'When President Trump is not in court eight hours per day'

For as long as civilization has existed, people have gambled. Gambling goes as far back as the Paleolithic period and it is astonishing how much the landscape has transformed over the centuries. The version of CONTINUE READING... The post How the Internet Changed the Face of Gambling appeared first on The Retro Network.

Dreamscape A man who can enter and manipulate people’s dreams is recruited by a government agency to help cure the President of the United States of his nightmares about nuclear war but stumbles upon an CONTINUE READING... The post 84 From ’84: Dreamscape appeared first on The Retro Network.

Kabosu, the Shiba Inu behind one of the most popular Internet memes, crossed the rainbow bridge on Friday, May 24, at the age of 18.

What started off as a family reunion with a big barbecue to boot wound up with six people infected with rare parasitic worms and three of those people ending up in hospital. The source? Undercooked black bear meat.The story began to unravel when a 29-year-old man was admitted to hospital in July 2022 with some pretty nasty symptoms: severe muscle pain, swelling around his eyes, and a fever, not to mention a sky-high response from his immune cells.It wasn’t until he became hospitalized for the second time that he mentioned the unusual meal he’d had with his family just days before.During this meet-up, one member of the family had brought along the remnants of a hunting trip in Canada – kebabs made from black bear meat. Not being the usual barbecue fodder, the family reportedly had trouble determining if the meat was cooked or not due to its dark color, which probably should’ve been a sign to leave well alone.Instead, the meat was initially served rare, before people began to notice and had it recooked.Upon finding out that the man had consumed the bear meat, doctors suspected they were witness to a rare case of human trichinellosis. This particularly unpleasant disease is the result of an infection with parasitic Trichinella roundworms, the larvae of which can be found in a variety of wild animals.Once they’re in the digestive system, the larvae grow up and make their own baby worms, which work their way into muscles, causing symptoms such as those experienced by the man who ate bear meat. Occasionally, the infection can become more dangerous if the worms manage to reach the heart, lungs, or central nervous system.Not only do these larvae cause problems, but they’re also pretty resilient. The family member who hunted the bear had actually been warned about Trichinella – it’s thought to be present in at least 1 to 24 percent of Canadian and Alaskan black bears – but was told freezing the meat would kill the parasites off. In news that’s likely to make future family reunions a tad awkward given the consequences, that advice was very wrong. The species of Trichinella normally found in bear meat can survive freezing, something that became particularly apparent when microscopic analysis of the meat revealed wriggly larvae aplenty.A further five members of the family also became ill with symptoms of trichinellosis, with three of them, including a 12-year-old, becoming hospitalized – though not all had eaten the meat. Investigations revealed that they’d eaten vegetables that had been cooked alongside it.Thankfully, all six family members recovered, the three hospitalized members after treatment with the antiparasitic drug albendazole and the remaining members without any treatment. The family member who’d hunted the bear was advised to get rid of the remaining meat.If this tale of parasitic worm infection isn’t quite enough to put someone off the idea of eating bear meat, the CDC recommends taking measures to avoid cross-contamination and ensuring “adequate cooking” of the meat – that means getting it to an internal temperature of at least 74°C (165°F).In other words, it’s best well done or not at all.

Colossal quantities of lithium – a metal that’s vital for the world of tomorrow – could be sourced from wastewater that’s been pumped out of a Pennsylvania fracking site. In a new study, scientists at the National Energy Technology Laboratory and the University of Pittsburg worked out that 38 to 40 percent of the country's demand for lithium could be obtained from wastewater that’s produced by the hydraulic fracturing of rocks in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania.Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock by blasting it with a mixture of water, sand, and other chemicals. The process is highly controversial, not least because it can disperse a huge amount of tainted wastewater into the surrounding water table if not managed properly. This research suggests the wastewater might hold some benefits, however. The researchers took samples of the water back to the lab and found they were able to extract lithium from water with more than 90 percent efficiency.“We just didn't know how much was in there," Justin Mackey, lead study author and researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, said in a statement."It's been dissolving rocks for hundreds of millions of years – essentially, the water has been mining the subsurface," explained Mackey.The world needs more lithium. In a future powered by batteries, from electric cars to smartphones, the silvery metal has became one of the most sought-after commodities on the planet. Obtaining it isn’t always easy, however. Mining lithium can have a damaging impact of the surrounding environment, as well as the people and wildlife that live there. The vital resource raises a bunch of political issues too. Currently, most of the world’s lithium is extracted from brine ponds in Chile, before being shipped to China where it's processed. China has placed itself as a fundamental node in the global supply chain of lithium – a position that the US isn’t too pleased about. The US is striving to become self-sufficient in lithium by 2030 so it doesn’t have to rely on importing it from elsewhere. Paired with this, the Biden Administration hopes to challenge China’s command over the global market for electric cars, which are typically powered with lithium-ion batteries.If the technology explored in this latest study is implemented, it could help to make these goals a little bit closer to reality. The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

A handful of puzzling cases in a brain bank of over 5,000 donated samples – these are the people identified in a new study from the Netherlands as having had asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. These individuals are known as “resilient” to the disease, and scientists are only just beginning to uncover the secrets inside their brains.The Netherlands Brain Bank in Amsterdam is a hugely important resource for neuroscience researchers. Brain tissue samples from people with a range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, as well as from those who die without any evidence of brain disease, are held along with a precise account of their diagnoses and a copy of each donor’s anonymized medical record. This level of detail allows scientists to compare the pathology inside someone’s brain tissue with a record of the symptoms they were experiencing in life. Recently, a team led by Luuk de Vries of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience identified some puzzling anomalies amongst this wealth of data. Some people’s brains showed all the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease – but, when their medical records were checked, it became clear they’d never shown any symptoms.“What is happening in these people at a molecular and cellular level was not clear yet,” explained de Vries in a statement. “We therefore searched for donors with brain tissue abnormalities who did not show cognitive decline in the Brain Bank. Of all the donors we found 12, so it is quite rare.”There are some lifestyle factors that are thought to help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia in at-risk people. World Health Organization guidelines released in 2019 summarized several of these factors, including quitting smoking, limiting alcohol consumption, and maintaining a healthy diet and exercise regime. “It has recently also been found that those who receive a lot of cognitive stimuli, like through a complex job, can build up more Alzheimer’s pathology before developing symptoms,” added de Vries. However, the evidence behind many of these factors is mixed, and there’s still a lack of clarity about what might be happening at the molecular level in the brains of resilient people. To investigate further, the researchers looked at the gene expression profiles in tissue samples from 35 donors, including some with documented Alzheimer’s disease dementia, some with no evidence of Alzheimer’s disease, and some from the small resilient group. “When we looked at gene expression, we saw that a number of processes were altered in the resilient group,” de Vries explained. “First of all, the astrocytes appeared to produce more of the antioxidant metallothionein.”Astrocytes are star-shaped supportive cells (glia) within the brain that de Vries likened to “garbage collectors”. It would make sense that those who are able to resist the symptoms of Alzheimer’s for longer might have more efficient astrocytes. “Astrocytes often also ask for help from microglia, but because they can be quite aggressive, they sometimes worsen inflammation. In the resilient group a microglia pathway that’s often linked to Alzheimer’s disease appeared to be less active,” de Vries continued. “In addition, we saw that the so-called 'unfolded protein response', a reaction in brain cells that automatically removes a misfolded toxic protein, was affected in Alzheimer’s patients, but was relatively normal in resilient individuals.”As well as these mechanisms helping to keep the brain “tidy” and the environment healthy, the team also found evidence that resilient brains might have better energy production thanks to more mitochondria. Their findings are summarized in a handy infographic that you can view here. But as interesting as all these results are, this is really just the start of the story. More experiments are now needed to start to tease apart how someone’s genetic and lifestyle factors might combine to offer them protection against a disease that currently affects approximately 6.7 million in the US alone.  “It remains difficult to determine from human data which process initiates the disease process. You can only demonstrate this by changing something in cells or animal models and seeing what happens next,” de Vries concluded. “That is the first thing we have to do now.”The study is published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica Communications. [H/T: Medical News Today]

Former Christian pastor John Burke was faced with a situation where his research into near-death experiences (NDEs) led him to radically change his views on life after death. Burke interviewed more than a thousand people who had experienced NDEs and found that many of them reported encounters with “demonic entities.” These stories were so convincing that they forced him to look at the biblical texts from a new angle, taking them more literally than ever before. “Learning this has actually changed my theology—even as a Christian and even as a pastor,” Burke admitted in an interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan. “I used to think that much of this was just fantasy or metaphor, but now I am convinced that heaven and hell are not just concepts, but a reality that exists beyond our physical world.” One of the most moving cases Burke recounted was that of his friend Jim Woodford, who experienced an NDE after accidentally overdosing on painkillers prescribed for his very painful Guillain-Barré syndrome. Woodford described traveling through a “tunnel of light” and subsequently seeing a dark valley that he said was “even darker” than the darkest black valley he could imagine. “He told me, ‘You know, when you die, I feel the fire go through me.’ And he realized, “I never thanked God for the life I thought I had created.” I’ve heard enough about this to know that you don’t want to wait until the last minute, but God pursues people until the last minute.” Jim reported passing through a “tunnel of light” that is common to many descriptions of near-death experiences. The pastor continued: “He goes through this tunnel of light and then he comes out… but then he sees this beauty on the right, but then it’s almost like a dividing line, and then it gets more and more gray and black, and then there’s a jet black chasm, which simply ends in nothingness.” “Out of curiosity, he started going there to see what it was like, and he said, Imagine looking down into the darkest black valley you can imagine, but darker.” “Then he saw a tiny point of light in the distance, almost like a campfire, and he heard something open, and he saw this thing come out, and this thing came for him, and knows his name, and he understands that it wanted to lay claim to it.” Stories like these not only strengthened Burke’s belief in the literal existence of heaven and hell dimensions, but also led him to believe that the supernatural beings described in the Old Testament were also real. “There are species created by God outside of humanity that exist in dimensions beyond our own,” he added. Some experts explain these stories as hallucinations, while others see them as evidence that life continues beyond what we can know, see and imagine. The post Pastor believes life after death is real in 1,000 near-death studies appeared first on Anomalien.com.

A U.S. military serviceman detained in Russia on suspicion of theft has also been charged with threatening to kill his girlfriend, Russian independent outlet Mediazona reported Monday, citing the local prosecutor's office.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived Monday in Madrid, where he was expected to sign a bilateral security agreement with Spain that will help his country fight its more than two-year war with Russia amid a recent offensive by the Kremlin's forces.