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‘Hide their head’: GOP senator says Trump ‘will go nuts’ if Republicans don’t defund NPR

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The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate is running out of time to pass a bill that would cut billions of dollars from foreign aid — as well as defund NPR and PBS — and one Senate Republican says his colleagues are particularly afraid of President Donald Trump’s wrath if they fail.

Politico reported Tuesday that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is being particularly cagey about whether the Senate Republican Conference has the stomach to vote for a “rescissions package” — the term used for previously appropriated money Congress is clawing back — that the House of Representatives passed last month. That legislation would codify some of the funding cuts greenlit by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that would strip more than $9 billion from foreign aid programs and public broadcasting. Under rescission rules, the Senate only has until July 18 to pass it, or else the Trump administration will be legally required to spend the money as appropriated.

Some Senate Republicans have indicated that they aim to amend the bill to protect funding for the PEPFAR program, which provides critically needed resources for countries battling AIDS. Trump wants to slash PEPFAR’s budget by $400 million.

“I have already made clear I don’t support the cuts to PEPFAR and child and maternal health,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told Politico.

While Collins is one of the moderates who voted against Trump’s massive budget recently signed into law, the rescissions package has also notably been criticized by Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who is typically a reliable conservative vote. South Dakota’s junior U.S. senator said that in addition to protecting PEPFAR, he may submit an amendment to also preserve funding for NPR and PBS affiliates. Rounds said rural communities in particular “can’t lose these small-town radio stations across the country that are literally the only way to get out an emergency message.”

However, concerns about AIDS relief funding and public broadcasting may end up being outweighed by politics, according to Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.). The Louisiana Republican said that if the Senate doesn’t pass the bill, it would be considered an “embarrassment to the president” and that Trump “will go nuts.”

“I think if the Republicans in the United States Senate do not pass the rescission package, after all the rhetoric about reducing spending, then they should hide their head in the bag, and I think the White House will provide the bag,” Kennedy said.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner and Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., June 27, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno/File Photo © provided by AlterNet

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/hide-their-head-gop-senator-says-trump-will-go-nuts-if-republicans-don-t-defund-npr/ar-AA1IelU3?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=611f67d124bb4448862324a3e0096ce4&ei=5

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What Is Thimerosal? Why Most Vaccines Don’t Contain Mercury Anymore

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This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is meeting to review and vote on several vaccine recommendations. Just in the past week, however, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., added additional items to the agenda, including a discussion of thimerosal—a mercury-containing compound that is used in some vaccines. Thimerosal has already been removed from all childhood vaccines, and detailed research has shown it does not cause neurodevelopmental disorders. The mercury in thimerosal is quickly and easily cleared by the body. Here’s how we know and why we still use the compound in some adult vaccines.

What is thimerosal, and why has it been used in vaccines?

Thimerosal is a preservative that was first added to the manufacturing of vaccines in the 1930s. Because it is a highly effective antiseptic, it can prevent the introduction of fungi or bacteria that could be harmful to inject. By weight, about 50 percent of thimerosal is ethylmercury, a compound that contains mercury. That sounds scary to some people because it’s well understood that mercury can be toxic to the brain. Many people are aware, for example, that eating too much tuna can be unsafe because of how much mercury the fish can contain.

“I think everyone is pretty familiar with the concept that mercury is toxic,” says Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist at University Hospitals in Cleveland. “The thing that is not conveyed is that there are multiple different forms of mercury with very different toxicities.”

Mercury is ubiquitous in our environment, Marino says, and it arises from both natural and human sources. Volcanoes, forest fires and rock weathering all release mercury into the air, but the vast majority of the element comes from mining, the burning of coal and other fossil fuels and industrial waste.

How does ethylmercury differ from elemental mercury and methylmercury?

Microorganisms convert inorganic mercury in the environment into the compound methylmercury, which aquatic creatures inadvertently consume. Methylmercury accumulates up the food chain, so apex predators such as sharks, tuna, and swordfish have the highest concentrations. That’s why the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency recommend weekly limits to the consumption of certain fish, particularly such fish consumed by children and pregnant people.

The mercury in thimerosal, however, is ethylmercury, and that one missing letter makes a big difference.

Both molecules include the element mercury, a metal that, in its elemental form, is silver-colored, liquid at room temperature, and well known for its use in old thermometers. And both molecules are organic, which means they include carbon atoms. Specifically, ethylmercury’s chemical formula is C2H5Hg+, and methylmercury’s is CH3Hg+. The different numbers of carbon and hydrogen atoms in those molecules mean they have very different properties. To get a sense of the difference a single atom can make, consider that our bodies need—and are mostly made up of—water, or H2O, but if you add another oxygen atom to that molecule, you get H2O2. The latter is hydrogen peroxide, something we definitely should not drink.

Methylmercury is more easily absorbed into neurological tissues and bioaccumulates, or builds up in the body, Marino says. It can cross the blood-brain barrier, and too much of it can result in symptoms ranging from “forgetfulness, irritability, and depression all the way to dementia,” he says. The half-life of methylmercury is about 50 to 80 days, so it can remain in the body for nearly four months. But ethylmercury is not absorbed as readily into tissues as methylmercury is. Ethylmercury’s half-life is just three to seven days, so the body removes it within about a week and a half.

“Ethylmercury does not behave in the same way as methylmercury,” Marino says. While too much ethylmercury can also cause poisoning, “the body can clear the amount that’s in vaccines very rapidly. You would have to get hundreds, if not thousands, of vaccines at once” to cause any problems, he says.

When and why was thimerosal removed from vaccines?

In the late 1990s, the U.S. government took measures to reduce human exposure to mercury, including the 1997 Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act. This law required the FDA to make a list of all foods and drugs containing mercury compounds and the amounts of those compounds. At the time, three childhood vaccines contained thimerosal: the diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis (DTaP), hepatitis B, and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccines.

Although no evidence up to that point had suggested the thimerosal in vaccines was harmful, only limited research existed at the time on the differences between ethylmercury and methylmercury. The total ethylmercury in childhood vaccines that infants could have been exposed to fell below the FDA’s recommended safety limits for methylmercury: 0.4 microgram per kilogram of body weight per day (0.4 μg/kg/d). But they slightly exceeded the EPA’s recommended limit of 0.1 μg/kg/d. (Agencies have different limits depending on their data sources and purpose.) But again, those were limits for methylmercury.

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-thimerosal-why-most-vaccines-dont-contain-mercury-anymore/

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Is Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Good for America? Newsweek Contributors Debate

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Mark Davis:

The Big Beautiful Bill went through the wringer from both parties on its way to passage. But now that it’s law, it can be appreciated by anyone with the eyes to see its benefits. Congress averted a massive tax increase, with additional good news for workers in the form of tax relief on tips and overtime. Voters clearly asked for functional borders and a more efficient government, and the OBBBA takes valuable steps toward both. Critics may be shocked, but this bill amounts to President Trump delivering what he ran on.

David Faris:

By strong-arming the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the president demonstrated he has successfully imposed European-style party discipline on Republicans. From the massive, insane expansion of ICE and tax giveaways to the rich to the cruel gutting of Medicaid and the National Parks Service, this bill is a devastatingly clear reflection of the GOP’s legislative and moral priorities. It makes everyday life worse for millions of Americans and imposes almost unimaginable suffering on MAGA’s enemies, which is exactly what its architects hoped for and what America’s political choices have made all but inevitable.

Davis:

The GOP’s overwhelming support for the bill was not the result of authoritarian pressure, but a rare and welcome event in party history—conservative leadership from the president, with principled agreement from a Republican majority in Congress. Far from “suffering,” MAGA adherents and enemies alike will enjoy a strong border and an invigorated economy.

Faris:

Far from principled agreement, members of Congress are going along with this bill to avoid President Trump’s vengeance. They know the devastation that Medicaid losses, hospital closures, and service cuts will inflict on their constituencies. But these things are the essence of Trumpism—and the beating heart of this bill.

Mark Davis:

The Big Beautiful Bill went through the wringer from both parties on its way to passage. But now that it’s law, it can be appreciated by anyone with the eyes to see its benefits. Congress averted a massive tax increase, with additional good news for workers in the form of tax relief on tips and overtime. Voters clearly asked for functional borders and a more efficient government, and the OBBBA takes valuable steps toward both. Critics may be shocked, but this bill amounts to President Trump delivering what he ran on.

David Faris:

By strong-arming the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the president demonstrated he has successfully imposed European-style party discipline on Republicans. From the massive, insane expansion of ICE and tax giveaways to the rich to the cruel gutting of Medicaid and the National Parks Service, this bill is a devastatingly clear reflection of the GOP’s legislative and moral priorities. It makes everyday life worse for millions of Americans and imposes almost unimaginable suffering on MAGA’s enemies, which is exactly what its architects hoped for and what America’s political choices have made all but inevitable.

Davis:

The GOP’s overwhelming support for the bill was not the result of authoritarian pressure, but a rare and welcome event in party history—conservative leadership from the president, with principled agreement from a Republican majority in Congress. Far from “suffering,” MAGA adherents and enemies alike will enjoy a strong border and an invigorated economy.

Faris:

Far from principled agreement, members of Congress are going along with this bill to avoid President Trump’s vengeance. They know the devastation that Medicaid losses, hospital closures, and service cuts will inflict on their constituencies. But these things are the essence of Trumpism—and the beating heart of this bill.

Davis:Is there any reduction in the size of government that would not bring such cries of ruin? And if a few congressional Republicans did indeed subjugate their own gripes in order to go along with the president—and thus the will of the voters—good for them. I’m sure Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had to work to bring Democrats around to their agenda at times, and it was not viewed as sinister.

Faris:

The process of the bill’s passage is less of a problem than the outcome, which polls very poorly and lavishes obscene amounts of money on an ICE detention gulag that will not help anyone pay their bills. The bill ultimately continues a generations-long Republican tendency to transfer wealth upward while abandoning working Americans.

Davis:The wealth transfer Trump seeks is from government to taxpayers. Know what polls poorly? A nation overrun by illegal immigrants and government spending without limits. These are being fixed. Know what benefits American workers? More American jobs. That is what’s happening, and it’s part of the reason Trump has wrestled working-class voters away from Democrats.

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Beautiful Bill

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-one-big-beautiful-bill-good-america-newsweek-contributors-debate-2095693

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Egyptian DNA from 4,800 years ago reveals secrets from the age of the pyramids

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Ancient Egypt is a period of time that elicits great fascination, and, even today, secrets from that era are continuing to be uncovered.

For the first time, scientists have now been able to sequence DNA from the complete genome of someone who lived in Egypt around 4,800 years ago when the pyramids were being constructed.

The man’s remains were found within a necropolis in the ancient city of Nuwayrat, located 265 kilometres (165 miles) south of Cairo. It’s thought the man died between 2855 and 2570 BCE, and he was buried inside a pottery vessel that was kept inside a tomb.

Experts say the genome belongs to an older male who they believe had brown hair, brown eyes, and dark skin. He was most likely part of the elite social class, according to researchers.

The results found that around 80 per cent of the males’ genome had links to lineages from North Africa, with the remaining 20 per cent originating from lineages in West Asia.

They suggest that Egyptians during that time lived in a melting pot society, thanks to the arrival of migrants and traders from other parts of Africa as well as Mesopotamia, which is an ancient region comprising parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran.

Archaeologists have also uncovered evidence that culture and goods were traded between the regions with the sharing of things like domesticated plants and animals, writing systems, and pottery wheel technology.

Ancient Egypt is a period of time that elicits great fascination, and, even today, secrets from that era are continuing to be uncovered.

For the first time, scientists have now been able to sequence DNA from the complete genome of someone who lived in Egypt around 4,800 years ago when the pyramids were being constructed.

The man’s remains were found within a necropolis in the ancient city of Nuwayrat, located 265 kilometres (165 miles) south of Cairo. It’s thought the man died between 2855 and 2570 BCE, and he was buried inside a pottery vessel that was kept inside a tomb.

Experts say the genome belongs to an older male who they believe had brown hair, brown eyes, and dark skin. He was most likely part of the elite social class, according to researchers.

The results found that around 80 per cent of the males’ genome had links to lineages from North Africa, with the remaining 20 per cent originating from lineages in West Asia.

They suggest that Egyptians during that time lived in a melting pot society, thanks to the arrival of migrants and traders from other parts of Africa as well as Mesopotamia, which is an ancient region comprising parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran.

Archaeologists have also uncovered evidence that culture and goods were traded between the regions, with the sharing of things like domesticated plants and animals, writing systems, and pottery wheel technology.

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/egyptian-dna-from-4-800-years-ago-reveals-secrets-from-the-age-of-the-pyramids/ar-AA1HUjrC?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=b82599bf9f3247118d3d25640e43cfef&ei=16

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How Perfectionism Hurts Parents and Their Kids

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You want your kids to feel loved—and to be happy, healthy, and reasonably well-behaved. Nothing is more important. Advice about how to achieve this comes at you from every corner: playground moms, media, your in-laws. You may be one of those people who demand perfection from yourself in everything you do, especially this. Or you may be someone who fixates on the gap between what your ideal of parenting is and what you can actually achieve. The sad irony is that the harder you work at and worry about being perfect, the more miserable you can make yourself—and the likelier you are to raise kids who are anxious or down on themselves, psychological research has shown.

“If you are a perfectionistic parent, know you are not alone!” says clinical psychologist Erica Lee of Boston Children’s Hospital. As cultural changes in Western countries emphasize competitive individualism, younger men and women increasingly feel that others demand perfection from them, and they demand it of themselves, including when they parent. Studies consistently

reveal perfectionism’s links to anxiety, depression, and other ills. “Holding yourself to an ‘all or nothing’ standard can induce feelings of anxiety, overwhelm, and shame [you], make you more critical and rigid, subtract from your joy and fulfillment as a parent,” Lee says.

Mounting research shows that, when people are perfectionistic about their parenting, their children are also at risk of these emotional problems. “Perfectionistic parents tend to raise perfectionistic kids, which can increase [kids’] risk for depression, anxiety, self-criticism and self-harm,” Lee says. Recently, scientists have identified which perfectionistic parents are most at risk of suffering serious emotional consequences, and also when setting superhigh standards might benefit parents and kids.

Psychologists define perfectionism as a personality trait that is generally stable over time, although circumstances can inflame or calm it. They have also found that perfectionism is embedded in two core personality traits: high conscientiousness and high neuroticism. These traits, in turn, are linked to the two facets of perfectionism: “strivings” for high standards and “concerns” over perceived failures. Highly conscientious “strivers” tend to seek excellence in everything. They set up unachievable goals and try to meet them. On the other hand, people high in the trait of neuroticism, who focus more on their concerns—let’s call them simply “worriers”—are likely to have anxiety or self-esteem issues. They ruminate more on the gap between their ideals and the nitty-gritty of daily parenting, berating themselves for making mistakes.

Recently, psychologists set out to understand how strivings versus concerns influence mothers’ and fathers’ identities as parents. In a study of 1,275 Polish parents aged 18 to 30, participants were asked to answer questions about how they felt about themselves as parents three times over the course of a year. They noted how much they agreed with statements such as “It is important to me that I be thoroughly competent in everything I do” or “If I fail at work/school, I am a failure as a person.”

The parents with most concerns about their performance felt the worst about themselves as parents. Such parents experience greater uncertainty, dissatisfaction, and even regret about their decision to become parents,” says psychologist Konrad Piotrowski, lead author of the study, who works at SWPS University in Poland. Parents who were primarily strivers with fewer concerns, on the other hand, felt better about themselves than those who ranked higher in concerns, as measured by perfectionism scales.

But it was rare even for strivers to have no worries. Strivings and concerns are two sides of the same coin; in most people, they co-occur. “Only a relatively small subset of parents—those who maintain high personal standards while experiencing minimal concerns or self-doubt—benefit from their trying to be the best,” Piotrowski says. “For most, perfectionism can ultimately lead to impaired functioning, increased stress, and reduced satisfaction with parenting.”

Those are symptoms of burnout. A study of mothers of babies in Finland showed that two factors contributed most to burnout: outside social pressures to be a flawless parent and low self-esteem. Moms already suffering from low self-confidence were hit hardest by burnout, while more self-confident mothers experienced it less. (Generally, research finds that although perfectionist fathers can feel disappointed in themselves, cultural expectations of mothers as the primary caregiver leads them to hold themselves to much higher standards than fathers.)

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-perfectionism-hurts-parents-and-their-kids/

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The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double

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Keiko Ogura was just 8 years old when the atoms in the Hiroshima bomb started splitting. When we met in January, some 300 feet from where the bomb struck, Ogura was 87. She stands about five feet tall in heels, and although she has slowed down some in her old age, she moves confidently, in tiny, shuffling steps. She twice waved away my offered arm as we walked the uneven surfaces of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, first neutrally and then with some irritation.

Ogura can still remember that terrible morning in August, 80 years ago. Her older brother, who later died of cancer from radiation, was on a hilltop north of the city when the Enola Gay made its approach. He saw it shining small and silver in the clear blue sky.

Ogura was playing on a road near her house; her father had kept her home from school. “He had a sense of foreboding,” she told me. She remembers the intensity of the bomb’s white flash, the “demon light,” in the words of one survivor. The shock wave that followed had the force of a typhoon, Ogura said. It threw her to the ground, and she lost consciousness—for how long, she still doesn’t know.

Like many people who felt the bomb’s power that day, Ogura assumed that it must have been dropped directly on top of her. In fact, she was a mile and a half away from the explosion’s center. Tens of thousands of people were closer. The great waves of heat and infrared light that roared outward killed hundreds of Ogura’s classmates immediately. More than 20,000 children were killed by the bomb.

Ogura told me that after the initial explosion, fires had raged through the city for many hours. Survivors compared the flame-filled streets to medieval Buddhist scroll paintings of hell. When Ogura awoke on the road, the smoke overhead was so thick that she thought night had fallen. She stumbled back to her house and found it half-destroyed, but still standing. People with skin peeling off their bodies were limping toward her from the city center. Ogura’s family well was still functional, and so she began handing out glasses of water. Two people died while drinking it, right in front of her. A black rain began to fall. Each of its droplets was shot through with radiation, having traveled down through the mushroom cloud’s remnants. It stained Ogura’s skin charcoal gray.

In the days following the bombing, Ogura’s father cremated hundreds of people at a nearby park. The city itself seemed to have disappeared, she said. In aerial shots, downtown Hiroshima’s grid was reduced to a pale outline. More than 60,000 structures had been destroyed. One of the few that remained upright was a domed building made of stone. It still stands today, not far from where Ogura and I met. The government has reinforced its skeletal structure, in a bid to preserve it forever. Circling the building, I could see in through the bomb-blasted walls, to piles of rubble inside.

Ogura and I walked to a monumental arch at the center of the Peace Memorial Park, where a stone chest holds a register of every person who is known to have been killed by the Hiroshima bomb. To date, it contains more than 340,000 names. Only a portion of them died in the blast’s immediate aftermath. Tens of thousands of others perished from radiation sickness in the following months, or from rare cancers years later. Every generation alive at the time was affected, even the newest: Babies who were still in their mothers’ wombs when the bomb hit developed microcephaly. For decades, whenever one of Ogura’s relatives took ill, she worried that a radiation-related disease had finally come for them, and often, one had.

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https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/fGUWshtB5NE9-Vrr2PSjUVztrzE=/0x0:1920x1080/1920x1080/media/img/2025/07/01/atlantic_Nukes_anniversary_asia_opener/original.jpgNuclear club

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/08/nuclear-proliferation-arms-race/683251/

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Where Can I Donate Clothes That Won’t Be Sold?

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Donating is the best way to help needy people in your community and clear out space in your closet simultaneously. But since many places accept old clothes, you might be wondering, “Where can I donate clothes that won’t be sold and put them to the best use?”

Below, we will look at various local organizations that take clothing donations, their differences, and the benefits of donating your clothes.

Benefits of Donating Your Old Clothes

There are several benefits that clothing donations provide to you and your community, each of them making the extra step of finding a worthwhile place to donate worth the hassle.

Helping Your Community

Just because you don’t need old clothing items doesn’t mean someone nearby can’t put them to good use. Every clothing donation you make contributes to the well-being of your community, giving people without the means to buy brand new apparel a chance to keep themselves and their families clothed.

Organizing Clutter

It’s easy to convince yourself that you need a new outfit or accessory, but it’s harder to muster the strength to get rid of your old attire when you buy new clothes. As a result, old clothing will pile up in closets and take up more space than you can afford.

Not only do your clothing donations assist your community, but they also help you organize your home and create more storage space in your closet.

Positive Environmental Impact

When you throw your clothes away rather than donating them, they will sit in a landfill and slowly break down, releasing harmful methane and carbon dioxide that pollute the air. When you don’t donate, your items are not being put to good use and actively harm the environment.

Donating your clothes will ensure they still get used and won’t decompose. This will prevent them from harming the environment from a landfill and lower the demand for new clothing production, creating a negative environmental impact.

Improved Health and Wellness

When you donate your clothes, you’re creating a positive impact on yourself and your community. Giving to people in need doesn’t just feel good. It also has small health and wellness boosts.

Donating has been proven to lower stress levels and blood pressure and increase individual satisfaction. So, with all the benefits a small donation can provide, from health boosts to environmental aid, there’s no reason to put off finding a place to donate any longer.

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://easydonationpickup.com/blog/where-can-i-donate-clothes-that-wont-be-sold/

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Why Mushrooms are Starting to Replace Everything

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Imagine a world where homes, clothing, and electronics are grown instead of manufactured. Mycelium, the root structure of fungi, is transforming industries through innovative applications such as sustainable construction and meat alternatives. This mushroom-based material is used for building insulation and compostable packaging, while luxury brands explore fungal threads as a leather substitute. Furthermore, mycelium is being integrated into robotics, replacing traditional electrical sensors with the living pulses of fungi. How long until mycelium becomes as commonplace as wood, metal, and plastic?

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Everything is made from mushrooms

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Click the link below for the complete video (sound on):

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/why-mushrooms-are-starting-to-replace-everything/vi-AA1I1Mxe?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=3cec094ed79e44f6ca51f08cea024810&ei=23

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A Sodom and Gomorrah Story Shows Scientific Facts Aren’t Settled by Public Opinion

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In 2021, a multidisciplinary team of researchers claimed that a Tunguska-sized airburst, larger than any such airburst in human history, destroyed a Bronze Age city near the Dead Sea. The story went viral. This alleged destruction of Tall el-Hammam around 1650 BCE, with reports of melted pottery and mudbricks, pointed to the Bible, the team concluded in Scientific Reports, noting “what could be construed as the destruction of a city by an airburst/impact event.”

News outlets from Smithsonian to the Times in Britain covered the report. It had all the ingredients—with authors touting its connection to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah—to make it pure clickbait gold. On the day it was published, one of the co-authors posted links on his blog to their three press releases. A week later, he asserted that it was “the most read scientific paper on Earth” based on 250,000 article accesses.

Science, however, is not a popularity contest, and the “cosmic outburst” story indeed holds a different lesson than the one first supposed, about how the public should hear incredible claims. In April, just before the study passed the 666,000 mark, Scientific Reports retracted the finding, writing that “claims that an airburst event destroyed the Middle Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam appear to not be sufficiently supported by the data in the Article,” and that “the Editors no longer have confidence that the conclusions presented are reliable.” Independent scientists (I was one of them) had alerted them to faulty methodology, errors of fact, and inappropriate manipulation of digital image data. One study co-author responded to the retraction in an online post with claims that the editor had caved to harassment by skeptics, concluding that the “court of public opinion is much more powerful than a shadowy hatchetman spamming a corrupt editor’s inbox.”

Public opinion does influence policy decisions and funding priorities in science. People are interested in new medical cures and new starry discoveries, which helps explain why we have a NASA and an NIH. That’s why it is important for the public to be scientifically literate and well informed. But scientific facts are determined by the scientific method, logic, and evidence, all presented in peer-reviewed publications that require reproducible results. Scientists don’t vote on findings, but they do achieve consensus by convergence on understandings based on multiple studies across many fields.

The Sodom airburst paper instead represented the nadir of “science by press release,” in which sensational but thinly supported claims were pitched directly to the media and the public. Press releases, rife with references to Sodom and biblical implications, appeared to be focused as much on titillation as on science.

A meme, in its original definition, is a self-propagating unit of cultural information that is highly fit in the evolutionary sense. Like genes, memes can be engineered. Science by press release can be an effective first step in the creation and laundering of such memes into the public’s collective consciousness. The authors of the Sodom airburst paper did this well. Their press releases were quickly picked up and repeated by both online clickbait media and mainstream media.

The Sodom airburst meme was so successful that it achieved pop culture status and public acceptance within a year of the paper’s publication, in this “Final Jeopardy!” question: “A 2021 study suggested that an asteroid that struck the Jordan Valley c. 1650 B.C, gave rise to the story of this city in Genesis 19.” (Winning answer: “What is Sodom?”)

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The Destruction Of Sodom and Gomorrah, painting by John Martin, 1852.  incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-sodom-and-gomorrah-story-shows-scientific-facts-arent-settled-by-public/

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Grilled Jimmy Nardello Peppers

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If you’re ready to try the hottest pepper in town, then scoop up some Jimmy Nardellos at your next trip to the farmers market. But be warned, they are not spicy-hot — far from it. In fact, they are prized for being the exact opposite. They’re exceptionally sweet and versatile without a touch of heat. Though the peppers were brought to the U.S. by Angella Nardello from Italy’s Basilicata region, it’s her son Jimmy who cultivated them and eventually donated his seed wealth to the Seed Savers Exchange before his passing in 1983. Here, we treat them simply by grilling them with oil, salt, and pepper. Enjoy them on their own or layer onto sandwiches, toss into pastas, or chop into a sauce for chicken or fish. 

Can you cook Jimmy Nardello peppers on the stove or in the oven? 

Yes, you can easily cook Jimmy Nardello peppers on the stovetop or in the oven. To cook on the stove, opt for a wok or large cast-iron skillet, and heat over high. Stir-fry the peppers in oil, tossing constantly, until blistered and softened in spots, about the same amount of time as to grill. To cook in the oven, line a large rimmed baking sheet with foil, and broil on high about six inches from the heating element.  

Can you eat Jimmy Nardello peppers when they’re green?

Yes, just like green and red bell peppers, green Jimmy Nardello peppers are simply less ripe than red Jimmy Nardello peppers. They are slightly less sweet and have a more vegetal flavor, but they would work equally well in this recipe. 

Notes from the Food & Wine Test Kitchen

Look for Jimmy Nardello peppers at farmers markets or in well-stocked co-ops. Or trying growing your own from seeds from Seed Savers Exchange. 

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https://www.foodandwine.com/thmb/pTGyuUt7dQaJRqXj8VgLTNQmB_U=/750x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/Grilled-Jimmy-Nardello-Peppers-FT-MAG-RECIPE-0825-9baa35a43cfc4d0fb28c010c7a6205e7.jpgCredit:  EVA KOLENKO / FOOD STYLING by NATALIE DROBNY / PROP STYLING by GENESIS VALLEJO

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.foodandwine.com/grilled-jimmy-nardello-peppers-11763695

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