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Friday • February 16, 2024
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Fresh off his electric appearance in Usher’s Super Bowl halftime show, Lil Jon is showing another side of himself in his new meditation album, released today. Titled Total Meditation, the album contains 10 guided practices “to relieve anxiety, boost focus, and find peace,” the rapper said in a teaser posted to Instagram last week. “I’ve always kind of meditated a little bit, but when I turned 50, started going through a lot of things. Started going through a divorce … and all the emotions from the divorce and all that process was really getting to me. So, I found I had to start to go within to calm myself,” he added in an interview with XXL magazine. Take a listen.
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Health & Wellness
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| Belgian Teen Is the First Child to Be Cured of Rare Brain Cancer |
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Nikada/ iStock |
Lucas was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor at age 6. Now, the Belgian boy is 13 and his tumor is gone, making him the first child to be cured of this particular tumor, officially called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.
The teen was among the first patients to join a clinical trial in France that tests potential new drugs for his cancer type. Seven of his fellow participants lived for years after their initial diagnoses, but Lucas was different. “Over a series of MRI scans, I watched as the tumor completely disappeared,” his doctor, Jacques Grill, told Agence France-Presse, adding, “I don’t know of any other case like him in the world.”
Grill explained that Lucas was likely able to “beat all the odds” due to a mutation in his tumor that made it more susceptible to the drug being tested. The next steps will be trying to reproduce this mutation in a lab and then finding a treatment that could create the same effect in other patients.
“Lucas’ case offers real hope,” said Marie-Anne Debily, a researcher supervising the lab work.
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Deepen Your Relationship This Year
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Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but it’s not too late to offer your love the gift that keeps on giving: therapy. Roses wilt and chocolates get eaten, but making the choice to strengthen and deepen your relationship will have a lasting effect.
With Regain, access couples therapy at your convenience through text, phone, or video call. You can even use your FSA or HSA dollars to start on this meaningful journey — and get 25% off your first month as a Nice News reader.
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*Please support our sponsors! They help us keep Nice News free. ♡
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Culture
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| 1940 Shipwreck Discovered in Lake Superior: Learn Its “Mysterious” Story |
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| Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society |
Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake by area, holds its fair share of secrets amid its icy depths. The massive body of water has been the site of hundreds of shipwrecks, most of which still remain undiscovered. Recently, researchers located one of them over 600 feet beneath the water’s surface — but some mystery surrounding the vessel persists.
A 244-foot bulk carrier named the Arlington pulled away from Port Arthur in Ontario, Canada, on April 30, 1940, and encountered an intense storm shortly after. On May 1, as it became clear the vessel would sink, its panicking crew started abandoning it. Everyone made it safely onto another nearby ship, except for the captain, Frederick “Tatey Bug” Burk — which is where the mystery lies.
Fast forward to about a decade ago, when shipwreck researcher Dan Fountain began exploring the Great Lake via remote sensing data. When he noticed a “particularly deep anomaly,” which he suspected might be a wreck, he contacted the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society. In 2023, the group organized a two-day excursion across the lake to investigate, and sonar scans confirmed Fountain’s suspicions.
“These targets don’t always amount to anything … but this time it absolutely was a shipwreck. A wreck with an interesting, and perhaps mysterious, story,” the society’s executive director, Bruce Lynn, said in a news release.
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Animals
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| Monkey Business: Apes Playfully Tease Each Other Just Like Humans, Study Finds |
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Anup Shah/ Stone via Getty Images
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Joking around is a key element of human interaction — one that starts emerging in babies as young as 8 months old, before they can even speak. Now, a new study is suggesting that the human instinct to play goes further back than previously thought.
An international team of cognitive biologists and primatologists documented playful teasing in the four species of great apes: orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. They identified 18 distinct teasing behaviors, indicating that “the prerequisites for humor evolved in the human lineage at least 13 million years ago,” per a press release.
“Similar to teasing in children, ape playful teasing involves one-sided provocation, response waiting in which the teaser looks toward the target’s face directly after a teasing action, repetition, and elements of surprise,” explained lead author Isabelle Laumer.
The concept of playful primates isn’t new — Jane Goodall previously documented such behavior — but this is the first study to systematically analyze it. “We hope that our study will inspire other researchers to study playful teasing in more species in order to better understand the evolution of this multifaceted behavior,” Laumer said.
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In Other News
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Google and the Environmental Defense Fund are creating satellite maps of methane pollution to help researchers better track the greenhouse gas and find ways to mitigate its climate impact.
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The FDA approved a new treatment for patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer, the first in more than a decade.
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Turkey welcomed its first astronaut home earlier this week. The country’s president said Alper Gezeravci’s mission represents “a growing, stronger, and assertive Turkey.”
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Ecosia, a search engine that plants a tree for each search, just hit 200 million trees planted.
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The oldest known platypus in the wild is a 24-year-old male spotted in Melbourne, Australia, and he’s helping researchers learn more about the species.
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Inspiring Stories
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“Absolute disbelief”
A customer left a $10,000 tip on his $32.43 bill at a cafe in Michigan earlier this month — “an act of kindness that impacted so many people,” said waitress Paige Mulick. “It was in memory of a friend who had recently passed and he was in town for the funeral,” she explained.
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Cooking up change
A nonprofit in Brooklyn offers culinary training and job opportunities to teens and young adults who have been incarcerated or affected by the criminal justice system. See their work in action.
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Post of the Day
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@world_aquatics
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Seventy-three years after bringing home the silver and bronze medals at the inaugural Asian Games in New Delhi in 1951, Iranian diver Taghi Askar recently got back on the platform. The 100-year-old athlete dove from the 1-meter springboard during the Diving World Championships in Doha, Qatar, last week to promote the upcoming World Aquatics Masters Championships. He received a gold medal from the World Aquatics president afterward, per an Instagram post from the organization containing photos from his early career. Watch the dive. (Photo Credit: Deepbluemedia/ Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)
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Invest in Love With Regain
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February is the season of love, and why not honor that by starting a therapy journey with your partner that will strengthen your relationship? Regain’s program is both convenient — available via phone, text, or video call — and financially accessible.
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*Please support our sponsors! They help us keep Nice News free. ♡
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Quote of the Day
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| “Fun is the secret to feeling alive.”
- Catherine Price
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