The government says it is "stepping up action" to stop the "totally unacceptable" crossings.

As the government begins to ease the lockdown it will keep an anxious eye on the R number.

Tesla boss Elon Musk has threatened to pull the firm's headquarters and only US car factory out of California after local officials stopped the company from reopening the electric vehicle plant.

Filed under: Europe, North America, France, United Kingdom, United States

The litany of year-end travel-related lists continues. Today, it's TripAdvisor, which unveiled its most reviewed cities. Leading the way: London, Rome and Paris, according to the Telegraph. The top U.S city was New York, which ranked fourth overall -- a stunning blow for American exceptionalism.

Continue reading London, Rome, Paris Top TripAdvisor's Most-Reviewed Cities List

London, Rome, Paris Top TripAdvisor's Most-Reviewed Cities List originally appeared on Gadling on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 14:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Arts and Culture, North America, United States

Joanne and Gary, rival travel agents compete for their industry's top honor, the Globel Prize, while trying to address their clients' impossible demands in an Off-Broadway comedy that debuts this week, "Craving for Travel."

The 85-minute, two-actor, 30-character comedy was commissioned and produced by Jim Strong, president of the Dallas-based Strong Travel Services travel agency.

"Travel agents are always asked to do the impossible, and this play shows how that is done, from finding the impossible rooms to making dreams come true," Strong told the "Dallas Morning News." "I decided to bring it to life on stage as a comedy in New York."

From "Craving for Travel's" press release:

With their reputations on the line, travel agents Joanne and Gary will tackle any request, no matter how impossible, and any client, no matter how unreasonable. Full of overzealous travelers, overbooked flights, and hoteliers who are just over it, Craving for Travel reminds us why we travel-and everything that can happen when we do.

"Craving for Travel" opens Thursday at the Peter J. Sharp Theater, where it'll run through Feb. 9. Tickets are $32.50 and $49. They can be purchased at CravingForTravel.com, 212-279-4200 or the Ticket Central Box Office (416 W. 42nd St., 12-8 p.m. daily). More than half of the shows are already sold out.

Continue reading Off-Broadway Comedy 'Craving for Travel' Showcases Travel Agents Trying to do the Impossible

Off-Broadway Comedy 'Craving for Travel' Showcases Travel Agents Trying to do the Impossible originally appeared on Gadling on Tue, 07 Jan 2014 10:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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• NASA engineers are continuing to drive the Mars Curiosity Rover while working from home.
• The job is highly technical and delicate, but the team has already managed to complete a successful operation under lockdown.
• Business Insider asked two of the rover team how they manage their work-life balance now the rover has colonised their living space.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Life during lockdown has meant millions of people having to adapt to their home and work lives colliding. But what's that like when your work involves driving a nuclear-powered robot on the surface of Mars?

Business Insider spoke to two of the NASA technicians currently piloting the Mars Curiosity rover from home. It's a delicate operation that takes careful planning between a team of roughly 75 NASA engineers and scientists. Even while working remotely, the team was able to rig up their home workstations well enough that the rover has already completed a successful drilling operation while its human operators are in lockdown.

Despite doing the most otherworldly job imaginable, the Curiosity rovers are having to contend with familiar stresses of lockdown working life. They told Business Insider their personal tips and tricks for staying focused and healthy as they work from home.

Get comfy

Matt Gildner is the planning team lead for the rover, which means he directs a team of about 20 people who build the commands to send the rover to tell it where to go and what to do. Gildner's day involves staying permanently teleconferenced in to conversations using two headsets, one in each ear. A few times a day he also uses red-blue 3D glasses to examine images sent back by the rover.

His first change to his work-from-home set-up: Get a better chair. "The first week I got here I had an old wooden bank chair that while it looked really nice next to my desk, [was] not very comfortable," said Gildner. He quickly swapped this out for a more comfortable ergonomic chair. He and his wife are also making cold-brew coffee every night, ready to go in the morning.

Make sure you're seeing some kind of change

Gildner's also trying to make sure he doesn't stay glued to his ergonomic chair, making it a point to get up and moving around. "It's really about just getting up and stepping away from the desk for a while," Gildner said. This could be to just go to the kitchen to get a snack or, in Gildner's case, tend to some home baking projects.

"I was already baking some bread before this all happened, but I did kind of up my game in that area," he said. Specifically Gildner (a fan of the YouTube cooking channel "Bon Appetit") has started experimenting with overnight dough fermentation.

"It's nice to go and have something new to see every morning that changed overnight, or you get to see something progress," he said. "That's an important part of mental health and this point in time — to make sure you are having something in your life that is life-changing and dynamic despite your being in the same place."

He draws a parallel between this and his work on the rover. "That is one of the big draws of working a spacecraft operation, especially on Mars, is that every day we're driving to a new place and I get to look at images that no human has ever seen before. And Mars is always throwing us something new."

Keep a firm line between work time and downtime

"I also tend to really shut my computer down and put my phone away for work at the end of the day, just because I want to still try to keep some good separation between work life and home life, even though they're happening in the same place right now," Gildner said.

Project lead Alicia Allbaugh, who oversees the entire team of 75, also likes to draw a clear line between home and work life. She also recommends "not blending home tasks during your work time."

"I try not to deviate too much from what I would've done at work. Because then it can get you distracted and you start pulling away," she said.

Allbaugh also had to divvy up parts of the house with her husband, who also works at NASA. The two didn't want to work in adjacent rooms because they might hear each other's teleconferences through the walls, so Allbaugh works upstairs while her husband gets the kitchen, along with the couple's two rescue bunnies Oreo and Grayce.

In her free time Allbaugh has been tinkering with home improvements, and finished a long-standing project of painting and varnishing some linen-closet doors.

Respect other people's rhythms

As manager of a large team, Allbaugh also has to be sensitive to the fact that everyone has different daily rhythms working from home, especially those with children. Sudden mutes in meetings for children talking and clocks chiming have become the norm.

"We're all very empathetic for each other. I mean we find this adorable. We're not frustrated, whereas if someone came in and interrupted your meeting when you were in the conference room, you may have been like, 'What was that about?'" said Allbaugh.

Keep up the social side of the office

Allbaugh's team has also tried to keep social elements of their office going through virtual happy hours, and she has set up open-office tea break meetings so her team can just come in for a chat, which she thinks is important to keep up even as the lockdown drags on. "Because at first it's novel, and then it's okay — now it's a marathon," she said.  

SEE ALSO: NASA engineers explain what it's like to drive a nuclear-powered Mars rover from home during the pandemic

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NOW WATCH: A cleaning expert reveals her 3-step method for cleaning your entire home quickly

Hairdressers have been forced to go underground as lockdown regulations stifle their livelihood and job security. For some, bootlegging has been 'life-saving'.

A bodyguard of Eastern Cape Social Development MEC Siphokazi Mani-Lusithi has been arrested with four others by the Green Scorpions for illegal hunting on a private farm outside East London, as well as for breaking Covid-19 lockdown regulations.

Four minutes and 28 seconds. That is how long it took a News24 reporter to find cigarettes – meant to be banned under Level 4 lockdown regulations – which were available for purchase at one of many places in South Africa.

There was a steady stream of people dropping off donations at Goodwill’s donation centres Saturday—marking the first day it was open in about six weeks.

Residents in Okotoks, Alta. were about to help support those less fortunate in their community by donating non-perishable food items in a drive hosted by a local baseball club.

Wera, a four-year-old terrier cross, has found her way home to a Calgary-care organization after fraudsters tricked the dog's foster family.

French tennis chief Bernard Guidicelli admitted that Roland Garros could be staged behind closed doors.

With the UK government set to tighten its lockdown restrictions, fresh doubts have been cast over the viability of a British Grand Prix.

It seemed like such a great idea at the time. You wanted to put together a video for a loved one, including all their family and friends singing their praises, making their life look as epic as a Hollywood production.

Oh, it was a Hollywood production, all right. Contributors showed up late and sent weird file formats, editing took forever, the music wasn’t right...and on it went. Before you know it, a simple tribute video you thought might take an hour or two consumed multiple nights and had you cursing the day you ever thought of the idea.

Video montages take work. But by enlisting Tribute to help you assemble your message of love, It’s all a lot more manageable.

In fact, the Tribute process is so easy that you probably won’t have to do more than a few minutes of work to produce a high-quality tribute video that brings tears of joy. No, seriously...Tribute swears 80 percent of their videos elicit actual tears of joy. Of course, there’s no way of knowing their metrics for judging the results of their 500,000 Tribute videos so far...but if they’re close, your odds for an emotional testament to your subject are pretty darn high.

With Tribute, you just enter the emails for all the people you’d like to contribute to the video. Tribute emails your participants, explains the project, and guides your subjects through how to shoot and submit their segment for the finished video.

Once all your videos are in, Tribute will compile all your clips into a touching, polished montage. Read the rest

The DML News App offers the best in news reporting.

The post REPORT: Airline to suspend service to nearly a dozen US airports starting next week appeared first on Dennis Michael Lynch.

The following article, Mark Levin on Michael Flynn Bombshell Documents: This Is “Barack Obama’s Blue Dress” Without The DNA, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Mark Levin nailed the importance of the newly released documents that cleared Michael Flynn and pinned Obama to the wall. He says that the documents are “Barack Obama’s Blue Dress” without the “DNA” alluding to the blue dress from Monica Lewinsky that proved Bill Clinton’s guilt. Levin begins by praising AG Bill Barr and then […]

Continue reading: Mark Levin on Michael Flynn Bombshell Documents: This Is “Barack Obama’s Blue Dress” Without The DNA ...

The following article, Rep. Ilhan Omar Asks For Contributions To Her Campaign To Help MN Food Bank…Food Bank Director Says Omar Has Nothing To Do With Project: “I have no idea where this money is going”, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Ilhan Omar is a lot of things. First, and foremost, she’s deceitful. David Steinberg of PJ Media was one of the first investigative journalists to break the story about the anti-Semitic, freshman lawmaker’s marriage to her immigrant brother while she was still married to her first husband, who she has since divorced after having an […]

Continue reading: Rep. Ilhan Omar Asks For Contributions To Her Campaign To Help MN Food Bank…Food Bank Director Says Omar Has Nothing To Do With Project: “I have no idea where this money is going” ...

The following article, OUCH! Michelle Obama’s Netflix Documentary “Becoming” Gets Panned By Critics, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Unlike Melania Trump, who’s yet to appear on the cover of a major fashion magazine since becoming America’s First Lady, Michelle Obama has always been given special treatment by the far-left media, who couldn’t put her face on enough magazine covers. When her “Becoming” documentary aired on Wednesday, it was probably expected that the media […]

Continue reading: OUCH! Michelle Obama’s Netflix Documentary “Becoming” Gets Panned By Critics ...

A crowd descended on the Manitoba Legislature Building Saturday afternoon, demanding an end to the COVID-19 quarantine.

Invitation Only Research Event

Event participants

HE Professor Kwaku Danso-Boafo, High Commissioner for Ghana to the United Kingdom
Chair: Alex Vines OBE, Research Director, Area Studies and International Law; Head, Africa Programme, Chatham House

7 October 2014

31 July 2014 , Volume 70, Number 4

Branding the country a failed state is unhelpful

Research Event

Event participants

Charlie Parton, Counsellor, Political Section, Beijing Delegation, European External Action Service
Chair: Roderic Wye, Assciate Fellow, Asia Programme, Chatham House

captain_j03 posted a photo:

Wish me a happy mother's day and I'll slit your guts like a ripe melon.

My mood is not the best today - my sister woke me at 6 AM for said reason. On a sunday. And guess what - I am not even a mother.

Toy Project Day 1746

The former Senate staffer, who is accusing Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her 27 years ago, is being represented by a lawyer who is also a donor to President Trump.

Pakistanis crowded markets on Saturday after a nationwide coronavirus lockdown was eased, despite the country declaring its second highest daily infection toll. Prime Minister Imran Khan has allowed businesses to reopen in phases from the weekend, citing the economic havoc the virus restrictions have wreaked on the improvised nation. In the garrison city of Rawalpindi, thousands of shoppers were preparing for Eid, which follows the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, with many flouting social distancing rules and advice to wear masks.

On Thursday, the Professional Beauty Federation of California published a press release to the “Hot Topics” section of their website. It was titled: “Time to Sue Governor Newsom.” The release came in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that the following morning, California would officially enter “Phase Two” of the “Safer at Home” order. Select businesses, from florists to clothing retailers to toy stores, would be able to resume operations in a limited capacity. But absent from the list of acceptable businesses: beauty salons. Newsom placed businesses like nail salons and barbershops in “Phase Three”—a stage he believes to be “months, not weeks” away. “This whole thing spread in the state of California—the first community spread—was in a nail salon,” Newsom said in a press conference last week, without providing details about the date or location of the case. “Many of the practices that you would otherwise expect of a modification were already in play in many of these salons, with people that had procedure masks on, were using gloves, and were advancing higher levels of sanitation.”The news has thrust nail salons onto the frontline of a growing coronavirus revolt in California, a battle being waged in many more American cities, like Dallas, where hairdresser Shelley Luther became a star of the anti-lockdown movement when she opted to go to jail rather than comply with an order to close her hair salon. Anti-Lockdown Protesters Are Now Facing Down Cops Outside of BarsOn Monday morning, the Professional Beauty Federation of California will file a lawsuit in federal court demanding a regulated reopening process of their salons. “We were 100 percent behind the lockdown, so that we would not overwhelm our hospitals,” the group’s legal counsel Fred Jones said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “However, after two months of the lockdown, in which, by Gov. Newsom’s own admission, we have succeeded—we have checked the mark, we have flattened the curve—we were anticipating that the governor would allow for gradual reopenings of our beauty salons under strict new guidelines.”Their argument, Jones said, hinges on the fact that, without regulated reopening, stylists will be forced underground to meet financial ends, resulting in a potentially more dangerous risk.“A lot of our stylists are on the brink of starvation in order to make their leases and make ends meet,” Jones said. “So you have a volatile combination of desperate clients and desperate stylists. We know that will lead to thousands of our stylists going underground and moving kitchen to kitchen and house to house. That’s reality. Nobody can argue that. So the real question is: how do you stop that from happening if you’re the governor? You can’t.”He suggested a gradual and controlled reopening would be safer than “stylists going house to house and spreading more than beauty.”Unmasked Protesters Storm Huntington Beach After California Governor’s ClosureSome salons statewide have already opened, defying the statewide order, like an Orange County nail spa owner who has vowed to stay open despite being handed a citation by local police, who ordered her to appear in court in July. “I have to do what I have to do. I’m fighting to provide for my children and myself and my family,” another salon owner, Breann Curtis, of The Clip Cage barbershop in Auburn, California, told Fox40 about her decision to reopen. “It’s very hard. I’m pregnant. I have children.”“Just going into debt every single day,” added Tisha Fernhoff, who owns The Beauty Bar Salon in the same Auburn shopping center. “How much longer am I supposed to just go down the rabbit hole before I just throw in the towel and go back to work?”According to Jones, the California State Board of Barbering and Cosmetology—which issues all 623,442 beauty licenses in the state—has already drafted a protocol for how salons could reopen under the current conditions. He claimed Newsom had blocked the plan from distribution, to avoid mixed messaging. (Newsom’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment and a spokesperson for the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology said their draft protocols “haven't been published because they are not finished.”)“We want him to release the plan so that our professionals can start stocking up,” Jones said. “We know we’ll need masks. Will shields be required for these services? They probably will.”If such a plan was to go into effect, Jones said, salons would use personal protective equipment widely. They would stagger appointments to avoid crowded waiting rooms, spread out work stations and shift schedules, implement a touchless pay system, and remove anything in the waiting rooms that could carry contagion. “So, sorry no more magazines and newspapers for our clientele,” Jones said. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends maintaining a distance of six feet from other people—a practice that would be all but impossible in salon settings. Dr. Birx Says What Trump Would Not About ProtestersThere are 53,694 licensed beauty salons in California, representing 313,734 stylists or cosmetologists, 34,093 barbers, 90,392 estheticians, 1,679 electrologists, and 129,802 manicurists, according to the State Board of Barbering and Cosmetology. All of these workers, Jones said, have to complete between 350 and 1600 hours of formal education before acquiring their license, including training in sanitization. Jones emphasized that the lawsuit stemmed from financial desperation, a sentiment shared across the country. The Labor Department announced Friday that the economy lost over 20.5 million jobs in April alone, putting the national unemployment rate at its highest since the Great Depression: 14.7 percent. But the devastation has hit the beauty sector differently than many industries. Over 80 percent of salon workers are independent contractors, meaning each stylist represents their own business. By extension, many salon owners are basically landlords, “whose income relies on those booth owners,” Jones said. As a result, most salon workers qualify for unemployment benefits under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, signed by Trump in March—although the program is riddled with loopholes, has frequently run out of money, and may not cover their entire income, which heavily relies on tips. It is salon owners who stand to gain the most from the lawsuit. “Freelance workers do benefit on unemployment benefits,” Jones said. “But most of those Paycheck Protection Program reimbursements are based on your payments. If you’re a salon owner, you don’t have a payroll. Those stylists are their own proprietors.”On Friday, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduced legislation to give a majority of Americans $2,000 a month throughout the pandemic. Asked whether the bill could provide financial relief to salon workers, while allowing them to maintain social distancing, Jones seemed doubtful that it would pass. “It’s the proverbial ‘check is in the mail’ promise,” he said. “When you’re dealing with true economic devastation, let me tell you, most of our licensees will not be banking on a divided Congress and a White House that is also divided. While Washington fiddles, our stylists are burning.” Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

In a tweet Saturday morning, Tesla's chief executive said it would file a lawsuit against county officials over not being able to run its factory.

β-1,3-d-Glucan is a ubiquitous glucose polymer produced by plants, bacteria, and most fungi. It has been used as a diagnostic tool in patients with invasive mycoses via a highly-sensitive reagent consisting of the blood coagulation system of horseshoe crab. However, no method is currently available for measuring β-1,6-glucan, another primary β-glucan structure of fungal polysaccharides. Herein, we describe the development of an economical and highly-sensitive and specific assay for β-1,6-glucan using a modified recombinant endo-β-1,6-glucanase having diminished glucan hydrolase activity. The purified β-1,6-glucanase derivative bound to the β-1,6-glucan pustulan with a KD of 16.4 nm. We validated the specificity of this β-1,6-glucan probe by demonstrating its ability to detect cell wall β-1,6-glucan from both yeast and hyphal forms of the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans, without any detectable binding to glucan lacking the long β-1,6-glucan branch. We developed a sandwich ELISA-like assay with a low limit of quantification for pustulan (1.5 pg/ml), and we successfully employed this assay in the quantification of extracellular β-1,6-glucan released by >250 patient-derived strains of different Candida species (including Candida auris) in culture supernatant in vitro. We also used this assay to measure β-1,6-glucan in vivo in the serum and in several organs in a mouse model of systemic candidiasis. Our work describes a reliable method for β-1,6-glucan detection, which may prove useful for the diagnosis of invasive fungal infections.

The dextransucrase DSR-OK from the Gram-positive bacterium Oenococcus kitaharae DSM17330 produces a dextran of the highest molar mass reported to date (∼109 g/mol). In this study, we selected a recombinant form, DSR-OKΔ1, to identify molecular determinants involved in the sugar polymerization mechanism and that confer its ability to produce a very-high-molar-mass polymer. In domain V of DSR-OK, we identified seven putative sugar-binding pockets characteristic of glycoside hydrolase 70 (GH70) glucansucrases that are known to be involved in glucan binding. We investigated their role in polymer synthesis through several approaches, including monitoring of dextran synthesis, affinity assays, sugar binding pocket deletions, site-directed mutagenesis, and construction of chimeric enzymes. Substitution of only two stacking aromatic residues in two consecutive sugar-binding pockets (variant DSR-OKΔ1-Y1162A-F1228A) induced quasi-complete loss of very-high-molar-mass dextran synthesis, resulting in production of only 10–13 kg/mol polymers. Moreover, the double mutation completely switched the semiprocessive mode of DSR-OKΔ1 toward a distributive one, highlighting the strong influence of these pockets on enzyme processivity. Finally, the position of each pocket relative to the active site also appeared to be important for polymer elongation. We propose that sugar-binding pockets spatially closer to the catalytic domain play a major role in the control of processivity. A deep structural characterization, if possible with large-molar-mass sugar ligands, would allow confirming this hypothesis.

Extracellular matrix-evoked angiostasis and autophagy within the tumor microenvironment represent two critical, but unconnected, functions of the small leucine-rich proteoglycan, decorin. Acting as a partial agonist of vascular endothelial growth factor 2 (VEGFR2), soluble decorin signals via the energy sensing protein, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), in the autophagic degradation of intracellular vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGFA). Here, we discovered that soluble decorin evokes intracellular catabolism of endothelial VEGFA that is mechanistically independent of mTOR, but requires an autophagic regulator, paternally expressed gene 3 (PEG3). We found that administration of autophagic inhibitors such as chloroquine or bafilomycin A1, or depletion of autophagy-related 5 (ATG5), results in accumulation of intracellular VEGFA, indicating that VEGFA is a basal autophagic substrate. Mechanistically, decorin increased the VEGFA clearance rate by augmenting autophagic flux, a process that required RAB24 member RAS oncogene family (RAB24), a small GTPase that facilitates the disposal of autophagic compartments. We validated these findings by demonstrating the physiological relevance of this process in vivo. Mice starved for 48 h exhibited a sharp decrease in overall cardiac and aortic VEGFA that could be blocked by systemic chloroquine treatment. Thus, our findings reveal a unified mechanism for the metabolic control of endothelial VEGFA for autophagic clearance in response to decorin and canonical pro-autophagic stimuli. We posit that the VEGFR2/AMPK/PEG3 axis integrates the anti-angiogenic and pro-autophagic bioactivities of decorin as the molecular basis for tumorigenic suppression. These results support future therapeutic use of decorin as a next-generation protein therapy to combat cancer.

Contact between inflammatory cells and endothelial cells (ECs) is a crucial step in vascular inflammation. Recently, we demonstrated that the cell-surface level of endomucin (EMCN), a heavily O-glycosylated single-transmembrane sialomucin, interferes with the interactions between inflammatory cells and ECs. We have also shown that, in response to an inflammatory stimulus, EMCN is cleared from the cell surface by an unknown mechanism. In this study, using adenovirus-mediated overexpression of a tagged EMCN in human umbilical vein ECs, we found that treatment with tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) or the strong oxidant pervanadate leads to loss of cell-surface EMCN and increases the levels of the C-terminal fragment of EMCN 3- to 4-fold. Furthermore, treatment with the broad-spectrum matrix metalloproteinase inhibitor batimastat (BB94) or inhibition of ADAM metallopeptidase domain 10 (ADAM10) and ADAM17 with two small-molecule inhibitors, GW280264X and GI254023X, or with siRNA significantly reduced basal and TNFα-induced cell-surface EMCN cleavage. Release of the C-terminal fragment of EMCN by TNF-α treatment was blocked by chemical inhibition of ADAM10 alone or in combination with ADAM17. These results indicate that cell-surface EMCN undergoes constitutive cleavage and that TNF-α treatment dramatically increases this cleavage, which is mediated predominantly by ADAM10 and ADAM17. As endothelial cell-surface EMCN attenuates leukocyte–EC interactions during inflammation, we propose that EMCN is a potential therapeutic target to manage vascular inflammation.

Endorepellin, the C-terminal fragment of the heparan sulfate proteoglycan perlecan, influences various signaling pathways in endothelial cells by binding to VEGFR2. In this study, we discovered that soluble endorepellin activates the canonical stress signaling pathway consisting of PERK, eIF2α, ATF4, and GADD45α. Specifically, endorepellin evoked transient activation of VEGFR2, which, in turn, phosphorylated PERK at Thr980. Subsequently, PERK phosphorylated eIF2α at Ser51, upregulating its downstream effector proteins ATF4 and GADD45α. RNAi-mediated knockdown of PERK or eIF2α abrogated the endorepellin-mediated up-regulation of GADD45α, the ultimate effector protein of this stress signaling cascade. To functionally validate these findings, we utilized an ex vivo model of angiogenesis. Exposure of the aortic rings embedded in 3D fibrillar collagen to recombinant endorepellin for 2–4 h activated PERK and induced GADD45α vis à vis vehicle-treated counterparts. Similar effects were obtained with the established cellular stress inducer tunicamycin. Notably, chronic exposure of aortic rings to endorepellin for 7–9 days markedly suppressed vessel sprouting, an angiostatic effect that was rescued by blocking PERK kinase activity. Our findings unravel a mechanism by which an extracellular matrix protein evokes stress signaling in endothelial cells, which leads to angiostasis.

At least 10 stores inside the Portmore Mall have fallen casualty to the economic chokehold brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, with several others struggling to stay afloat as St Catherine businesses grapple with revenue losses. And with a 14-day...

This report focuses on the development of children of Black immigrants in the United States, comparing against the outcomes for their peers in native-born and other immigrant families. It also compares these U.S. children to those in the United Kingdom, where there is a large Black immigrant population but a notably different policy context of reception.

Immigrants have been disproportionately hit by the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and now confront a number of challenges. The report, which has a particular focus on Germany, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and United States finds that the unemployment gap between immigrant and native workers has widened in many places.

In a report by MPI's Labor Markets Initiative, noted economist and Georgetown University Public Policy Institute Professor Harry J. Holzer examines the economic reasoning and research on these questions and looks at the policy options that shape the impact of less-skilled immigration on the economy. The discussion is on what policy reform would best serve native-born American workers, consumers, and employers, as well as the overall U.S. economy.

This discussion focuses on the MPI report, "Executive Action on Immigration: Six Ways to Make the System Work Better," which outlines administrative actions that can be implemented to improve the immigration system.

New research shows that we can train our brains to become memory champions

To many of us, having to memorize a long list of items feels like a chore. But for others, it is more like a sport. Every year, hundreds of these ‘memory athletes’ compete with one another in the World Memory Championships, memorising hundreds of words, numbers, or other pieces of information within minutes. The current world champion is Alex Mullen, who beat his competitors by memorizing a string of more than 550 digits in under 5 minutes.

You may think that such prodigious mental feats are linked to having an unusual brain, or to being extraordinarily clever. But they are not. New research published in the journal Neuron shows that you, too, can be a super memorizer with just six weeks of intensive mnemonic training, and also reveals the long-lasting changes to brain structure and function that occur as a result of such training.

Related: The Homer Simpson effect: forgetting to remember

Related: A neural pathway that erases memories

Continue reading...

Or better yet go back to Africa, we don’t need any feminazis ruining our society

I say - Lock everything down, as we are, and keep everything locked down for years  This way, what every these people are complaining about will be long gone 

I think The Rock is a combination of both but barely because when he made his debut in the WWF in late 1996, he wasn't even called The Rock yet he was Rocky Maivia at that time. By the time he started getting over with the fans as The Rock, the 90s were almost over because it was 1998 - 99 by then. He spent more time as The Rock in the 2000s but even though he was still in the WWF/E when the decade started, he was gone by 2004 (by then he was already doing movies and wrestling at the same time). Then The Rock stopped wrestling completely and spent the rest of the 00s decade making movies, he spent even less time wrestling in the 2010s which is his most recent run in the WWE he missed 2010, came back in 2011 and was gone by 2013 aside from one match in 2016. What do you guys think ?