This week's featured adoptable pets from the Kent County Animal Shelter are a sweet, patient dog and a playful, young pup. ...Read More
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts grad student whose deportation case was terminated by an immigration judge, has self-deported to Istanbul, sources say....Read More
A fan brawl broke out at Yankee Stadium during the Los Angeles Angels' 11-4 win as the New York Yankees dropped eight of their last 11 games in a frustrating stretch....Read More
Marie-Thérèse had moved to the US after reuniting with her long-lost love, an American man who died in January....Read More
...Read More
Eric Swalwell's sexual misconduct allegations were an open secret, critics say, as the media industry faces scrutiny for years of failing to report them....Read More
Kinahan, in his 40s, was arrested in Dubai on foot of an arrest warrant issued by the Irish courts....Read More
Hegseth's full remarks leading up to the 'fake Bible verse' show he was never under the impression that it was an actual Bible verse. ...Read More
...Read More
Wolves and humans share the same eye trait that helped both species become the ultimate pack hunters....Read More
...Read More
Sugar has had a terrible few decades in public relations. Which is rich, considering sugar never hired a publicist or lobbied for its inclusion in 37 varieties of salad dressing. Sugar was simply sitting there, being a carbohydrate, when an entire industry decided it made a more convenient villain than portion size, impulse control, or the more uncomfortable question of why a gas station sells a beverage the size of a toddler.Fat was the villain in 1990. Americans loaded up on SnackWell's cookies and ate them by the sleeve.Somewhere between the obesity panic of the 2000s and the clean-eating obsession of the 2010s, sucrose transformed from a pantry staple into a health and wellness villain on par with cigarettes and sloth.Sugar, sugarThe human body runs on glucose. Your brain needs it. Your muscles prefer it. Sugarcane has been sweetening drinks in South Asia since roughly 350 A.D., and somehow humanity survived long enough to argue about it on social media.The problem was never the molecule but the amount — 22 teaspoons a day, the American average, poured mostly into beverages people didn’t even register as meals. A single large fountain soda contains 17. A flavored coffee drink from any chain you can name contains more than that and comes with a cheerful barista who will spell your name wrong on the cup while handing you what is essentially a dessert with a lid.That is a dosage problem. It got rebranded as a chemistry problem, and that rebranding sold a lot of diet soda.Gut checkI learned this the hard way, via my own stomach. For about two years I swapped sugar for artificial sweeteners with the confidence of someone who had done exactly one Google search. Sucralose (commonly sold as Splenda) in my coffee. Stevia in everything else. The occasional sugar-free chocolate that tasted like sweetened cardboard, which I ate anyway, because suffering voluntarily is how adults signal virtue.I was, by all the metrics I had invented for myself, being responsible. Then I started feeling bloated roughly 40 minutes after every meal — a persistent, uncomfortable fullness that no amount of walking around the block seemed to fix. And then came a specific, percussive kind of digestive discomfort that I will describe only as "audible." My fiancée noticed. I blamed the dog.I cut the sweeteners on a Friday. By Sunday, the situation had resolved itself completely. The bowel-induced thunder had passed, the barometric pressure had normalized, and my fiancée stopped sleeping with the window open.Metabolic mayhemIt turns out that I was ahead of the research for once in my life. A recent study examining the biological effects of common artificial sweeteners — sucralose and stevia, specifically — found that even quantities comparable to everyday human consumption altered gut microbiome composition in measurable ways.The gut houses roughly 39 trillion microorganisms, meaning it contains more bacterial cells than human cells, a fact that raises serious questions about who, exactly, is running things. It regulates metabolism, modulates immune response, produces neurotransmitters, and sends chemical signals to the brain, influencing mood and appetite. The body is less a person than a committee, and the committee has opinions about your sweetener choices.Disrupt the ecosystem, and you get disrupted systems downstream. The researchers found that beneficial compounds helping maintain metabolic health declined in subjects exposed to these sweeteners. In plain terms, the body became measurably worse at handling sugar, and it had not consumed any sugar to arrive there. The sweetener had taught the body a new dysfunction without any of the calories required to earn it.RELATED: Save your brain: Eat more meat Bettman/Getty ImagesSweet surrenderThe findings on sucralose were particularly persistent. Researchers observed that its effects on gut bacteria and gene activity carried across multiple generations in animal studies. Offspring who had never consumed sucralose showed early signs of impaired glucose regulation — their bodies struggling with sugar metabolism as an inherited consequence of a parent's diet.This is epigeneticism: the transmission of acquired biological traits through changes in gene expression rather than DNA sequence. Stevia's impacts were detectable but short-lived, fading rather than compounding. Neither result fits the marketing promise of a neutral, calorie-free pleasure. Both suggest that the quest to outsmart biology with chemistry has, predictably, run into biology itself.Americans consume artificial sweeteners at scale. They are in diet drinks, protein bars, flavored yogurts, chewing gum, children's vitamins, and roughly half the products shelved in the "healthy" aisle of any grocery store. Meanwhile, rates of obesity, insulin resistance, and metabolic disorders remain stubbornly high — exactly the conditions these products were engineered to help prevent. The sweeteners are not the sole explanation. But the idea that they carry zero metabolic consequences is no longer a position the evidence supports, and it was probably never as solid as the packaging implied.The M-wordNone of this requires burning your Splenda packets in the back yard, but the broader pattern is familiar enough to be dispiriting. Fat was the villain in 1990. Americans loaded up on SnackWell's cookies — fat-free, proudly labeled, stuffed with sugar — and ate them by the sleeve because the math seemed to check out. Sugar became the villain in 2010. Americans loaded up on artificially sweetened alternatives and called it progress.The villain rotates on a roughly 20-year cycle. The processed food industry introduces the replacement, funds the science that endorses it, and collects the revenue while researchers spend the next decade figuring out what went wrong. Then a new villain is identified, a new replacement is launched, and somewhere a marketing team opens a bottle of champagne that probably contains aspartame.The answer to every panic in that cycle was always moderation, a word so aggressively boring that it apparently requires a global dietary crisis every 10 years to get anyone's attention. It also means reframing what sugar actually is: not a poison to be eliminated but a pleasure to be savored, like good whiskey or compliments from your father. Save it for a nice piece of cake, a well-made dessert, the occasional spoon of honey stirred into morning tea with the uncomplicated satisfaction of someone who has stopped reading the label....Read More
Kamala Harris blasts Trump over surging gas prices tied to the Iran war, but her 2022 remarks on fuel costs and democracy highlight a stark contrast....Read More
The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously struck down a bizarre effort at climate lawfare, which aimed to penalize Chevron for its role in boosting the... Read More The post Supreme Court Strikes Down Climate Lawfare Attempt to Penalize Oil Companies for Helping US During World War II appeared first on The Daily Signal. ...Read More
The sentence raises huge questions marks over the political future of one of South Africa's most controversial politicians....Read More
When disbarment becomes a foreseeable consequence of advancing controversial legal theories in politically charged contexts, the effect is to narrow the range of permissible legal thought....Read More
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts reportedly offered preliminary approval to President Donald Trump's plan for a massive new monument in the nation's capital city....Read More
10-day ceasefire largely appears to hold even as Lebanese media report Israeli strike on motorcycle; Hezbollah says its 'finger on the trigger'; wartime restrictions lifted on public The post Netanyahu: Long ‘road to peace’ begins, as Trump says Israel ‘PROHIBITED’ from bombing Lebanon appeared first on The Times of Israel. ...Read More
An idea born out of a four-hour session at a Chick-fil-A may have the ability to both cheapen energy costs and solve data center production solutions.With land-grabs and land offers from Big Tech routinely popping up in the news cycle, citizens are concerned with how America's heartland could fall into the hands of tech companies that replace farming plots with gigantic rooms of computers.One company is asking why it can't just put those in the ocean.'Our goal is to make terawatts.'Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, said that he has been operating his ocean nodes in semi-secret for about 10 years.At about 66 feet wide and 260 feet tall, his company's floating nodes bob up and down with the ocean waves and create energy from the water that flows through them. The water is funneled through channels inside the nodes to create a pressurized system that spins turbines that connect to a generator and produce electricity.The object can move and steer on its own once in the water and is capable of traveling about 30 miles per day to ideal spots where the winds are most intense and thus create the most waves.Sheldon-Coulson told the Core Memory Podcast that each unit has an approximate cost of about $1 million and that while it is expensive now, the path to scaling could come in a couple of different ways.First, the energy production could be stored and brought back to shore, likely packaged as cheaper, cleaner energy. Panthalassa said it can produce electricity at about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, which is allegedly below the cost of solar energy and even natural gas in some jurisdictions.However, a faster track to success may be through the combination of floating data centers and satellite internet.RELATED: The crazy reason some AI obsessives love it when their chatbot talks like a caveman - YouTubeThe CEO said that his company is looking at the idea of putting processing units aboard its nodes, using the generated electricity to power them and of course the ocean water to cool them. Cooling is currently an expensive and integral process of shored AI data centers.The data processed in the ocean would then be digitally shipped off via satellite services like Starlink. Impressively, Panthalassa was founded before Starlink, meaning the company put at least some of its eggs into a basket that didn't quite exist yet.When asked about the AI data transfer and the speed at which it could actually travel by satellite (as opposed to fiber optics), Sheldon-Coulson noted that the speed of the input and output comes in very small quantities — text that is the size of kilobytes. It is actually the processing that takes up the time — which would theoretically take place aboard his ocean nodes — not the question taken in or the answer provided by a chatbot, for example.RELATED: The divisive issue that could decide the midterms now has $200 million on the line - YouTube"Our goal is to make terawatts," states the Panthalassa company's video. "The entire global electricity supply right now is about three and a half terawatts. We think we can do a significant fraction of that."The company has raised over $78 million in investment to date and has pointed to areas in the Southern Hemisphere as ideal spots for the nodes due to high wind speeds.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!...Read More
Nolte: Former President Barry Obama’s high opinion of himself extends to the $30 admission cost to visit his vast presidential library. The post Nolte: $30 Admission for Obama’s Presidential Library, Locals Must Show ID for Discount appeared first on Breitbart. ...Read More
Nolte: Former President Barry Obama’s high opinion of himself extends to the $30 admission cost to visit his vast presidential library. The post Nolte: $30 Admission for Obama’s Presidential Library, Locals Must Show ID for Discount appeared first on Breitbart. ...Read More
Bigme revealed it's dual-screen smartphone, and the internet wasn't happy about it....Read More
"Hunger Games" actor Ethan Jamieson was arrested in Raleigh, North Carolina, for allegedly assaulting three men with a deadly weapon....Read More
Spanberger is sending an unequivocal message — it's open season on those who would honor American history and the heritage of their ancestors....Read More
Pope Leo XIV is on his third day in Cameroon before he heads to Angola on Saturday....Read More
...Read More
Games like Words With Friends have become hunting grounds for romance scammers who build trust and then ask victims for untraceable gift card payments....Read More
The etiquette for dog ownership is simple and should be obvious. When followed, everyone is happier, including the dogs....Read More
...Read More
"Acting president" of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez on Thursday thanked President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for "goodwill" in restoring bilateral ties between their countries. The post Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez Praises Trump and Marco Rubio for ‘Goodwill’ with Country appeared first on Breitbart. ...Read More