James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Scientists have converted the blood type of a donor kidney and transplanted the organ into a person. The procedure — the first of its kind — could improve access to donor organs, specialists say, because the blood type of the donor would no longer matter.

Currently, organs from deceased donors can be transplanted into people only if they have a compatible blood type. This is because the recipient’s immune system can produce antibodies to attack and destroy the donated organ if the donor and recipient have different antigens, which come in two types: A and B. Organs that are blood type O do not have A or B antigens, so anyone can receive them.

Researchers from Canada and China used an enzyme to remove type-A antigens from a donor kidney. The enzyme converts type-A blood into type-O, says study author Stephen Withers, a chemist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The type-O kidney was then transplanted into a 68-year-old brain-dead man in Chongqing, China. The organ remained healthy for two days before showing signs of rejection. It produced urine for six days. The results are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering today.

The enzyme was first identified in 2019 by some members of the same team. In 2022, they showed that a type-A lung could be converted into a type-O one, although the organ wasn’t transplanted into a person.

The results are groundbreaking, says Natasha Rogers, a transplant clinician at Westmead Hospital in Sydney, Australia. They could improve access to donor organs and reduce transplant wait lists. If the blood type of the organ was no longer a barrier for transplantation, physicians could focus on things such as matching other antigens unrelated to blood type, which are important in terms of how long a transplant will last, she adds

What’s next?

Living donors can give their organs to people with different blood types, but the recipient first has to undergo multiple treatments to lower their antibody levels, Rogers says. However, for deceased donors, there is not enough time for the recipient to undergo the treatments before the donor organ becomes unusable, she adds. The treatment also affects the recipient’s immune system, increasing the risk of infection.

Treating the donor organ instead of the recipient is a breakthrough, says Rogers. The study shows that a person could initially receive the same kind of immunosuppression given for transplants between people with matching blood types to reduce the risk of rejection. But more trials in brain-dead and trials in living people will be needed before the enzyme can be used routinely, she adds, including adjusting treatment for the organ or recipient to help the organ function for longer.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The massive Amazon Web Services outage that took down sites from Reddit to Ring to Roblox has been fixed, the company said. The AWS outage rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable for most of the work day for many people on Monday. As the day rolled along, the breakdown affected more than 2,000 companies and services, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network, Amazon itself and critical services such as online banking. 

As of 3:53 p.m. PT, Amazon said that the massive issue was resolved. The company said the outage began at 11:49 p.m. on Sunday, with the company seeing increased error rates for services on the US East Coast. Amazon says its workers identified the source of the error at 12:26 a.m., blaming DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints. After that issue was resolved, Amazon faced additional problems, and had to throttle, meaning temporarily limit the power and performance, for certain operations. 

“Over time, we reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered,” the latest update said. “By 3:01 p.m., all AWS services returned to normal operations.”

Why were so many sites affected?

AWS, a cloud services provider owned by Amazon, props up huge portions of the internet. So when it went down, it took many of the services we know and love with it. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows just how much of the internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on can be revoked when something goes wrong. 

The reliance on a small number of big companies to underpin the web is akin to putting all of our eggs in a tiny handful of baskets. When it works, it’s great, but only one small thing needs to go wrong for the internet to fall to its knees in a matter of minutes.

Outage reports spiked as the West Coast woke up

AWS first registered an issue on its service status page just after midnight PT on Monday, saying it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 Region.” Around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified a potential root cause of the issue. Within half an hour, it had started applying mitigations that were resulting in significant signs of recovery. 

“The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” AWS said at 3.35 a.m. PT. 

The issues seemed to have been largely resolved as the US East Coast was coming online, but outage reports spiked again dramatically after 8 a.m. PT as work began on the West Coast.

As of 8:43 a.m. PT, the AWS status page showed the severity as “degraded.” In a post at that time, AWS noted: “We are throttling requests for new EC2 instance launches to aid recovery and actively working on mitigations.”  (EC2 is AWS shorthand for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that it says “provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.”)

Amazon didn’t respond to a request for further comment beyond pointing us back to the AWS health dashboard.

Around the time that AWS says it first began noticing error rates, the outage-tracking site Downdetector saw reports begin to spike across many online services, including banks, airlines and phone carriers. As AWS resolved the issue, some of these reports saw a drop-off, whereas others have yet to return to normal. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Ring, Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues. Reddit finally came back online around 4.30 a.m. PT, according to its status page, which was then verified by CNET.

n total, Downdetector saw over 9.8 million reports, with 2.7 million coming from the US, over 1.1 million from the UK and the rest largely spread across Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Over 2,000 companies in total have been affected, Downdetector added, without around 280 still experiencing issues around 10 a.m. PT.

“This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swath of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year,” Daniel Ramirez, Downdetector by Ookla’s director of product, told CNET. “They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform.”

What caused the AWS outage?

AWS didn’t immediately share full details about what caused the internet to fall off a cliff this morning. Then at 8:43 a.m. PT, it offered this brief description: “The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

Earlier in the day, it had attributed the outage to a “DNS issue.” DNS stands for the domain name system and refers to the service that translates human-readable internet addresses (for example, CNET.com) into machine-readable IP addresses that connect browsers with websites.

.

An Amazon Web Services outage affected more than 2,000 companies at the start of the work week.  Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

European and Arab nations, Canada, and the U.S. appear willing to contribute to the estimated $70 billion needed to rebuild Gaza, a U.N. official said on Tuesday, adding that the two-year war there had produced rubble equal to 13 times the pyramids of Giza.

.

Jaco Cilliers, an official at the United Nations Development Program, said Israel’s war against Hamas had generated at least 55 million tons of rubble and that it could take decades for Gaza to fully recover.

.

“We’ve heard very positive news from a number of our partners, including European partners… Canada,” regarding their willingness to help, he told a press conference, adding that there were also discussions with the United States.

Since a ceasefire deal came into effect in Gaza, large numbers of Palestinians have returned to the ruins of their homes in the coastal territory.

.

Huge swathes of Gaza have been reduced to a wasteland by Israeli bombardment over two years that killed some 68,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities.

A large part of the destruction is in Gaza City, scene of some of the fiercest fighting. About 83% of all building structures there have been damaged, according to the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT).

.

UNDP said it had already cleared some 81,000 tons of rubble from the Gaza Strip and was continuing to do so.

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas-led militants attacked the country on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

.

Hamas freed the last living Israeli hostages from Gaza on Monday under the ceasefire deal, and Israel sent home busloads of Palestinian detainees, as U.S. President Donald Trump declared the end of the two-year-long war.

.

[1/2] Heavy machinery drives through a street, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, October 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ebrahim Hajjaj Purchase Licensing Rights

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Babies start processing language before they are born, a new study suggests. A research team in Montreal has found that newborns who had heard short stories in foreign languages while in the womb process those languages similarly to their native tongue.

The study, published in August in Nature Communications Biology, is the first to use brain imaging to show what neuroscientists and psychologists had long suspected. Previous research had shown that fetuses and newborns can recognize familiar voices and rhythms, and even that they prefer their native language soon after birth. But these findings come mostly from behavioral cues—sucking patterns, head turns, or heart rate changes—rather than direct evidence from the brain.

“We cannot say babies ‘learn’ a language prenatally,” says Anne Gallagher, a neuropsychologist at the University of Montreal and senior author of the study. What we can say, she adds, is that neonates develop familiarity with one or more languages during gestation, which shapes their brain networks at birth.

The research team recruited 60 people for the experiment, all of them about 35 weeks into their pregnancy. Of those, 39 exposed their fetuses to 10 minutes of prerecorded stories in French (their native language) and another 10 minutes of the same stories in either Hebrew or German at least once every other day until birth. These languages were chosen because their acoustic and phonological properties are very distinctfrom French and from each other, explains co-lead author Andréanne René, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical neuropsychology at the University of Montreal. The other 21 participants were part of the control group; their fetuses were exposed to French in their natural environments, with no special input.

Between the first 10 hours and three days after birth, the team observed how the newborns’ brains reacted to German, Hebrew and French by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a noninvasive imaging technique that measures changes in blood oxygenation in the brain.

All babies in the cohort had increased activity in the left temporal lobe, the brain’s language processing center, when they heard spoken French. But only those exposed to Hebrew or German before birth showed similar brain activation when listening to those languages. Newborns who had not heard the Hebrew or German stories before birth showed activation in brain regions for processing sounds in general and less activation in language-processing regions.

The study supports the idea that the newborn brain is not a “blank slate,” says Ana Carolina Coan, a pediatric neurology expert and member of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology. Instead, the gestational environment starts shaping fetuses’ brain processing even before birth.

It isn’t clear how much in utero exposure to a given tongue is needed for newborns’ brains to process it as language. Some previous research into the effects of the auditory environment on fetuses used hours-long exposure; other studies used a duration of as little as 15 minutes. Gallagher was concerned that the new study’s exposure time wouldn’t be enough to note any response, but asking for more than that might have been burdensome to the participants. This made the study’s clear results a welcome surprise, she says.

“The study doesn’t suggest mothers should expose their unborn babies to foreign languages to be smarter or multilingual later,” says Coan, who did not take part in the research. But studying how language exposure in utero affects a child’s speech development will be important for understanding speech disorders, which affect around 5 to 10 percent of children in the U.S. “For clinicians, this adds evidence that language development begins much earlier than birth, which matters for how we detect and treat delays,” she says.

.

Vicki Smith/Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Capital gains taxes are levied on profits from the sale of assets like stocks, mutual funds, and real estate. The rate at which these gains are taxed depends on your taxable income and how long you’ve held the asset. But keep in mind that capital gains tax rates are generally lower than the tax rates for ordinary income, like wages.

Let’s examine the 2025 rates for long-term capital gains (assets held for more than a year) and highlight the changes from last year’s rates. We will also review the new IRS threshold brackets for 2026.

Additionally, we will discuss short-term rates (ordinary income tax rates) and rates for specific capital gains tax situations, including those applicable to collectibles and the Net Investment Income Tax.

Long-term capital gains tax rates

Long-term capital gains tax rates apply to assets held for more than a year. These rates are structured to encourage long-term investment.

The rates are 0%, 15%, or 20%, depending on your income level; essentially, the higher your income, the higher your rate. The income thresholds for long-term capital gains are adjusted annually for inflation.

If you compare the capital gains tax rates from 2024 and 2025 below, you can see the impact of inflation adjustments.

The 2025 capital gains tax thresholds increased by about 2.8% across various filing statuses from the prior year.

For instance, with single filers, the 0% rate now applies to incomes up to $48,350 in 2025, up from last year’s threshold of $47,025.

The 20% rate threshold for single filers rose substantially from $518,900 in 2024 to $583,400 for 2025.

For married couples filing jointly:

• The 0% rate threshold increased by 2.82%, from $94,050 last year to $96,700 for 2025.
• The 20% rate threshold rose from $588,750 to $600,050.

Head of household filers also experienced changes:

• The 0% rate threshold increased by about 2.78%, from $63,000 last year to $64,750 for 2025.
• The 20% rate threshold jumped from $551,350 to $566,700

These inflation adjustments are designed to prevent “bracket creep,” where taxpayers might be pushed into higher tax brackets due to inflation rather than actual increases in real income.

.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Hmmmm… Gen Z, and Gen Alpha in the USA have been bamboozled!

Click the link below the picture

.

“If you’re worried about the potential for those indirect impacts, those only increase the longer the shutdown goes on,” Mr. Zdinak said.

Economists estimate that the shutdown will trim between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points off annual growth in economic output for each week it drags on. That amounts to between $7.6 billion and $15.2 billion a week based on hours that government employees aren’t working, according to Oxford Economics. The 2018 shutdown trimmed slightly less than 0.1 percentage points off annual growth per week, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That estimation does not capture the ways federal services support economic activity in other sectors, where the effect could be narrow but deep. Consider visa processing. Much of it is performed by contractors, who were told to stop work on Oct. 1. Unlike government employees, they will not be paid back when the shutdown ends.

Brandon Muniz owns a Maryland information technology provider, HeiTech Services, which relies on federal contracts. He has already lost business this year because of government cost-cutting, and over the past couple of weeks, he has had to cut hours for staff members who can’t evaluate applications for green cards and employment-based visas until the government reopens. Mr. Muniz has had to lay off 15 people this year and furlough another 25 because of the shutdown. He worries about getting them back if they find other jobs and keeping the business afloat in the meantime.

“All of our indirect costs for our headquarters team, the facilities, the vehicles that they have, we still have to pay for,” Mr. Muniz said. “Those are things we factor in when we write up a proposal for a contract, but it’s very difficult to factor in something like a shutdown.”

The individuals and businesses that HeiTech serves — like farmers, operators of seasonal attractions and seafood processors — are dealing with delayed visa applications.

Small companies that depend on one or two foreign workers with specific skills are in limbo, said Mark Neuberger, a lawyer with Foley & Lardner in Miami who helps clients with labor issues. “Even a short shutdown gums up the works for months, and they have to clean up the mess from when they were gone,” Mr. Neuberger said.

The federal government also guarantees a significant share of credit markets through agencies whose work has been significantly curtailed, including the Small Business Administration and the Department of Agriculture.

The pause in federal loan processing poses the largest obstacle for low-income borrowers who would qualify for a mortgage backed by the Agriculture Department’s program for rural areas. But even people with approvals for private mortgages in disaster-prone areas are getting tripped up because they have no access to the National Flood Insurance Program.

.

The U.S. Capitol is seen from an empty meeting room in the Hart Senate Office Building during the federal government shutdown. Credit…Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________