A viral video shared on X claims President Joe Biden recently said he may resign from the presidency for medical reasons. Breaking Video: Biden Says He May Resign The Presidency For Medical Reasons pic.twitter.com/4AsIJ4a8nb — Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) June 30, 2024 Verdict: False The video is not recent but shows a 2020 interview between Biden […]

Our Electric Light Orchestra’s Best Song on Each of Their Studio Albums article presents the songs of one of our favorite bands of all time. We first saw Electric Light Orchestra in concert back in the 1970s. They put on one of the most exciting rock concerts we ever saw. Their laser shows were phenomenal. That is, of course, before lasers were banned. Bands used to actually shoot the lasers right into the audience. The ’70s were a crazy time. Nonetheless, this is a band that has never disappointed me, except maybe when they jumped on that Xanadu bandwagon. But The post Electric Light Orchestra’s Best Song On Each Of Their Studio Albums appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

This is the heart-stopping moment a toddler was saved by a hero commuter after falling onto a railway line seconds before a high-speed train thundered past. CCTV footage captured the dramatic near-miss at Newark Northgate railway station in Nottinghamshire last month. The 36-second clip shows the three-year-old boy walking behind two adults before running to […] The post Toddler Saved from Train Tracks After Falling Seconds Before it Thundered Past appeared first on Good News Network.

The post Sleep Shaming or Bio-Hacking: The Science of Feline Polyphasic Sleep 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. OK, I admit it. I sleep shame Pancake. If you’ve read my previous articles, you’ve likely seen multiple comments about how often she can be found… sleeping. To the point that some days I actually wonder if she does ever leave the sofa during the day, while I’m at work. A recent podcast by the Huberman Lab, however, made me question if I needed to rethink her hours of time whiled away sleeping. When we are born, as babies we enter the world as polyphasic sleepers. So what happens, and what is polyphasic sleep? According to the sleep foundation, polyphasic sleep is sleeping marked by multiple intervals of sleep and wakefulness throughout the 24-hour day.1 Apparently there are even further schedules such as the Uberman, the Everyman, and the Triphasic, if you want to get really nitty gritty. The Benefits of Polyphasic Sleep In newborns, our brains lack the capability to discern day and night signals that indicate sleep and wakefulness patterns in adulthood. But adult cats don’t; they are diurnal creatures, so they obviously understand such signals. So why do animals such as cats retain this sleep pattern as they age? In fact, even fire ants participate in polyphasic sleep. So, what are we humans missing? Some initial studies theorized that predation risk may have meant an evolutionary tendency towards polyphasic sleep. Basically, you were probably less likely to be a larger someone’s snack if you weren’t caught snoozing for 8 hours straight. But a more recent study refuted this idea, suggesting that predation risk did not correlate with polyphasic sleep; instead they theorized that small animals may simply need more frequent feeding and therefore their sleep schedule evolved to mimic their appetite and energy needs. (No one has yet done a study on whether, given the option of a memory foam mattress, and endless take out deliveries, if cats might elect to change to a monophasic sleep schedule!) The Drawbacks of Polyphasic Sleep When done in a human context of using polyphasic sleep to limit non-waking periods to two hours today, at least one review study found no benefits, and actually detrimental effects in physical and mental wellbeing, as well as productivity levels. But cats aren’t limiting their sleep to two hours, attempting to squeeze every last drop of productivity into their day. Perhaps, a smarter approach would be to take a page from their book: relax more, sleep more, schedule less, and slow down. Unless it’s a red dot, or a feather toy, or a particularly tasty bug, in which case, all bets are off! The post Sleep Shaming or Bio-Hacking: The Science of Feline Polyphasic Sleep 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 book recommendations Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for July and August 2024 This season’s indie press titles include bizarre cults, bird-free futures, and travel to alternate dimensions… By Tobias Carroll | Published on July 3, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share What do July and August have in store for us? If forthcoming books on indie presses are any indication, bizarre cults, bird-free futures, and travel to alternate dimensions are all on the menu. As we make our way into the back half of 2024, here’s a look at a number of books due out on independent presses, from cutting-edge fiction to new editions of cult classics.  File Under: Apocalyptic Readers who savor the art of the short novel are probably well-acquainted with César Aira, whose work encompasses everything from ghost stories to tales of literary obsession. His latest, Festival & Game of the Worlds—translated by Katherine Silver—includes two novellas, one of which is set in the future and finds Aira riffing on video games and the perils of machine learning. (New Directions; July 23, 2024) There are plenty of ways to tell a post-apocalyptic story, from zeroing in on the people responsible for the devastation to exploring the new alliances that arise in a transformed landscape. Joel Dane’s novel The Ragpicker opts for a different approach: focusing on the signals and artifacts left behind from the previous world, as well as the people who encounter and interpret them. (Meerkat Press; July 23, 2024) “The book concerns home in a variety of ways, from exploring non-traditional friendships and kinships and families to thinking through questions of belonging as it relates to the world, to one’s nation, to one’s town, to one’s household,” said  Lindsey Drager in a recent interview about her novel The Avian Hourglass. Drager’s previous work has been nominated for Shirley Jackson and Lambda LGBTQ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Awards; this new novel, set in a world where birds and stars have vanished, looks to be a memorable addition to a surreal bibliography. (Dzanc Books; Aug. 23, 2024) In 1920, in the aftermath of his time in the British Army during World War I, Edward Shanks published his novel The People of the Ruins. This new edition, complete with an introduction by Paul Marsh-Russell, introduces new readers to Shanks’s tale of a present-day man who finds himself 150 years in the future where technology and society have regressed. (MIT Press/Radium Age; Aug. 6, 2024) File Under: Atmospheric In 2021, Alex Brown hailed the “unconventional narrative structures” of a short story by Alisa Alering. If the publisher’s description of their novel Smothermoss is any indication, there should be a lot more juxtaposition of the familiar and unexpected. This one’s set in an uncanny version of Appalachia in the 1980s, one where everyday concerns coexist with the inexplicable. (Tin House; July 16, 2024) It’s a big year for fans of Brian Evenson’s disquieting fiction, as he’ll also have a new collection out this fall. This summer also brings with it a new edition of his novel Dark Property, which is subtitled “an affliction” and, as per the author’s own website, involves “a mysterious resurrection cult.” Prepare to shudder. (Black Square Editions; July 1, 2024) A decade after the publication of his acclaimed debut The Currency of Paper, Alex Kovacs has returned with a new novel, Sexology. It’s the story of an unconventional family whose childhood experiences lead them to strange and unforeseen spaces, with psychic abilities playing a role. It’s a very different way of taking big ideas and using them to explore elements of society.  (Dalkey Archive Press; July 2, 2024) Each of Eugene Lim’s novels has borne readers and characters alike to some unexpected and fantastical spaces, some more overtly than others. His debut novel Fog & Car is being reissued this summer, and its tale of the aftermath of a divorce, in which its characters’ lives grow increasingly bizarre, demonstrates Lim’s skill at evoking the quotidian and the evocative. Plus there’s a Renee Gladman introduction, which is always welcome. (Coffee House Press; July 16, 2024) File Under: Conspiratorial Publisher New Directions describes Juan Emar’s collection Ten (translated by Megan McDowell) using a few intriguing descriptions, including references to a “demonic gemstone” and a taxidermied bird that returns to life. Emar hasn’t been available in English translation for very long, but this Alejandro Zambra essay provides a good overview of why his work might be of interest. (New Directions; Aug. 13, 2024) Do you enjoy your fiction with a touch of the Gothic? Harriet Lee’s 1801 novel Kruitzner certainly fits the bill, with an air of mystery suffusing the book’s plot and various characters reckoning with sinister schemes and the unrest that comes from exile. If you’re looking for an additional Gothic point in this book’s favor, know this: Lord Byron was a fan. (Sublunary Editions; July 19, 2024) There’s a grand tradition of fantastical literature in which dreams turn out to be… more than just dreams. It’s in that tradition that Ryan Elizabeth Penske’s novel The Dreamers can be found. Penske’s novel follows a quartet of people with uncanny abilities related to dreams and the mysterious force that’s trapped them in a sinister location. (Rare Bird; Aug. 13, 2024) There’s a transgressive charge that runs through Michael J. Seidlinger’s new novel The Body Harvest. It’s a story about an unlikely duo who find themselves inexorably drawn towards infecting themselves with potentially fatal viruses. You might read that and shudder; the novel itself is unsettling in the best possible way, reminiscent of the work of J.G. Ballard and Dennis Cooper. (CLASH Books; July 23, 2024) File Under: Epistemic The new collection Glass is Ivy Grimes’s second book released this year, following the novella Star Shapes. This new collection chronicles characters’ travails in both realistic and mythic settings; there’s also another visual and tactile element that recurs throughout the collection, and you can probably guess what it is from the book’s title. (Grimscribe Press; Aug. 23, 2024) Daniel Braun compared some of the stories in Elad Haber’s The World Outside to the works of Angels Carter, so that’s a good way to pique my interest. Haber’s fiction runs the gamut from revisiting the raw stuff of fairy tales to using the apocalyptic as a kind of parable. That sounds like a recipe for an ambitious and compelling collection. (Underland Press; July 16, 2024) What happens when portal stories and political theory converge? That’s the concept at the center of Pam Jones’s novel Animalia, about a group of young people who travel to another dimension where the environment is more primal and the society’s residents get in touch with nature in unexpected ways. (Spaceboy Books; July 31, 2024) Joanna Russ’s 1980 novel On Strike Against God is something of a departure from her usual writing—including the fact that it finds her working in a more realistic mode than the bulk of her other fiction. Writing about this book in these pages in 2011, Lee Mandelo said, “it’s eminently quotable, and it captures quite a lot of authentic emotion, which is valuable fictionally and personally.” This new edition also features an interview with Samuel R. Delany. (Feminist Press; July 23, 2024) File Under: Horrific In a 2021 interview with Gwendolyn Kiste, Rick Claypool said, “I always sort of have one foot in the like, weird speculative fiction camp and one foot in the offbeat literary camp.” His new novel Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War is his latest foray into fiction, and includes a character who can literally vomit knives. As intriguing details go, that’s especially so. (Anxiety Press; July 1, 2024) The fundraiser for editors Vaughn A. Jackson and Stephanie Pearre’s anthology Beyond the Bounds of Infinity described it as “an anthology of cosmic horror and weird fiction populated with stories written entirely by people from marginalized groups.” The editors added, “we want to bring forth stories that would make H.P. Lovecraft roll over in his grave.” The lineup for this includes contributions by S.A. Cosby and Mary SanGiovanni. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; August 2024) Scott R. Jones’s unsettling brand of cosmic horror has been appreciated in these pages before. This summer brings with it a new novel, Drill, which involves a plan to do away with a deity. A recent review at 3:AM called this “a curse masquerading as a novel,” which is a thoroughly enticing comparison.  (Word Horde; August 2024) File Under: Otherworldly Kirkus’s review of Richard Kelly Kemick’s new collection Hello, Horse made comparisons to “George Saunders and the slackers from Wayne’s World,” which is an intriguing combination. These stories include a number of strange visions of the not-so-distant future—and throw some ghosts into the mix as well. (Biblioasis; Aug. 6, 2024) Ghost hunters and bizarre creatures with paranormal abilities are among the characters you’ll encounter in the stories within Lena Valencia’s collection Mystery Nights. Valencia’s fiction often ventures to desert landscapes, illustrating the strange and fantastical goings-on that take place there. (Tin House; Aug. 6, 2024) Even when they don’t completely cross over into the fantastical, Joy Williams’s fiction often trafficks in the surreal and inexplicable. And when Williams does veer into the more uncanny of folkloric—consider The Changeling—the results are especially memorable. As for her new collection Concerning the Future of Souls, that one has the Angel of Death at its core; things are about to get very metaphysical. (Tin House; July 2, 2024) [end-mark] The post Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for July and August 2024 appeared first on Reactor.

First House Dem Calls for Biden to Step Aside

Is a Convicted Felon Already Running the White House?

As pretty much every sci-fi movie ever has taught us, the future is going to be full of lasers. They will power our quantum computers; probe microscopic nooks and crannies in scientific experiments; we’ll use them in medicine, for surgeries, or to assess eye health – the possibilities are endless. There’s just one problem: so far, the best options we have – those made with titanium ion-doped sapphire crystals, known as titanium-sapphire or Ti:sapphire lasers – are far too large and expensive for general use. So you can understand why the new development, by researchers at Stanford University, of a Ti:sapphire laser that can fit on a chip is so exciting. It’s four orders of magnitude smaller than any Ti:sapphire laser produced so far – measurable in millimeters rather than tens of meters – and three orders of magnitude less expensive. It’s even vastly more efficient than its predecessors.“This is a complete departure from the old model,” said Jelena Vuković, the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership, a professor of electrical engineering, and senior author of the recently published paper introducing the chip-scale Ti:sapphire laser, in a statement. “Instead of one large and expensive laser, any lab might soon have hundreds of these valuable lasers on a single chip,” Vuković said. “And you can fuel it all with a green laser pointer.”The breakthrough comes thanks to two innovations: firstly, rather than dealing with Ti:sapphire on its own, the team mounted it on an insulator made from silicon dioxide. The Ti:sapphire they did use – a layer just a few hundred nanometers thick – was then polished and etched with an intricate swirl of tiny ridges. The pattern, which looks rather like a coiled-up firehose, is known as a waveguide.Light sent through this waveguide is then warmed using a tiny heater, basically allowing the team – or whoever ends up using this potentially soon-to-be-ubiquitous technology – to tune the laser to whatever wavelength they require. The tiny laser could have profound benefits throughout science. Ti:sapphire lasers are indispensable in fields such as quantum optics, spectroscopy, and neuroscience, prized for their unrivaled gain bandwidth – a technical term meaning that energy can be emitted across a wider spectrum of wavelengths than in other lasers. They’re also ultrafast, explained Joshua Yang, a doctoral candidate in Vuković’s lab and co-first author of the study, able to emit pulses of light every quadrillionth of a second – for reference, that’s about fourteen orders of magnitude faster than the kind of laser you can buy in a store.But that performance comes at a cost – literally. A Ti:sapphire laser purchase could put you back hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the basic kit; you’ll need a spare bit of room to put it in, since it’ll take up about the same amount of space as, oh, say, four bowling balls; and of course, then there’s the multiple other high-powered lasers, each costing tens of thousands of dollars themselves, which you’ll need to power it.It’s no surprise, then, that the tech is not currently what you’d call widespread. But a chip-sized version would change all that, said Yang: “When you leap from tabletop size and make something producible on a chip at such a low cost, it puts these powerful lasers in reach for a lot of different important applications,” he explained. “A chip is light. It is portable. It is inexpensive and it is efficient. There are no moving parts. And it can be mass-produced.” And the bonus? Scaling it down like this doesn’t just make Ti:sapphire lasers smaller and cheaper – it actually makes them better.“Mathematically speaking, intensity is power divided by area. So, if you maintain the same power as the large-scale laser, but reduce the area in which it is concentrated, the intensity goes through the roof,” explained Yang. “The small scale of our laser actually helps us make it more efficient.”“What’s not to like? This democratizes Ti:sapphire lasers.”The paper is published in the journal Nature.

Longevity has got the world in a right tizz of late, as everyone scrambles for the right goop to slather on their face as they wild swim their way to eternal life – but can we learn secrets to long life from nature? And if so, what does the world's longest-living vertebrate have to say about it all?New experimental research on the topic has found that metabolic activity may be the key to the incredibly long life of Greenland sharks. This increased understanding could help us conserve them on a warming planet, while also possibly informing interventions for human cardiovascular health.Greenland sharks – known to science as Somniosus microcephalus – have an expected lifespan of at least 270 years, but may live beyond 500 in the most remarkable cases (which, bizarrely, we know thanks to nuclear weapons). It’s long been suggested that the cold environment they inhabit, combined with the minimal effort they put into moving, might be the key – but a team including Ewan Camplisson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, UK, decided to take a closer look.In pursuit of the adaptations that allow Greenland sharks to live so long, the team conducted enzyme assays on preserved muscle tissue samples. Such samples are a rare opportunity to study these animals, which are the focus of the University Of Copenhagen’s Old And Cold project.Greenland shark tissue collection.Image credit: Ewan Camplisson“While on expedition, a key focus is to catch sharks to tag them with both electronic and physical tags so that we can release them and then either monitor where they swim (via electronic tag) or record how much they grow if they are recaptured and we can identify them via their physical tag,” explained Camplisson to IFLScience.“Occasionally during this process a shark is wounded and may not survive being released. To avoid the shark suffering needlessly we may decide to not release it back to the water but instead to ethically euthanize it. In this case we collect samples for future work so that the animal is in no way wasted and can still be used for science. Any remains of the shark are also donated to local fishermen or hunters which feed their sled dogs shark meat so that none of the animal is wasted.”The team used red muscle samples in storage to measure the metabolic activity of the sharks’ enzymes with a spectrophotometer, looking at a range of different shark ages and environmental temperatures. Surprisingly, they observed no significant variation in muscle metabolic activity across the sharks, which indicates their metabolism doesn’t decrease with age – as we see in other animals – and may be a crucial contributor to their extreme longevity.“For us, this is important as most animals that show traditional signs of aging would show decreases in some enzyme activity and compensating increases in others as they get older,” said Camplisson. “This is all part of natural metabolism as aging causes it to fail and change over time. The fact we don’t see this in the Greenland shark suggests they don’t show this traditional sign of aging.”      The results showed variation across environmental temperatures, indicating the metabolic enzymes were significantly more active where it was warmer. According to Camplisson, this suggests the muscle metabolism isn’t adapted for the polar environment as otherwise there would be less of a temperature-related difference in activity.The team’s work continues in the hope that a better understanding of Greenland sharks can inform how they may respond to the planet’s rapidly changing climate, while also possibly revealing insights that could be applied to the study of human cardiovascular health as we age.“I have other projects all focused on studying aging in the Greenland shark,” Camplisson said. “Looking at changes in metabolism Is only a one of these projects. However, within this small project I plan to look at some other tissues in the Greenland shark which may show different metabolic profiles, and also look at some more enzymes which will give even further insight into metabolism in this incredible species.”The study is being presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Prague onJuly 2-5, 2024.