The US Women’s Gymnastics team has won 8 medals—which may be down to the excellence of the effervescent Simone Biles, although it have furrier explanations. All throughout the games, Beacon the golden retriever has been within petting distance of any one of the five members who may feel some pre-performance jitters. The topic of mental […] The post One Key to Success For U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Team Is a Support Dog to Calm Nerves appeared first on Good News Network.

The post Carpet Sharks & Their Shark Bites: Biting Cats by Dr. Lauren Demos DVM (Veterinarian) appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. Hi, I’m Dr. Lauren! Read my introduction to learn more about me and my two adventurous cats, Pancake and Tiller. Love biters. No, not that kind…cat love biters. We’ve all probably met them: the loveable cat that gets excited, then bites you. Or the one that comes up to you and gets a pat, and gives you a gentle bite. Tiller is one of the world’s great love biters. In fact, it’s far more likely you’ll get a love bite than a pur if you interact with her. Even Pancake is not immune- a few licks, and then a good bite. No wonder Pancake no longer shares the bed with Tiller-zilla. But beware the carpet shark… And Tiller is not alone. I’ve met a variety of different types of cats in my work: dog cats, people cats, cat cats, and biters. Clients often come in saying: my cat bites me. You might think that people are talking about a cat that is an aggressive or fear biter, but that is rarely the case. Most clients that talk about their biter cats, refer to those cats that intermittently exchange a friendly pat for an equally friendly bite. They don’t break the skin, they cause surprise more than pain, and they are sometimes adorable, when they do it slowly, gently, and just hang there. But just why do cats do this familiar, gentle, persistent biting? To be honest, no one really knows! If only cats could talk… But here are a few theories: Mother/kitten instinct and nursing: It’s possible that this instinct which involves oral stimulation by the kitten on the queen along with the release of bonding hormones, extends into biting, in adult life, and the adult cat’s human family. Biting is a way that many feline emotions are expressed – not just anger. Sexual desires, play, social boundaries and more are all developed via biting. Potentially cats are using the biting to communicate more than we realize? The vomeronasal organ: In cats, the roof of their mouth holds the vomeronasal organ, which is able to detect various pheromones. Pheromones are chemical signatures that can be “smelled” by this organ (humans have all but lost theirs). It’s possible that biting puts a cat into a better position to use their vomeronasal organ to “flesh out” (pardon the pun) the situation when interacting with familiar humans. Who will love bite at any opportunity! But, in the end, we simply don’t know. Tiller will remain the household “carpet shark” and her “shark bites” will remain a fun and endearing danger whenever we traverse up or downstairs. Such is the risk of owning cats. This article is a part of Dr. Lauren, Pancake, and Tiller's series. Read her previous article: An Owner’s Manual on Spaying or Neutering Your Cat: Why Not to Feel Guilt The post Carpet Sharks & Their Shark Bites: Biting Cats by Dr. Lauren Demos DVM (Veterinarian) appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

Books Horror Five Scary Stories Set at Camp Why should camp-based horror flicks like “Friday the 13th” have all the fun? Here are five books and stories that will leave you shivering in your bunk. By Lorna Wallace | Published on August 14, 2024 Photo by Leon Contreras on Unsplash Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Leon Contreras on Unsplash I never actually went to a summer camp when growing up, but I do know that telling spooky stories around a campfire (preferably while roasting marshmallows to make s’mores) is an integral part of the experience—at least, that’s what every camp-set film ever has led me to believe. While any old urban legend will do when it comes to freaking out fellow campers, telling a scary story set at a camp itself just seems so frightfully fitting… There are, of course, plenty of horror films that lean into this trope—the Friday the 13th franchise, Sleepaway Camp (1983), and Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021) are a few of the biggest examples—but this list is for fiction lovers! Here are five scary stories that make chilling use of the camp setting.  The Boy in the Woods (2020) by Scott Thomas It’s the last day of summer camp at Camp Cottonwood, but ten-year-old Eddie Reicher’s parents haven’t shown up to take him home. He has to spend one more night at the near-deserted camp under the watch of the teenage counselors, but at least all of the cruel campers who’ve spent the summer bullying him for his facial scarring—the result of a dog attack years earlier—have gone home. Better yet, Eddie’s crush, June, also has to stay an extra night. What could have been an evening of dreamily connecting with June soon turns into a nightmare when the counselors start exhibiting weird and dangerous behavior. Expect Friday the 13th vibes, but with a twist to the story. The Boy in the Woods may be novella-length, but it manages to squeeze a lot of compelling storytelling into its pages. The characters are vividly sketched and the plot is compulsively fast-paced. To top it all off, the ending is an absolute punch in the gut. Heads Will Roll (2024) by Josh Winning Josh Winning’s Heads Will Roll feels like a classic camp-set slasher film translated directly into book form. Although most camps cater to kids, the novel’s Camp Castaway serves an adult clientele. Located deep in the woods, the purpose of this camp is to entirely discontent from the world—meaning no phones and no internet—which sounds like the perfect escape for Willow, an actress who has recently been canceled. All of the campers are running away from something, but instead of experiencing a refreshing pause at Camp Castaway, they find themselves literally running for their lives when a killer shows up. I read Heads Will Roll incredibly quickly, driven by my desire to figure out the identity of the killer, as well as the mystery of the campers’ backstories, I found myself flipping the pages at record speed. Plus, the final act is pure blood-soaked carnage…I couldn’t tear my eyes away. But although blood is certainly spilled, the descriptions of the gore are never that extreme, so the overall tone of the book is less hair-raisingly frightening and more thrillingly fun. “How to Get Back to the Forest” (2014) by Sofia Samatar If you’re in the mood for a camp story that doesn’t follow the classic path through the woods or even really play with the typical genre conventions, check out Sofia Samatar’s short story “How to Get Back to the Forest.” The story starts with a girl called Cee telling her friends at camp that they need to make themselves throw up because she’s convinced a metal bug has been implanted in their chests and that puking is the only way to get it out (other than surgery). From there, the story gets progressively weirder (and a bit less vomit-based!), but as it’s so short I won’t say anything more about the plot. I will say that you’re likely to be left buzzing with questions and puzzling over the intriguing little nuggets of information about this strange and scary world that Samatar drops along the way… (Originally published in Lightspeed, and collected in Tender) Camp Damascus (2023) by Chuck Tingle Rather than being set entirely at a camp, the story of Camp Damascus unfolds in the looming shadow cast by a gay conversion camp. The main character is twenty-year-old Rose, a devout Christian whose church essentially rules her hometown of Neverton, Montana. The church is also known for running the titular gay conversion camp which proudly boasts a 100% success rate. Rose is at a lake with her friends when she sees a ghost-like woman staring at her, and later that evening she starts coughing up flies…like, a lot of flies. Her parents brush it off, but Rose obviously wants to figure out why a swarm of insects erupted from her and why a creepy woman who no one else can see is following her around. This sets her on a path that eventually leads to cracks forming in her faith. Rose reads younger than her twenty years, but there’s a good reason for that which is revealed later in the story, and her character arc is incredibly satisfying to witness. Camp Damascus goes hard when it comes to depicting the real-life horrors of conversion therapy while also offering up some inventively demonic supernatural scares. The Troop (2014) by Nick Cutter Told in the quasi-epistolary style of Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), Nick Cutter’s The Troop documents the horrifying events that occur when a Boy Scout troop takes a trip to a small Canadian island to gain some wilderness experience. Things go off the rails when a voraciously hungry man unexpectedly sails to the island and stumbles his way up to their cabin begging for food. But the man isn’t merely suffering from regular hunger pangs—there’s something far more sinister (and squirmy!) quite literally lurking beneath the surface. Cutter has a knack for writing gross scenes that are so graphically described that they leave me physically recoiling. There are even some scenes involving animals that are so brutal I had to skim a bit, but it was worth getting though those sections for the elements I loved—primarily the isolated camp setting, the parasite-based body horror, and the fracturing group dynamics in a high-pressure survival situation. There are plenty of other books and stories that would be right at home on this list, so let me know your favorites below, be they lightly spooky YA thrillers or nightmare-inducing adult novels![end-mark] The post Five Scary Stories Set at Camp appeared first on Reactor.

I’m going to be completely honest with you – I wasn’t the biggest fan of Captain N: The Game Master. Castlevania is one of my favorite NES games, and it did my boy dirty. As CONTINUE READING... The post Captain N and More Games That Need Cartoons appeared first on The Retro Network.

Secure Technology Value Solutions is a company with a boring name and a bland website that is staffed by jovial-looking former policemen and corrections officers. It doesn’t exactly scream “Chinese Communist Party threat,” and that’s precisely the point. Secure Technology Value Solutions is actually a front for Nuctech, a Chinese government- and military-owned company, and it’s selling sensitive security equipment to police and corrections departments all across the United States. Nuctech sells devices such as the body scanners that passengers must use during airport security checks, as well as larger devices, such as cargo scanners for commercial ports. It was an early adopter of a technique that’s become popular among Chinese companies that fall under national security scrutiny: Change the name of your American subsidiary to something that sounds benign and hope to fly under the radar. Nuctech’s U.S. subsidiary changed its name to Secure Technology Value Solutions in 2022, after Nuctech was hit by several forms of national security sanctions. Nuctech equipment was blocked from U.S. airports a decade ago by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department in 2020 on national security grounds. Notably, the Commerce Department cited concern that Nuctech’s “lower-performing equipment means less stringent cargo screening, raising the risk of proliferation” of “nuclear and other radioactive materials.” Doing business with Nuctech is essentially doing business with the Chinese Communist Party itself. Nuctech was spun out of Tsinghua University, an elite institution that works closely with the Chinese military. It was co-founded and led for years by the son of Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping’s predecessor as general secretary of the CCP. According to Wirescreen, a business intelligence platform that provides data on Chinese companies, Nuctech is one-fourth government-owned, majority owned by a Chinese defense contractor, and is a supplier to China’s own security agencies. Nuctech is a subsidiary of China National Nuclear Corp., a state-owned company that runs China’s civilian and military nuclear programs, and which has been identified by the U.S. as a Chinese military-industrial complex company. NuctechDownload In April of this year, another China National Nuclear Corp. subsidiary was sanctioned by the Treasury Department for proliferating weapons of mass destruction technology. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security assessed in 2020 that, among other concerns, “Nuctech’s screening and detection systems likely have deficiencies in detection capabilities, which may create opportunities for exploitation by the Chinese government. … [If] backdoors or deficiencies are present, remote access could be enabled to gain access of Nuctech systems and other networked infrastructure.” The U.S. Department of Transportation has also repeatedly warned port operators about the threat of Nuctech equipment. The threat is a global one, with the Homeland Security Department flagging “the alarming rate at which the security company continues to gain control over various strategic security infrastructure” in Europe—as much as 90% of Europe’s sea-cargo screening equipment market and 50% of the market for airport baggage and cargo screening. In light of those concerns, the U.S. has pressed its allies to dump Nuctech. European countries awarded more than 160 contracts to Nuctech over the past decade in spite of warnings, but finally show some signs of moving on from a “see no evil” attitude toward Nuctech’s takeover of the security screening market. However, Europe’s action against Nuctech is part of an anti-dumping investigation, making it unclear whether and when Nuctech devices will be phased out of Europe’s critical infrastructure. Canada, likewise, had awarded several contracts to Nuctech, operating their devices “across Canada,” and in 2020 were poised to install Nuctech devices in Canadian embassies across the world until the U.S. intervened. Despite the federal and international scrutiny, Nuctech and its Secure Technology Value Solutions front company have found plenty of localities and state governments willing to buy its devices using taxpayer dollars. Often, the customers are corrections and police departments, and Secure Technology’s top leadership consists of former corrections and police officers, no doubt to leverage their professional networks and trusted relationships. Secure Technology’s website brags about a sale in Louisiana, and even features a video of its equipment appearing to be connected to the computer system of a jail. Arizona spent millions of dollars acquiring Nuctech equipment in 2023. Pennsylvania has maintained a contract with Nuctech since 2018, which was renewed in February. Virginia purchased Nuctech equipment in 2023. Nuctech devices also operate in Ohio. The list goes on. It’s a safe bet that Americans don’t want a Chinese military-linked company providing security for sensitive sites or plugged into states’ computer networks and surveillance systems. States should stop doing business with Nuctech and Secure Technology, and advance policies to block CCP-controlled companies from participating in taxpayer-funded procurement. Granting the CCP access to government infrastructure and troves of sensitive data—let alone paying it for the privilege—just doesn’t make sense. The post States Should Stop Buying Security Scanners From China’s Nuctech appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. New York Attorney General Letitia James has been actively campaigning for stricter controls on AI and social media platforms, invoking concerns about “misinformation.” James has a history of social media censorship demands that have faced allegations of First Amendment violations. ABC News reports that James has contacted key players in the AI industry, such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI, through a letter, urging them to implement mechanisms that could restrict what she defines as misleading and deceptive speech related to elections. “While misinformation has been a concern in past elections, with the rise of gen AI, barriers that prevent bad actors from creating deceptive or misleading content have weakened dramatically,” said the letter, sent to social media and AI companies, including Google, Meta, and OpenAI. “As tens of millions of voters in the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” it reads. James has proposed an in-person meeting to discuss these strategies more thoroughly, calling for cooperation while hinting at possible enforcement actions, which further raise censorship alarms. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Letitia James Demands Big Tech Curb Election “Misinformation” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

'Light 'Em Up': Paintball Tim?

Sometimes, it can be hard to comprehend the enormity of climate change without seeing any immediate effects. That shouldn’t be a problem for much longer: in a grim sign of the planet’s current condition, last year wasn’t only the hottest on record – it also likely caused more heat-related deaths in Europe than any other year bar one.How was this result calculated?According to researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), approximately 47,690 people in Europe died from heat-related causes in 2023. That’s more than any other year on record other than 2022, when the same team reached an estimate of 61,672 excess deaths from heat.Now, we should point out right off the bat that this conclusion was probably not found how you’re imagining. Rather than simply counting how many coroners’ records across the peninsula were labeled “cause of death: too hot”, the figure comes from epidemiological models – basically, researchers analyzed temperature and mortality data from 823 regions in 35 European countries between 2015 and 2019, and used that to estimate the death toll in 2023.As such, while the team put the number of heat-related deaths in Europe last year in the mid-47,000s, they caution that the true number may be as low as 28,853, or as high as 66,525.More worryingly, however, is the other caveat: that these numbers may be a significant underestimate. While the team used mostly the same methodology as 2022’s report, they hit a snag when it came to sourcing data – rather than standardized daily mortality records, they were forced to rely on weekly updates from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. It may not seem like much of a difference, but less regular updates can result in lower estimates of the heat-related mortality burden. The researchers can correct for this, and they did – finding that the heat-related death toll may actually have been more than 10,000 higher than their headline figure.Who was the worst affected?Perhaps unsurprisingly, the worst affected countries were those in the south of the continent: Greece topped the list with 393 deaths per million from heat in the year, followed by Bulgaria with 229, Italy with 209, Spain with 175, and Cyprus with 167. Many of the worst-hit nations are also those with the highest share of elderly people – a correlation borne out in the study, which found heat-related mortality to be close to eight times higher for people over 80 years of age than in people aged between 65 and 79.Also worse affected were women, whose mortality rate was found to be 55 percent higher than men’s. Again, this is not totally surprising: women are known to fall prey to heat-related mortality at higher rates than men, even if the reasons why are not totally understood – it’s potentially to do with the fact that women sweat less, and are therefore less able to lose heat; it may be that women have higher core body temperatures on average; it could be a combination of factors, or something as yet unknown.Obscured by adaptationNow, perhaps you’re thinking that 47,000, or 58,000, or even 62,000 aren’t such high numbers, all things considered – it is, after all, at most one in every 125 deaths in the region. But there’s a second conclusion drawn in the study which, depending on how you look at it, is either reassuring or even more worrying: in the past two decades of ever-increasing temperatures, we’ve learned to adapt to extreme heat in such a way that it almost halved the number of likely deaths through the year.“Our results show how there have been societal adaptation processes to high temperatures during the present century, which have dramatically reduced the heat-related vulnerability and mortality burden of recent summers, especially among the elderly”, said Elisa Gallo, a researcher at ISGlobal and first author of the study, in a statement. “For example, we see that since 2000, the minimum mortality temperature – the optimum temperature with the lowest mortality risk – has been gradually warming on average over the continent, from 15°C in 2000-2004 to 17.7°C in 2015-2019,” she explained. “This indicates that we are less vulnerable to heat than we were at the beginning of the century, probably as a result of general socio-economic progress, improvements in individual behavior and public health measures such as the heat prevention plans implemented after the record-breaking summer of 2003.”What this means in real terms is that, had the summer of 2023 occurred back in 2003 when we were all still making fun of Al Gore, the death toll would have been much, much higher – like, nearly double. We simply weren’t ready for it. Now, extreme heatwaves are so commonplace that we’ve adapted our lives around them.A warning for the futureSo, what’s the major takeaway of this report? Well, it’s hardly a surprise: the planet is warming, and we’re running out of time to mitigate the damage.“In 2023, almost half of the days exceeded the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement and Europe is warming at a rate twice as fast as the global average,” pointed out Joan Ballester Claramunt, Principal Investigator of the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant EARLY-ADAPT – a project designed to analyze the environmental and socioeconomic causes of trends in public health.“Climate projections indicate that the 1.5°C limit is likely to be exceeded before 2027, leaving us a very small window of opportunity to act,” Claramunt said.Whether or not you care about the planet, one thing this report makes clear is that we each have a vested interest in slowing and – science willing – maybe even reversing climate change. After all, we can’t adapt forever.“We need to take into account that inherent limits in human physiology and societal structure are likely to set a bound to the potential for further adaptation in the future,” Claramunt warned. “There is an urgent need to implement strategies aimed at further reducing the mortality burden of the coming warmer summers, together with more comprehensive monitoring of the impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations.” “These adaptation measures must be combined with mitigation efforts by governments and the general population,” he advised, “to avoid reaching tipping points and critical thresholds in temperature projections.”The study is published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Good news, conspiracy theorists: Atlanteans are real after all. There’s just one catch: they’re actually not a heroic race of people from an ancient and mythical land lost to Poseidon’s wrath. Turns out, they’re volcanoes.Discovered in the oceans north of the Canary Islands, the three underwater volcanoes have been named “Los Atlantes” – Spanish for “the Atlanteans” – by the team who found them. The title isn’t random: it’s a reference to the “Atlantis” research project, launched in late June by institutions across Spain and Portugal to investigate features of the local marine environment, during which the trio was accidentally discovered.That’s not the only thing the volcanoes have in common with the myth. While the discovery of hitherto unknown geological features is always pretty cool, Los Atlantes are far more than just a zit on the ocean bed: sitting as they do in the Canaries – a Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa, comprising the islands of Lanzarote, Tenerife, La Palma, and so on – they speak to a history millions of years in the making. “They were islands in the past and they have sunk,” explained geologist Luis Somoza, coordinator of the Atlantis project, in a translated statement. “They are still sinking, as the legend of Atlantis tells us.” Indeed, the geological story of the Canary Islands is much more tempestuous and mysterious than the region’s reputation as a vacation spot would suggest. Located firmly inside the African continental shelf, the archipelago is nevertheless a hotbed of volcanic activity: all seven islands currently making up the region began as submarine volcanoes, built through millions of years of eruptions into the landmasses we know today. Evidently, however, not all the islands were so lucky. Los Atlantes haven’t been above the waves since the Eocene age some 56 to  34 million years ago – with an honorable mention for a few of the inactive volcanoes during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower and they could poke their calderas out into the air for a while. Now, though, these three mounts are at least 60 meters (200 feet) below the surface, home to marine microorganisms and crucial elements.Which is a shame, really – because Los Atlantes sounds just as idyllic as their sisters. The team has "been able to verify that they still maintain their beaches,” Somoza explained in the statement; the team also identified “cliffs and sand dunes at the flat summit of the seamount,” he told Live Science. During the last ice age, he said, “these islands could […] be used for inhabiting wildlife.”“This could be the origin of the Atlantis legend,” Somoza suggested.