Latest news with #CuttingEdge
What's On
05-07-2025
- Business
- What's On
Beyond the Buzzcut: Men's salons in Dubai that do it all
These barbershops go far beyond your average trim. Whether you're prepping for a big event or just want to freshen up your look, here are three stylish men's salons in Dubai worth checking out 1847 For Men A premium spot for the modern gent, 1847 is one of Dubai's most trusted names in men's grooming. Their services go far beyond just a quick trim – we're talking hot towel shaves, facials, waxing, massages, hair removal, mani-pedis, and even advanced hair replacement solutions. What sets them apart? They broke a Guinness World Record for the most beard trims and shaves by a team in eight hours. Now that's grooming greatness. Location: 12 locations across Dubai including Emirates Towers, City Walk, and Dubai Hills Mall Contact: Tel: (0)4 330 1847, Skills DXB Skills DXB is a premium barbershop that blends old-school grooming with modern style. Located in Dubai Silicon Oasis, this award-winning spot offers a sleek setting and expert service, with a full range of hair, face, and grooming treatments. Services include everything from precision haircuts and beard trims to advanced hair treatments, facials, waxing, and mani-pedis. Unique offerings like hair braiding, hair botox, and scalp micropigmentation set skills apart, making it a go-to destination for complete men's grooming. Location: Skills DXB, Clover Bay Tower, Business Bay, Marasi Drive Contact: Tel: (0)50 624 2005, Cutting Edge Gents Salon Cutting Edge is a sleek and modern barbershop delivering professional grooming services in the heart of Dubai. With branches in Business Bay and Dubai Marina, this contemporary salon offers a full suite of treatments – from classic haircuts and hot towel shaves to facials, waxing, massages, and hand and foot care. What sets Cutting Edge apart are its luxurious service options, including diamond peel facials, deep tissue massages, and rejuvenating hair treatments. It's a one-stop shop for gents looking to refresh their look in style. Location: 5 locations across Dubai including JLT and Ibn Battuta Mall Contact: Tel: (0)4 360 8899, Images: Instagram > Sign up for FREE to get exclusive updates that you are interested in
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Can Sound Therapy Really Heal Your Brain?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." The term 'nervous breakdown' is no longer used—'mental-health crisis' is the nomenclature du jour—but I think I had one two years ago. My journey into the psychological night was precipitated by a propensity for clinical depression and catalyzed by the death of my father, the loss of two friends to suicide, and my husband's transition into a wheelchair after years of chronic illness. I don't believe that sound therapy cured me. I gradually escaped the darkness through medical intervention from a brilliant Russian psychiatrist who was well worth his exorbitant fee. But throughout my odyssey, I relied on sound-healing tools for comfort. I regularly attended in-person sound baths with a Los Angeles sound-bowl practitioner, Devon Cunningham, which helped me return to the world by lying on a mat in public, surrounded by strangers. At home, I soothed anxiety using a YouTube video with a very long title: 'SLEEP RELEASE [Insomnia Healing] Deeply Relaxing Sleep Music * Binaural Beats.' The 'SLEEP RELEASE' audio that accompanied me through what Emily Dickinson would call 'a funeral in my brain' was created by a musician from the Netherlands who, like Prince, is simply named Zac. Zac's YouTube channel, @SleepTube, offers a seemingly infinite collection of audio tracks with subtitles like 'Binaural Delta Brainwaves @2.0Hz' to alleviate worry and foster sleep. He has nearly a million subscribers, including one video ('The DEEPEST Healing Sleep | 3.2Hz Delta Brain Waves | REM Sleep Music – Binaural Beats') that has racked up more than 45 million views. But Zac's free YouTube channel is only the tip of the contemporary sound-healing iceberg. International media-music and intellectual-property giant Cutting Edge has launched a wellness division, Myndstream, and is currently partnering on wellness music with producer and rapper Timbaland, as well as on an album with Sigur Rós's Jónsi. In a 2023 interview with Harper's Bazaar, Reese Witherspoon espoused the benefits of falling asleep to binaural beats, and on a recent episode of Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast, actress Rashida Jones discussed using sound-wave technology to manage road rage. So why has sound healing, which has a 2,000-year history rooted in the singing bowls of Nepal, Tibet, and India, become so popular in the Western zeitgeist? What exactly is a binaural beat? And what does it do to our brains? Manuela Kogon, a clinical professor and integrative-medicine internist at the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine, describes binaural beats as an 'auditory illusion.' 'If you give the brain two different sounds that have different frequencies but are close together—within 30 hertz of each other—the brain is like, 'What the fuck? There are two sounds. What am I supposed to do?' ' she explains. 'The brain can't differentiate that. It can't say that it's two; it also can't say it's one. It just averages the difference and hallucinates a new sound. It's kind of funny.' The binaural beat may be newly viral, but Kogon points out that they've been around for more than a hundred years. A German scientist named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered them and published a paper about his findings in 1839. Kogon, a self-described 'brain junkie,' has been studying them for decades; she digs out one of her papers from the '90s for me where she states that 'binaural beats have been purported to induce mood alterations, contingent on the beat frequency. Claims range from entraining the whole brain to altering states of consciousness.' Modern sound healing is not limited to binaural beats alone. Modalities include sound baths, guided meditation, tuning-fork therapy, vibroacoustic therapy, audiovisual technology, and music therapy, and the espoused results range from mood enhancement, sleep improvement, stress reduction, and relaxation to wilder claims of destroying cancer cells and manifesting wealth. A binaural beat or sound bath has not been proven to cure cancer or make you rich, but the beneficial effects of sound healing, according to Kogon, involve 'modulating physiology, including blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, EEG … altering immune and endocrine function, and improving pain, anxiety, nausea, fatigue, and depression and have been extensively studied.' Like many alternative wellness treatments and approaches, sound therapy seems to have increased in popularity during Covid. 'We were all stuck at home,' says New York–based sound-healing practitioner Lavender Suarez, author of the book Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives. 'So how could we get these same healing tools?' A sound-healing practitioner for 10 years and an experimental musician for 20, with an academic background in counseling and art therapy, Suarez uses physical instruments like gongs, often in repetitive patterns that function in similar brain-entraining ways to digital audio files. She's wary, though, of the claims tossed around related to sound frequencies. 'When people are prescriptive about sound frequencies, I'm like, hold on. Brain waves and sound waves are not in direct correlation,' she says. 'I think the interest in specific frequencies comes from our culture's obsession with data. We want that single-shot fix that's always been building in the wellness industry. How do we get to things quicker, faster? 'I only have X amount of time.' ' The impact of sound on healing may be just as much about the recipient's goals as it is about the healer's design. 'It's more about the intentions you're putting behind these binaural beats when you're listening,' Suarez says. 'When people are listening to these essentially generic audio files online, they're taking what they're bringing into it. The creator is trying to steer the intention by saying, 432 Hz for self-love. You go into it thinking, 'Okay, self-love.' But you could listen to binaural beats for sleep and go for a jog.' I spoke with Robert Koch, an official musical partner of the Monroe Institute, which bills itself as 'the world's leading education center for the study of human consciousness' and has extensive programming around sound technology to 'empower the journey to self-discovery.' Koch, who goes by the stage name Robot Koch, is an L.A.-based composer, producer, and sonic innovator who began his career as a heavy-metal drummer. He now embeds signals produced by the Monroe Institute into his compositions. 'I'm my own guinea pig,' says Koch. 'I try these things on myself, and I can tell when something works on my nervous system because I get more relaxed. I trust it to be real because I experience it subjectively.' Koch sent me a Spotify link to one of his Monroe Institute collaborations, titled 'Ocean Consciousness.' I found the track relaxing and sleep-inducing, though the sirenic voices peppered throughout the piece made me melancholic. Maybe that's the point. 'It's powerful when people write to me about experiences they've had with my music helping them move through something emotional,' says Koch. 'Music isn't just entertainment. It's a language that speaks to the subconscious.' Virginia-based sound therapist and musician Guy Blakeslee works with clients on everything from alleviating anxiety and increasing physical energy to manifesting love and assisting with fertility issues. Blakeslee interviews his clients and then creates personalized 'sonic talismans' using custom blends of sounds, including Mellotron and Nord synthesizer tones, dolphin and whale sounds, honeybee sounds, and a heartbeat. 'Have you ever gotten anyone pregnant?' I ask him. 'I have met the baby,' he says. Blakeslee always believed in the healing properties of music, but it wasn't until he was hit by a car and suffered a traumatic brain injury that he began pursuing music as therapy. 'It was March 13, 2020, and I was unconscious in the hospital when lockdown took effect,' he says. 'I woke up in the pandemic with this brain injury and spent most of my time using music and sound to guide myself through the recovery process. I found that long, sustaining tones were healing and soothing. I went on to get certified through an online course. What I learned was what I'd intuitively discovered in my own recovery.' Musician, heal thyself. My sound practitioner, Devon Cunningham, who has played her singing bowls for Hermès and Dartmouth College and in outreach programs for Los Angeles County, also describes her trajectory from a job in real estate to sound-bowl practitioner as healing. Cunningham went on a plant-medicine retreat in Ecuador with her 80-something-year-old mother, and it was there that she first began playing the singing bowls. She found that sound healing provided additional benefits for her chronic lung disease. 'The bowls saved my life,' she says. When Cunningham ordered new quartz-crystal bowls for a residency at Colgate University, she discovered that 432 Hz, what she calls 'the god frequency,' had a heightened impact on healing. 'I witnessed people having experiences with these new 432 bowls that I hadn't seen with my 440 Hz bowls. Ever since then, I've been on the 432, and I've seen miracle after miracle.' While Cunningham's results with the god frequency are experiential, a 2022 study by researchers at University of Florence and Careggi University Hospital that was published in the journal Acto Biomedica concluded, 'Listening to music at 432 Hz is a low cost and short intervention that can be a useful resource to manage anxiety and stress.' Robert Koch composes music with a frequency called the Schumann resonance: a natural phenomenon, also known as the Earth's heartbeat, that has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hz. He's also pursuing vibroacoustics, where listeners feel sounds in their bodies. 'Einstein said that music is the medicine of the future,' he notes. 'Vibration. And I think we're just scratching the surface.' I, myself, am no Einstein. Maybe this is why I find Brainwaves—the most popular binaural-beats app in the Apple App Store—overwhelming. Upon downloading the app, I'm asked which goals I hope to achieve, and I'm given an abundance of choices: Body Wellness, Binaural Sleep, Relax and Calm, Spiritual Awakening. Who doesn't want all of these things? I go with Spiritual Awakening and am brought to another page, where my path to enlightenment is broken down into still more categories: Connection with a Higher Power, Fulfillment and Meaning, Self-Understanding and Clarity. As an existentially challenged person, I choose Fulfillment and Meaning, but then I get FOMO and go back to the beginning. Rather than soothing my nervous system, the choices give me more anxiety. This choose-your-own-adventure approach is unsurprising, given that some of the latest sound-healing tools emerged from gaming. SoundSelf, an interactive audiovisual therapeutic, uses video-game technology, vocal-toning biofeedback, and generative soundscapes to induce drug-free psychedelic states. On Zoom, I meet with the audio director for the digital therapeutics company SoundSelf, Lorna Dune, a Milwaukee-based sound designer and electronic musician. Dune walks me through several experiments with immersive audiovisual tech. First, we tinker with bilateral light signals: a visual version of binaural beats purported to induce brainwave states like theta (associated with relaxation) and delta (emitted during deep sleep). The light signals make me anxious. But to be fair, a lot of things make me anxious. We then play with binaural beats at varying frequencies, and this experiment is much more successful. As we transition from an alpha (alert but relaxed) to theta, I feel a palpable shift to a more serene physiological state. Maybe this is the power of suggestion, but I could stay here all afternoon. 'Just like with binaural beats, you can look at dance music and how when we're all moving together to one rhythm, we synchronize,' says Dune. 'Our brain wants to synchronize. It's normal behavior that we've been displaced from in modern society. But we find it again through festivals and in pop culture. We say, 'Oh, it's something new.' No, it's actually just who we are.' Of course, we can't always be at a rave. Or in a sound bath. 'I'm happy for people to receive care in whatever way they can, as long as it's not detrimental,' says Suarez. 'I'm not like, 'No, don't listen to the YouTube audio.' If that's what's working for you, go for it.' The takeaway, says Kogon, is that 'acoustic therapies make people feel better, and it might be as simple as that the relaxation happens through focusing on sound, or associated imagery, rather than stressful thoughts, which most of us have too many of these days.' Two years later, I am still listening to the same YouTube audio from Zac's channel. Sometimes I even sleep soundly. This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Harper's Bazaar. 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IOL News
22-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Deadly floods expose Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane's chaotic leadership
Devastated Mthatha residents react as pathology services remove a body found in a flooded house. When the worst disaster struck, Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane shone in his absence, says the writer. Image: AFP Thamsanqa D. Malinga THE many lives lost in the Eastern Cape in wake of the severe weather that engulfed the province last week, and the country, should have never been. Had it not been for the ineptitude of Premier Oscar Mabuyane and his government, the disaster could have been minimised or averted and the families could have been spared the pain of double blow, losing property and loved ones. The Eastern Cape is the country's second largest province by land area and yet it is the country's poorest. The province has the highest unemployment rate. For years since the dawn of democracy this province has been South Africa's forgotten child. It has been the place where political ineptitude thrives. The province where avarice and corruption are the foundations of government. For the larger part of our democracy, as South Africans we have come to accept that service delivery and the Eastern Cape are just water and oil. Enter Oscar Lubabalo Mabuyane, the Eastern Cape seemed to disappear altogether from South Africa's map. The province 'vanished' into thin air. The only time it will resurface is when the premier or one of his officials is allegedly embroiled in a qualification scandal or some other controversy. Then the province would vanish again only to resurface when it hosts its provincial ANC Conference as it prepares a slate that will go to the National Conference of the mother body, to back another slate. Notice, nothing about anything developmental has been said in between its David Copperfield moments. It is no surprise that television exposè programme Cutting Edge has famously made itself popular by turning the province into its hunting ground for heart-wrenching stories. Stories of gripping poverty, unabated corruption and malfeasance. Stories of how people have been left in the periphery of non-being. Children crossing ravaging rivers in order to get to school, and families having to carry coffins across flooded rivers to bury loved ones whilst promises of a bridge are not kept for ages. I digress. Back to the disaster that has befallen the province. I was flabbergasted listening to the Premier's interview with the state broadcaster and how he spoke. He kept on pushing everything to some unknown helper that they have been waiting for assurance from. I have never seen a premier of a province, a man who has been at the helm for six years and one of the longest serving Premiers of President Ramaphosa's New Dawn, speaking like a ward councilor from some unknown village. Really now! Oscar Mabuyane was asked about the absence of divers for search and rescue in Umthatha and he waxed lyrical about one helicopter that is based in Gqeberha and how they have been asking for assistance for years and he went to Tarshish and got swallowed by a giant fish and all that and he prayed whilst inside the giant fish. It was such a sad story to listen to from the head of the province. I am saying it is a sad story because Mabuyane became premier of the Eastern Cape in the year of our Lord 2019. In 2020 just before we had COVID lockdown, the province was hit by floods. There were casualties recorded. Then came the 2021 festive season floods with its casualties. Again in 2022 torrential rains caused widespread destruction and damage, claiming the lives of 20 people, the highest at the time. In the six years Mabuyane has been the premier in this poorest and second largest province in the country, the Eastern Cape has been struck by natural disasters three times. When the worst disaster struck last week, the man shone in his absence only to emerge and spew diatribe on national television. It was embarrassing to watch. Disgusting, at least. Three natural disasters hit the province, yet there was no disaster management plan put in place. Even worse, the South African Weather Service had issued an alert way ahead that severe weather was inbound for eight provinces bar Limpopo. Mabuyane, like the forever absent Cameroonian president Paul Biya, together with his government had their head in the sand as we know them to be. He knew he had one helicopter, and still was not proactive to mobilise resources. He knew he had no divers and enough K9 units and didn't act. What was he doing? Where was he? Where was his government? Inside a fish on their way back from Tarshish? Had they ceded the province like they normally do only to return it at their whim? Oscar Lubabalo Mabuyane displayed the highest level of incompetence this time around. We have tolerated enough of his absence, ineptitude and that of his government. The Eastern Cape has had its fair share of bad leadership but Mabuyane's is just intolerable and it doesn't need nearly 100 lives to convince us as such. His Youth Day jamboree, at the beginning of the week, is what he knows best, garnering media attention as he dishes away hand-outs and singing his praises like some old African despot whose time has long run out and whose reputation could be saved by throwing frivolity at the poor. The people of the Eastern Cape are dying in squalor and drowning in torrential rains, bodies are still being picked up floating in Mthatha dam. People cannot afford to eat cake and be subjected to see dead bodies float by in nearby streams as the Premier and his Cabinet continue to administer the province in absentia from Mount Venus or inside the big fish supposedly taking them to Niniveh. Malinga is an Independent Political Commentator and author of "Blame Me on Apartheid" as well as "A Dream Betrayed"
Leader Live
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Leader Live
Event at Park in the Past on the Wrexham-Flintshire border
Park in the Past, in Hope, hosted Auxilia: Rome's Cutting Edge, taking place over two days of immersive fun, showcasing the essential role of the auxiliary forces in shaping the military and cultural landscape of Roman Britain. The family-friendly event brought history to life, and included Britain's Big Fort Build - a unique experimental archaeology challenge to build a full-scale size authentic Roman fort - set in a 120-acre landscaped venue, and chance to 'Meet the Romans'. Auxilia: Rome's Cutting Edge event at Park in the Past. Picture: Karl Eastwood Operations director and organiser Paul Harston said: "Our annual Auxilia event is now a firm favourite with people, attracting visitors from all over the UK who want a taste of life in Roman Britain. Read more: Family fun as Chester Racecourse hosts 'Roman Day' "In fact, Park in the Past is the only place in the country where you can enjoy an exciting immersive experience in a full-size reconstructed Roman fort, populated with Roman infantry soldiers and cavalry performing displays, as well as craftspeople and traders demonstrating their skills." Media and PR director Phil Hirst added: "We're really delighted that hundreds of families and visitors flocked to the Park and were amazed to see how fantastic it looks with our new commander's HQ building. "The fort was buzzing with activity and our living history camp felt like a huge film set. In July, the famous Ermine Street Guard reenactment group are descending on the fort to wow visitors with their drills and displays."
Business Upturn
21-05-2025
- Business
- Business Upturn
How U.S. manufacturing is finding machinists
STUART, Fla., May 21, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — When Pace Machine & Tool owner Monica Dirr visited an America's Cutting Edge (ACE) CNC machining bootcamp during a 2023 visit to Indian River State College, she slipped one of the participants her business card. ''When you graduate, call me,'' she told him. 'And he did. I hired him right away.' The success he's had at the small aerospace machine shop in Stuart changed how Dirr has found and trained CNC machinists. ACE provides free online and in-person training to participants interested in starting or upskilling their machining careers. In-person bootcamps typically run for five days, with time spent on CAD/CAM software and CNC machines. Dirr says the national program 'gives people the basic skills' that she can build on to put them on the shop floor. Additionally, it's transformed her talent search process. 'It saves you money,' she said. 'I went through the routine of advertising and interviewing people. It wastes time. When I go to the school and hire someone out of the program, they're ready to go.' Dirr has described the program as a 'filter' to finding serious employees. And she isn't alone in the approach of using ACE to find or upskill talent. Missouri-based Seyer Industries has described the ACE bootcamp as great not only for exposure, but as a prerequisite for apprentices. 'I see ACE as a recruiting tool,' Chance Henke, workforce development manager at Seyer, said. 'We have an apprenticeship that this could serve as a pipeline to.' Mayday Manufacturing in Texas has been sending cohorts of its own personnel through the training as they've turned to in-house employees to fill their machining needs. 'What ACE has done for us is give a leg-up to their training and accelerate their exposure,' said Craig Barhorst, director of operations. 'We see it as beneficial for our new machinists or those who show promise to become machinists.' If you're a company looking for talent, consider visiting an ACE partner. A full list of partners can be found here. Contact us if you'd like us to facilitate a connection between you and your nearest ACE partner. About ACE America's Cutting Edge, supported by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program, is a national training program designed to reestablish American leadership in the machine tool industry through transformative thinking, technological innovation, and workforce development. The curriculum – developed by University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Professor Dr. Tony Schmitz and Dr. Uday Vaidya, IACMI CTO and the UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor's Chair for Advanced Composites Manufacturing – combines advanced training and techniques from the University of Tennessee, the scientific expertise of the Department of Energy's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the proven workforce development capabilities of IACMI. About IACMI The Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation, or IACMI–The Composites Institute®, is dedicated to securing U.S. global leadership in advanced manufacturing by connecting people, ideas, and technology. IACMI is a 165-plus member community of industry, academic institutions, and government organizations working to enhance U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, with a strong focus on technology, commercialization and workforce development. Established in 2015 by the Department of Energy, IACMI is one of 18 Manufacturing USA Institutes collaborating to accelerate new technology, create new products, reduce costs and risks, and equip the workforce with future-ready skills. IACMI also partners with the Department of Defense to scale up industry-driven job skills and revitalize American manufacturing. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee, IACMI is managed by the Collaborative Composite Solutions Corporation, a not-for-profit organization established by The University of Tennessee Research Foundation. Media Contact: Michael Alachnowicz | IACMI Communications Specialist [email protected]
