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Based on the Alfa Romeo Giulia but with a new and completely bespoke carbonfibre body shell, Zagato's latest effort was designed in partnership with Alfa's own design team – headed up by Alejandro Mesonero – as a spiritual successor to the 'Sprint Zagato' (SZ) line of Alfa coupés from the late 1950s - which also inspired the radical 1989 coupé of the same name. Importantly, though, Zagato says the development and production processes were carried out completely independently, and the Alfa Romeo badge on the front is "solely for descriptive and promotional purposes". It's built on the same Giorgio platform as the Giulia, but with a significantly shortened wheelbase "in keeping with Zagato's sporting tradition", and for proportions which more closely ape the 1989 SZ - known as 'Il Mostro'. There is only one example, and it has already been acquired by an unnamed German Alfa Romeo collector – who owns a selection of rare Alfa models including an SZ and an 8C Competizione, as well as 'several' Zagato-bodied Aston Martins – for an undisclosed sum. It is the latest entry in a long line of 150 Alfa Romeo models rebodied by the Italian design house, which stretches back to 1921's 'Tipo G1', a reworking of Alfa's then luxury flagship. Underneath, it is more closely related to the hardcore, track-focused Alfa Romeo Giulia GTAm, sharing that car's fiery 533bhp twin-turbo V6 and adding a six-speed manual gearbox. There's no word on performance figures, but given its two-door carbonfibre shell is likely lighter than that of the larger GTAm, a 0-62mph time of less than 3.5sec is within reach. Welcoming the new creation, Alfa's Mesonero said: "lfa Romeo "SZ", an acronym that evokes emotions, roots its origins in the deep history of coachbuilding, that of cars made with the sartorial care of those who dress a mechanically in a special way according to the thought, the culture of those ateliers that, like Zagato, in this case, have interpreted the "biscione" brand. He called attention to the charismatic '3+3' headlamp design, similar to that worn by Alfa Romeo's current production cars, which was a defining feature of the 1989 SZ, as well as the double-bubble roof and bluff rear end, which he calls "a typical Zagato body style solution". Source

Instead, Pelosi herself named the Republicans, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, both of whom are leaving Congress next month. But in other ways, the Jan. 6 panel ranks among the most exhaustive and effective congressional investigations in a generation and more. During its 18-month inquiry, the committee collected more than 1 million documents, conducted more than a thousand interviews, issued more than 100 subpoenas and held 10 public hearings. They explored not only the attack on the Capitol but also Trump's efforts in the weeks leading up to it as the president tried to overturn the vote that had defeated him and elected Democrat Joe Biden. Monday's hearing was held on the same date that Trump had posted a crucial tweet two years ago. "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th," he wrote on Dec. 19, 2020. "Be there, will be wild!" Members of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, defending themselves in trials for their roles in the assault, have cited that tweet as a call to action. The committee's final session covered little new ground. Instead, it spotlighted the road map for prosecution drawn by the most compelling testimony behind their conclusions: that Trump knew he had lost the election but continued to pressure Pence, the Justice Department, state officials and others to prevent Biden from taking power. And that when the violence erupted, he did nothing for 187 minutes to quell it. The panel approved criminal referrals against Trump on charges of inciting an insurrection, obstruction of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to make a false statement. “Faith in our system is the foundation of American democracy," chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in the hearing's opening remarks. "Donald Trump broke that faith. He lost the 2020 election and knew it, but he chose to try to stay in office through a multi-part scheme. "This can never happen again." Not every question was answered, including concern about the performance of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It doesn't firmly resolve disputed testimony that Trump had lunged for the steering wheel of his presidential limousine when his lead Secret Service agent told him he couldn't go to the Capitol himself that day. There's little time left for this panel, poised to disband in two weeks, to settle them. McCarthy has said that when Republicans take control of the new Congress in January, they will launch their own investigation, one that might discredit the panel's work. The peaceful transfer of power in peril We have never been here before. Never before have U.S. citizens assaulted the Capitol; the last time the building was besieged was by British troops during the War of 1812. Never before has the peaceful transfer of power to a new president been so seriously challenged. Never before has a former president faced such a serious threat of criminal prosecution. Source

A preliminary magnitude 6.4 earthquake rocked Northern California early Tuesday morning, jolting residents awake, damaging infrastructure, and cutting off power to thousands of homes and businesses. It was not immediately known if anyone was injured, but officials reported "widespread damages" to buildings and roads around Humboldt County, which is more than 250 miles north of San Francisco. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck at 2:34 a.m. PT in Pacific Ocean waters about 7.5 miles west of Ferndale at a depth of just over 16 miles. The city is about 19 miles south of Eureka, near the California and Oregon state line. More than two dozen aftershocks were recorded on the USGS website, nearly all of which were less than magnitude 4. As of early Tuesday morning, the National Weather Service's tsunami warning system reported there was no tsunami threat associated with the quake, which was the strongest earthquake the area has seen in years. "Be prepared for aftershocks," the Humboldt County Office of Emergency Services tweeted just after 6:30 a.m. PT. "Check gas and water lines for damages or leaks. Exercise caution if traveling." Source

Dust whirlwinds, po[CENSORED]rly called dust devils, are a common phenomenon on Mars. These winds are part of the weather patterns on the red planet. And recently, scientists revealed the audio of a dust whirlwind or dust devil on Mars, which was recorded by the Perseverance rover of NASA. The audio lasts for about 10 seconds. The audio recording also included a total of 308 impacts on the Perseverance rover from dust grains carried by the dust devil. As per NASA's press release, the dimensions of the dust devil were 25 metres (82 feet) wide and at least 118 metres (387 feet) tall. Besides, the space agency noted that the dust devil was moving at around 19 kph (12 mph). NASA says that it takes some luck to capture a passing dust devil, so rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance keep monitoring for them in all directions. Source

Nick Movie: Laththi Time: / Netflix / Amazon / HBO?: - Duration of the movie: / Trailer:

Live Performance Title: Yo Yo Honey Singh | IIFA Awards 2022 | Full video | Blue Eyes | LoveDose | Desi Kalakar Signer Name: Honey singh Live Performance Location: / Official YouTube Link: Your Opinion About the Track (Music Video): 10/10

Artist: Norah Jones Real Name: Norah Jones Birth Date /Place: March 30, 1979 /New York City, U.S. Age: 43 Social status (Single / Married): Married Artist Picture: Musical Genres: pop and jazz Awards: Grammy award Top 3 Songs (Names): Don't Know Why, Come Away With Me, Happy Pills Other Information: Norah Jones (born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar; March 30, 1979)[5] is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. She has won several awards for her music and as of 2012, has sold more than 50 million records worldwide.Billboard named her the top jazz artist of the 2000's decade. She has won nine Grammy Awards and was ranked 60th on Billboard magazine's artists of the 2000s decade chart.

Musician Name: Norah Jones Birthday / Location: March 30, 1979 /New York City, U.S. Main instrument: Vocal and piano Musician Picture: Musician Awards & Nominations: Grammy award Best Performance: Don't Know Why, Come Away With Me, Happy Pills Other Information: /

Music Title: Mera Naam Bantai Signer: Bilal Shaikh Release Date: 11|09|2015 Official Youtube Link: Informations About The Signer: / Your Opinion About The Track (Music Video): 8/10

Researchers digging in Peru's Ocucaje desert have uncovered the skull of an enormous marine predator thought to be the ancestor of modern whales and dolphins. Four feet long (1.2 meters) and lined with knife-like teeth, the skull appears to be a new species of Basilosaurus — a genus of ferocious marine mammals that lived some 36 million years ago during the Eocene epoch, researchers from the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM) in Lima told Reuters. From snout to tail, the creature probably measured about 39 feet (12 meters) long, or about the size of a city bus. For now, researchers are calling this ancient beast the "Ocucaje Predator." It won't be formally named until the team publishes a scientific description of the species in a peer-reviewed journal. "It was a marine monster," Rodolfo Salas, founder and director of the paleontology department at the Museum of Natural History at UNMSM, told Reuters and other media outlets at a news conference on March 17. "When it was searching for its food, it surely did a lot of damage." According to the researchers, the Ocucaje Desert was once the bottom of an ancient ocean. Basilosaurus and its ferocious cousins swam these seas as apex predators from 41 million to 34 million years ago, gliding through the water with bodies that resembled enormous snakes, but with a large pair of flippers near their heads. "Basilosaurus" means "king lizard," and the creature's serpentine skeleton was once mistaken for a marine reptile, according to Smithsonian. Scientists now know that Basilosaurus was a mammal — a fully aquatic cetacean, like the whales and dolphins that would follow it millions of years later. Earlier whale ancestors were mammals who lived on land full-time, then gradually evolved to be semi-aquatic over millions of years, Live Science previously reported. Beginning about 55 million years ago — 10 million years after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs — whale ancestors finally became fully aquatic, giving rise to the first cetaceans. Today, there are more than 90 species of cetaceans. The Ocucaje desert is abundant in fossils, some dating back more than 42 million years, according to the researchers. Previous excavations have uncovered other early whale ancestors, dolphins, sharks and other creatures of the ancient deep. Source

For 25 years, Mercedes-AMG has used a V8 engine to define the unique appeal of its ‘super’ C-Class. The very first V8-powered one, the W202-generation C43 AMG, emerged just as Mercedes’ then-parent DaimlerChrysler was buying control of what would become its in-house performance brand right at the end of 1997. It became the very first AMG model to be built on one of Mercedes’ own production lines. If not for the V8 C-Class, then, perhaps AMG might not have become the success it is today. But, like it or not, another page in the AMG development story is now being turned. The V8 C-Class is dead – and its usurper is the new four-cylinder Mercedes-AMG C63 S E Performance. No longer will the appeal of this most amusingly over-endowed of compact saloons be defined by the not so compact eight-cylinder combustion engine under its bonnet. We can’t know for sure, but perhaps the Mercedes management board decided that a C-Class like that might very quickly begin to look like a damning anachronism. If not, it would certainly become an emissions-related balance sheet liability. With its bigger thunder saloons, AMG can probably afford to keep its V8s, at least for now, and simply to add hybridisation, and crank up price and profit margin accordingly, but evidently the C63 sells that little bit too strongly to make the numbers add up in quite the same way. It’s a regrettably familiar situation. And yet only at the moment that you experience how directly it impacts upon the dynamic appeal of such a unique driver’s car as this one can you really appreciate what its true cost is going to feel like. This is no nicer to report than it must be to read, but an AMG saloon - specifically this one - without a V8 engine seems a strangely bereft thing, like a watch face without hands. The new Mercedes-AMG C63 S E-Performance has had all manner of powertrain, chassis and steering technologies thrown at it in order to cover for what’s been taken away, of course – and we’ll get to those. The fact is none of them really succeeds at it. And the hardest thing of all to accept is how pointless and churlish it is to complain. The times in which we’re living are those in which a company like Mercedes-AMG can only take drastic action in order to keep cars like this on sale. Frankly, the ones making the biggest changes, and taking the biggest risks, ought to get the loudest applause – provided they’re the right risks. The C63 S E Performance uses an updated version of AMG’s M139 turbo four-pot, which, in other states of dress, powers the Affalterbach brand’s smaller transverse-engined models. Here, however, it’s fed by a turbocharger the size of a fruit bowl. That turbo is driven by a 400V electric motor, rather than just by exhaust gases, in order to eliminate any turbo lag. It helps to produce 469bhp and 402lb ft of combustive power from just under 2.0 litres of swept capacity, which is then channelled through AMG’s nine-speed Speedshift MCT automatic gearbox, and then to the road via a torque-vectoring four-wheel drive system with a rear-mounted electronically controlled limited-slip differential. So as well as going four-cylinder turbo, the C63 has also gone four-wheel drive for the first time. Oh, and there’s four-wheel steering as well. What more could you possibly want? That turbo is driven by a 400V electric motor, rather than just by exhaust gases, in order to eliminate any turbo lag. It helps to produce 469bhp and 402lb ft of combustive power from just under 2.0 litres of swept capacity, which is then channelled through AMG’s nine-speed Speedshift MCT automatic gearbox, and then to the road via a torque-vectoring four-wheel drive system with a rear-mounted electronically controlled limited-slip differential. So as well as going four-cylinder turbo, the C63 has also gone four-wheel drive for the first time. Oh, and there’s four-wheel steering as well. What more could you possibly want? The drive battery is Mercedes-AMG’s own development. While it’s only small by the standards of most luxury PHEVs (6.1kWh), its construction is specially designed for close thermal management, high energy density and the sort of rapid and intensive supply and storage of energy that’s necessary to prevent a heavy car like this from running out of electrical oomph on track. It weighs 80kg dry, is carried directly over the rear axle and contains up to 30 litres of coolant, which it distributes around each of the 560 cylindrical cells in the pack. The S63 E Performance uses the same technology in a pack of twice the capacity. Driving the new C63 on track is a very different experience from the one that the old car traded on so squarely and evocatively. When you’re using Race driving mode, Mercedes-AMG’s Track Precision lap telemetry app logs your position and tells you, via brightly flashing ‘BOOST’ graphics that appear on the car’s digital instrument screen, where best to deploy the better part of the electric motor’s power. It’s the kickdown switch right at the bottom of the accelerator pedal travel that you use to do this, as if it were some Formula 1-grade ‘push to pass’ KERS deployment button. Thusly hooning around, pretending you’re George Russell on a qualifying lap, is certainly fun – and the point is, if you follow the instructions, the C63 won't run out of battery power and should continue to do it almost indefinitely. Soon enough, though, you’ll want to know what else your Mercedes super-hybrid has to offer. How much old-school hot-rod charm and dynamic entertainment value have AMG's engineers remembered to include, for example, there to be savoured wherever and whenever you happen to want to tap into it? Back to top Honestly, and compared with AMG's long-standing measure in particular, there isn’t very much - although, when the electric motor’s fully boosting, this is certainly a fast car. Use one of the drive modes other than Race (there are eight in all, counting the Electric and Battery Hold modes associated with the PHEV tech, and not counting Drift mode) and, for the most part, you do get full boost from that electric motor without pushing past the throttle kickdown switch. Lock in a higher gear ratio using the paddles for the nine-speed ’box and the torque that floods in at middling engine revs makes the car feel effortlessly, instantly brisk. As those revs rise, though, there’s no mistaking what you’re working with. The four-pot just doesn’t rev with the freedom that a bigger multi-cylinder engine would. The car doesn’t stonk on from 5000rpm with quite the ferocity you somehow expect of it, however unreasonably. And, on track at least, it’s a little too easy to run into the car’s rev limiter after a downshift, because the high-rpm power delivery we’ve got used to in a C63 just isn’t there. Neither is the enticing audible allure of a proper multi-cylinder performance engine, needless to say. The C63’s new four-pot turbo sounds 'all right' - but, to me at least, it certainly doesn’t sound like very nearly £100,000, which is what this car is likely to cost once you've lavished a few options on it. Back to top For handling, the switchable four-wheel drive system does indeed offer some rear-driven track adjustability and amusement factor if you use that secret-handshake-enabled Drift mode. But the rest of the time, the torque vectoring dynamic benefit you’re expecting to feel from the car’s better-balanced weight distribution, and that diff-mounted electric motor, doesn’t ever really materialise. The new C63 rides with moderation on the public road and has good body control at faster road speeds, but it begins to jiggle and jounce, and to struggle to rein in its mass, on more testing surfaces. On circuit, you feel the impact of the car’s 2.1-tonne kerb weight in a tendency to push into gentle but persistent understeer through faster sweeping bends - and in a perceptible reluctance to shed speed in harder braking areas. The C63 feels like a large and heavy car now, because that's what it has become. That’s the plain truth. The extra dose of grip and agility that its predecessors offered relative to their bigger super-saloon siblings is gone. Want to hoof the rear axle into the sort of long, indulgent powerslide that so many C63s have felt made to do? Unless you’re in Drift mode, forget it. But the loss of so much rich and demonstrative charm in this car overarching character is a much greater one than anything to do with its weight, or its handling. That’s the loss that the engineers will be powerless to mitigate over time, that advancing battery technology can do nothing to help. It isn’t Mercedes’ fault that the classic, big-engined muscle saloon’s number is up - and neither can it be blamed for getting on with the job of replacing it. But here’s hoping that it's not too late to come up with a better send-off for the genuinely block-busting AMG combustion engine, and for the compact AMG performance four-door, than this. Source

Achievement: Chairman of the Hero Group; Honored with Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2001 B.M. Munjal (Brij Mohan Lall Munjal) is the Chairman of the Hero Group. He is a first generation entrepreneur who started very small and through sheer hard work and perseverance made it to the top. Today, Hero Group is the largest manufacturer of two-wheelers in the world and Brij Mohan Lal Munjal is the man widely credited with its success. B.M. Munjal's journey began in 1944 at the age of 20. Brij Mohanlall along with his three brothers, Dayanand (32), Satyanand (27) and Om Prakash (16) moved from his birthplace Kamalia in Pakistan to Amritsar. The brothers started supplying components to the local bicycle business. After partition in 1947, the family was forced to move to Ludhiana. The town of Ludhiana was already a major hub of the Indian bicycle business and an important textile center. The Munjals slowly spread their bicycle component distribution network in other parts of the country and became one of India's largest bicycle parts suppliers. In 1952 Munjals made a shift from supplying to manufacturing. They started manufacturing handlebars, front forks and chains. In 1956, the Punjab state government announced the issue of twelve new industrial licenses to make bicycles in Ludhiana. The Munjal brothers cashed on this opportunity. Helped by the Punjab government financing of Rs 600,000 to supplement their own limited capital resources, the Munjals set up Hero Cycles. Hero Cycles was registered as a 'large-scale industrial unit' and it initially produced 7,500 units per year. Soon Hero Cycles started giving well-established players such as Raleigh, Hind Cycles, and Atlas Cycles a run for their money. The hero cycle was comparatively cheaper and was sturdy and reliable. It gave the customers value for their money. In January 1984, Japan's Honda, the world's largest manufacturer of motorcycles, elicited interest in collaborating with the Hero Group to manufacture motor cycles in India. An agreement was signed and on 13 April 1985, the first Hero Honda motorbike was rolled out. Today, the company is the largest manufacturer of motorcycles in the world. For his outstanding contribution to the success of Hero Group, B.M. Munjal was honored with Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2001. Source

WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court Friday denied a request by conservative states seeking to retain a pandemic policy that allows the federal government to rapidly expel migrants in a legal battle over immigration and public health likely headed to the Supreme Court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked an effort by Republican officials in 19 states, including Texas and Arizona, to intervene in the case. The states already had signaled that they are prepared to file an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. At issue is a Trump-era policy known as Title 42 that permits Customs and Border Protection to expel migrants without the usual legal review to Mexico or to their home countries to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in holding facilities. The Biden administration announced in April that it intended to wind down the policy. Last month, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington vacated the policy and gave the Biden administration until Dec. 21 to end it. The administration appealed the decision but was moving to end its use next week. It was then that the Republican-led states stepped in, asking to join the lawsuit and temporarily block Sullivan's ruling. But a three-judge panel of the appeals court denied that request in an unsigned order Friday. Two of the appeals court judges were nominated by Democratic presidents and the third was nominated by former President Donald Trump. The appeals court said that the states were seeking to jump into the case late in the process. "Nowhere in their papers do they explain why they waited eight to fourteen months to move to intervene," the court said in its order. The Biden administration has been preparing to lift the policy next week and a White House spokesman said late Friday that effort continues. "To be clear: the lifting of the Title 42 public health order does not mean the border is open," White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said in a statement. "We have a robust effort underway to manage the border in a safe, orderly, and humane way when Title 42 lifts as required by court order." In earlier paperwork, the states signaled they were preparing to appeal an adverse ruling to the Supreme Court, likely on its emergency docket. That would put another high-profile immigration dispute on the Supreme Court's docket: A 5-4 majority of the court sided with the Biden administration earlier this year on a Trump policy requiring migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting the processing of their asylum claims. The case, which was returned to a lower court, came back to the fore this week when a U.S. District judge temporarily blocked the administration from ending the program. The high court also recently debated another Biden immigration policy in a dispute with conservative states who disagree with the administration's enforcement and deportation priorities. Title 42 has been used to expel migrants more than 2.4 million times since its implementation and has bottled up tens of thousands of migrants in Mexican border cities who are waiting to request asylum in the United States. A separate ruling from a federal judge in Louisiana in May blocked Biden's plan to terminate Title 42. That case is being reviewed by the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Contributing: Arizona Republic, Tami Abdollah Source

A giant aquarium in a Berlin hotel, the AquaDom, burst unexpectedly early Friday – causing significant debris, nearly 264,000 gallons of water and more than a thousand tropical fish to pour through the lobby and into the street, police and other authorities said. The 82-foot-tall AquaDom, a tourist attraction that was previously described as the biggest cylindrical tank in the world, was home to about 1,500 tropical fish before the incident. Authorities confirmed to the Associated Press that the burst began shortly before 6 a.m. in Germany (12 a.m. ET). Parts of the building holding the AquaDom – which also contains a hotel and cafes – were damaged and two people were injured by broken glass, police said on Twitter. The AquaDom sits inside the lobby of the Berlin Radisson Blu hotel in the Dom Aquarée complex, according to CBS. 16 disasters at $1 billion each. How the US was impacted by weather in 2022. Travel:I toured Celebrity Cruises newest ship from my couch. Check it out before booking In a statement emailed to USA TODAY Friday, Union Investment Real Estate, the company that owns the AquaDom, confirmed that the AguaDom was "completely destroyed." The cause or reasons behind the burst "are not yet clear," the company added. No evidence of a malicious act was found, police said. A hotel employee and a guest were the two people that were injured, Union Investment Real Estate said. The company added that the hotel has been fully evacuated. "We are dismayed by the accident and wish the injured persons all the best and a speedy recovery," Union Investment Real Estate stated, adding that "a large part of the fish kept in the AquaDom" have died. "There are still smaller aquariums that were not destroyed. Rescue workers are currently working with the operator to try to save the fish from these aquariums." Almost all of the 1,500 fish inside the AquaDom at the time of the burst died, the Berlin Mitte district government confirmed on Twitter, noting that a few fish at the bottom of the tank could be saved. Both Union Investment Real Estate and Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey thanked the first responders who were at the scene. According to the Associated Press, Giffey said the burst unleashed a "veritable tsunami." In an interview with reporters, Giffey noted that the timing of the incident could have been much worse – even if the burst occurred just an hour later. Injuries were prevented because less people were on the streets so early in the morning, she said. Rankings:Our readers voted these the 10 best aquariums in the United States In tweets announcing the AquaDom burst, the Berlin Fire Brigade and Berlin Police said that 100 emergency responders went to the scene at the DomAquarée complex. Other emergency efforts included providing heated buses for guests leaving the hotel and deploying rescue dogs. The rescue dogs found no one left in the building, the fire brigade said. Photos of the building's exterior show significant debris. “There are shards (of glass) everywhere. The furniture, everything has been flooded with water," Sandra Weeser, a German lawmaker who was staying in the hotel, told the Associated Press. "It looks a bit like a war zone.” The AquaDom sits in the same building as Sea Life Berlin, and visitors can tour both with the same ticket – but Sea Life does not own or participate in the maintenance of the AquaDom, the company notes. Still, after Friday's incident, Sea Life said its Berlin aquarium would be closed "until further notice." "Our teams at (Sea Life) have offered support to the teams at AquaDom, as our priority is the safety and wellbeing of all the people and animals involved," Marcel Kloos, regional manager at Merlin Entertainments, which owns Sea Life Berlin, said in a Friday statement. What's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day About 400 smaller fish that survived in other aquariums housed under the hotel lobby were evacuated as of Friday afternoon, the Berlin Mitte district government said on Twitter. The fish were rehoused in the neighboring SeaLife building. Source

As a child visiting her grandparents in Turkey, Gül Dölen was terrified to swim in the Mediterranean. She could see through the clear water all the way to the bottom, where scores of sea urchins lived. “I was like, ‘I'm not gonna go in that water; those spiky things are gonna hurt me,’” she recalls. Her grandmother, a zoologist and high school biology teacher, knew how to transform Dölen’s fear: She plucked one of the spiny echinoderms out of the water and dissected it right there on the beach. She showed her 8-year-old granddaughter its mouth, its little teeth, its stomach. “I wasn’t scared anymore,” Dölen says. “I was just curious.” small white octopus preserved in glass flask MATTHEW RAKOLA/SPECTRUM Dölen’s office decor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is associate professor of neuroscience, recalls that teachable moment. Sea urchin skeletons line the long windowsill, alongside snail shells and an ammonite fossil—even a preserved octopus. But there are also items that hint at her more recent work, including Mayan stone mushroom sculptures, a grinning ceramic peyote cactus and a framed photograph of Dölen with the late chemist Alexander Shulgin, who invented and self-assayed hundreds of psychedelic compounds. Her lab walls bear images by Alex Grey, the psychedelic artist whose work has been associated with the progressive-rock band Tool. The decor reflects where Dölen’s mind is these days: deep in the ocean, with its weird and wild creatures, and focused on the healing power of psychedelics. But her lab is also upending long-held scientific views of the brain, on a mission to improve quality of life for autistic people and those with neurological conditions. Yet, as recently as 2018, Dölen was thinking about quitting science. For years prior, she had gone all in on her career, following a path familiar to many researchers. As an M.D./Ph.D. student in Mark Bear’s lab, first at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Dölen arrived so full of new research ideas that Bear’s main goal was to rein her in; he recalls telling her to “narrow your worldview a little bit, and try to pick something we can make some progress on.” She began work on fragile X syndrome in mice. The syndrome arises from a mutation in the gene FMR1 and is a leading genetic cause of autism. Of the multiple publications Dölen and Bear co-authored on the topic, perhaps the most significant was a 2007 paper in Neuron demonstrating that the brains of mice with half the normal level of FMRP (the protein encoded by FMR1) have overactive synaptic plasticity, forming too many connections between neurons. Reducing the amount of the protein mGluR5 in mice helped level out overactive signaling in their brains, primarily correcting the synaptic plasticity issue. This singled out mGluR5 as a treatment target for fragile X syndrome. During this time, Dölen’s perspective on neuroscience began to shift. As a neuroscientist working with mice, she took consistent control of their lives—housing, food, cagemates, and even the lengths of day and night—so she could monitor their core brain mechanisms. But once a month she visited the genetics clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she watched clinicians work with people who had autism, fragile X syndrome or a neuropsychiatric condition. She observed that the developmental trajectory for an autistic person living with 10 people in a 2-bedroom apartment was different from an autistic person living in the country and receiving plenty of personalized care. This was a key realization. “So much of what makes human behavior interesting is not the stuff that we're born with,” she says. “It's the stuff that we're born ready to learn—and in cases like autism, born unable to learn.” From there, Dölen joined the lab of Robert Malenka as a postdoctoral researcher in 2009. Malenka is professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University in California, and at the time his lab was focused on the mesolimbic reward pathway, a brain circuit involved in motivation. Malenka was investigating how that circuitry is implicated in depression and addiction, and in particular the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine, but Dölen thought perhaps the social hormone oxytocin could be important to this pathway in mice. Malenka was not optimistic about the project’s prospects, and he gave her six months to generate meaningful data. “It was a little bit of a dare,” Dölen says. She took him up on it and found that not only are oxytocin receptors present in the mouse nucleus accumbens (part of the mesolimbic pathway), but also that they are involved in peer-to-peer social reward behavior in mice. Perhaps most surprisingly, she demonstrated that oxytocin controls the release of the brain chemical that moderates this relationship: serotonin. The results appeared in Nature in 2013. This finding boosted Dölen’s career. She moved to Baltimore and started her own lab at Johns Hopkins University. Her newfound autonomy was both exhilarating and scary, and she quickly secured three private foundation grants, including a prestigious Searle Scholarship, to study autism via the brain circuitry of social reward—the positive feelings that motivate people and animals to be social. But the bigger money and recognition of National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants proved more elusive. Her department and the university tweaked budgets to help keep her staff intact and the lab running, which felt “wonderful, on one hand,” she says, but “on the other hand, it also felt like, God, I’m an immigrant—we don’t rack up credit card debt.” She wondered how she could really be perceived as a leader if she couldn’t financially stabilize her team. headshot of Gül Dölen smiling with gray hair pulled up on top of head Gül Dölen MATTHEW RAKOLA/SPECTRUM When Dölen reached her 10th NIH rejection, she began to fear she might not make it as a lab head, or even as a scientist. Her outside-the-box thinking had yielded impactful findings during her graduate and postdoc years, but her approach didn’t seem to fly with the NIH, and she felt the mounting pressure to prove that she could run a world-class lab. “Even if the department isn’t literally putting pressure on you to get it done or get out, it’s implied,” she says. Grant rejections are part of doing science, and the need to chase money for research can be distressing. This is a feeling Malenka is familiar with. “I think the challenge of getting and maintaining grant support is the major reason investigators leave academia,” he says. Something similar was happening to Dölen. Her confidence was beginning to wane, and she wondered if she knew how to come up with meaningful projects, or if she could generate evidence to support her ideas. She wondered if her work had the potential to make an impact. Finally, she began to wonder if she still loved science. “The transition from postdoc to [principal investigator] is very challenging,” Bear says. “An entirely new skill set needs to be mastered, particularly multi-tasking, and the first grant review is usually a bitter pill to swallow." Bear gave her a pep talk at the time, but ultimately it was a road Dölen had to walk herself. Her fears persisted, and her grant proposals became more conservative to fit with what the NIH seemed to want. She felt the joy and curiosity that had initially attracted her to science slipping away. If this was going to be her career—disappointing, stifling and frustrating—then she should have chosen a job with more free time and a 9-to-5 schedule. She also began to feel resentful. She was a woman living on her own, whereas her male colleagues seemed to have the benefit of spousal support for their long hours. She also had no children and found that she was the de facto dinner host for visiting scientists—as if she had nothing waiting for her at home. In the face of her growing NIH grant rejections, she felt a creeping suspicion that her ambitious ideas would not be so uniformly dismissed if she were a man, that she would not have to overcome such a large credibility gap. Dölen fell into a depression that extended beyond the lab. She stopped doing the things that brought her joy outside of work: going to jazz concerts, taking long walks in the woods. And her dimmed spark made it even harder to keep pushing at work. When she’d been in Bear’s lab at MIT, he had stressed the importance of science being fun. “If you lose sight of the fun in science, it’s hardly worth continuing,” he used to say. Dölen decided that if she was indeed going to give up a life of science, she would go out on her own terms. She would do one final project—a fun one, just to see what would happen, and it would have only a tenuous relationship to everything else she had been studying. The idea was this: Dölen wondered whether octopuses would make friends while on ecstasy. She had read a 2015 paper about the octopus genome, which got her wondering whether serotonin signaling in octopus and human brains share any similarities—even though the two species’ last common ancestor lived hundreds of millions of years ago. She got in touch with Eric Edsinger, who had worked on the paper as a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts. And as luck had it, Woods Hole had seven of the animals and was willing to lend them out. Dölen wondered whether octopuses would make friends while on ecstasy. Woods Hole shipped the octopuses down, and Dölen hosted Edsinger in Baltimore, bestowing upon him an air mattress in her living room. She sent her students and postdocs home for the week, and Dölen and Edsinger played mad scientist, toiling in the lab from early morning until late at night, breaking only for coffee or food. Using Edsinger’s team’s octopus genome, they found that octopuses have genes that encode a serotonin transporter, the protein whose response to MDMA likely leads to the psychedelic drug’s prosocial effects in people. Bathing the octopuses in a solution of MDMA, they found that the psychedelic drug seemed to make the usually solitary animals interested in socializing with other members of their species. This finding indicated that the octopus, whose brain structure is nothing like a mammal’s, has a serotonin system in its brain that plays an important role in social interaction—just as humans have. See “Octopuses On Ecstasy Reveal Commonalities with Humans” Dölen was shaken by the finding. Conventional neuroscience wisdom says that brain structure is what matters when it comes to translating animal findings to humans—if MDMA exerts its effects by way of the amygdala in rats, for instance, then it probably affects the human amygdala, too. But an octopus doesn’t have an amygdala. It doesn’t even have a cerebral cortex. It has one central donut-shaped brain in its head and one subordinate ‘mini-brain’ in each of its eight legs. If Dölen and Edsinger’s results were reliable, they suggested that compounds such as MDMA were acting on a cellular level, not a structural level. “It challenges not a specific result, but a whole framework of how to approach how to understand the brain,” Dölen says. The paper was published in September 2018, and it immediately got attention. Po[CENSORED]r news outlets covered it, late-night comedians joked about it, and academics paid attention, too; it has been cited 49 times, according to Altmetric. But what mattered to Dölen was that it got her excited about science again. “It kind of brought me back,” she says. “I had spent three years feeling like I had a boot on my chest, and when the octopus paper came out, instead of an elephant wearing that boot, it was a horse.” While the octopus study was in progress, Dölen began to build on what she had learned, investigating a potential role for MDMA as a therapeutic for people with autism. To this end, she used an assessment of social-reward learning to demonstrate that MDMA, through its effects on oxytocin, can reopen the critical period for social-reward learning in mice. Scientists long assumed that any compound powerful enough to reopen a critical period, the timespan when the brain’s connections can reshape in response to learning, would wreak havoc on the brain, either causing seizures or amnesia. But now she had done it: Her work showed that adult mice, which are typically too old to learn social reward, suddenly became open to it after treatment with MDMA. The paper appeared in Nature in 2019. If you lose sight of the fun in science, it’s hardly worth continuing. —Mark Bear, MIT After that success, she began to suspect that using psychedelics to reopen a critical period could be the missing piece in other areas of study. Though drugs targeting mGluR5 have been investigated in clinical trials, they have not yet yielded the results researchers had hoped for. Dölen remains confident that mGluR5 might be a treatment for fragile X syndrome, especially if MDMA is included with the therapy to prime trial participants to respond. And in other work, she and her team are exploring whether classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD can have similar effects. She also suspects that other critical periods, such as that for stroke recovery, can be reopened by this class of drugs, which would be a massive scientific breakthrough. During her slump, Dölen had slid into a conservative approach to science. The octopus breakthrough demonstrated to her the power of questioning conventional thinking around brain research. Since then, she has secured three NIH grants, and now, as the self-styled creative director of her lab, the conservative bent that dampened her research questions is nowhere to be found. This creative, elegant approach was apparent in Dölen’s previous work, says Catherine Dulac, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, who has known her since the 2013 Nature paper came out. In that one paper, Dölen had brought together three different circuit components in a way that nobody had before, Dulac says: the nucleus accumbens that regulates reward, serotonin that regulates the nucleus accumbens and oxytocin that regulates it all at the synaptic level. “She’s a little bit like an artist,” Dulac says. “It’s great to have somebody like this in the field. Theory of mind is the idea that a person or animal can attribute to another individual a state of mind different from one’s own. Impairment in theory of mind was once thought to be a core autism trait. That idea has mostly fallen out of favor, but Dölen thinks that studying it in the octopus has important implications for our understanding of how theory of mind evolved in the first place. Many suspect it arose from social living, where animals watch and learn from one another, but it also exists in the solitary pygmy zebra octopus. The animal uses theory of mind to hunt, tailoring its approach based on the type of prey: attacking directly from behind for crabs, for instance, or setting a trap for quick shrimp. For the pygmy zebra octopus, theory of mind seems to have “evolved out of predatory rather than-social selection pressure,” she says. Source\

Artist: Ustad Ali Akbar Khan Real name: Ustad Ali Akbar Khan Birth Date /Place: April 14, 1922 Age: 97 Social status (Single / Married): Artist Picture: Musical Genres: Classical Awards: / Top 3 Songs (Names): / Other Information:Ali Akbar Khan (14 April 1922 – 18 June 2009) was a Bengali Hindustani classical musician of the Maihar gharana, known for his virtuosity in playing the sarod. Trained as a classical musician and instrumentalist by his father, Allauddin Khan, he also composed numerous classical ragas and film scores.[1] He established a music school in Calcutta in 1956, and the Ali Akbar College of Music in 1967, which moved with him to the United States and is now based in San Rafael, California, with a branch in Basel, Switzerland.

Musician Name: Ustad Ali Akbar Khan Birthday / Location: April 14, 1922 Main instrument: Vocal Musician Picture: Musician Awards & Nominations: / Best Performance: Karuna Supreme Other Information: /

Live Performance Title: Ranveer Singh Prasing DIVINE Signer Name: Ranveer Singh Live Performance Location: / Official YouTube Link: Your Opinion About the Track (Music Video): 7/10

Nick Movie: Cirkus Time: 23-12-22 Netflix / Amazon / HBO?: - Duration of the movie: / Trailer: