A tech inventor teams up with scientists to extract ancient Egyptian yeast and bake bread with it.
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Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Woman throws pot of hot grease at face of man after alleged break-in
An Alabama woman was in the fight of her life when an armed man broke into her home. But she fought back and wielded a pot of hot grease and scalded the criminal’s face.
—She’s Free! Cyntoia Brown is released from prison after serving 15 years—
The person on the receiving end of having hot oil thrown in his face was Larondrick Macklin. He suffered severe burns and was taken to a local hospital for medical treatment, according to the Decatur Police Department.
Police responded to a call for a domestic dispute at the 2800-block of Wimberly Drive, Decatur. According to USA Today, Macklin was the “primary aggressor in the altercation,” according to a police statement.
According to Newsweek, Macklin, 31, is the woman’s ex-boyfriend and had a gun.
Police contend that Macklin “entered the victim’s house with a firearm, and the victim defended herself with a pot containing hot grease.”
Police did not confirm how the woman knew Macklin.
“Since the situation was of a domestic nature, we are not at liberty to discuss the relationship between the victim and the suspect at this time,” a police spokeswoman told the outlet.
But she was compelled to defend herself with what was available to her.
Macklin was jailed and charged with first-degree domestic violence and first-degree burglary. He is being held on $300,000 bond.
Police said, “The defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty,” which is kind of an oxymoron given the evidence.
—Meek Mill retrial decision delayed until end of month—
According to Darley Law LLC, a criminal justice firm: “First-degree domestic violence is a Class A felony, which carries a sentence of life in prison. First-degree domestic violence occurs when the defendant commits either aggravated stalking or first-degree assault.”
We hope this suspect learns from this and get butter, we mean, better.
The post Woman throws pot of hot grease at face of man after alleged break-in appeared first on theGrio.
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Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Astrophysical shock phenomena reproduced in the laboratory
Vast interstellar events where clouds of charged matter hurtle into each other and spew out high-energy particles have now been reproduced in the lab with high fidelity. The work, by MIT researchers and an international team of colleagues, should help resolve longstanding disputes over exactly what takes place in these gigantic shocks.
Many of the largest-scale events, such as the expanding bubble of matter hurtling outward from a supernova, involve a phenomenon called collisionless shock. In these interactions, the clouds of gas or plasma are so rarefied that most of the particles involved actually miss each other, but they nevertheless interact electromagnetically or in other ways to produces visible shock waves and filaments. These high-energy events have so far been difficult to reproduce under laboratory conditions that mirror those in an astrophysical setting, leading to disagreements among physicists as to the mechanisms at work in these astrophysical phenomena.
Now, the researchers have succeeded in reproducing critical conditions of these collisionless shocks in the laboratory, allowing for detailed study of the processes taking place within these giant cosmic smashups. The new findings are described in the journal Physical Review Letters, in a paper by MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center Senior Research Scientist Chikang Li, five others at MIT, and 14 others around the world.
Virtually all visible matter in the universe is in the form of plasma, a kind of soup of subatomic particles where negatively charged electrons swim freely along with positively charged ions instead of being connected to each other in the form of atoms. The sun, the stars, and most clouds of interstellar material are made of plasma.
Most of these interstellar clouds are extremely tenuous, with such low density that true collisions between their constituent particles are rare even when one cloud slams into another at extreme velocities that can be much faster than 1,000 kilometers per second. Nevertheless, the result can be a spectacularly bright shock wave, sometimes showing a great deal of structural detail including long trailing filaments.
Astronomers have found that many changes take place at these shock boundaries, where physical parameters “jump,” Li says. But deciphering the mechanisms taking place in collisionless shocks has been difficult, since the combination of extremely high velocities and low densities has been hard to match on Earth.
While collisionless shocks had been predicted earlier, the first one that was directly identified, in the 1960s, was the bow shock formed by the solar wind, a tenuous stream of particles emanating from the sun, when it hits Earth’s magnetic field. Soon, many such shocks were recognized by astronomers in interstellar space. But in the decades since, “there has been a lot of simulations and theoretical modeling, but a lack of experiments” to understand how the processes work, Li says.
Li and his colleagues found a way to mimic the phenomena in the laboratory by generating a jet of low-density plasma using a set of six powerful laser beams, at the OMEGA laser facility at the University of Rochester, and aiming it at a thin-walled polyimide plastic bag filled with low-density hydrogen gas. The results reproduced many of the detailed instabilities observed in deep space, thus confirming that the conditions match closely enough to allow for detailed, close-up study of these elusive phenomena. A quantity called the mean free path of the plasma particles was measured as being much greater than the widths of the shock waves, Li says, thus meeting the formal definition of a collisionless shock.
At the boundary of the lab-generated collisionless shock, the density of the plasma spiked dramatically. The team was able to measure the detailed effects on both the upstream and downstream sides of the shock front, allowing them to begin to differentiate the mechanisms involved in the transfer of energy between the two clouds, something that physicists have spent years trying to figure out. The results are consistent with one set of predictions based on something called the Fermi mechanism, Li says, but further experiments will be needed to definitively rule out some other mechanisms that have been proposed.
“For the first time we were able to directly measure the structure” of important parts of the collisionless shock, Li says. “People have been pursuing this for several decades.”
The research also showed exactly how much energy is transferred to particles that pass through the shock boundary, which accelerates them to speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light, producing what are known as cosmic rays. A better understanding of this mechanism “was the goal of this experiment, and that’s what we measured” Li says, noting that they captured a full spectrum of the energies of the electrons accelerated by the shock.
"This report is the latest installment in a transformative series of experiments, annually reported since 2015, to emulate an actual astrophysical shock wave for comparison with space observations," says Mark Koepke, a professor of physics at West Virginia University and chair of the Omega Laser Facility User Group, who was not involved in the study. "Computer simulations, space observations, and these experiments reinforce the physics interpretations that are advancing our understanding of the particle acceleration mechanisms in play in high-energy-density cosmic events such as gamma-ray-burst-induced outflows of relativistic plasma."
The international team included researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the National Research Nuclear University in Russia, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Rome, the University of Rochester, the University of Paris, Osaka University in Japan, and the University of California at San Diego. It was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the French National Research Agency.
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WATCH | Black Travel Diary: Inside Antigua’s Hottest Late-Night Music Competition
This week the island of Antigua celebrates Carnival, also known as The Caribbean’s Greatest Summer Festival. The streets will be filled with the sweet sounds of soca, calypso music, and dancehall too. As part of our Black travel series “Grio Goes to: Antigua,” theGrio’s Deputy Editor Natasha S. Alford gets an inside look at the history and unique music scene on the island.
In this episode, local soca artist Menace XL narrates the history Sound Clash, a massive DJ battle with a live audience, which takes place at the Historical Fort James Plantation Venue in Antigua.
“Sound Clash is culture. Dancehall is culture,” explains Menace XL. “I don’t care how you go around it and twist it around or if you want to try to fight it. It’s just culture. Since the days of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, coming right up, it’s always been embedded in the Carribean people and the world in general. Sound Clash is always about competition and once you add competition to anything, you get a rivalry and it brings entertainment.”
Menace also opens up about Caribbean music’s cultural connection to Africa.
“You already know how to feel when the drums come on,” Menace tells theGrio. “You already get a type of vibes. Soca is basically a wonderful job at adding some keys and some sense into different elements. But the drum pattern is actually what drives it.”
“The bass you feel it in your belly, feel it in your heart,” says the soca artist. “It drives you. So that’s why it’s always music that gives you this wonderful feeling, this happy feeling.”
“From time you hear it from the ancestors, we usually use the drums to relay messages or to celebrate something. You feel it in soca music.”
Watch the full episode above and subscribe to theGrio’s YouTube channel to get more Black Travel Diary episodes.
The post WATCH | Black Travel Diary: Inside Antigua’s Hottest Late-Night Music Competition appeared first on theGrio.
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How brain cells pick which connections to keep
Brain cells, or neurons, constantly tinker with their circuit connections, a crucial feature that allows the brain to store and process information. While neurons frequently test out new potential partners through transient contacts, only a fraction of fledging junctions, called synapses, are selected to become permanent.
The major criterion for excitatory synapse selection is based on how well they engage in response to experience-driven neural activity, but how such selection is implemented at the molecular level has been unclear. In a new study, MIT neuroscientists have identified the gene and protein, CPG15, that allows experience to tap a synapse as a keeper.
In a series of novel experiments described in Cell Reports, the team at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory used multi-spectral, high-resolution two-photon microscopy to literally watch potential synapses come and go in the visual cortex of mice — both in the light, or normal visual experience, and in the darkness, where there is no visual input. By comparing observations made in normal mice and ones engineered to lack CPG15, they were able to show that the protein is required in order for visual experience to facilitate the transition of nascent excitatory synapses to permanence.
Mice engineered to lack CPG15 only exhibit one behavioral deficiency: They learn much more slowly than normal mice, says senior author Elly Nedivi, the William R. (1964) and Linda R. Young Professor of Neuroscience in the Picower Institute and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. They need more trials and repetitions to learn associations that other mice can learn quickly. The new study suggests that’s because without CPG15, they must rely on circuits where synapses simply happened to take hold, rather than on a circuit architecture that has been refined by experience for optimal efficiency.
“Learning and memory are really specific manifestations of our brain’s ability in general to constantly adapt and change in response to our environment,” Nedivi says. “It’s not that the circuits aren’t there in mice lacking CPG15, they just don’t have that feature — which is really important — of being optimized through use.”
Watching in light and darkness
The first experiment reported in the paper, led by former MIT postdoc Jaichandar Subramanian, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, is a contribution to neuroscience in and of itself, Nedivi says. The novel labeling and imaging technologies implemented in the study, she says, allowed tracking key events in synapse formation with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. The study resolved the emergence of “dendritic spines,” which are the structural protrusions on which excitatory synapses are formed, and the recruitment of the synaptic scaffold, PSD95, that signals that a synapse is there to stay.
The team tracked specially labeled neurons in the visual cortex of mice after normal visual experience, and after two weeks in darkness. To their surprise, they saw that spines would routinely arise and then typically disappear again at the same rate regardless of whether the mice were in light or darkness. This careful scrutiny of spines confirmed that experience doesn’t matter for spine formation, Nedivi said. That upends a common assumption in the field, which held that experience was necessary for spines to even emerge.
By keeping track of the presence of PSD95 they could confirm that the synapses that became stabilized during normal visual experience were the ones that had accumulated that protein. But the question remained: How does experience drive PSD95 to the synapse? The team hypothesized that CPG15, which is activity dependent and associated with synapse stabilization, does that job.
CPG15 represents experience
To investigate that, they repeated the same light-versus-dark experiences, but this time in mice engineered to lack CPG15. In the normal mice, there was much more PSD95 recruitment during the light phase than during the dark, but in the mice without CPG15, the experience of seeing in the light never made a difference. It was as if CPG15-less mice in the light were like normal mice in the dark.
Later they tried another experiment testing whether the low PSD95 recruitment seen when normal mice were in the dark could be rescued by exogenous expression of CPG15. Indeed, PSD95 recruitment shot up, as if the animals were exposed to visual experience. This showed that CPG15 not only carries the message of experience in the light, it can actually substitute for it in the dark, essentially “tricking” PSD95 into acting as if experience had called upon it.
“This is a very exciting result, because it shows that CPG15 is not just required for experience-dependent synapse selection, but it’s also sufficient,” says Nedivi, “That’s unique in relation to all other molecules that are involved in synaptic plasticity.”
A new model and method
In all, the paper’s data allowed Nedivi to propose a new model of experience-dependent synapse stabilization: Regardless of neural activity or experience, spines emerge with fledgling excitatory synapses and the receptors needed for further development. If activity and experience send CPG15 their way, that draws in PSD95 and the synapse stabilizes. If experience doesn’t involve the synapse, it gets no CPG15, very likely no PSD95, and the spine withers away.
The paper potentially has significance beyond the findings about experience-dependent synapse stabilization, Nedivi says. The method it describes of closely monitoring the growth or withering of spines and synapses amid a manipulation (like knocking out or modifying a gene) allows for a whole raft of studies in which examining how a gene, or a drug, or other factors affect synapses.
“You can apply this to any disease model and use this very sensitive tool for seeing what might be wrong at the synapse,” she says.
In addition to Nedivi and Subramanian, the paper’s other authors are Katrin Michel and Marc Benoit.
The National Institutes of Health and the JPB Foundation provided support for the research.
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Wendy Williams reportedly joins forces with her alleged cheating ex to continue joint business ventures
Is Wendy Williams softening her stance on her cheating ex-husband a bit?
—Wendy Williams sheds tears over divorce drama, but then gets real about it—
Could be since reported surface that the talk show host has hired Kevin Hunter, 47, back on her team to handle some of her business affairs, after he allegedly had an affair.
The two had been joined at the hip for more than 20 years as a married couple and together built an empire and had several business ventures together like the Hunter Foundation.
But when Williams, 55 reportedly found out her man had fathered a baby outside the marriage, she ousted him with the quickness, filed for divorce and dissolved her joint businesses.
But it appears poppa has rolled his way back into Wendy’s good graces and they released a joint press release saying that they will not dissolve their production company, publishing house or charitable foundation that they’ve built together.
“Wendy and Kevin’s marriage might be over but they still have love for one another and she realizes that when it comes to business they had a great partnership, there was definitely magic there,” a source close to the couple told DailyMail.com.
“Wendy has come around to the idea that it makes more sense for Kevin to stick around, it’s best for her business and career and for their family.
“Since he left the business there’s been a lot of infighting and back-biting behind the scenes, that’s the kind of stuff Kevin kept a handle on.”
—SHOCKING: Black man in Texas led by white police officers on horses with leash tied around his neck—
“Of course Wendy was furious with Kevin over his affair, she felt he had publicly humiliated her and she wanted to come out fighting, but she’s since softened her view of him and wants an amicable divorce.”
“He has been very supportive, particularly around her struggles with alcoholism.”
Williams has put on a brave face since her very public and she’s been celebrating her new lease on life since she filed for divorce. Still, talk show host still gets emotional when talking about the way her family has been torn apart over the last year.
The post Wendy Williams reportedly joins forces with her alleged cheating ex to continue joint business ventures appeared first on theGrio.
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SHOCKING: Black man in Texas led by white police officers on horses with leash tied around his neck
In one of the most inhumane and emasculating moments a human could have, a photo has gone viral of a Black man in Texas being led on a leash by two white police officers.
Galveston Police was hit with a barrage of complaints over the weekend about the shocking photo of Donald Neely, 43, who was arrested on charges of criminal trespass at 22nd street and Mechanic, ABC 13 reports.
—Body of 4-year-old Baltimore boy reported missing found in dumpster, mother charged—
The photo hit a nerve among people of color at a time when racial tensions are high and white criminals are often treated in a more humane manner than Black suspects.
Chief Vernon L. Hale, III of the Galveston Police Department released a statement about the ordeal and apologized to Neely:
“First and foremost I must apologize to Mister Neely for this unnecessary embarrassment. Although this is a trained technique and best practice in some scenarios, I believe our officers showed poor judgement in this instance and could have waited for a transport unit at the location of arrest. My officers did not have any malicious intent at the time of the arrest, but we have immediately changed the policy to prevent the use of this technique and will review all mounted training and procedures for more appropriate methods.”
On Facebook, a woman, Christin Neely said Donald was her brother in law and explained that he is “mentally ill” and “homeless” but the family has contacted a lawyer to find out why he was treated in such an inhumane way.
“The MAN in the photos is my brother in law Donald Neely. He is mentally ill and homeless with family just over the causeway in Texas City. We have attempted many times to bring him home but he refuses. He gets arrested often for trespassing. After calling GPD and getting no where we have contacted our family lawyer who is working to get answers as to what occurred and why. We would like to thank everyone who has shared the original post and encourage you all to continue sharing! #wearenotourancestors #dontlookaway #share”
—Afton Williamson calls out ‘The Rookie” co-star she alleges sexually harassed her—
“You don’t even do a dog like that,” said Sherri Kelly about the troubling photo. “I don’t care. That’s inhumane.”
“Where were they walking him to and why did they rope him if he was handcuffed? I don’t think it’s right,” Cynthia Orise of Galveston said.
The officer under fire has been identified as P. Brosch and A. Smith. They were also wearing body cameras and police confirmed the cameras were activated.
Posted by Adrienne Bell for Congress TX-14 on Monday, August 5, 2019
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