This holiday season, an unexpected treat has stepped into the limelight and onto the buffet table at many a festive gathering: the Jell-O shot. But the shot in question, which is currently going viral on TikTok and popping up on high-end menus across New York City, is nothing like the ones you probably remember from the sticky basement of a college frat party. Instead, these treats are sleek, refined, classy, and coveted—in short, the opposite of electric green slime in a plastic cup.
Brooklyn-based Solid Wiggles, cofounded by pastry chef Jena Derman and mixologist Jack Schramm, is among the pioneers of this Jell-O shot revival. Founded in 2020, the company describes its mission as “reimagining the nostalgic Jell-O shot” with its “cocktail jellies” that double as edible art. Flavors include margarita, espresso martini, and mezcal negroni, all presented in eye-catching cubes with expertly layered colors, flavors, and designs. A 40-piece, full-menu sampler costs $115.
After just five years in business, Solid Wiggles are on the menu at 20 bars and restaurants in the U.S., including NYC’s ultrapopular restaurant Tatiana, helmed by James Beard award-winning chef Kwame Onwuachi. According to Derman, the brand’s sales have roughly doubled every year for the past three years, and it’s gearing up to release its own cookbook with Penguin Random House in 2026.
A clear trend is emerging: the Jell-O shot is getting a rebrand as a classy treat for a more mature drinker (foodie?) In a growing number of circles, it’s no longer a kitschy throwback, but instead a fashionable food statement.
The Jell-O shot’s tasteful rebrand
To get a taste of the Jell-O shot’s newfound popularity, one need only search the term on TikTok and browse through some of the most popular videos.
“Maturing is realizing your friends will take jello shots if you call them ‘edible cocktails,’” reads the caption of one recent TikTok with 13,000 likes, starring Jell-O shots with encased maraschino cherries cut into cubes.
Another TikTok of “lychee martini jello-shots with cherries,” once again artfully cubed (and this time dusted in powdered sugar), amassed nearly 140,000 likes in just two days. And a third YouTube Short, also sharing a lychee martini shot recipe, recently surpassed half a million views.
“I’m 27, and a real shot sends chills through my literal spine these days,” creator @babytamazz explains in the clip. “I’m still gonna take them, but a Jell-O shot is just preferred at this time. Plus, they’re so fun and bitchy and an awesome party pull.”
Perhaps the most popular video, though, was created by the publication Punch and features Solid Wiggles’ unique take on the Jell-O shot. Derman says it’s now been viewed more than eight million times across social media, leading to what she described as a “colossal” spike in sales just before the holidays.
Solid Wiggles has spent five years trying to convince consumers that the Jell-O shot can be cool—and, clearly, it’s paying off.
All year, top Democrats have shown a striking awareness of one of their biggest problems.
The party, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told NPR this month, needs to show how it will “shake up the status quo.”
“Embrace change,” Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan urged on “The Daily Show” in May. “The Democratic Party should be leading, rather than just saying: ‘No, no, no. Status quo, status quo.’”
“We have become the party of the status quo, when we’re not,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told NBC News in March.
As they try to repair their political brand before the midterm elections, Democrats are rushing to redefine themselves as Washington disrupters, eager to challenge a government that many Americans believe has failed to improve their lives.
For years, Democratic leaders have cast their party as a firewall against the threats to American democracy they argue are posed by President Trump and his political movement. With their fierce opposition to Mr. Trump, Democrats became the party of institutional preservation, championing political norms, expertise, and the role of the federal government.
But with Republicans now in control of Washington, many Democratic politicians are trying to revamp their image with promises to upend existing power structures, whether they are the Trump administration, Congress or even their own party orthodoxy. It is a message for an electorate that barely trusts government, politicians, or Washington to accomplish any change at all.
“I took on the powerful and corrupt Democrats,” Mayor Paige Cognetti of Scranton, a Democrat running for a swing House seat in northeast Pennsylvania, said in a video announcing her run that was widely praised across her party. “We can stand tall against a Washington that takes advantage of working people.”
Combating a ‘Corrupt System’
But changing the party’s image won’t be easy for Democrats.
For much of the past year, they have fiercely opposed efforts by the Trump administration to drastically cut the size of the federal government. They have protested the shuttering of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development, defended federal workers, and backed lawsuits filed by federal unions and advocacy groups.
Democrats know that those actions have affected how voters view their party. In the spring, congressional lawmakers were briefed in private meetings on polling by Navigator Research, a progressive public opinion firm, showing that a majority of voters described Democrats as focused on “preserving the way government works,” while only 20 percent said the same of Republicans, according to slides of the presentation given to The New York Times.
The challenge Democrats face is how to simultaneously defend government institutions that Mr. Trump is trying to gut while also offering a forward-looking message that resonates with voters who believe politics and democracy are broken.
“We have to embrace the need for change and reform. At the same time, I’m not interested in throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” said Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat chosen by his party’s House campaign arm to recruit candidates. “We end programs that aren’t working, we reform agencies that are not delivering, and then we preserve those that are.”
Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California who is trying to position himself as a leader of his party, said Democrats needed to do more than simply oppose Mr. Trump to restore the trust and support of voters.
“We can’t start with just, ‘We want to return to normalcy,’” he said. “What we need is a vision for change and holding elites accountable that is consistent with our values and our Constitution, and that we have a positive vision of building things up, not just a negative vision of tearing things down.”
What that vision is, exactly, remains unclear. Deep divisions on policy issues, including taxes and the role of money in politics, are already dividing the party in increasingly contentious primary races across the country.
Government-Critical Veterans of Government
Many Democratic candidates believe they will connect with voters better if they start by acknowledging that government — including their own party — has not always worked. The problem is that many of those candidates have been part of state and federal government for years.
In Minnesota, both Democrats competing for the state’s open Senate seat have cast themselves as independent-minded fighters eager to upend the status quo.
.
“The Democratic Party should be leading, rather than just saying: ‘No, no, no. Status quo, status quo,’” Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, left, said in May. Next to her on the Capitol steps is Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey.Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
This year has seen some amazing advancements in fundamental mathematics. Researchers have made breakthroughs in geometry, topology, chaos theory, and more. And a startling three of our top 10 discoveries involve the perennially fascinating prime numbers.
Without further ado, here are some of the most fascinating math findings Scientific American wrote about in 2025:
A New Shape
A newfound shape called a noperthedron has 90 vertices, 240 edges, and 152 faces. The baroque shape has a surprising property that disproves a long-standing geometrical conjecture: no matter how you shift or rotate it, one noperthedron can’t fall through a straight hole in an identical noperthedron.
Prime Number Patterns
Prime numbers, divisible only by themselves and 1, have long fascinated mathematicians. Discovering new ones is difficult as you get to larger and larger numbers. But this year, mathematicians have found a set of probabilistic patterns that govern how the primes are distributed. The patterns involve random chaotic behavior and fractals.
A Grand Unified Theory
A “gargantuan” effort involving nine mathematicians and five papers spanning almost 1,000 pages recently proved the geometric Langlands conjecture. The conjecture connects the properties of different Riemann surfaces, which are structures with coordinates that have real and imaginary parts. It is part of a broader set of problems called the Langlands program, which, if fully proven, could provide a “grand unified theory of mathematics.”
Knot Complexity
A long-standing conjecture stated that if you attach the ends of two different knots to each other, the complexity of the new knot you create will be the sum of the individual knots’ complexity. But the recent discovery of a knot that is simpler than the sum of its parts disproves that assumption.
Fibonacci Problems
The Fibonacci sequence, in which each term is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …) shows up throughout nature. And now mathematicians have found that it also provides an answer to a variation of a classic quandary called the pick-up sticks problem: If you have a number of sticks with random lengths between 0 and 1, what are the chances that no three of those sticks can form a triangle?
Detecting Primes
The largest known prime number, 2136,279,841 − 1, is 41,024,320 digits long, but mathematicians aren’t satisfied—they want to find even bigger primes. This year, a team identified a new approach for finding undiscovered prime numbers. The strategy involves partitions, or ways numbers can add up to make other numbers.
125-Year-Old Problem Solved
In 1900 mathematician David Hilbert presented a series of major unsolved problems. One of them was the goal of determining the fewest possible mathematical assumptions behind the laws of physics. Researchers later broke up this task into subgoals, and this year mathematicians claimed to have completed one of them: they unified three physical theories to explain the motion of fluids. If the achievement is confirmed, it will be a major step toward solving Hilbert’s sixth problem.
Triangles to Squares
How many pieces must you cut a triangle into to be able to rearrange it into a square? In 1902, a newspaper reader found a way to do it with four pieces, but no one has managed to do it in fewer pieces since then. This year, researchers finally proved that a triangle cut into fewer than four pieces cannot be turned into a square.
Moving Sofas
Anyone who’s moved houses can appreciate the dilemma of trying to fit a large couch around a corner. Mathematicians formally recognized the question around 60 years ago when they dubbed it the “moving sofa problem”: What is the largest shape that can turn a right angle in a narrow corridor without getting stuck? Researchers have now found a solution.
Catching Prime Numbers
Another breakthrough on the prime front is a new method for estimating how many prime numbers exist within any given range of numbers. The strategy first relies on eliminating all numbers that are multiples of other primes and therefore can’t be primes themselves. It then accounts for numbers that get crossed off the list more than once. The study’s authors also discovered a limit to how precise any estimate of this sort can be, showing that the fundamental mysteries of primes will remain elusive, at least for now.
From graceful figure skaters to brutish ice hockey players, the act of wearing ice skates can transform a frozen pond from a nightmare to navigate into a dream.
Although ice itself is normally a slick, low-friction surface that’s very hard to steady yourself on and move across in a controlled fashion, the act of ice skates makes it not only possible, but easy.
This is due to a combination of properties that are specific to water and its solid form, ice, that are only rarely found in nature. The ability to ice skate truly is a miracle of physics.
Imagine there’s a large, flat sheet of ice out in front of you, and someone unceremoniously shoves you across it at a high speed. What are you to do? If you’re wearing conventional shoes without crampons or blades attached to them, you’re going to have a difficult time. Ice is a very low-friction surface, and there’s very little you’re going to be able to do to change your momentum without slipping and perhaps falling down. You’re bound to simply slide along until either you run into an obstacle or slowly come to rest, likely a long way from where you began.
But if you put thin blades on the bottoms of your shoes — e.g., wear ice skates — you’ll discover that the situation is very much different in this case. As long as you can remain on your feet, with only your blades touching the ice, you’ll find that you can control your motion relatively easily, simply by applying forces through your feet (and the blades) to the ice down below. You can speed up, slow down, or change direction at will, and only if you fall or lose control of your skates (and body) will you wind up in a similar situation to the no ice skate case. It might seem miraculous, but there’s physics behind what you’re experiencing at each and every step. Here’s how it all works.
On Earth, the most common form that ice takes is with a hexagonal crystalline ice structure, which explains why snowflakes typically exhibit hexagonal symmetry as well as the shape of these lab-grown plate-on-pedestal crystals.
Credit: K.G. Libbrecht, arXiv preprint, 2015
Here on the surface of Earth, at normal atmospheric pressure and wherever you have sub-freezing temperatures, almost all of the ice you’ll encounter comes in a very specific configuration: normal hexagonal crystalline ice, sometimes known as Ice Ih. Ice, just like water, is made up of primarily a very simple molecule (H2O) with two hydrogen atoms anchored by a single oxygen atom, and with a very specific bond angle between them. Whereas in liquid water, the bond angle is 104.5° between the connecting lines of each O-H bond, in normal hexagonal crystalline ice, the bond is lengthened into the shape of a more perfect tetrahedron: 109.5°.
Under different temperature and pressure conditions found on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, different possibilities arise for how those various molecules bind together, creating a massive variety of possible configurations. At present, there are a whopping 20 known phases of ice, including:
Ice Ih, which is normal hexagonal crystalline ice and the most common form of ice found on or near Earth’s surface,
Ice Ic, which is a cubic crystalline variant of ice whose oxygen atoms are arranged in a diamond structure, that often appear at the lower temperatures found in the upper atmosphere.
And amorphous ice, which has no crystalline structure and is sometimes formed at ambient atmospheric pressure,
in addition to the higher-pressure/temperature phases of ice: Ice 2 through Ice 18.
At a variety of temperatures and pressures, water will take on a variety of states: solid, liquid, and gas. With high enough pressures, so long as your ice temperature remains above -8 F (-22 C), ice can melt from the Ih phase, the most common phase found on Earth, into the liquid phase.
Credit: Cmglee/Wikimedia Commons
However, it’s the most common form of ice, plain old Ice Ih, that’s relevant for the problem of ice skating. Normally, under this configuration, the water molecules within ice are arranged in a hexagonal crystal lattice, and adding new water molecules to these icy structures will simply result in the growth of the main crystal in the same ongoing pattern. Adding more molecules won’t change the structure of your ice; it will simply cause those new molecules to bind together to the available spaces open in the underlying lattice, keeping the same “type” of ice but just making more and more of it.
If you want to change the form of ice that you have, you can always either heat it or cool it, or apply a varying amount of pressure to it. Those changes in temperatures and/or pressures can often coax ice into a new configuration, as it’s sometimes more energetically favorable for those molecules (and the atoms within them) to arrange themselves into a different form of ice.
However, the most common fate of hexagonal crystalline ice — the type of ice found on Earth’s surface — is that either heating it or compressing it will simply cause it to melt.
.
The grooves seen on the rink ice after ice skaters have passed over it aren’t due to the ice skates “scratching” the surface of the ice, but rather to the pressure from the blades melting the ice beneath them, with the ice then re-freezing after the blades have left them. Credit: Adobe Stock/Big Think/Ben Gibson
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to allow President Trump to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops in the Chicago area over the objection of Illinois officials, casting doubt on the viability of similar deployments in other American cities.
The justices’ order is preliminary, but it blocks the Trump administration for now from ordering the state-based military force to the Chicago area, where an immigration crackdown led to thousands of arrests and confrontations between residents and federal agents.
In its three-page unsigned ruling against the administration, the court refused to grant the president broad discretion to deploy the military in U.S. cities, citing an 1878 law, which bans the use of the military for domestic policing. It represented a rare departure from recent cases, in which the conservative majority has overwhelmingly sided with Mr. Trump in preliminary tests of presidential power.
At this stage in the litigation, the court said the Trump administration had not shown that the statute at issue “permits the president to federalize the Guard in the exercise of inherent authority to protect federal personnel and property in Illinois.”
Three conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., and Neil M. Gorsuch — noted their objections in lengthy dissents, with Justice Alito writing that “the protection of federal officers from potentially lethal attacks should not be thwarted.”
In response to the ruling, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said the president had promised to “work tirelessly to enforce our immigration laws and protect federal personnel from violent rioters.”
She added: “He activated the National Guard to protect federal law enforcement officers, and to ensure rioters did not destroy federal buildings and property. Nothing in today’s ruling detracts from that core agenda.”
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois called the ruling a victory for democracy.
“This is an important step in curbing the Trump administration’s consistent abuse of power and slowing Trump’s march toward authoritarianism,” Mr. Pritzker, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The brave men and women of our National Guard should never be used for political theater and deserve to be with their families and communities, especially during the holidays.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago said he hoped the Supreme Court’s ruling would shield other cities from unwanted National Guard deployments.
Mr. Trump had also in recent months ordered the National Guard to Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., also over the objections of state and local leaders. The president’s efforts to use troops for domestic policing prompted legal challenges accusing the Trump administration of exceeding its authority and infringing on traditional state powers over policing. The state-based troops are typically deployed at the request of governors to respond to emergencies in their own states, such as natural disasters.
Federal law allows the president to federalize members of the National Guard without the permission of state officials in certain circumstances, notably when there is a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against the government or when law enforcement is overwhelmed and cannot execute U.S. law.
.
The president’s efforts to use troops for domestic policing have prompted legal challenges accusing the Trump administration of exceeding its authority. Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Offshore wind farms may do more than boost renewable energy: they might support marine ecosystems, too. That’s the takeaway of a new study conducted in China. The researchers found that wind turbines provided support for colonies of oysters and barnacles and that fish species and biomass were more abundant near the turbines than they were in an area without the machines.
The study counters a frequent criticism of offshore wind farms—that they are detrimental to marine life and may damage the seabed. China, while being the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is a global leader in renewable energy build-out, including offshore wind projects. It has the largest wind power capacity of any nation and plans to build the world’s largest wind turbine.
Located in China’s northern Yellow Sea, the wind farm evaluated in the study gave rise to a so-called benthic ecosystem—one dominated by seafloor organisms—that was nonexistent in a comparable area nearby that had no turbines. The researchers think the rough turbine surfaces provided an optimal habitat for such organisms.
Because these organisms were able to grow and thrive on and around the turbines, predatory fish followed the food, boosting the ecosystem’s diversity and stability overall, said James Tweedley, a senior lecturer at Murdoch University in Australia and a co-author of the study, in a recent statement.
Lawmakers are threatening to take action against the Trump Administration for only partially releasing government files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein despite a new law requiring it to make all such materials public by last Friday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Monday that he is introducing a resolution directing the Senate to initiate legal action against the Justice Department “for its blatant disregard of the law in its refusal to release the complete Epstein files.”
“The law Congress passed is crystal clear: release the Epstein files in full so Americans can see the truth. Instead, the Trump Department of Justice dumped redactions and withheld the evidence—that breaks the law,” Schumer said in a press release. He called the move a “blatant cover-up,” accusing Justice Department officials of “shielding [President] Donald Trump from accountability.”
Schumer’s announcement comes after two other lawmakers—Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky—said over the weekend that they were discussing pursuing contempt findings against Attorney General Pam Bondi for the incomplete release. Khanna and Massie co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last month that gave the Justice Department 30 days to make public a wide collection of unclassified documents related to Epstein, his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, and other people connected to their cases. The law allows the department to redact some information in certain situations, such as to protect victims’ identities and to adhere to the rules of grand jury secrecy.
“The quickest way, and I think most expeditious way, to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi,” Massie said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which aired on Sunday. “Ro Khanna and I are talking about and drafting that right now.”
The resolution, Khanna told The Washington Post, would also include a provision that would permit a congressional committee to evaluate any redactions to the files to ensure that there is a valid reason for the redaction.
The Justice Department began releasing the files in the Epstein case on Friday, the deadline imposed by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Before the release, the Trump Administration warned earlier that day that it wouldn’t be releasing all the files—which is required by the law—because of the large scale of the redactions it said were needed to protect victims’ identities.
“What we’re doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story to the extent it needs to be protected is completely protected,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News on Friday. He added that more documents are expected to be made public over the coming weeks.
Victims of Epstein and lawmakers quickly criticized the department for releasing incomplete and heavily redacted documents that included no significant new details about Epstein’s crimes or the attempts to investigate him.
“For survivors, this deadline was not symbolic for us but was a real opportunity to see whether transparency would finally outweigh the protection of powerful interests, after decades of reporting this abuse,” Liz Stein, an Epstein survivor and anti-trafficking advocate, said in a statement. “The DOJ’s partial, staggered release—largely repeating already public information, lacking context, and extending beyond the statutory deadline—violates federal law and risks shielding the individuals and institutions who perpetrated and enabled this abuse, falling far short of the transparency intended by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”
.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks at a press conference with other Senate Democrats on the upcoming deadline for the release of the Epstein files, in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 16, 2025.Nathan Posner—Anadolu/Getty Images
Hmmmm … Is War part of the current administration’s plan?
Click the link below the picture
.
Where ICE makes arrests
The Trump administration has said it would prioritize deporting the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”
Historically, ICE detained immigrants who had committed crimes through “custodial” arrests — picking up people who had already been arrested by other law enforcement agencies from jails and prisons.
While custodial arrests still make up half of all immigration arrests, ICE has increasingly gone after anyone who may be in the country illegally, whether they have a criminal record or not.
Most ICE arrests at jails and prisons take place in Republican-led states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas.
The rest are “at-large” arrests in the community, which are more common in states led by Democrats, like California and New York, where many local agencies do not cooperate with ICE.
More people who have been in the country for years or decades are being swept up and removed. More than 3,000 adults who entered before the age of 16 — potential “Dreamers” — have been deported, as have more than 4,000 children.
Where they are held
In the past, most people who were arrested were released to await their day in immigration court. Illegal immigration is a civil — not a criminal — offense, and detention was designed to hold only those deemed a flight risk.
But the Trump administration told ICE to hold people indefinitely and told immigration judges that most people are no longer eligible for bail. The Laken Riley Act, passed in January, further narrowed who can be released.
Immigrant detention centers are filling up, even as the Trump administration has opened dozens of new facilities to expand the capacity and reach of this network
The detained population has nearly doubled, to more than 68,000 people in December, an all-time high.
People detained by ICE have described unsanitary and unsafe conditions in some detention centers — including rotten food, a lack of access to showers and toilets, and the use of solitary confinement. At least 32 people have died in ICE custody since Mr. Trump took office, more than the number in Mr. Biden’s entire four years in office.
Officials have denied claims of poor conditions and mistreatment of detainees.
Because detention facilities are concentrated in the South, people arrested elsewhere are often quickly transferred long distances to places where there is space, often in Texas and Louisiana, far from family and lawyers.
Each line here represents the average monthly volume of transfers of immigrant detainees between detention facilities. Darker lines reflect higher numbers of detainee transfers.
People are moving around the system more than last year — passing through an average of three different facilities over seven weeks before they are deported. Immigration lawyers say the process has caused some people to give up their asylum cases and to agree to be deported.
Where deported people go
The Trump administration has deported people to almost every country in the world, including those that had resisted taking back their citizens. It has sent people to repressive regimes, including Afghanistan, Iran, and Russia, and it has pressed countries like South Sudan and Uganda to accept deportees from far-away places who have no ties to those countries.
Detailed data on ICE removals was available only through the end of July, but it showed that the monthly pace of deportations had more than doubled compared with last year for people from more than 100 places.
.
How ICE has moved thousands of people through detention and out of the country.
Ancient Romans in Britain were riddled with intestinal parasites that spread through human feces.
A new analysis of the sewer system at Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall, found that residents in ancient times were infected with at least three gut parasites—roundworm, whipworm, and Giardia duodenalis.
Roundworms and whipworms both live in the intestine and cause various ailments, including abdominal pain, nausea, fever, and diarrhea. Roundworms can grow as long as 30 centimeters, while whipworms tend to be smaller. People can get infected by ingesting food or drink contaminated with human feces holding the eggs of these worms. Giardia duodenalis, meanwhile, is not a worm but a tiny organism that lives primarily inside the small intestine. It exists in two forms—cysts and trophozoites—and causes giardiasis, an illness that causes severe diarrhea and makes it harder for the body to absorb vital nutrients. It is also spread through human waste.
For the analysis, published in the journal Parasitology, researchers looked at 50 sediment samples taken from the drain of a third-century latrine at the fort. About 28 percent of the samples contained whipworm or roundworm eggs, whereas others had traces of Giardia duodenalis. A sample from an older structure dating to the first century also contained the worms.
What all this suggests is that ancient Romans were probably not as fastidious about washing their hands or their food as we are today. Fecal matter may also have contaminated the drinking water supply at Vindolanda fort, sickening the residents. And once the Romans were infected, there was little that could be done, said study co-author Marissa Ledger, a medical microbiology resident at McMaster University in Ontario, in a statement.
“While the Romans were aware of intestinal worms, there was little their doctors could do to clear infection by these parasites or help those experiencing diarrhoea, meaning symptoms could persist and worsen,” Ledger said.
The conditions almost certainly affected the Romans’ ability to protect Hadrian’s Wall, a vital defense structure built by the Romans in C.E. 122 to keep out the Picts and other tribes who lived to the north. Disease outbreaks would have been common, with dozens sickened at a time.
Ultimately, the findings suggest life for a Roman soldier at Hadrian’s Wall was pretty miserable, the researchers said. “Excavations at Vindolanda continue to find new evidence that helps us to understand the incredible hardships faced by those posted to this northwestern frontier of the Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years ago,” said Andrew Birley, a co-author of the study and CEO of the Vindolanda Charitable Trust.
A Wisconsin teacher pleaded guilty to one count of child enticement and two counts of sexual misconduct and was sentenced to six years in prison
Madison Bergmann broke down in tears at her sentencing hearing on Friday, Dec. 19
Bergmann exchanged thousands of texts with an 11-year-old student, including one that referenced “making out” with him
A Wisconsin elementary school teacher who engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a student broke down in tears after being sentenced to six years in prison on Friday, Dec. 19.
Madison Bergmann was sentenced to six years of confinement, to be followed by six years of supervision, after pleading guilty to one count of child enticement and two counts of sexual misconduct, according to KARE 11, WQOW, and WEAU.
Bergmann, 26, frequently texted an 11-year-old student, PEOPLE previously reported.
Authorities previously said in a criminal complaint that Bergmann sent texts saying how much she enjoyed “making out” with him and that she liked when he touched her, KARE 11 reported.
The outlet further reported that subsequent searches revealed 100 handwritten notes and artwork, in addition to thousands of texts.
“Dude, I love you so much more — like I didn’t think it was possible — but oh my god today during reading….” she wrote in one of the texts, according to WEAU.
KARE reported that Bergmann ultimately pleaded guilty in order to receive a reduced sentence. The outlet reported that she had asked the judge to only sentence her to a year behind bars, whereas prosecutors requested 12 years.
In a video of the proceedings aired by KARE, Bergmann apologized for her conduct.
“I want to make it absolutely clear that I take full accountability for every boundary that was crossed,” Bergmann said through tears.
The victim’s father also spoke at the sentencing hearing, calling the texts “disturbing stuff.”
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Explore the dynamic relationship between faith and science, where curiosity meets belief. Join us in fostering dialogue, inspiring discovery, and celebrating the profound connections that enrich our understanding of existence.
[Photos: @solidwiggles]
OsakaWayne Studios/Getty Images
The grooves seen on the rink ice after ice skaters have passed over it aren’t due to the ice skates “scratching” the surface of the ice, but rather to the pressure from the blades melting the ice beneath them, with the ice then re-freezing after the blades have left them. Credit: Adobe Stock/Big Think/Ben Gibson
Liu Mingzhu/Getty Images
How ICE has moved thousands of people through detention and out of the country.
DeAgostini/Getty Images
KARE 11/YouTube Madison Bergmann
James' World 2 