The History of Heart Disease
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
31 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Justin Timberlake Jokes He's 'Not Doing S--- Today' as He Returns Home from Tour amid Lyme Disease Diagnosis
NEED TO KNOW Justin Timberlake is "not doing s---" as he relaxes at home, following the end of his two-year Forget Tomorrow World Tour and his Lyme disease diagnosis In an Instagram Stories photo posted Aug. 4, Timberlake, 44, could be seen posing in a sweatshirt that reads: "I'm not doing s--- today. Mission accomplished" Timberlake shared the news about his recent diagnosis with fans on July 31Justin Timberlake is spending his time relaxing at home, following the end of his two-year Forget Tomorrow World Tour and his Lyme disease diagnosis. In an Instagram Stories photo posted on Monday, Aug. 4, the NSYNC alum, 44, could be seen posing in a sweatshirt that reads: "I'm not doing s--- today. Mission accomplished," as he sticks his tongue out for the camera. Related: Timberlake shared the news about his Lyme disease diagnosis with fans in his Instagram Stories and in his feed on Thursday, July 31. "I've been battling some health issues, and was diagnosed with Lyme disease — which I don't say so you feel bad for me — but to shed some light on what I've been up against behind the scenes," the 'SexyBack' singer wrote. "If you've experienced this disease or know someone who has — then you're aware: living with this can be relentlessly debilitating, both mentally and physically." Transmitted from the bite of an infected tick, Lyme disease can cause flu-like symptoms such as headaches, joint pain, fatigue, or a fever, per the Cleveland Clinic. It's often diagnosed by a rash resembling a bullseye around on the tick bite, and can be confirmed with a Lyme disease blood test. The announcement came just as he ended the Forget Tomorrow World Tour. Earlier in the tour, Timberlake canceled or postponed various shows due to an ongoing back injury, bronchitis and laryngitis, and an ankle injury. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. A number of the musician's friends and family members have come out in support of him amid the announcement, including his wife Jessica Biel. A family source told PEOPLE soon after Timberlake's announcement that the news has brought Timberlake "clarity" and that Biel has been "incredibly supportive" of him during this time. "He's not 20 anymore. But when his symptoms worsened, he realized something deeper was going on," the source said. "He pushed through for months before finally getting answers. The Lyme disease diagnosis brought clarity to a series of unexplained issues that he's been quietly dealing with." As the insider explained, Timberlake's focus is now on treatment and recovery following the conclusion of his tour. "He's taking it seriously. The plan is to rest, spend time with Jess and the kids and do everything he can to heal," the family source said of the couple, who are parents to sons Silas, 10, and Phineas, 5. "He loved touring and being back onstage, but he's also relieved it's over. Now he can focus on his health." Read the original article on People
Forbes
43 minutes ago
- Forbes
Inside Look: The Ranch, Hudson Valley Review
The Ranch Hudson Valley mansion in Sloatsburg, New York. The Ranch You can tell a lot about a place by its phraseology. Here at the Ranch Hudson Valley, the newest outpost from the people who brought you the Ranch Malibu, there are a lot of therapists running around in yoga pants using breathy phrases like: 'Be present. Connect with your life force.' Or, 'You are not your body. You are your breath.' Or, the modern spa-goer's phrase du jour : 'This will heal you at the cellular level.' Let's just say, if you have yet to experience 'Ranch Life,' go with a solid sense of humor, and you'll be just fine. Better, even. It is, after all, an award-winning wellness retreat with a 50% repeat guest return rate for a reason. Given the rigor of the Ranch's diet and exercise program, and the basic rules of biology, it's hard to imagine not seeing positive results. (During my four-day stint, I lost two pounds, gained ten new friends, and consumed absolutely zero alcohol. I'm now the kind of person who can proudly decipher lettuce varieties at my local farmer's market). But first, a general word of warning: If any therapist anywhere promises to: 'heal you at the cellular level' without being able to explain how a treatment works — say, an IV vitamin drip or a high-frequency facial wand — first, laugh (because all humans are made of cells) and then seek the nearest exit. It's an obvious red flag, and a pervasive one in the $7.3 trillion wellness industry, which is and always has been vulnerable to pseudo-scientists and snake oil salesmen. The Ranch's appeal is the opposite: No radical health claims, just a deep dedication to naturalism. Yes, there is a cushy kumbaya vibe (group hugs happen), but they've smartly avoided med-spa fads, and the buzzword 'longevity' is not bandied about. No one at the Ranch tells you that a three or four-day program will actually extend your life span. The original Malibu program is 6-8 days, not four. But Hudson Valley, NY attracts east coast A-types like the tech entrepreneurs, film producers and hedge fund managers who populated our June group. Good luck getting them to unplug for a full week; though ironically they're the ones who need it most. Bring it in, you're on "Ranch time". Courtesy The Ranch What the Ranch does instead is present you with healthy habits (while discreetly removing unhealthy options), in the hopes that you'll actually implement them. There are no short-cuts; this is better health, for the long haul. And screens are discouraged. During orientation in the Great Room, originally built in 1902, you'll hear something like this: 'Take this as an opportunity to disconnect from the outside world. Find some time to reconnect with yourself. If you participate in our digital detox, I highly encourage it. Let our team take care of you. We have been doing this, helping people move, using movement as medicine, food as medicine, and community as healing for over 15 years now,' says Stacy, the yoga instructor-slash-emcee. It all sounds very nice as you let yourself sink into plush cloud couches, sipping a creamy green smoothie while trying to resist the urge to take photos of the marble fireplace with your smartphone and just 'be present.' Then things get real: This is the living room where orientation happens. Courtesy The Ranch 'You'll be working hard if you do the program all the way through, meaning six or more hours of exercise in a day. So work hard, and rejuvenate harder. Utilize our daily massages, our cold plunge and our infrared sauna,' she adds, before introducing Glenn, our trail guide. We'll be hiking Ramapo Lake Loop Trails in New Jersey and Claudius Smith's Den in Harriman State Park, New York—both stunning public trails which feature wild forest canopies, babbling brooks, rock formations and even waterfalls I never knew existed. He warns us about local wildlife, including black bears, brown snakes, copperheads and the occasional rattle snake: 'Just give them some time and space, and they'll slither out of sight in just a few minutes.' Thankfully, we do not have any dangerous animal encounters on our excursions. And we're frankly far more concerned with checking our post-hike bodies for ticks (no bites were reported). But, six hours of exercise per day is no joke. The reprieve is simply that mornings and evenings are book-ended by yoga, stretching and 'breathwork,' which counts. Yoga and fitness sessions occur in the mansion's former ballroom. Jennifer Leigh Parker Rise and Shine, Ranchers The day begins promptly at 6am, at which point a staffer rings Tibetan bells outside your door to coax you from sweet slumber. You've got 30 minutes to suit up and get downstairs to the ballroom-turned-yoga studio, to commence morning yoga beneath the carved crown moldings of what used to be a roaring twenties ballroom. Then, everyone lines up for coffee rations (one cup a day), and sits down to breakfast in a beautiful, sun-dappled Orangery with views down the rolling lawn to Sheppard Pond. Farm-fresh eggs are offered for not-really-Vegans, and the deep bowls of hearty homemade Ranch granola with oat milk and blueberries are delightful. But don't lolly-gag. By 7:30am, everyone's out in the van. Our toes have been taped, we're lathered in sunblock, sprayed with insect repellant, and ready (or not) for a two or four hour morning hike. (You get to choose which group you're in at the two-hour mark). After the hike, a van returns you to the English manor-style mudroom where you can ice your sore feet in silver bowls infused with lavender oil and rose petals (don't knock it until you've tried it). Then, lunch is served — such as veggie fajitas with Mexican wild rice and guacamole or cobb salad with Ranch vegan dressing — followed by an afternoon of massages and optional extras, which range from high-intensity strength training to high-colonics, reiki energy healing, meditation and journaling classes or hypnotherapy. Yes, you could just take a nap and marvel at the fact that they've already done your laundry from the day before and laid it out on your insanely comfortable Beautyrest bed billowing with Vivreluxe sheets and Primaloft pillows (I checked). But the main event — communal dinner — is not to be missed. This is the social gathering where budding friendships are forged, and real connections are made. The Orangery hosts intimate communal meals. Jennifer Leigh Parker Dinner promptly begins at 7pm in the Orangery, allowing time for declarations of gratitude for the comforting meal placed before us by Executive Chef Michael Narciso. Candles have been lit, the mood is self-congratulatory (you made it through the day!) and the cacophony of conversation slowly rises like the steam hovering over our fancy-farmhouse dishes of basil crusted zucchini ravioli and miso butter leaf salad, which elegantly ends with cups of bourbon vanilla tea or sleepy citrus chamomile. Of course, someone inevitably cracks this chestnut: ' boy, I could really go for a slice of cheesecake right now!' Instead, we drink in the sweetness of summer solstice by meandering barefoot on the lawn as twilight descends slowly. One by one, we retreat to our respective quarters. Come fall and winter, this will become a crackling fireside ritual, and instead of cheesecake, we'll be swathed in flannel and longing for spiked hot chocolate. If, at this point, you're thinking: There's no way I could do any of this , I, too, shared your sentiments. My initial train of thought went something like: I'm a night owl, not a morning person! I don't need a tiny bell, so much as caffeinated jumper cables to get out of bed at 6am. Espresso and red wine are my two favorite food groups, and why should 'healthy' mean depriving myself of life's small but great pleasures? And if I so much as faintly hear the rattle of a snake, that's it, I'm retreating to this corner of the couch and clutching my mug of ginger turmeric tea and reading a Shteyngart novel until it's time for bed! But I stick it out. Because mixing peer pressure with a strict routine actually works. You do it because everyone here (25-30 people max) is doing it with you. There's a powerfully cohesive 'we're in this together' mental glue that has the amazing effect of making people do things they're visibly uncomfortable doing — like cold plunging and weight lifting — with a smile. Because we're all blithely aware of the fact that this whole sweaty week of spandex and trading nighttime magnesium pills like contraband with high-strung strangers without makeup is a privilege . The newly refurbed entrance is a Steven Gambrel signature. Courtesy The Ranch New Owners, New Era? The Ranch Malibu was established in the Santa Monica Mountains by Alex and Sue Glasscock fifteen years ago and quickly earned a reputation as a weight-loss bootcamp disguised as a luxury wellness retreat, with cultural significance. This was around the time the 'Biggest Loser' tv show was peaking in popularity, and of course, before America had access to Ozempic and GLP-1 drugs. Fast forward to today, and Malibu continues to attract people from all over the country looking not just for weight loss, but for full 'resets.' On the East Coast, the Glasscocks saw a new opportunity in the form of a 40,000-square-foot stone mansion set on a verdant 200-acre plot in the Hudson Valley, which is looking more like Napa every day. Originally, the mansion was a wedding gift from JP Morgan to his daughter in 1907. Today, it's looking better than ever. The Glasscocks tapped A-list interior designer Steven Gambrel to transform the property's guest rooms, spa, and former ballroom. The result is a stately mansion with 26 sophisticated guest rooms layered in deep blues and warm gray tones, creating an aesthetic that blends classical American design with contemporary functionality. There are wood-burning fireplaces, quiet reading nooks, and a new solarium and sauna — all anchored around a grand marble staircase that, come morning, is bathed in ethereal light. The refurb was complete by early 2024, when the property opened to guests and Town Lane Investment Group made an (undisclosed) offer Alex and Sue couldn't refuse. They sold the company, and Town Lane quickly hired London-born Victoria Nickle, a Four Seasons wellness veteran, to act as President and CEO. 'Town Lane felt that they needed someone to come in and oversee the day to day operation, of course. But it's also about strategy: What does the Ranch look like for the next five to 10 years?' said Nickle during our sit-down interview. Typically, when original owners back away and an investment group takes over, profits get prioritized over experience. But there are a lot of influential eyes on this property, with avid fans. Will the heart of the program remain intact or be changed to fuel an expansion? Here's what Nickle revealed: This fall, there are plans to expand the dock on the lake, known as Sheppard Pond, where guests will be able to kayak. They will begin to plant a vegetable and herb garden on their 200-acres (farm animals are not in the cards, given the price of animal feed). They are also talking to the New York and New Jersey Trail Association to create private trails in Harriman State Park for Ranch guests. In winter, snowshoeing and tobogganing down the hill are added to the lineup. The much bigger change is dietary. 'For the first time in Ranch history, probably around fall of this year, we will be introducing some organic, sustainable animal proteins. We've been vegan all of this time, which has stood us really well. Plant based is still always going to be our number one philosophy. But for the past couple of years protein has been such a big topic. And we've seen people sneaking protein bars into their guest rooms throughout the program,' says Nickle, chuckling. 'Well, this is how coffee started, right?' This is true. When guests start sneaking secret coffee grounds, staffers pay attention. But it does sound like a slippery slope. In my humble opinion, not having meat on the menu was a nice break, as was not having wine on the table. What's next, martinis and cigars? Having previously served as Executive Director for the Center for Health and Well-being at Four Seasons in California's Westlake Village, she knows her clientele. With emphasis, she adds: 'We want to give people the choice. That word is probably the biggest thing that will come into the Ranch in the future. Because it is a choice.' The Words That Stick On the drive home, my backseat filled with charcoal-infused sea salt, lemon soap, and the phone numbers of ten new friends, I did in fact experience a rush of mental clarity. Having done all the meditation and the journaling, the lifting and the sweating, the heartfelt gratitude sharing and the sound bowl vibrating, I honestly felt energetic, open, and optimistic for things-to-come. A quack might say I was 'listening to my life force'... I think back to Carlos' excellent breathwork class, and what he said on day one: 'Your fulfillment is your responsibility.' By day four, I'm a believer, because I had allowed it to sink in. With a renewed sense of purpose and the roof pulled back, I cranked up the music and pressed on the accelerator. More From Forbes Forbes Luxury Fly Fishing Is A Thing — Where To Cast In Big Sky, Montana By Jennifer Leigh Parker Forbes Virgin Atlantic Unveils Free Starlink Wi-Fi, OpenAI Partnership And More By Jennifer Leigh Parker Forbes Why Now Is The Time To Sail The Azores, In 12 Stunning Photos By Jennifer Leigh Parker
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
A wasting disease killed millions of sea stars. After years of searching, scientists just found a cause.
'It was like a battleground,' Drew Harvell remembers. 'It was really horrible.' She's reflecting on a time in December 2013, on the coast of Washington state, when she went out at low tide and saw hundreds of sick, dying sea stars. 'There were arms that had just fallen off the stars,' she says. 'It was really like a bomb had gone off.' The stars were suffering from something known as sea star wasting disease. It's a sickness that sounds like something out of a horror movie: Stars can develop lesions in their bodies. Eventually, their arms can detach and crawl away from them before the stars disintegrate completely. Harvell is a longtime marine ecologist whose specialty is marine diseases. And she was out for this low tide in 2013 because a massive outbreak of this seastar wasting had started spreading up and down the West Coast — from Mexico to Alaska — ultimately affecting around 20 distinct species of sea stars and wiping out entire populations in droves. In the decade since, some species have been able to bounce back, but others, like the sunflower sea star, continue to struggle. In California, for example, sunflower stars have almost completely died out. The question in 2013 was: What, exactly, was killing all these stars? While marine ecologists like Harvell could recognize the symptoms of seastar wasting, they weren't actually sure what was causing the disease. From the very beginning, though, it was something they wanted to figure out. And so, soon after the outbreak started, they collected sea stars to see if they could find a pathogen or other cause responsible for the wasting. The hunt for the culprit of this terrible, mysterious disease was on. Unfortunately, it was not straightforward. ' When this disease outbreak happened, we knew quite little about what was normal [in sea stars],' says Alyssa Gehman, who is also a marine disease ecologist. She says that when researchers are trying to do similar work to chase down a pathogen in, say, humans, they have an enormous trove of information to draw on about what bacteria and viruses are common to the human body, and what might be unusual. Not so for sea stars. ' We maybe had a little bit of information, but absolutely not enough to be able to really tease that out easily.' Also, Gehman says, there can be a lag before the disease expresses itself, so some stars have the pathogen that caused the disease, but don't present with symptoms yet, making it harder for scientists to even distinguish between sick stars and healthy ones as they run their tests. So even though a research team identified a virus that they thought might be associated with the wasting disease as early as 2014, over time, it became clear that it was most likely not the culprit, but rather just a virus present in many sea stars. 'The results were always confusing,' Harvell remembers. In the decade since the initial mass outbreak, other researchers have proposed other theories, but none have brought them to a definitive answer either. And yet, it became increasingly clear that an answer was needed, because people started to realize just how important the sunflower stars they had lost really were. ' We actually learned a lot from losing so many of these animals at once,' Gehman says. Before the outbreak, she says, they'd known that sunflower stars — giant sea stars that can be the size of dinner plates, or even bike tires — were skillful hunters and voracious eaters. They even knew that many things on the seafloor would run away from them. Gehman remembers taking a class on invertebrates back in college, where she learned that if you put even just the arm of a sunflower star in a tank with scallops, 'the tank would explode with scallops swimming everywhere trying to get away.' But all that fearsome hunting was, it seems, pretty key to ecosystem health. In many places, she says, ' after the sea sunflower stars were lost, the urchin populations exploded.' And so the die-off of the sunflower star and the explosion of urchins has been connected to the collapse of the Northern California kelp forests, a marine ecosystem that provides a home for a rich diversity of species. A cross-state, cross-organizational partnership between the Nature Conservancy and a variety of research institutions is working hard to breed sunflower seastars in captivity in the hopes that they can be reintroduced to the coast and reassume their role in their ecosystems. But as Harvell remembers, she and Gehman knew that no recovery project would be successful if they couldn't find the cause of sea star wasting disease. 'You're not gonna be able to get these stars back in nature if you don't know what's killing them,' she says. So in 2021, as part of the larger partnership, Harvell and Gehman, along with a number of their colleagues, launched into an epidemiological detective project. Their quest: to finally pin down the cause of seastar wasting disease. 'Really the work over the four years was done in the trenches by Dr. Melanie Prentice and Dr. Alyssa Gehman,' Harvell says, 'and then one of my students, Grace Crandall.' It was an emotionally difficult project because it required Gehman and her colleagues to deliberately infect many stars with the disease. 'It feels bad,' she admits, and they would be open about that in the lab, 'but we also can remember that we're doing this for the good of the whole species.' That work has paid off, though, and now, after four years of research, they've nailed their culprit in a paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution today. What follows is a conversation with Drew Harvell, edited for clarity and length, about what she and her collaborators found, how marine ecologists do this kind of detective work, and what identifying the culprit could mean for the future health of seastars. How did you start the journey to figure out what actually had happened? Well, we chose to work with the sunflower star because we knew it was the most susceptible and therefore was going to give us the most clear-cut results. So we set up at Marrowstone Point, which was the USGS Fisheries virus lab [in Washington state], because that would give us the proper quarantine conditions and lots of running seawater. The proper quarantine conditions — what does that mean? All of the outflow water has to be cleansed of any potential virus or bacterium, and so all of the water has to be run through virus filters and also actually bleached in the end, so that we're sure that nothing could get out. We did not want to do this work at our lab, Friday Harbor Labs, or at any of the Hakai labs in Canada because we were really worried that if we were holding animals with an infectious agent in our tanks without really stringent quarantine protocols, that we could be contributing to the outbreak. So you have these sea stars. They're in this quarantined environment. What is the methodology here? What are you doing to them or with them? So the question is: Is there something in a diseased star that's making a healthy star sick? And that's like the most important thing to demonstrate right from the beginning — that it is somehow transmissible. And so Melanie and Alyssa early on showed that even water that washed over a sick star would make healthy stars sick, and if you co-house them in the same aquarium, the healthy ones would always get sick when they were anywhere near or exposed to the water from a diseased star. There's something in the water. That's right. There's something in the water. But they wanted to refine it a little bit more and know that it was something directly from the diseased star. And so they created a slurry from the tissues of the disease star and injected that into the healthy star to be able to show that there really was something infectious from the disease star that was making the healthy star sick and then die. And then you control those kinds of what we call 'challenge experiments' by inactivating in some way that slurry of infected disease stuff. And in this case, what they were able to do was to 'heat-kill' [any pathogens in this slurry] by heating it up. And so the thing that was very successful right from the beginning was that the stars that were infected with a presumptive disease got sick and died, and the controls essentially stayed healthy. You do that control to make sure that it's not like…injecting a slurry into a star is what makes them sick? That's right. And you're also having animals come in sick, right? So you want to know that they weren't just gonna get sick anyway. You want to be sure that it was what you did that actually affected their health status. So you have a slurry — like a milkshake of sea star — and you know that within it is a problematic agent of some kind. How do you figure out what is in that milkshake that is the problem? The real breakthrough came when Alyssa had the idea that maybe we should try a cleaner infection source and decided to test the coelomic fluid, which is basically the blood of the star. With a syringe, you can extract the coelomic fluid of the sick star and you can also heat-kill it, and you can do the same experiment challenging with that. And it was a really exciting moment because she and Melanie confirmed that that was a really effective way of transmitting the disease because it's cleaner. It's cleaner, like there's less stuff than in the tissue? Like blood is just like a simpler material? Right. So, that was really the beginning of being able to figure out what it was that was in the coelomic fluid that was causing the disease. So basically it's like: … So it seems like it might be ingredient B that's causing the problem here because it's consistent across all samples? Yeah, that's exactly it. And so then that was very, very incredibly exciting. Wow. There's this one bacterium — Vibrio pectenicida — that's showing up in all of the diseased material samples. Could it be that? We weren't sure. We sort of thought, after 12 years, this is gonna be something so strange! So weird! You know, something alien that we've never seen before. And so to have a Vibrio — something that we think of as a little bit more common — turn up was really surprising. Then one of our colleagues at the University of British Columbia, Amy Chan, was able to culture that particular bacterium from the disease star. And so now she had a pure culture of the presumptive killer. And then last summer, Melanie and Alyssa were able to test that again under quarantine conditions and find that it immediately killed the stars that were tested. How did you all feel? Oh, we were definitely dancing around the room. It was — just such a happy moment of fulfillment. I really do like to say that at the beginning of the task that Nature Conservancy handed us — to figure out the causative agent — we told them again and again that this is a very risky project. We can't guarantee we're going to be successful. So yeah, we were incredibly elated when we really felt confident in the answer. It was just hundreds and hundreds of hours of tests and challenge experiments that came out so beautifully. What does it mean to finally have an answer here? What are the next steps? This was the part of it that really kept me awake at night because I just felt so worried early on at the idea that we were working on a roadmap to recovery of a species without knowing what was killing it, and I just felt like we couldn't do it if we were flying blind like that. We wouldn't know what season the pathogenic agent came around. We wouldn't know what its environmental reservoirs were. We didn't know what was making stars susceptible. It was going to be really hard, and it wasn't going to feel right to just put animals out in the wild without knowing more. And so knowing that this is one of the primary causative agents — maybe the only causative agent — allows us to test for it in the water. It allows us to find out if there are some bays where this is being concentrated, to find out if there are some foods the stars are eating that are concentrating this bacterium and delivering a lethal dose to a star. Now we'll be able to answer those questions, and I think that's going to give us a really good opportunity to design better strategies for saving them. It feels like you now have a key to use to sort of unlock various pieces of this. We totally do. And it's so exciting and so gratifying because that's what we're supposed to do, right? As scientists and as disease ecologists, we're supposed to solve these mysteries. And it feels really great to have solved this one. And I don't think there's a day in the last 12 years that I haven't thought about it and been really frustrated we didn't know what it was. So it's particularly gratifying to me to have to have reached this point. Drew Harvell is the author of many popular science books about marine biology and ecology, including her latest, The Ocean's Menagerie. She also wrote a book about marine disease called Ocean Outbreak. Solve the daily Crossword
