James' World 2

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Key Points

Dietitians recommend water as the top morning beverage for healthy kidneys.

Coffee, green tea, kefir, and cranberry juice may also support kidney health.

Choose unsweetened drinks and stay hydrated to help kidney function.

The kidneys are vital organs that filter out waste products from the blood, regulate blood pressure, and balance fluid, electrolyte, and pH levels in the body. Without healthy kidneys, waste products and excess fluid can build up, leading to serious health complications. Lifestyle habits, like diet, are key to healthy kidney function.

“Diet plays a major role in kidney health because the kidneys help to process and regulate many of the nutrients we eat and drink,” says Lydia Bunszel, M.S., RD. 

The good news? Something as simple as your morning beverage can help support your kidneys. Read on for five kidney-friendly drinks worth adding to your daily routine.

1. Water

By far, experts agree that water is the best beverage for kidney health. Starting your day with water helps rehydrate your body after hours without fluids and supports optimal kidney function. 

Sheila Patterson, M.S., RD, CDCES, notes that water is the best choice to help the kidneys run their essential functions that support the body. This includes filtering waste products, maintaining fluid balance, and lowering the risk of kidney stones.1 “Water helps to dilute minerals in the urine that can form crystals,” adds Amanda Roll, M.S., RD. Inadequate water intake can saturate the urine, making stones more likely to develop.1

Not a big fan of the taste—or lack thereof—of water? Bunszel suggests adding a squeeze of citrus juice, such as lemon, lime or orange, to boost the flavor. 

2. Coffee

“Coffee may come as a surprise, but research suggests that moderate coffee consumption (about 1–2 cups per day) may help to lower the risk of developing chronic kidney disease and slow its progression,” shares Hannah Coven, M.S., RD. Some studies suggest that up to 3 to 4 cups per day may reduce risk, though individual tolerance can vary.23

“Black coffee is filled with antioxidants which may help protect your kidney cells from inflammation and oxidative stress,” explains Bunszel.2 This is important because the kidneys are constantly filtering waste from the blood, making them vulnerable to cellular damage over time. Antioxidant-rich foods and drinks, such as coffee, may help counteract some of that damage.2

That said, Coven highlights a common issue with coffee drinks: sugar. “Loading your coffee with sugar syrups and flavored creamers can offset many of those potential benefits by increasing added sugars and spiking blood sugars.”

While individual tolerance varies, sticking to less than 4 cups of coffee per day is recommended for most people. 

Click the link below the picture for the rest of the drinks!

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Credit: Getty Images. EatingWell design.

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President Trump told a crowd of supporters in Michigan on Monday that the affordability problems they were experiencing were vestiges of the Biden administration, and spent the better part of an hourlong speech painting a dystopian picture of what the United States could look like if Democrats won competitive elections this fall.

“We had the single greatest year we’ve ever had as a country,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re not going to let these people destroy it.” The president added that “in 18 months, we’ve turned this country completely around.”

The president also assured supporters that negotiations over ending the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, a conflict that has sent fuel and energy prices soaring, were continuing in a “friendly” fashion. Iran has not confirmed such talks with the United States.

Mr. Trump’s decision to head to Michigan, a purple Midwestern state that has been economically pummeled by his tariff policies, is part of a plan to travel the United States and defend his choices as the midterm elections draw closer. The president’s advisers say he will be ramping up such trips over the next few months.

Visiting a General Motors proving facility in Milford, where vehicles are pressure-tested before they hit the market, Mr. Trump accepted some gifts (car sculptures) and road-tested his latest insult for the Democratic Party — “Dumocrats” or “Dumbocrats”; he is apparently still mulling the spelling — as he attacked several presidential predecessors. And, aside from a moment when people waving signs that said “STOP DATA CENTERS” interrupted Mr. Trump’s speech, the crowd cheered along.

Before he spoke, Mr. Trump watched a crew of professional drivers drag-race several luxury vehicles, including a race between a black 2027 Corvette ZR1X, a car that starts at $227,000, and a silver Corvette ZR1 convertible, which costs around $207,195. Later, he told hundreds of supporters, many of them dressed in Trump regalia, that the economic pressures they were experiencing were problems inherited from the Biden administration.

“I’m one day in office, and the fake news goes ‘affordability, affordability,’” he complained.

Part of Milford is in Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District, where Representative Tom Barrett is fighting to hold onto a seat he narrowly won in 2024. Mr. Barrett, an Army veteran, was already one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House. He has twice broken with his party and voted to rein in the president’s war powers, which appeared to have earned Mr. Barrett a smattering of boos when he took the stage earlier.

Later, speaking in front of Mr. Trump, Mr. Barrett praised the president’s policies and said he was “stepping up every single day to make sure that we bring more manufacturing jobs back to America.”

Other candidates who took the mic included Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman running for a Senate seat this fall. Mr. Rogers told the president that if he wins, he would work to pass the SAVE Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship, ban IDs without a photo at polling places and severely restrict voting by mail. Democrats have argued that the legislation would make it more difficult for eligible voters to make it to the polls.

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President Trump’s decision to head to Michigan is part of a plan to travel the United States and defend his choices before the midterms. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Millions of people will take to the roads this holiday season, only to end up spending frustrating hours sitting in traffic jams. Congestion costs drivers time, fuel and patience – while also increasing pollution and placing huge pressure on transport networks.

If you’ve ever found yourself staring enviously at the lane next to you, convinced it’s moving faster, you’re not alone. Most of us instinctively believe that changing lanes will get us home sooner. But mathematics suggests this intuition is usually wrong.

As an applied mathematician, much of my research is driven by one question: how can we predict and control the behaviour of complex systems operating under uncertainty? And this can apply as much to holiday traffic as it does to emerging quantum technologies.

We tend to think traffic jams need a trigger: an accident, roadworks or a lane closure. Yet some of the most frustrating queues have no obvious cause at all. These are known as phantom traffic jams—stop-start waves that travel backwards through traffic even though every vehicle is moving forwards.

In 2008, Japanese researchers asked 22 drivers to drive around a circular track while maintaining a constant speed and safe distance from the vehicle in front. Within minutes, tiny and unavoidable differences in braking and reaction times grew into a stop-start wave that travelled continuously around the circuit, despite there being no obstacle anywhere on the road.

The explanation is surprisingly simple. One driver brakes slightly more than necessary. The driver behind reacts a little later and brakes a little harder. The next driver does the same.

In this way, the initial tiny disturbance grows as it travels backwards until drivers hundreds of metres behind are forced to stop completely, even though nobody can identify what caused the queue in the first place.

The mathematics behind traffic

Rather than modelling every driver individually, mathematicians treat traffic as a continuous flow – borrowing ideas from fluid dynamics, where the movement of vehicles is analysed much like the flow of water through a pipe.

One of the simplest relationships in traffic flow theory is q = ρv, where q is the traffic flow (the number of vehicles passing a point each hour), ρ is the traffic density (amount of cars on the road), and v is their average speed.

This deceptively simple equation explains a counterintuitive phenomenon. Initially, adding more vehicles obviously increases the overall traffic flow, as more vehicles pass along the road.

But once the road becomes too crowded, everyone is forced to slow down. Eventually, this reduction in speed outweighs the increase in number of vehicles such that the overall flow is reduced.

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If you’re a new parent, the idea of starting a new hobby right now might sound ludicrous. But postpartum experts say that setting aside 10 minutes and trying one of these low-demand hobbies for new parents is actually one of the best things you can do for yourself and your family.

“When someone becomes a parent, they go through what’s called matrescence, a profound identity shift that reorients most of their time and energy toward caring for their baby,” says Erica Manto Paulson, certified doula, childbirth educator and founder of Nurture. “Taking even a few minutes for themselves can feel like stepping away from that responsibility, when in reality it’s part of adapting to their new role in a healthy way.”

These hobbies don’t require a ton of time, energy, or equipment. They’re just about reconnecting with yourself and carving out a bit of personal time, which research shows can lower the risk of postpartum depression and anxiety.

“Think low pressure, high reward,” says Tracy Carson, licensed professional clinical counselor. “The commitment you make to yourself far outweighs the actual skill learned. You showed up for yourself, and that is all that really matters.”

Keep reading to learn more about the best hobbies for new parents. After Clicking the link below the picture.

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Daniel de la Hoz//Getty Images

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Carol Ann Murphy is an American film critic and writer.

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She’s known for her insightful and thoughtful reviews of both mainstream and independent films. Over the years, she has contributed to various platforms, including print and digital publications, where her critiques often focus on deeper thematic elements, character development, and social issues in film.

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Murphy’s style of criticism tends to be engaging and accessible to a wide audience, offering both an appreciation of cinema as an art form and a critique of the broader cultural and societal implications of the movies she reviews.

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She has built a reputation for being fair but also unafraid to critique films when they fall short of their potential.

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While not as widely known as some other critics, she has established a loyal following for her nuanced perspectives on both big-budget blockbusters and smaller, art-house films.

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If you’re into more in-depth and reflective reviews, she might be someone worth reading!

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Something for Everyone!

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On a clear afternoon this month, high above the Mojave Desert, an A.I.-powered drone launched a missile in a test that could reshape modern warfare.

Since the dawn of the jet age, the U.S. military has used the isolation over this stretch of sand to push secret, experimental aircraft to their aerodynamic and technological limits. It’s doing the same today: fine-tuning machines capable of engaging in aerial combat with barely any human intervention. These drones’ flight is controlled not by a pilot, not by human remote control, but entirely by onboard software. It’s a historic advancement in drone technology that aims to incorporate artificial intelligence into everyday warfighting.

Today’s conflicts are increasingly defined by unmanned weapons, delivering destruction over battlefields in Ukraine, Iran and Sudan. But in almost all these cases, there is a human operator sitting somewhere, steering each robot toward its target.

The two types of next-generation drones being tested over Southern California today, built for the Air Force by Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, can fly entirely on their own. They make hundreds of split-second decisions to maneuver, evade, and attack enemy targets, based upon countless hours of flight data and computer processing. A human is involved at just a few key moments in each flight: to program the drone’s mission, to start and stop the mission, and to decide whether or not the drone should launch a weapon. Late last year, the companies’ drones flew for the first time. Anduril fired its first missile two weeks ago, and General Atomics says it is not far behind.

The Air Force program is part of a sweeping overhaul in how the American military prepares for war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that he intended to make the military “an ‘A.I. first’ warfighting force across all domains.” Throughout the Pentagon, Uncle Sam-style recruitment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s likeness declaring “I want YOU to use A.I.” are plastered on the walls. His department has requested $54.6 billion in next year’s budget for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, a body recently set up to coordinate all autonomous weapons programs across U.S. forces.

The United States isn’t alone in this pursuit. Around the world, and particularly in China and Russia, an arms race is emerging to mass-produce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared in 2017 that whoever leads in A.I. “will become the ruler of the world.” President Xi Jinping of China has poured billions of dollars into A.I. development for the country’s military. Prototypes of smaller, rudimentary A.I.-assisted weapons have already been reported in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azerbaijan and Gaza. In a few years, we could see swarms of self-guiding robots not only in the skies, but also at sea and on the ground.

As the world’s militaries race to weaponize artificial intelligence, the international community has failed to establish limits on its use. The United Nations has spent a decade deliberating how to restrict autonomous weapons — a rare instance of anticipating a global threat before it arrives. Yet these efforts have yielded no binding rules or codes of conduct.

Instead, global leaders are accelerating toward an era of automated warfare. The fear of body bags has been one of the greatest deterrents to conflict in history. Mass-produced, expendable robots do not carry the human or financial costs that have tempered the urge to go to war for centuries.

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Aleksey Kondratyev For The New York Times

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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You might find these videos enlightening!

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A. R. Bernard: one of many

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Click the link below for the videos:

https://www.youtube.com

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To the casual observer, the look and feel of shipping containers suggests a world of smooth, lossless transportation, almost immaterial in its implementation of a logistical ideal. However, the system is far from lossless. In fact, during storms and shipwrecks, shipping containers regularly go overboard.

Nobody knows exactly how many of these vast, 20- or 40-foot-long steel capsules—stacked in the thousands in the cargo holds of each ship, carrying the stuff of the global economy—are lost each year. Shipping lines and insurance companies keep these figures under wraps. But estimates suggest that of the hundreds of millions in circulation annually, several thousand containers vanish—sometimes forever.

And what becomes of the containers that disappear?

If they reappear, then the matter is relatively simple. Each standard container carries, on each of its four sides, a code clearly identifying it. The codes for all containers worldwide are distributed by the Bureau International des Containers (BIC). In cargo shippers’ databases, the histories and current cargo of containers are recorded and accessible via their respective codes. Thus, it can be determined what was in each container and for whom it was intended. As long as the contents of a container have not been plundered outright, they can even be delivered to the recipient after an accident, albeit with some delay.

But it is, of course, more difficult when a container breaks open—particularly on the high seas, leaving its freight to the whims of the wind and the waves. In these cases, the contents are highly unlikely to ever reach their intended recipient. Yet these mishaps are not all for naught. In fact, while these lost shipping containers likely represent hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for the shipping industry, they have inadvertently been a boon to another community: oceanographers.

In May 1990, the Hansa Carrier, a German cargo ship traveling from Korea to the U.S., lost 21 containers in a Pacific storm north of Japan, and four of the containers broke open. The payload, more than 60,000 pairs of Nike sneakers, poured out into the sea. About nine months after the accident, known colloquially as “The Great Shoe Spill,” 1,600 sneakers washed up along the coast of Oregon, on the Queen Charlotte Islands in Canada, and on other beaches along the northern Pacific coast.

The fiasco resulted in something like 20–30 metric tons of footwear waste. However, for Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer based in Seattle, the mishap presented a unique research opportunity. With the help of local beachcombers, Ebbesmeyer carefully documented the path of these sneakers, as he later wrote in his 2009 book “Flotsametrics and the Floating World.” Using the Ocean Surface Currents Simulation (or “OSCUR”), his colleague, James Ingraham, wrote a program to simulate surface flow. Together, they calculated the probable routes of the drifting shoes, which, though unintentionally released, were fed into the ocean system as data.

Of course, Nike sneakers are hardly the only accidental “probes” to have bobbed across the ocean: Over the years, researchers have tracked everything from toy cars and Lego figures to beer cans, hockey gloves, and hermetically sealed Riesen chocolates. By comparing their simulations with the real-world journeys of goods that washed ashore and were identified by serial number, oceanographers have helped produce increasingly precise maps of Pacific Ocean currents. These maps account for a range of variables, including cargo-shipping routes, surface currents, wind patterns, and the unpredictable drift of objects at sea.

In 1885, Prince Albert I of Monaco threw 1,675 buoys into the Atlantic along several lines between Europe and North America. As French author Érik Orsenna recounts in his 2010 sea tale “A Portrait of the Gulf Stream: In Praise of Currents,” the prince, sailor, explorer, and amateur oceanographer wanted to investigate the path and speed of the Gulf Stream as it crossed the Atlantic toward Europe.

Each of the prince’s buoys contained a message, drafted in seven languages within a sealed glass tube, requesting that those who found it should return the note “to the proper offices of their home country, so that it may be passed on to the French government, indicating the circumstances in which this document was found.” The buoys were eventually found along the coast of Europe to Gibraltar, on the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, in the Antilles, and along the coast of Central America.

Ever since then, an important branch of oceanography has developed from the practice of setting buoys, albeit more sophisticated ones than the bottles and floats used by Prince Albert I. Modern ocean surface drifters now transmit their locations by satellite. They allow scientists to track their whereabouts in real time and measure variables such as pressure, salinity, and wind.

Yet, sophisticated as these buoys might be, damaged containers have sometimes proven superior in recent decades. After all, a lost container can become a mass experiment that no research program would deliberately stage, sending thousands of objects into the ocean at once and allowing their eventual landfalls to chart the hidden pathways of currents across the globe. Of course, this growing mass constitutes a serious threat to the ocean ecosystem, not to mention the environmental catastrophes regularly caused by tanker accidents themselves. At the same time, the flotsam also contributes positively to the knowledge of the ocean system’s function, thereby presenting possibilities for its salvation.

If plastic objects spilled from shipping containers can help us understand the workings of the ocean, then nature and culture are no longer separate realms. They are deeply entangled: human actions, manufactured objects, trade routes, storms, currents, coastlines, and ecosystems all acting on one another. A lost shipment is therefore not only waste but a message: What does the sudden arrival of a container’s contents reveal? What can stranded shoes, toys, or fragments of plastic tell us that their counterparts still moving invisibly through global trade cannot?

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