry you as long and as far as you want to go."

[goldie0608]

Pet Owners Praise 'Power of a Microchip' After Reuniting with Lost Cat 5 Years Later

“It is a miracle that he walked up to these two women who were in rescue," said owner Cindy Hall



A Nevada couple has called the discovery of their cat in Arkansas "a miracle" — five years after the feline first went missing.

Cindy and Jeff Hall received a phone call in March that their Russian Blue cat Sam was discovered at a gas station in Arkansas, Cindy told local NBC affiliate KARK.

Two women found Sam at the location and brought him to Jacksonville Animal Hospital. Using the information from Sam's microchip, the women contacted the animal rescue where the Halls initially adopted him when he was just 12 weeks old, PAWSitively Cats.

The women, according to a post from the rescue on Facebook, were part of the Alone 2 Home pet transport crew and were transporting two dogs at the time of Sam's discovery.

“We had him for seven years and then one day he got out,” Cindy told the outlet of her family's pet. “It is a miracle that he walked up to these two women who were in rescue."

Cindy also told KARK that PAWSitively Cats then called her and Jeff directly. She described the moment as a "beautiful story" and added that reuniting with her cat — whom they had owned for seven years before his disappearance — was "surreal."

"This story just can’t underestimate the power of a microchip," she said. "We are so grateful for everyone that was involved.”

The cat, now 12 years old and weighing 21 lbs., had his journey documented by PAWSitively Cats on Facebook, where the organization first posted about Sam (who previously went by the name Luke) earlier this month. The rescue wrote that when Sam first escaped from the Hall residence, "someone picked him up and failed to look for his home."

PAWSitively Cats then got a message on March 22 that the microchipped cat had been found in Brinkley, Ark., before contacting the family. The feline received "the royal treatment at the Jacksonville Animal Hospital in Little Rock" in the meantime. Alone 2 Home then again assisted with Sam's travels back home, as the Halls departed from Nevada to meet up with him.

"Once again, we will do everything possible to be sure our cats are safe and can get back home if that is what is best for them," the rescue wrote on Facebook.

"They are safe for life with us, one way or another as long as PAWSitively Cats can continue. You make that possible by donating and sharing our cats' stories. It really does take a whole community to save lives," it added.

The Alone 2 Home pet transport crew also posed for photos and provided additional updates with PAWSitively Cats, before the shelter updated followers on Sam's safe return home.

"Sam was joyfully reunited with his family this morning," the organization wrote in a later post. "They are on their way home to Nevada now where Sam will join the rest of the family: cats, dogs and human sisters."

Speaking to KARK, Cindy noted that "having [Sam] home makes our family feel complete."

[lush]

Ukrainian-Born Woman Wins Miss Japan Beauty Pageant, Sparks Controversy
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A 26-year-old model who was born in Ukraine and moved to Japan at the age of five was recently crowned Miss Japan, sparking a heated debate regarding national identity.

Carolina Shiino speaks and writes impeccable Japanese, she spent most of her life in Japan and identifies as Japanese. But she wasn’t born in Japan and, most importantly, she doesn’t look Japanese, and for many, as the newly-crowned Miss Japan, that’s a big problem. Ukrainian-born Carolina is the first naturalized Japanese citizen to win the national beauty pageant, and while some accepted her win as a “sign of the times,” for others it is a tough pill to swallow. Everyone acknowledges the young woman’s beauty, but the fact that a European woman was voted Miss Japan is simply unacceptable.


Photo: MISS NIPPON ASSOCIATION

“This person who was chosen as Miss Japan is not even a mix with Japanese but 100% pure Ukrainian. Understand she is beautiful, but this is ‘Miss Japan’. Where is the Japaneseness?” someone wrote on X (Twitter).

“If she was half [Japanese], sure no problem. But she’s ethnically 0% Japanese and wasn’t even born in Japan,” another person commented.

Ai Wada, the organizer of the Miss Japan Grand Prix pageant, told the BBC that judges had voted for Ms. Shiino with “full confidence”, and that her participation “gave us an opportunity to rethink what Japanese beauty is”.


Photo: MISS NIPPON ASSOCIATION

“Following today’s result, there is one thing I am convinced of… Japanese beauty exists not in the appearance, not in the blood, but it exists firmly in our heart,” Wada said.

However, the organiser’s message did little to calm spirits on social media where critical posts continued to go viral. People complained that crowning a European woman Miss Japan gave Japanese society a confusing message, while others simply said that they considered the decision ridiculous.

As for Carolina Shiino, she said she considered herself Japanese in both “speech and mind,” and hopes to one day help create a society where “people are not judged by their appearance”.



“I’ve had to face barriers that often prevent me from being accepted as Japanese, so I am filled with gratitude to be recognized at this competition as a Japanese person,” Ms Shiino said.

Carolina’s story is very similar to that of Brooke Bruk-Jackson, the white woman who sparked controversy by winning the title of Miss Zimbabwe, despite being born and raised in the African country.

It's Back! Voyager Is Making Sense Again After Months of Gibberish


Voyager probe against a stellar backdrop. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's Voyager 1 probe – the most distant man-made object in the Universe – is returning usable information to ground control following months of spouting gibberish, the US space agency announced Monday.

The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could tell it was still receiving their commands.

In March, teams working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single malfunctioning chip was to blame, and devised a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of its 46-year-old computer system.

"Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems," the agency said.

"The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again."

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was mankind's first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium, in 2012, and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018.

Both Voyager spacecraft carry "Golden Records" – 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing recipients to date the spaceship's launch, and symbolic instructions that convey how to play the record.

The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.

Their power banks are expected to be depleted sometime after 2025. They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.

Great Barrier Reef experiencing one of its worst coral bleaching events
Source: The Washington Post

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is experiencing one of its worst bleaching events since monitoring began nearly four decades ago, authorities say, with much of the famed reef showing signs of damage as warming ocean temperatures blight reefs worldwide.

Bleaching occurs when heat-stressed coral turn white after expelling symbiotic algae that provide food and color. It's a result of abnormal ocean temperatures in the past year that scientists worry could represent a major change to Earth systems.

In the Great Barrier Reef marine park, 73 percent of the reefs surveyed have prevalent bleaching — which means that more than 10 percent of the coral cover is bleached, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which manages the area, said Wednesday. Very high and extreme bleaching was observed across nearly 40 percent of the reef system.

"Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs globally," said Roger Beeden, the authority's chief scientist. "The Great Barrier Reef is an incredible ecosystem, and while it has shown its resilience time and time again, this summer has been particularly challenging."


Bleached and dead coral are visible from the air around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef on April 4.
David Gray/AFP/Getty Images

The dire update on Earth's largest reef system comes just days after scientists with the U.S.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Coral Reef Initiative said anomalous ocean temperatures are afflicting reefs worldwide.

According to NOAA scientists, the world is experiencing its fourth global bleaching event, and the second in the last decade. At least 53 countries and local regions have experienced mass bleaching across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, they said.

Ocean temperatures began building in the Great Barrier Reef area in late December and continued to rise throughout the Southern Hemisphere summer, causing "the highest levels of thermal stress on record," the marine park authority said.

The most intense and prolonged heat stress occurred at inshore reefs in the southern part of the marine park, with sea surface temperatures peaking at 2.5 degrees Celsius above average.

This is the Great Barrier Reef's fifth major bleaching event in nine years. Scientists say it could be the biggest test yet of the 1,400-mile-long world wonder's ability to recover. For the first time, extreme bleaching — where more than 90 percent of coral cover on a reef is bleached — was observed in all three regions of the marine park.

"Southernmost parts of the reef, which had been largely spared previously, have been hit particularly hard this time, with bleaching affecting many more species, extending to greater depths, and affecting some of the oldest and most resilient corals," said Simon Bradshaw, a research director with the nonprofit Climate Council. "This is a disaster at our doorstep."


Dead coral are seen underwater on April 5 near Lizard Island in Queensland, Australia.
David Gray/AFP/Getty Images

The giant reef system — which is so large it can easily be spotted from space — has bounced back from disturbances in the past, including underwater heat waves in 2016 and 2017 that triggered coral bleaching events so severe that scientists worried the reef would never look the same again.

Scientists say the recovery from those events was driven by fast-growing Acropora corals, which are more vulnerable to thermal stress and coral bleaching.

"The Great Barrier Reef has seen increases in coral cover to high levels in recent years, indicating it is still a resilient system. But this resilience has its limits," said David Wachenfeld, research program director at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, a government agency.

Wachenfeld said the level of heat stress, and the results of the aerial surveys, indicate that the latest bleaching event is "one of the most extensive" the reef has experienced since the agency began monitoring the reef nearly 40 years ago.

Research divers had observed coral fatalities in every region of the reef, he said.