TOP FOUR – Page 3

St. Patrick’s Day Is Near: Time To Toast … Your Liver

15Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TOP FOUR

St. Patrick’s Day Is Near: Time To Toast … Your Liver

St. Patrick’s Day is almost here, we have something to cheer over – our livers. If St. Patrick is celebrated for his unselfish commitment converting Ireland to Christianity, we should also celebrate the magnanimous dedication of our liver not only to process alcohol, but keep our whole body fed and alive. I am a biochemist, and every time I teach liver metabolism, I am in awe of all its accomplishments. Here are four reasons to be grateful to your liver. It metabolizes alcohol and other bad molecules The alcohol we consume can’t be directly excreted - it has to be transformed to be eliminated. Degrading alcohol is a multi-step process that happens in the liver, where cells metabolize it using a series of enzymes working in a tidy cascade of reactions. These enzymes will turn alco...

10Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SELF, TOP FOUR

Do You Have Fear Of Saying ‘No’

Are our fears of saying ‘no’ overblown? Everyone has been there. You get invited to something that you absolutely do not want to attend – a holiday party, a family cookout, an expensive trip. But doubts and anxieties creep into your head as you weigh whether to decline. You might wonder if you’ll upset the person who invited you. Maybe it’ll harm the friendship, or they won’t extend an invite to the next get-together. Should you just grit your teeth and go? Or are you worrying more than you should about saying “no”? An imaginary faux pas We explored these questions in a recently published study. In a pilot study that we ran ahead of the main studies, we found that 77% of our 51 respondents had accepted an invitation to an event that they didn’t want to attend, fearing blowback if...

10Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

CULTURE, TOP FOUR

A Canvas To Be Seen And Heard

For graffiti artists, abandoned skyscrapers in Miami and Los Angeles become a canvas for regular people to be seen and heard. The three qualities that matter most in real estate also matter the most to graffiti artists: location, location, location. In Miami and Los Angeles, cities that contain some of the most expensive real estate in the U.S., graffiti artists have recently made sure their voices can be heard and seen, even from the sky. In what’s known as “graffiti bombing,” artists in both cities swiftly and extensively tagged downtown skyscrapers that had been abandoned. The efforts took place over the course of a few nights in December 2023 and late January 2024, with the results generating a mix of admiration and condemnation. KTLA 5 news highlights public outrage over a graff...

The Impact Of Community-Based Entrepreneurs Solving The Local News Crisis

10Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

The Impact Of Community-Based Entrepreneurs Solving The Local News Crisis

Community-based entrepreneurs are leading the way in solving the local news crisis. The local news crisis has led to no end of policy proposals, funding initiatives and angry denunciations of the harm done to journalism by the likes of Craigslist, Google and Facebook. Ideas for responding to the crisis include paying recent journalism school graduates with state tax revenues to cover underserved communities, as in California; mandating that state agencies direct half of their spending on advertising to community media, as has been proposed in Illinois; and creating tax credits that would benefit subscribers, advertisers and publishers, the subject of several federal and state initiatives. And those are just a few. Though all of these have some merit, they share a fundamental flaw: They...

Teenagers Can Often Spot Financial Struggles

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism, TOP FOUR

Teenagers Can Often Spot Financial Struggles

Teenagers often know when their parents are having money problems − and that knowledge is linked to mental health challenges, new research finds. When parents try to shield their kids from financial hardship, they may be doing them a favor: Teens’ views about their families’ economic challenges are connected to their mental health and behavior. That’s the main finding of a study into household income and child development that I recently conducted with my colleagues. As a professor of psychology, I know there’s a good deal of research showing that young people who experience more household economic hardship tend to have more behavioral problems. But most studies on this issue rely heavily on caregiver reports – that is, what adults say about their kids. Fewer researchers have asked you...

10Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IMPACT, TOP FOUR

The Downside To ‘Springing Forward’

Could the days of ‘springing forward’ be numbered? A neurologist and sleep expert explains the downside to that borrowed hour of daylight. As people in the U.S. prepare to set their clocks ahead one hour on Sunday, March 10, 2024, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time to daylight saving time. About one-third of Americans say they don’t look forward to these twice-yearly time changes. And nearly two-thirds would like to eliminate them completely, compared with 17% who aren’t sure and 21% who would like to keep moving their clocks back and forth. But the effects go beyond simple inconvenience. Researchers are discovering that “springing ahead” each March is connected with serious negative...

The Impact Of Saving The News Media On Society

28Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IMPACT, TOP FOUR

The Impact Of Saving The News Media On Society

Saving the news media means moving beyond the benevolence of billionaires. For the journalism industry, 2024 is off to a brutal start. Most spectacularly, the Los Angeles Times recently slashed more than 20% of its newsroom. Though trouble had long been brewing, the layoffs were particularly disheartening because many employees and readers hoped the Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would stay the course in good times and bad – that he would be a steward less interested in turning a profit and more concerned with ensuring the storied publication could serve the public. According to the LA Times, Soon-Shiong explained that the cuts were necessary because the paper “could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year.” As one X user pointed out, Soon-Shiong could weather US$4...

28Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

CULTURE, SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

Where Did The Time Go?

Why is free time still so elusive? There have been massive gains in productivity over the past century. So why are people still working so hard for so long? Output per worker increased by almost 300% between 1950 and 2018 in the U.S. The standard American workweek, meanwhile, has remained unchanged, at about 40 hours. This paradox is especially notable in the U.S., where the average work year is 1,767 hours compared with 1,354 in Germany, a difference largely due to Americans’ lack of vacation time. Some might argue that Americans are just more hardworking. But shouldn’t more productive work be rewarded with more time free from work? This is the central theme of my new book, “Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal.” Keynes misses the mark Many economists see the status quo mostly as ...

Uncovering The Reasons Behind The Astonishing Rise In LGBTQ+ Romance Literature

28Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

LGBTQ, LIFESTYLE, TOP FOUR

Uncovering The Reasons Behind The Astonishing Rise In LGBTQ+ Romance Literature

What’s behind the astonishing rise in LGBTQ+ romance literature? A major transformation is underway in Romancelandia. Once upon a time, romance novels from major U.S. publishers featured only heterosexual couples. Today, the five biggest publishers regularly release same-sex love stories. From May 2022 to May 2023, sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew by 40%, with the next biggest jump in this period occurring for general adult fiction, which grew just 17%. The data from 2023 extends a boom that began in 2016: In the five years from May 2016 to May 2021, sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew by a jaw-dropping 740%. It’s tempting to see this trend as a sign of the times. After all, same-sex couples now populate TV shows, commercials and even Hallmark Christmas movies. Surely it was only natural for books su...

Lorne Michaels — Nearly 50 Years Of Comedy Gold

28Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

CELEBRITY NEWS, TOP FOUR, VIDEO REELS

Lorne Michaels — Nearly 50 Years Of Comedy Gold

Lorne Michaels, the man behind the curtain at ‘Saturday Night Live,’ has been minting comedy gold for nearly 50 years. On April 24, 1976, Lorne Michaels, the creator and producer of the late-night NBC comedy program “Saturday Night” – it had not yet changed its name to “Saturday Night Live” – appeared on camera in hopes of luring the Beatles to reunite on the program. The Fab Four’s last concert had been eight years earlier in San Francisco, and the band had stopped recording together in 1969. Michaels addressed the band members by name – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – and then acknowledged rumors that the group might get back together. “It’s also been said that no one has yet to come up with enough money to satisfy you,” Michaels said. “Well, if it’s money ...