Over 1 in 5 Americans experiences chronic pain, affecting their mobility, mental health, and overall quality of life. Although traditional healthcare providers make big money from pain management, nearly half of all patients fail to find relief. Traditional treatments are often ineffective, and in many cases, they do more harm than good. Yet, healthcare professionals […]

'Any beef or any drama'

Diamond Dave is at it again. After having a surprising cover of Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny,” he has once again turned to a traditional classic rock standard to make his own. This time, it’s Gerry Rafferty’s classic solo hit “Baker Street.” David Lee Roth has recently released new songs on his YouTube channel, giving all his fans some fresh material from the legendary Van Halen singer. You have to hand it to Diamond Dave; he has no fear in covering some of the most iconic, highly loved songs in classic rock history. The song “Baker Street” was originally released in February The post David Lee Roth Covers Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

News Battlestar Galactica Please Can Someone Let Sam Esmail Make His Battlestar Galactica Show Already So say we all! So say we all! By Molly Templeton | Published on August 1, 2024 Screenshot: Syfy Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Syfy Another day, another bit of disappointing news: Sam Esmail’s Battlestar Galactica reboot is dead at Peacock. The series was announced in 2019 as part of the then-nascent streamer’s first wave of programming, and, predictably, stirred up a whole lot of please-no-more-reboots-and-remakes griping. These gripes are generally understandable, and I have made them about other properties myself, but consider: Esmail is the mastermind behind Mr. Robot, one of the best under-appreciated series of recent years. He has already proven himself with ensemble casts, conspiracy theories, elaborate plots, stylish and surprising episodes, and brazen storytelling choices. And he wasn’t going to straight-up reboot Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, anyway. As he wrote on the site formerly known as Twitter at the time, “BSG fans, this will NOT be a remake of the amazing series @RonDMoore launched because… why mess with perfection? Instead, we’ll explore a new story within the mythology while staying true to the spirit of Battlestar. So say we all!” So say we all, indeed. Battlestar Galactica began its life as a short-lived 1970s ABC show before being reborn, in 2003, as Ron Moore’s messy, compelling, epic, ambitious space opera about the last dregs of humanity trying to survive an attack by the robots they had created. At its best, it was brilliant (“33”) and emotional (“Someone to Watch Over Me”). At its worst, it got real sloppy (the ending). It’s exactly the kind of show that could be creatively and powerfully re-imagined by someone with a vision. As Variety put it, the series was “a passion project” for Esmail, who has been developing it for the past five years. Just months ago, in January, Derek Simonds (The Sinner) was announced as writer and showrunner, which was interesting and disappointing at once. (I really wanted Esmail’s hand all over this show.) Variety notes that, “According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, UCP will shop the project to other outlets.” Dear other outlets: Please pick up this show. Please bring back nuanced and complex character work combined with incredible space set pieces and interesting inquiries into the nature of personhood. Please let Sam Esmail make his show. Please?[end-mark] The post Please Can Someone Let Sam Esmail Make His <i>Battlestar Galactica</i> Show Already appeared first on Reactor.

In the third installment of our Saved By The Summer series, we journey through all 7 seasons of Saved By The Bell: The New Class. This TNBC series lasted longer than the original, enduring many CONTINUE READING... The post Remember That Show? Ep. 18: Saved By The Bell The New Class appeared first on The Retro Network.

More Illegals Released Without Bail After Attacking NYPD

Has Iran Penetrated Team Kamala?

If you’re the sort of person who likes to end a meal with smoke coming out of your ears then you may be tempted to try and get your hands on the recently developed "Pepper X". Be warned, though, this bad boy is the hottest chili pepper on the planet, with a heat rating that smashes the previous record set by the infamous Carolina Reaper.Grown by Ed Currie of PuckerButt Pepper Company, Pepper X was awarded the Guinness World Record for the spiciest chili in existence after it clocked up 2,693,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU) during tests. For reference, the aforementioned Carolina Reaper - which was also created by Currie and crowned back in 2013 - provides an average of 1,569,300 SHU, which is more than a million units less than this new monstrosity.The Scoville scale measures the intensity of chili peppers and other spicy foods by determining how much dilution is required to neutralize their heat. In the case of Pepper X, then, it takes almost 2.7 million cups of sugar water to take away the pain contained in one cup of chili extract.Putting that into context, habanero peppers weigh in with a puny 100,000-350,000 SHU, while jalapeños typically deliver an embarrassing 4,000 to 8,500 SHU.    Like all chilies, Pepper X gets its heat from a molecule called capsaicin, which activates the pain receptors of the mouth and throat when ingested. It’s thought that plants originally developed capsaicin as a means of deterring would-be predators, although humans have since acquired a puzzling taste for piquant condiments, and can even get "high" from eating spicy foods. The fiery compound is mainly found in the tissue surrounding a pepper’s seeds, known as the placenta. According to Guinness World Records, the fact that Pepper X is so curved and ridged means the placenta has more space to grow, which may explain how it ended up with so much capsaicin. Unfortunately for any masochistic foodies out there, however, Currie isn’t selling Pepper X chilies or seeds, which means the only way to get a taste of this banger is through his hot sauces. Revealing how he created the beast, Currie explained that he spent ten years cross-breeding Carolina Reapers with other “brutally hot” peppers at his farm in Fort Mill, South Carolina. After eating a whole Pepper X, Currie said he was “laid out flat on a marble wall for approximately an hour in the rain, groaning in pain.”Sounds delicious.

Sometimes, physicists spend their time solving the great universal mysteries like “where is all the dark matter?” or “how do we know we’re not living in a simulation?” Other times, they look at the important stuff – like why paper cuts happen, and how we can avoid the damn things.“Paper has been central to human culture for more than a millennium,” begins a new study, correctly, recently accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review E. “Its use is, however, associated with a common injury: the paper cut.”And considering it’s a wound that most of us have suffered probably dozens, if not hundreds, of times in our lives, you might expect us to understand the paper cut pretty well by now. But in fact, the study points out, “the physics underpinning a flexible sheet of paper slicing into soft tissues remains unresolved.” Not only do we not really know how paper cuts happen – after all, shouldn’t our skin be more sturdy than a micrometers-thick piece of pulped cellulose? – but they seem to occur almost randomly. What sets that envelope apart from this piece of tissue paper? Why do I always seem to cut myself on magazines, but not wrapping paper?To solve both these questions, a team from the Technical University of Denmark set up an experiment delightfully Mythbusters in design: they collected a variety of different types of paper and tested each one’s slicing ability on a slab of ballistics gelatin – a material specifically designed to mimic human and animal muscle tissue, and the same stuff used in all those cool slo-mo videos you’ve seen. And yes, it’s not as good as the real deal, but, as study co-author Kaare Jensen pointed out to Science News, “it’s hard to find volunteers” for paper cut studies.So, what did they discover? Well, it turns out that a paper cut is the result of a delicate balance between slicing and buckling. Choose too thin a sheet of paper, and it will buckle against the skin before it slices through; a sheet that is too thick, on the other hand, won’t be able to create enough pressure to cut.Now, we know what you’re thinking: what’s the most dangerous type of paper? Don’t worry: the team pinpointed a thickness of around 65 micrometers to be the best – or worst, we suppose – for paper cuts. The angle of attack also made a difference: paper that met the skin straight-on was less slicey than sheets that came at an angle.In practical terms, that means we should avoid dot matrix paper, the team explained – which, fortunately, is pretty easy – it’s the kind of paper old-timey printers used to use, and not all that common today. Coming in a close second was paper from various magazine pages, which, let’s face it, is probably not too surprising to anybody who regularly reads magazines.And so, having discovered the most deadly types of paper, and how best to wield it to cause harm, the team did the obvious next step. Like any good Bond villain, they created a weapon – with a punny name.Admittedly, it’s only really a weapon if you’re a salad vegetable, but the 3D-printed “Papermachete” is able to cut through cucumbers, peppers, and even chicken. It uses as its blade a single sheet of printer paper – so next time someone tells you to stop being a baby over your paper cut, you can remind them it’s basically like being cut with a carving knife. Physics says so.The study is accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review E.

The entirety of Earth’s surface is made up of biomes. Within each of these biomes are many different ecosystems that are constantly growing, decaying, and teeming with diverse life. But which ecosystem came first, and which are still standing today?As ecosystems are made up of constantly decaying pieces, the organisms alive at the start of the system's lifespans are likely not alive at the end of it. The “life” of an ecosystem can be considered similar to the human body – our cells are constantly regenerating, so virtually none of the cells we were born with see us into adulthood, yet we are still the same person. In the same way, an ecosystem is alive as long as its components continue to cycle energy and nutrients.What is an ecosystem?An ecosystem is a unit of ecology where a balance of living plant and animal life, climate, terrain, and geology combine to create a distinct environment. Ecosystems can be large or small, and together make up the entirety of Earth’s surface. These ecosystems exist as part of larger biomes, which are broader descriptions of specific landscapes and environmental conditions in which there are many smaller ecosystems.Made up of two distinct broad types, terrestrial and aquatic, ecosystems contain both biotic and abiotic factors. Biotic factors are living things like animals and plant life, while abiotic factors are non-living things like rocks, temperature, and humidity. Ecosystems are made up of functional chains where each component affects another. Temperature and rainfall impact the types of plants that can grow; the types of plants that grow impact the herbivorous species that can live there; the herbivorous species impact which carnivorous species can thrive, and so on. This flow of nutrients through the system is a defining characteristic of an ecosystem.The oldest ecosystemJust like the species within them, ecosystems grow, evolve, and die over time. Due to their resilience, rainforests have withstood ice ages and persisted for at least 300 million years, making them one of the world’s oldest ecosystems.Rainforests are home to roughly half of the world’s animal and plant species, despite taking up just 6 percent of the Earth’s surface, making them the most diverse ecosystem as well as one of the oldest.Different types of rainforests exist on every content except Antarctica, and they are distinct from other types of forests by having high annual rainfall and a dense canopy cover made up of evergreen trees. To be considered a rainforest, a forest must experience over 180 centimeters (70 inches) of rain a year.Aquatic ecosystems like reefs can also stand the test of time, with many alive today that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s estimated that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef system in the world, has existed in some form for 500,000 to 600,000 years.A seagrass meadow ecosystem found in the Mediterranean sea.Image credit: Damsea / Shutterstock.comWhile seagrass meadows are a relatively young type of ecosystem, first forming around 100 million years ago, corals have been found in fossilized reefs dating back 500 million years, making them a strong contender for oldest ecosystem. However, it’s believed that coral reefs in their current form only appeared in the last 60 million years.These delicate ecosystems can, however, be easily disrupted by changes in sea temperatures, water levels, and pollution, while land-based ecosystems – especially those around the equator – experience far less turbulent environmental changes. This suggests their comparatively short life span may be why today’s living aquatic ecosystems are far younger than the ancient terrestrial forests. Today we can see the rapid effects climate change is having on Earth’s existing aquatic ecosystems.           The world’s oldest forestsPutting the mighty Barrier Reef to shame, some of the world’s oldest forests have persisted for millions of years, withstanding immense climatic shifts.The oldest known forest on Earth is a recent discovery found in southwest England and it’s believed to be 390 million years old. Made up of a bunch of now fossilized trees dating back to the Middle Devonian, the forest consisted of standing plants, ancient flora, and cladoxylopsids – an extinct group of plants related to ferns and sphenopsids (horsetails). Standing just 2 to 4 meters (6.5 and 13 feet) tall, the abundance of cladoxylopsids means the ancient forest was likely not very tall, but the trackways of some ancient critters found at the site suggest this tiny forest was once a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem.Before this forest was discovered, however, the oldest forest on Earth was believed to be a 368-million-year-old ecosystem located, rather unceremoniously, at the bottom of a sandstone quarry in the small town of Cairo in New York state. From the Devonian period, the forest, which is now made up of just a root system, is believed to have once stretched for around 400 kilometers (250 miles).Identifying the age of ecosystems is challenging as each biotic component has its own life cycle, meaning an ecosystem’s “life” is made up of constantly growing, dying, and shifting parts. For this reason, it’s hard to judge which living ecosystem is the current oldest.A 2005 study into the longevity, resilience, and future of the Amazon rainforest estimated that South America’s 6.7-million-square-kilometer (2.6-million-square-mile) tropical rainforest is at least 55 million years old, making it potentially one of the oldest living ecosystems – and the largest.The dense and diverse foliage in Daintree Rainforest.Image credit: AustralianCamera / Shutterstock.comHowever, there are two living forests that make the Amazon rainforest look like a sapling by comparison. The Borneo Lowland Rainforests are estimated to be 140 million years old and, at 428,438 square kilometers (165,420 square miles), cover more than 57 percent of Borneo.Potentially even older still, the Daintree Rainforest in Australia is thought to be a whopping 180 million years old, however, some sources state its age is closer to 135 million years. Located in North Queensland, this dense, tropical forest covers over 1,200 square kilometers (463 square miles) and hosts animal and plant species found nowhere else on the planet.All ecosystems are vital to the sustenance of life on Earth, and despite what the longevity of some of these environments might suggest, they’re also fragile and sensitively balanced. Human activity and climate change are rapidly threatening the lives of many ecosystems, making conservation efforts more important now than ever.