like

Dog Walking a Treat for Pet and Owner Alike

Title: Dog Walking a Treat for Pet and Owner Alike
Category: Health News
Created: 9/1/2017 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 9/1/2017 12:00:00 AM




like

Vaping May Trigger Lung Damage Like That Seen in Emphysema

Title: Vaping May Trigger Lung Damage Like That Seen in Emphysema
Category: Health News
Created: 8/26/2019 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/27/2019 12:00:00 AM




like

Just Like COVID, Severe Flu Can Trigger Heart Crises

Title: Just Like COVID, Severe Flu Can Trigger Heart Crises
Category: Health News
Created: 8/25/2020 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/25/2020 12:00:00 AM




like

COVID-19 Not Likely to Be Transmitted by Breast Milk: Study

Title: COVID-19 Not Likely to Be Transmitted by Breast Milk: Study
Category: Health News
Created: 8/28/2020 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/28/2020 12:00:00 AM




like

FDA Warns About Hand Sanitizers in Food-Like Packaging

Title: FDA Warns About Hand Sanitizers in Food-Like Packaging
Category: Health News
Created: 8/27/2020 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/28/2020 12:00:00 AM




like

Unrelated Folks Who Look Alike Share Similar DNA

Title: Unrelated Folks Who Look Alike Share Similar DNA
Category: Health News
Created: 8/23/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/24/2022 12:00:00 AM




like

AHA News: People With Dementia May Be Less Likely to Receive an Advanced Treatment For Stroke

Title: AHA News: People With Dementia May Be Less Likely to Receive an Advanced Treatment For Stroke
Category: Health News
Created: 8/24/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/24/2022 12:00:00 AM




like

COVID Breakthrough Infections More Likely in People Living With HIV

Title: COVID Breakthrough Infections More Likely in People Living With HIV
Category: Health News
Created: 6/8/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 6/9/2022 12:00:00 AM




like

Nonclinical Profile of PF-06952229 (MDV6058), a Novel TGF{beta}RI/Activin Like Kinase 5 Inhibitor Supports Clinical Evaluation in Cancer [Drug Discovery and Translational Medicine]

The development of transforming growth factor βreceptor inhibitors (TGFβRi) as new medicines has been affected by cardiac valvulopathy and arteriopathy toxicity findings in nonclinical toxicology studies. PF-06952229 (MDV6058) selected using rational drug design is a potent and selective TGFβRI inhibitor with a relatively clean off-target selectivity profile and good pharmacokinetic properties across species. PF-06952229 inhibited clinically translatable phospho-SMAD2 biomarker (≥60%) in human and cynomolgus monkey peripheral blood mononuclear cells, as well as in mouse and rat splenocytes. Using an optimized, intermittent dosing schedule (7-day on/7-day off/cycle; 5 cycles), PF-06952229 demonstrated efficacy in a 63-day syngeneic MC38 colon carcinoma mouse model. In the pivotal repeat-dose toxicity studies (rat and cynomolgus monkey), PF-06952229 on an intermittent dosing schedule (5-day on/5-day off cycle; 5 cycles, 28 doses) showed no cardiac-related adverse findings. However, new toxicity findings related to PF-06952229 included reversible hepatocellular (hepatocyte necrosis with corresponding clinically monitorable transaminase increases) and lung (hemorrhage with mixed cell inflammation) findings at ≥ targeted projected clinical efficacious exposures. Furthermore, partially reversible cartilage hypertrophy (trachea and femur in rat; femur in monkey) and partially to fully reversible, clinically monitorable decreases in serum phosphorus and urinary phosphate at ≥ projected clinically efficacious exposures were observed. Given the integral role of TGFβ in endochondral bone formation, cartilage findings in toxicity studies have been observed with other TGFβRi classes of compounds. The favorable cumulative profile of PF-06952229 in biochemical, pharmacodynamic, pharmacokinetic, and nonclinical studies allowed for its evaluation in cancer patients using the intermittent dosing schedule (7-day on/7-day off) and careful protocol-defined monitoring.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT

Only a few TGFβRi have progressed for clinical evaluation due to adverse cardiac findings in pivotal nonclinical toxicity studies. The potential translations of such findings in patients are of major concern. Using a carefully optimized intermittent dosing schedule, PF-06952229 has demonstrated impressive pharmacological efficacy in the syngeneic MC38 colon carcinoma mouse model. Additionally, a nonclinical toxicology package without cardiovascular liabilities and generally monitorable toxicity profile has been completed. The compound presents an acceptable International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use S9-compliant profile for the intended-to-treat cancer patients.




like

Osteoporosis Canada guideline on screening for men likely low value [Letters]




like

Americans Are Still Drinking Like It’s Summer 2020



New research shows that levels of overall and heavy drinking among Americans are still higher than they were in 2018.




like

RPG Cast – Episode 572: “Partly Cloudy Souls With a Chance of Roguelike”

Josh is having an Ys-y time. Anna Marie ranks all the slime families. Robert gets notified every time google kills a product. And Chris tells everyone to blink on cue.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 572: “Partly Cloudy Souls With a Chance of Roguelike” appeared first on RPGamer.



  • News
  • Podcasts
  • RPG Cast
  • Children of Zodiarcs
  • Dragon Quest Tact
  • Final Fantasy Brave Exvius
  • Giraffe and Annika
  • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
  • Suikoden V
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV
  • Ys IX


like

RPG Cast – Episode 615: “The New Dialga Looks Like My Brother’s Broken Vacuum Cleaner”

Kelley ruins Warcraft by including Conker. Chris mortgages his Xbox. Josh's cat won't let him control his Xbox. And Microsoft has announced their new Candy Crush themed Windows 12.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 615: “The New Dialga Looks Like My Brother’s Broken Vacuum Cleaner” appeared first on RPGamer.




like

RPG Cast – Episode 702: “He Plays Flute Like Your Mom Plays SNES”

Chris believes rabites are full of juice. Kelley's furry tank game bias is exposed. Robert gets to be the Snivey he always was inside. Rock flautist.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 702: “He Plays Flute Like Your Mom Plays SNES” appeared first on RPGamer.




like

Microsoft closing Arkane Austin was “stupid”, says founder: recreating “a very special group” like that would be “impossible”

Today in "person you already like says something you already agree with, but it’s still good to hear them say it" news, Arkane founder and im-simmy RPG studio WolfEye head Raphael Colantonio has spoken on Microsoft’s decision to shutter Prey (2017) studio Arkane Austin - alongside a handful of others - back in May.

Colantonio, who founded Arkane in 1999 and departed in 2017 to form Weird West studio WolfEye, recently chatted to Jeremy Peel for PC Gamer about Arkane’s closure, saying:

I think if you look a little bit, it's obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group of people that have made some cool things and that could pull it off again. I think it was a decision that just came down to, 'We need to cut something.' Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They're playing a different game.

Read more




like

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer review: it's like Call Of Duty

People have asked me, a Call Of Duty liker, "How's the new COD?" - such is the mass appeal of Call Of Duty that even a lot of my non-industry pals are invested in whether Black Ops 6's shooty really does bang. And every single time my brain clunks into gear and I turn inwards, where I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say. So much so that a fog develops and out of the fog emerges a figure - it's me. I'm holding an M4A1 with an extended barrel and a vertical foregrip. My brain and body perform a pincer movement of physical response: 1) I shrug 2) I say, "It's like Call Of Duty".

Read more




like

Could Mars become habitable with the help of glitter-like iron rods?

If we want to terraform the Red Planet to make it better able to host microbial life, tiny rods of iron and aluminium may be the answer




like

Hellish conditions have warped an Earth-like planet into an egg

Planets that orbit close to their parent stars are blasted with radiation and contorted by gravity – and the exoplanet TOI-6255b might be the most extreme example yet




like

Cloud atlas of Mars reveals an atmosphere unlike our own

Using images captured by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, researchers have created a cloud atlas of Mars, to better understand the climate of the Red Planet




like

Watch a robot peel a squash with human-like dexterity

A robot can hold a squash, pumpkin or melon in one hand, while it is peeled by the other




like

AI models can't learn as they go along like humans do

After their initial training phase, AI algorithms can’t update and learn from new data, meaning tech companies have to keep training new models from scratch




like

A riveting exploration of how AI models like ChatGPT changed the world

Supremacy, a new book from tech journalist Parmy Olson, takes us inside the rise of machine learning and AI, and examines the people behind it




like

The deepfakes of Trump and Biden that you are most likely to fall for

Experiments show that viewers can usually identify video deepfakes of famous politicians – but fake audio and text are harder to detect




like

What voice assistants like Alexa know about you – and how they use it

Voice assistants can build profiles of their users’ habits and preferences, but the consistency and accuracy of these profiles vary




like

AIs are more likely to mislead people if trained on human feedback 

If artificial intelligence chatbots are fine-tuned to improve their responses using human feedback, they can become more likely to give deceptive answers that seem right but aren’t




like

Battery-like device made from water and clay could be used on Mars

A new supercapacitor design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries




like

What We Do in the Shadows Recap: Like Father, Like Son

Ghost dads are so embarrassing.




like

Some scientists say blocking the sun could slow climate change — just like on The Simpsons

Scientists say geoengineering, or doing things like intentionally increasing Earth’s reflectivity or blocking the sun, is a “really big deal” in slowing down climate change. Here are the ideas they are proposing.




like

What does a mummy smell like? Woodsy and sweet, with a 'note of pistachio'

Scientists have recreated the scent of the embalming fluid used to preserve a noblewoman more than 3,500 years ago — and they say it's quite lovely, indeed.



  • Radio/As It Happens


like

Dinosaur-killing asteroid likely came from beyond Jupiter, study finds

The asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs after slamming into the Earth 66 million years ago is believed to have come from beyond Jupiter, a new study says.



  • dd69e44f-024e-5beb-8b64-5062022cdc2c
  • fnc
  • Fox News
  • fox-news/science/archaeology/dinosaurs
  • fox-news/world/world-regions/location-mexico
  • fox-news/science/planet-earth/geology
  • fox-news/science/planet-earth
  • fox-news/science/air-and-space/asteroids
  • fox-news/science
  • fox-news/science
  • article

like

Why do covid cases rise in summer, unlike other respiratory viruses?

Flu and other respiratory viruses seem to barely exist outside of winter, but covid-19 cases have consistently risen every summer over the past few years




like

Will mpox become a global pandemic like covid-19?

A new variant of mpox is surging in Central Africa, raising concerns about how quickly it could spread further afield




like

Does mpox cause lingering symptoms like long covid?

Amid rising cases of mpox in Central Africa, it is important to uncover whether this virus causes symptoms even after the infection has cleared




like

Rejecting standard cancer treatment like Elle Macpherson is a big risk

People with cancer may have understandable reasons to follow Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson in declining chemotherapy, but the odds aren’t in their favour, warns Elle Hunt




like

Are fermented foods like kimchi really that good for your gut?

The health benefits of fermented food and drink have long been touted, but firm evidence in favour of kombucha, sauerkraut and kefir is surprisingly elusive




like

The Unlikely Inventor of the Automatic Rice Cooker



“Cover, bring to a boil, then reduce heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.” These directions seem simple enough, and yet I have messed up many, many pots of rice over the years. My sympathies to anyone who’s ever had to boil rice on a stovetop, cook it in a clay pot over a kerosene or charcoal burner, or prepare it in a cast-iron cauldron. All hail the 1955 invention of the automatic rice cooker!

How the automatic rice cooker was invented

It isn’t often that housewives get credit in the annals of invention, but in the story of the automatic rice cooker, a woman takes center stage. That happened only after the first attempts at electrifying rice cooking, starting in the 1920s, turned out to be utter failures. Matsushita, Mitsubishi, and Sony all experimented with variations of placing electric heating coils inside wooden tubs or aluminum pots, but none of these cookers automatically switched off when the rice was done. The human cook—almost always a wife or daughter—still had to pay attention to avoid burning the rice. These electric rice cookers didn’t save any real time or effort, and they sold poorly.

This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation’s Edge.”

But Shogo Yamada, the energetic development manager of the electric appliance division for Toshiba, became convinced that his company could do better. In post–World War II Japan, he was demonstrating and selling electric washing machines all over the country. When he took a break from his sales pitch and actually talked to women about their daily household labors, he discovered that cooking rice—not laundry—was their most challenging chore. Rice was a mainstay of the Japanese diet, and women had to prepare it up to three times a day. It took hours of work, starting with getting up by 5:00 am to fan the flames of a kamado, a traditional earthenware stove fueled by charcoal or wood on which the rice pot was heated. The inability to properly mind the flame could earn a woman the label of “failed housewife.”

In 1951, Yamada became the cheerleader of the rice cooker within Toshiba, which was understandably skittish given the past failures of other companies. To develop the product, he turned to Yoshitada Minami, the manager of a small family factory that produced electric water heaters for Toshiba. The water-heater business wasn’t great, and the factory was on the brink of bankruptcy.

How Sources Influence the Telling of History


As someone who does a lot of research online, I often come across websites that tell very interesting histories, but without any citations. It takes only a little bit of digging before I find entire passages copied and pasted from one site to another, and so I spend a tremendous amount of time trying to track down the original source. Accounts of popular consumer products, such as the rice cooker, are particularly prone to this problem. That’s not to say that popular accounts are necessarily wrong; plus they are often much more engaging than boring academic pieces. This is just me offering a note of caution because every story offers a different perspective depending on its sources.

For example, many popular blogs sing the praises of Fumiko Minami and her tireless contributions to the development of the rice maker. But in my research, I found no mention of Minami before Helen Macnaughtan’s 2012 book chapter, “Building up Steam as Consumers: Women, Rice Cookers and the Consumption of Everyday Household Goods in Japan,” which itself was based on episode 42 of the Project X: Challengers documentary series that was produced by NHK and aired in 2002.

If instead I had relied solely on the description of the rice cooker’s early development provided by the Toshiba Science Museum (here’s an archived page from 2007), this month’s column would have offered a detailed technical description of how uncooked rice has a crystalline structure, but as it cooks, it becomes a gelatinized starch. The museum’s website notes that few engineers had ever considered the nature of cooking rice before the rice-cooker project, and it refers simply to the “project team” that discovered the process. There’s no mention of Fumiko.

Both stories are factually correct, but they emphasize different details. Sometimes it’s worth asking who is part of the “project team” because the answer might surprise you. —A.M.


Although Minami understood the basic technical principles for an electric rice cooker, he didn’t know or appreciate the finer details of preparing perfect rice. And so Minami turned to his wife, Fumiko.

Fumiko, the mother of six children, spent five years researching and testing to document the ideal recipe. She continued to make rice three times a day, carefully measuring water-to-rice ratios, noting temperatures and timings, and prototyping rice-cooker designs. Conventional wisdom was that the heat source needed to be adjusted continuously to guarantee fluffy rice, but Fumiko found that heating the water and rice to a boil and then cooking for exactly 20 minutes produced consistently good results.

But how would an automatic rice cooker know when the 20 minutes was up? A suggestion came from Toshiba engineers. A working model based on a double boiler (a pot within a pot for indirect heating) used evaporation to mark time. While the rice cooked in the inset pot, a bimetallic switch measured the temperature in the external pot. Boiling water would hold at a constant 100 °C, but once it had evaporated, the temperature would soar. When the internal temperature of the double boiler surpassed 100 °C, the switch would bend and cut the circuit. One cup of boiling water in the external pot took 20 minutes to evaporate. The same basic principle is still used in modern cookers.



Yamada wanted to ensure that the rice cooker worked in all climates, so Fumiko tested various prototypes in extreme conditions: on her rooftop in cold winters and scorching summers and near steamy bathrooms to mimic high humidity. When Fumiko became ill from testing outside, her children pitched in to help. None of the aluminum and glass prototypes, it turned out, could maintain their internal temperature in cold weather. The final design drew inspiration from the Hokkaidō region, Japan’s northernmost prefecture. Yamada had seen insulated cooking pots there, so the Minami family tried covering the rice cooker with a triple-layered iron exterior. It worked.

How Toshiba sold its automatic rice cooker

Toshiba’s automatic rice cooker went on sale on 10 December 1955, but initially, sales were slow. It didn’t help that the rice cooker was priced at 3,200 yen, about a third of the average Japanese monthly salary. It took some salesmanship to convince women they needed the new appliance. This was Yamada’s time to shine. He demonstrated using the rice cooker to prepare takikomi gohan, a rice dish seasoned with dashi, soy sauce, and a selection of meats and vegetables. When the dish was cooked in a traditional kamado, the soy sauce often burned, making the rather simple dish difficult to master. Women who saw Yamada’s demo were impressed with the ease offered by the rice cooker.

Another clever sales technique was to get electricity companies to serve as Toshiba distributors. At the time, Japan was facing a national power surplus stemming from the widespread replacement of carbon-filament lightbulbs with more efficient tungsten ones. The energy savings were so remarkable that operations at half of the country’s power plants had to be curtailed. But with utilities distributing Toshiba rice cookers, increased demand for electricity was baked in.

Within a year, Toshiba was selling more than 200,000 rice cookers a month. Many of them came from the Minamis’ factory, which was rescued from near-bankruptcy in the process.

How the automatic rice cooker conquered the world

From there, the story becomes an international one with complex localization issues. Japanese sushi rice is not the same as Thai sticky rice which is not the same as Persian tahdig, Indian basmati, Italian risotto, or Spanish paella. You see where I’m going with this. Every culture that has a unique rice dish almost always uses its own regional rice with its own preparation preferences. And so countries wanted their own type of automatic electric rice cooker (although some rejected automation in favor of traditional cooking methods).

Yoshiko Nakano, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a book in 2009 about the localized/globalized nature of rice cookers. Where There Are Asians, There Are Rice Cookers traces the popularization of the rice cooker from Japan to China and then the world by way of Hong Kong. One of the key differences between the Japanese and Chinese rice cooker is that the latter has a glass lid, which Chinese cooks demanded so they could see when to add sausage. More innovation and diversification followed. Modern rice cookers have settings to give Iranians crispy rice at the bottom of the pot, one to let Thai customers cook noodles, one for perfect rice porridge, and one for steel-cut oats.



My friend Hyungsub Choi, in his 2022 article “Before Localization: The Story of the Electric Rice Cooker in South Korea,” pushes back a bit on Nakano’s argument that countries were insistent on tailoring cookers to their tastes. From 1965, when the first domestic rice cooker appeared in South Korea, to the early 1990s, Korean manufacturers engaged in “conscious copying,” Choi argues. That is, they didn’t bother with either innovation or adaptation. As a result, most Koreans had to put up with inferior domestic models. Even after the Korean government made it a national goal to build a better rice cooker, manufacturers failed to deliver one, perhaps because none of the engineers involved knew how to cook rice. It’s a good reminder that the history of technology is not always the story of innovation and progress.

Eventually, the Asian diaspora brought the rice cooker to all parts of the globe, including South Carolina, where I now live and which coincidentally has a long history of rice cultivation. I bought my first rice cooker on a whim, but not for its rice-cooking ability. I was intrigued by the yogurt-making function. Similar to rice, yogurt requires a constant temperature over a specific length of time. Although successful, my yogurt experiment was fleeting—store-bought was just too convenient. But the rice cooking blew my mind. Perfect rice. Every. Single. Time. I am never going back to overflowing pots of starchy water.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Automatic Rice Cooker’s Unlikely Inventor.”

References


Helen Macnaughtan’s 2012 book chapter, “Building up Steam as Consumers: Women, Rice Cookers and the Consumption of Everyday Household Goods in Japan,” was a great resource in understanding the development of the Toshiba ER-4. The chapter appeared in The Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan, 1850-2000, edited by Penelope Francks and Janet Hunter (Palgrave Macmillan).

Yoshiko Nakano’s book Where There are Asians, There are Rice Cookers (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) takes the story much further with her focus on the National (Panasonic) rice cooker and its adaptation and adoption around the world.

The Toshiba Science Museum, in Kawasaki, Japan, where we sourced our main image of the original ER-4, closed to the public in June. I do not know what the future holds for its collections, but luckily some of its Web pages have been archived to continue to help researchers like me.




like

Photos: Hail blankets Saudi Arabian desert creating winter-like landscape




like

Draw Portraits Like a Pro – Essential Tools and Materials for Photo-Realistic Results

If you’ve ever tried to make a portrait that looks like the person you’re sketching, you know it’s no walk in the park. Maybe you’ve got the eyes perfectly, but then the mouth looks… well, let’s say “abstract.” So, how do the pros do it? What tools, materials, and techniques help bring out that jaw-dropping […]

The post Draw Portraits Like a Pro – Essential Tools and Materials for Photo-Realistic Results appeared first on Chart Attack.





like

Mark Rylance likely to play Dumbledore in ‘Harry Potter’ TV series

Mark Rylance is in talks to play Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter TV series. Warner Bros. is yet to enter negotiations with the actor




like

‘Alien: Isolation’ for Android Is Now a Free To Start Release Just Like iOS Letting Everyone Try Two Missions for Free

Earlier this year, Feral Interactive’s superb iOS version of Alien: Isolation (Free) was updated to change the game’s business model …





like

‘SpongeBob: Bubble Pop’ Is a New Bust-a-Move-Like Coming to iOS and Android Through Tic Toc Games, Nickelodeon, and Netflix

Netflix recently announced more games coming to its service in the coming months, but an unannounced (as far as I’m …





like

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Oscillates Like a Stress Ball

What is Jupiter's great red spot? Researchers have observed the red spot changing over time.




like

What Education Looked Like for These 5 Ancient Societies

There is not a ton of evidence of what education looked like in ancient society, but we do know it existed - although not for everyone.




like

Wild weather: ’It was like a tidal wave’

UPDATE: An emergency situation has been declared after wild storms left a trail of destruction on the Sunshine Coast. Brisbane residents have also described what was “like a tidal wave” hitting their homes.




like

‘It’s still a prison. I feel like an animal’

REACTION to the first TV crew’s story to emerge from Nauru tonight ranged from stunned to cynical. And it was a surprise to Australia’s Immigration minister.