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Hochul refuses to pony up state funds to keep Statue of Liberty open during government shutdown // ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door,’ no more!

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  • Government shutdown impact on Statue of Liberty: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declines state funding to keep the Statue of Liberty open amid the partial federal government shutdown starting Wednesday, potentially closing the national monument in New York Harbor.
  • Hochul's statement on blame: Hochul attributes any closure to Washington Republicans for rejecting a short-term funding bill, despite most Senate Democrats opposing it Tuesday night.
  • Previous precedent under Cuomo: In the 2018 shutdown, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo used state resources to maintain access to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, managed by the National Park Service.
  • Hochul's criticism of Republicans: She accuses Republicans of prior cuts to health care, public safety, and food assistance for New Yorkers, claiming the shutdown harms workers, small businesses, and families nationwide.
  • Visitor statistics: The Statue of Liberty drew over 3.7 million visitors last year, highlighting its significance as an iconic landmark symbolizing hope and strength.
  • Funding bill details: The rejected bill would have sustained government operations at current levels until November 21, but nearly all Senate Democrats blocked it, leading to the shutdown.

ALBANY – ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door,’ no more!

Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to come to the rescue and provide state funding to keep the Statue of Liberty open if it closes due to the partial government shutdown that commenced Wednesday.

Gov. Kathy Hochul refused to provide state funding to keep the Statue of Liberty open amid the partial government shutdown, Getty Images

Hochul blamed Republicans in Congress for a potential closure to the national monument, even though all but three Senate Democrats sunk a short-term funding bill Tuesday night that would have kept the government funded at current levels until Nov. 21.

“If Lady Liberty’s iconic torch goes dark, it will be thanks to the Washington Republicans who refused common sense and abandoned the people they were elected to represent,” Hochul said in a statement to The Post hours before the shutdown took effect.

“Washington Republicans have already cut billions from health care, public safety and food assistance for New Yorkers – and now their cruel, senseless cuts are sending us spiraling toward a federal shutdown that will harm workers, small businesses and families throughout our state and across the nation,” she continued.

During the last government shutdown in 2018, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo  forked over state resources to keep the iconic landmark, which is run by the National Parks Service, open. 

Hochul said “Washington Republicans” are to blame if the “iconic torch goes dark.” REUTERS
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“As we’ve done before when Washington’s dysfunction has shut down the government, New York will step up and ensure the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island remain open for the world to look to for strength and hope during this tumultuous time,” Cuomo said at the time. 

Over 3.7 million people visited the Statue of Liberty last year, according to the National Park Service.

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Who killed the East End mobster? // Gangsterism couldn’t survive globalisation

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  • Reggie Kray's death and legacy: Reggie Kray, one half of the infamous Kray twins, died of cancer on October 3, 2000, in London, marking 25 years in 2025; the article reflects on his polite demeanor in local pubs, family stories of their presence, and a violent incident involving a henchman, highlighting the era's code of conduct that avoided civilian harm while engaging in clubs, protection, and robberies, alongside charitable acts like a £100 donation to Aberfan relief in 1966.
  • Funeral and end of an era: Reggie's 2000 funeral featured celebrities and villains in a sentimental Cockney event, buried near twin Ronnie, coinciding with London's last major old-school heist at the Millennium Dome shortly after.
  • Decline of native gangsterism: As a former Met Police detective, the author observed the fall of families like the Adams and Hunt through MI5 operations and libel cases, shifting English organized crime toward drugs and laundering amid foreign rivals from Eastern Europe and globalization's impacts.
  • Police reforms' role: By 2000, the Met tackled corruption via the Ghost Squad, reformed informant handling, and diversified recruitment with graduates, reducing local ties between cops and criminals, effectively curbing homegrown outfits.
  • Foreign competition's edge: Ruthless groups like the Albanian mafia dominated with greater viciousness, exploiting UK cocaine markets worth £6 billion, while English gangs lacked the resolve for overseas expansion, leaving laws outdated for modern threats from war-torn regions.
  • Drug trade's transformation: Modern narcotics, especially crack, fueled petty acquisitive crimes like burglaries, sidelining organized heists; protection and robberies faded, with police now pursuing moped thieves and drug-gun ops rather than traditional blaggers.
  • Shift in working-class crime: White English working-class criminals moved to subservient roles in international drug networks, county lines, or small-scale dealing, akin to "Etsyfication" of boutique crime, while extortion went digital via hacking by teens, outpacing traditional policing.
  • Cultural nostalgia vs. reality: Media like Guy Ritchie's Mobland romanticizes extinct Kray-style villainy through posh creators, ignoring how survivors like Scottish gangs flee to Dubai with drug profits, suggesting the Krays would adapt to modern coke and money schemes if alive today.

Reggie Kray died a quarter of a century ago today. And, like any Londoner born within earshot of Bow Bells, my family has stories. Reggie and Ronnie, his psychotic twin brother, drank at the pub my parents managed in Stoke Newington. My late father recalled how they were unflaggingly polite and “everyone behaved themselves” in their presence. One lunchtime, a Kray henchman staggered into the bar, a hatchet buried in his skull. My mother wrapped a beer towel round his head and, of course, the police were never called. The local CID officers drinking in the snug were quick to scarper.

The mawkish affection the Krays inspired, along with fear, has become something of a cliché. Yet their business model — clubs, protection rackets, loan-sharking and the occasional robbery — really did have rules of engagement: avoiding “civilian casualties” chief among them. Like other criminal outfits, meanwhile, the Krays also indulged in performative acts of community engagement, donating to charities and the poor. In 1966, they quietly gave £100 to the Aberfan disaster relief fund, the largest single donation the organisation received.

Such philanthropy might explain why, when Reggie Kray died of cancer in October 2000, his send-off was a schmaltzy Cockney pageant, featuring a cast of C-list celebrities and ageing villains. Reggie was laid to rest near Ronnie, ending an era of antiquated villainy. It feels apt that one of London’s last old-school heists, the ill-fated Millennium Dome robbery, took place just a month after Reggie passed.

As a London policeman, I witnessed the death throes of old-school London gangsterism. This was the era when the Adams family was finally taken out by MI5. One of the infamous Hunt brothers ended up in court too — after The Sunday Times accused his organisation of murder and drug trafficking. Hunt lost his libel fight, and certainly by this point, English organised crime was increasingly centred on narcotics and money-laundering. Yet it soon found itself playing second fiddle to bloodthirsty foreign competition. I’m thinking, here, of the Eastern European gangs unleashed by the Soviet Union’s collapse, to say nothing of the dirty capital, cheap labour and drugs waved in by globalisation.

In this, the decline of English gangsterism has parallels with the wider white working-class, and indeed with the British economy more broadly. It’s tempting, too, to cast analogue villains like the Adams as dinosaurs, vaporised by a meteor storm of foreign narcotics. There’s something to this analysis — but detail is where the devil lurks, and chasing devils is what detectives used to do.

Consider, for starters, the role played by the authorities. By the time Reggie Kray died in 2000, the Metropolitan Police was disrupting English organised crime on several fronts. The first involved aggressively attacking corruption via the fabled “Ghost Squad”. The second encompassed an overhaul of informant-handling, restricting covert relationships between criminals and cops to specialist, heavily supervised units. These were shadowed by a third and accidental shift. By encouraging graduates to join the force, CID offices were less often staffed by detectives who’d attended the same schools as the criminals they investigated.

And if all this helped stymie native organised crime, so too did foreign competition. An uncomfortable truth is that working-class English gangsterism was replaced by foreign competitors. Crime is Hobbesian, and it turned out that foreign criminals were simply more vicious. Notice how London’s gangsters, for instance, have yet to develop the minerals to set up shop in Tirana or Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia makes softly-softly England its playground. At the same time, English laws and police forces remain configured for the relatively genteel crime lords of yore, not the ruthless bandits of war-torn Africa or the Balkans.

At this point, sociologists and criminologists might point to the structural similarities, say, between the Krays and their Albanian successors. Both involve, do they not, notions of class, family, honour? And, as my Adler family legend implies, English mobsters clearly had a capacity for violence; Reggie himself notoriously stabbed a man to death at a Clapton house party. Yet as a former detective, all this is a bit like saying all food consists of protein, fat and carbohydrate. It’s fundamentally true, but hardly insightful. It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanctioning hits in crowded family restaurants.

“It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanction hits in crowded family restaurants.”

As for the drugs themselves? They’re clearly important: Albanian gangs have carved out an estimated £6 billion niche in Britain’s cocaine market. In the end, though, it’s again more subtle than that, with the type of drugs also explaining the decline of white English gangsterism. Crack, especially, has become an accelerant of “acquisitive” crime, its addictiveness prompting waves of hit-and-run burglaries. For their part, protection rackets and bank robberies have become niche pastimes. A friend serving on the Met’s Flying Squad bemoans the demise of the old-school blagger. “When I joined we looked at proper people, second generation Eastenders, tooled-up with shotguns.” These days? He’s more likely to be chasing moped-riding kids. Another old colleague, serving on the Met’s Project Team, rolls his eyes when I ask about his work. “Same old shit,” he shrugs. “Drugs and guns, mate. Nothing but drugs and guns.”

In other words, then, the dynamics of the modern drug trade leave less space for the kind of organised heists the Krays became famous for. And there’s something else here too. As the English know full well, it’s easy to be cruel when you’re not on home turf. Our working-classes have cheerfully exported violence abroad, from the Black and Tans to Heysel. But back in England, Gen Z’s white, working-class organised criminals have given up on becoming crime lords. Nor is that especially surprising. The hard Victorian slums their grandparents knew are a distant memory, particularly from the vantage point of a three-bedroom semi in Swanley.

If they’re criminals at all, they’re more likely to operate underworld service industries, oiling the wheels of international narcotics cartels. From county lines drug dealing to City money laundering, English criminals are, increasingly, vassals. Either that, or second-tier dealers, big fish in small ponds — what I call the “Etsyfication” of boutique crime. For the sort who binge “Essex Boys” murder stories and stream TV gangster slop, the height of their ambition is shifting parcels of overcut, third-rate gak.

As for the old ways? Extortion and blackmail? It’s moved online, replacing shaven-headed men demanding money with menace. Now, teenage nerds bring multinationals to their knees from their bedrooms. Occasionally, they don’t even demand money, merely indulging in cheery digital nihilism. For their part, British police forces struggle with online fraud and hacking. It’s a transnational and highly specialised field, far beyond the ken of the average copper. Hacking is also being co-opted by parastatal organisations, deployed as a hybrid warfare tactic by China and Russia.

To Ronnie and Reggie and their ilk, all this would have felt like mind-blowing science fiction. But though white, working-class Londoners have largely given up on gangsterism, their social superiors haven’t got the message. Film and television show no hint of mercy for the dead horse of Kray-inspired crime — and, as usual, the floggings are delivered by posh boys. I recently enjoyed Mobland, directed by gangster film supremo Guy Ritchie and starring Tom Hardy, who turned in a barnstorming performance as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 flick Legend.

Hardy and Ritchie both attended private schools. Hardy grew up not in Tower Hamlets, but the gilded Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Again, that’s unsurprising: the middle classes have always lionised working-class crime. I suspect it’s partly “noble savage” syndrome, partly an enduring English fondness for Robin Hood defiance. Either way, and whatever their entertainment value, shows like Mobland retool an extinct age of English villainy for the 21st century, even as the Krays’ legacy remains a lodestone, an origin myth, for the kind of person who’s never even seen a hatchet, much less wielded it in anger.

There’s one more irony here too. The fact is, it’s never been easier to make drug money, launder it, then scurry off to the Gulf. Just ask Scotland, where indigenous thuggery has endured in a way it hasn’t down south, and where Dubai has become a sunnier alternative to Glasgow. So if you can almost hear the old Eastenders in their Essex bungalows, lamenting Reggie’s passing and shaking their heads at his brutal successors, such nostalgia misses the point. Were the Krays alive today, they’d happily be filling their boots with coke and dirty money too, then sharing the spoils on TikTok.


Dominic Adler is a writer and former detective in the Metropolitan Police. He worked in counterterrorism, anticorruption and criminal intelligence, and now discusses policing on his Substack.

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Why Earth is The Only World in the Entire Universe That We Know Of Where Fire Can Burn

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  • Overview of Fire's Uniqueness: ZME Science article explores why fire, a combustion process requiring fuel, oxygen, and heat, exists only on Earth in the known universe, due to the planet's specific atmospheric and biological conditions enabling the fire triangle, as evidenced by exploration of solar system bodies.
  • Fire Triangle Essentials: Combustion demands organic carbon-based fuel, free oxygen at about 21% in Earth's atmosphere, and an ignition heat source, which combine perfectly here but fail elsewhere due to insufficient oxygen or unstable environments.
  • Oxygen's Critical Role: Free oxygen, produced by Earth's life forms, maintains the ideal level for sustained flames; other planets like Venus and Mars lock oxygen in CO2, while Mercury's thin exosphere loses it to solar winds.
  • Absence on Other Worlds: No fire occurs on Venus with its molten surface, Jupiter's moon Io despite volcanism, Titan with methane lakes, or Enceladus with organics, lacking Earth's balanced atmosphere and fuel availability.
  • Earth's Fire History: Fire emerged late after the Great Oxidation Event 2.4 billion years ago from cyanobacteria, with levels rising via land plants around 470 million years ago, leading to earliest charcoal evidence at 420 million years and widespread wildfires by 383 million years ago.
  • Astrobiological Implications: Fire's requirements overlap with life's presence, such as plant-derived fuels, suggesting detection of flames on exoplanets could indicate biological activity.
  • Space Fire Analogues: Fire fountains on Earth and likely Io involve lava eruptions but not true combustion; in microgravity on the ISS, flames form spheres, burn cooler and bluer, and extinguish faster due to diffusion limits.
  • Human and Planetary Significance: Fire, harnessed by humans for at least 245,000 years, underscores Earth's rare chemistry and life's role in sustaining it, differentiating our world from the cosmos.

AI-generated illustration. Credit: ZME Science/Midjourney.

Fire has always shaped the human story. Strike a match, watch the flare, and you’re tapping into something humans have relied on for at least 245,000 years. But despite its primal aura, fire is almost impossibly rare. It’s not just that Earth is the only place we’ve seen it — it may be the only place in the cosmos where it can truly exist.

Outside of Earth, fire is a no-show. Not on Venus with its molten surface, not on Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, not anywhere.

What we call fire is actually a fragile chemical phenomenon, dependent on a cosmic Goldilocks setup. And Earth — out of all the places we’ve explored — seems to be the only one that got the recipe right.

The Triangle That Lights the World

Fire needs oxygen, heat and fuel to exist, which is known as the Fire Tringle. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

To understand why, start with the basics. Fire is combustion, a chemical reaction that requires three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Scientists call this the “fire triangle.” Only organic materials, which are composed of carbon atoms, can serve as fuel for combustion. On Earth, those fuels are everywhere — plants, fossil fuels, even the wax of a candle. But carbon is everywhere on other planets too and even on comets and asteroids. Carbon is not the problem, though.

Free oxygen is the problem. Our atmosphere is about 21 percent oxygen, a level that comfortably sustains fire. Too little oxygen, and flames sputter out. Too much, and everything around would erupt in constant blazes.

Even Mercury, with an exosphere that’s 42 percent oxygen, can’t sustain a flame. The problem is its “atmosphere” is so thin that solar winds strip it away almost immediately. And on Venus or Mars, where carbon dioxide dominates, oxygen is locked up in molecules that won’t feed a fire.

Heat, the third element, can come from lightning, volcanoes, or even the scrape of two stones. Put them all together, and fire thrives.

But none of these elements line up so neatly anywhere else in the solar system. Titan has lakes of methane. Mercury’s exosphere contains plenty of oxygen. Enceladus spits organic material into space. Yet without Earth’s balance of fuel, oxygen, and a stable, thick atmosphere, flames never catch.

A Late Arrival in Earth’s History

What’s surprising is that Earth itself was fire-free for billions of years. For most of its history, the planet’s skies were filled with methane, not oxygen. The first sparks only became possible after the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria began releasing oxygen.

Even then, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until land plants evolved in the Ordovician period, around 470 million years ago, that oxygen levels climbed into the fire “sweet spot.” Fossil evidence of the earliest charcoal appears about 420 million years ago. By 383 million years ago, extensive wildfires swept across the planet. From then on, fire became a permanent — if destructive — companion.

The rarity of fire in the cosmos has huge implications for astrobiology. Most of the fuel and conditions that fire needs are also directly related to life existing on the planet — think wood, oil and coal. If telescopes one day spot flames licking across an exoplanet, it would be like waving a giant flag: life is here.

So Far, a Unique Feature

For now, the closest extraterrestrial analogues to fire are “fire fountains.” These spectacular eruptions of lava and gas occur on Earth and likely on Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io. Fire fountains are beautiful and fascinating phenomena, but they are not, strictly speaking, fire.

Galileo image of lava on Jupiter's moon Io

NASA’s Galileo spacecraft saw shimmering, fresh lava in Io’s Tvashtar Catena back in 2000. Jupiter’s volcano moon holds the closest thing to earthly fire in our solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Even human-made fire in space is a challenge. NASA has studied combustion aboard the International Space Station, and flames behave strangely in microgravity. On Earth a flame is elongated, in microgravity it is spherical, resembling a fireball. That’s because the spherical flame is fed by the slower process of diffusion, so the flame occurs at a border between fuel and air. Effectively the entire surface of the flame is the “bottom”, reacting with fresh air close enough to the fuel source to combust, in a rough sphere.

Because exhaust gases like CO2 can’t leave the combustion area, by the same dictum, the outward diffusion of combustion gases can limit the inward diffusion of oxygen to an extent that the zero gravity flame will die a short time after ignition.

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Humans figured out how to start fires way sooner than expected

Prehistoric Humans Lit Fires to Smoke Meat a Million Years Ago

An on-Earth candle flame vs a microgravity candle flame

Left: a candle flame in normal gravity; right: a candle flame in microgravity. Image: Science.

Fire also has a different color in microgravity. When a candle burns on Earth, it’s being consumed molecule by molecule. Sometimes, the fuel — long strings of carbon — gets pushed upwards where it burns like charcoal, glowing yellow. Without gravity, the carbon strings don’t get burned, and the flame is blue, cooler, and much, much dimmer.

The bottom line is that the fact that fire is so tightly bound to Earth is a reminder of how special our planet is. Every campfire and candle isn’t just a chemical reaction. It’s a signature of Earth’s rare chemistry — and of the life that fuels it.

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Why liminal spaces are your brain’s secret laboratory - Big Think

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  • Overview of liminal spaces: Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explores liminal spaces as uncertain in-between life stages in a Big Think article, highlighting their role in fostering growth through heightened learning, creativity, self-discovery, and resilience, with no specific date or location provided, aimed at helping readers reframe anxiety into opportunities.
  • Personal experiences: Le Cunff shares instances of rushing through transitions like job changes and breakups to avoid discomfort in these ambiguous periods.
  • Definition and origins: Liminal derives from Latin for threshold, described by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1909 as the middle phase of rites of passage between old and new identities.
  • Brain's response: Anterior cingulate cortex detects conflict and amygdala signals threats in ambiguity, an evolutionary adaptation that often leads to unnecessary anxiety in modern contexts.
  • Cognitive benefits: Uncertainty enhances attention to new information for learning, enables novel connections for creativity, allows identity experimentation for self-discovery, and builds uncertainty tolerance for resilience.
  • Anxiety-curiosity switch: Both respond to uncertainty but anxiety focuses on threat elimination while curiosity promotes exploration and learning, activating similar brain regions differently.
  • Practice one - Reframing: Use cognitive reappraisal to view liminal spaces as discovery laboratories, reducing amygdala activity and boosting prefrontal control.
  • Practice two and three: Employ generative questioning to investigate possibilities and conduct small personal experiments to satisfy action needs while exploring uncertainty.

Key Takeaways

  • Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes that liminal spaces — those uncertain and disorienting “in-between” stages of life — can open up powerful opportunities for growth.
  • They can heighten learning, creativity, self-discovery, and resilience by pushing the brain beyond routine patterns.
  • The key is flipping from anxiety to curiosity through reframing, questioning, and small experiments.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

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When I was finishing university, I was so anxious about what came next that I started applying for jobs an entire year before graduation. When I left a big tech job, I threw myself straight into a startup. I rushed into new relationships after breakups, or into the next project as soon as the previous one ended.

I’ve often filled the gaps too quickly, because the in-between felt impossible to sit with. And I know I’m not the only one.

Maybe you just left a job without knowing what’s next. Maybe you’ve left a job without knowing what’s next, moved to a new city, or found yourself in that strange territory after a relationship ends.

These moments are destabilizing. You’re standing in the hallway between who you were and who you’re becoming. Your brain screams for certainty, for solid ground, for the familiar rhythms of a life you understand.

What if I told you that this discomfort isn’t a bug in your psychology, but a feature?

These uncomfortable in-between spaces have a name in anthropology: liminal spaces. And they’re not just inevitable parts of life. They can be a laboratory for transformation, creativity, and growth.

The uncomfortable in-between

The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, which means “threshold.” Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep first described liminal spaces in 1909 as the middle phase of rites of passage, that ambiguous period when we leave an old identity behind but haven’t yet stepped into a new one.

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Liminal spaces change how the brain processes information. The anterior cingulate cortex, your brain’s conflict detector, becomes hyperactive in ambiguous situations. Meanwhile, your amygdala starts firing warning signals about potential threats lurking in the unknown.

This neurological response evolved to keep our ancestors alive in genuinely dangerous situations. But in modern liminal spaces, it often backfires, creating anxiety about changes that could actually be opportunities for growth.

The key insight is that uncertainty itself isn’t inherently negative — it’s simply ambiguous information that our brains need to process — and that liminal spaces offer unique cognitive benefits that aren’t available during periods of stability:

  • Learning: Your brain pays intense attention to new information when it can’t predict what’s coming next, making liminal spaces ideal for learning.
  • Creativity and problem-solving: When your usual assumptions are suspended, your brain makes novel connections you’d normally miss.
  • Self-discovery: Escaping the constraints of your usual self-concept when you’re between roles or life phases allows you to experiment with aspects of your identity that might have remained dormant in more stable times.
  • Resilience: Each time you successfully navigate a liminal space, you develop uncertainty tolerance, the ability to remain functional even when you can’t predict outcomes.

But these benefits aren’t automatic. You need to actively shift how you respond to uncertainty.

How to flip the switch

The key to leveraging liminal spaces lies in what I call the anxiety-curiosity switch. Both anxiety and curiosity are responses to uncertainty, but they lead to very different outcomes.

Anxiety narrows your focus to eliminate uncertainty as quickly as possible. Curiosity expands it to explore what the uncertainty might reveal.

Research shows that curiosity and anxiety activate similar brain regions, with an important difference: In anxiety, these regions prioritize threat detection; in curiosity, they support exploration and learning.

And flipping the switch is a learnable skill. Here are three evidence-based practices that can help you transform uncertainty from threat into opportunity:

1. Cognitive reappraisal: Reframe the narrative. Instead of viewing liminal spaces as something to escape, practice reframing them as a laboratory for discovery. When you catch yourself thinking “I hate not knowing what’s next,” try “I wonder what this transition might teach me.” This form of cognitive reappraisal will reduce activity in the amygdala while increasing activity in prefrontal regions associated with executive control.

2. Generative questioning: Become a detective. Transform uncertainty from something that happens to you into something you actively investigate. Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” try “What possibilities am I not seeing yet?” Switching to generative questions shifts your brain toward discovery rather than threat detection.

3. Personal experimentation: Conduct tiny experiments. Try a new habit or activity for a short trial period – a week of morning writing, or solo lunch somewhere new every Tuesday. This experimental mindset satisfies your brain’s need for action while keeping your approach to uncertainty exploratory.

In a world where skills, relationships, and even identities change faster than ever, the ability to thrive in liminal spaces is essential.

So the next time you find yourself in that uncomfortable hallway between what was and what might be, remember: You’re not lost. You’re standing at the threshold of transformation, in a space designed by evolution to help you grow.

Your brain is already equipped with everything it needs for this transformation. All that’s required is the courage to flip the switch.

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OpenAI Launches Video Generator App to Rival TikTok and YouTube - WSJ

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  • OpenAI's new app launch: Sam Altman-led OpenAI introduces a social-media app for Sora 2 AI video generator, enabling text-prompt videos with user clips, competing with TikTok, YouTube, and Meta; announced Tuesday for invite-only U.S. and Canada App Store release.
  • Video creation features: Users upload personal clips into Sora-generated scenes, specifying ideas, styles, and settings, with options to connect, watch, and comment on others' content.
  • Navigation style: App uses swipe-and-scroll vertical feed like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, with algorithm-driven recommendations for engaging content.
  • Sora history: Original Sora released last December for high-definition video clips from text prompts; Sora 2 adds social elements.
  • Industry competition: Google integrates Veo 3 into YouTube Shorts; TikTok's AI Alive turns pictures into videos; Meta launches AI video feed.
  • Engagement strategies: Companies use AI features to boost app popularity; OpenAI limits infinite scroll for under-18s and prompts adults to create after passive viewing.
  • Content labeling: AI-generated videos marked when shared off-platform for clear provenance; no generation of recognizable public figures without permission.
  • Copyright approach: Sora 2 includes copyright material unless holders opt out, with alerts to agencies; raises lawsuit risks, as noted by Stanford's Mark Lemley referencing Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in a blue suit with arms crossed, looking away from the camera.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI Photo: Florian Gaertner/Zuma Press

OpenAI is squaring up to TikTok, Google’s YouTube and Meta with a new social-media app for its AI video generator that allows users to create high-definition video clips with audio from text prompts.

Users can upload short clips of themselves and insert them into Sora-generated worlds, describing the idea, style and scene they want to see. They can also connect with other users, watch and comment on their content.

The new version, Sora 2, will feature a swipe-and-scroll navigation similar to platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, setting out OpenAI’s stall as Silicon Valley ramps up its focus on AI video generation. The company plans to initially release the app through Apple’s App Store in the U.S. and Canada on an invite-only basis.

OpenAI faces stiff competition from Google, which recently connected its Veo 3 AI video generator to its popular YouTube platform, allowing users to incorporate the technology in short-form videos. Social media and video-sharing apps are competing fiercely for user engagement.

Sora 2 will include a vertical feed and algorithm-driven recommendations that prioritize content users might connect with, the company said Tuesday. Sora was first released last December, allowing users to create high-definition video clips from text prompts. 

Technology and social-media companies are betting that new AI features will increase engagement and the popularity of their apps and services. AI companies have taken an aggressive approach to how their fast-evolving tools use creative works both for training and in response to user prompts. 

In an attempt to prevent doomscrolling, OpenAI said the app won’t allow users under the age of 18 to have the infinite scroll function by default and will nudge adult users toward creating content if it perceives they have been passively viewing for too long. Content will be marked as AI generated when it is moved off platform so that its provenance is clear.

The new version of Sora can create videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. OpenAI began alerting talent agencies and studios about the forthcoming product and its opt-out process over the past week. 

The opt-out process for the new version of Sora means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright material in videos the tool creates. While copyright characters will require an opt-out, the new product won’t generate images of recognizable public figures without their permission, the Journal reported.

The Journal’s parent company, News Corp, has a content deal with OpenAI.

“I think they are certainly opening themselves up to lawsuits in particular cases,” said Mark Lemley, professor at Stanford Law School, who represented AI company Anthropic in its recent copyright case. Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit over its use of pirated books to train large-language models. 

The app joins a crowded field. TikTok’s AI Alive feature lets users turn pictures into videos with prompts and users can upload AI-generated content. Meta last week rolled out a new feed of short-form AI-created videos in its AI app.

Write to Keach Hagey at Keach.Hagey@wsj.com and Gareth Vipers at gareth.vipers@wsj.com

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Is Fat Killing Your Gains? Surprising Pork Burger Study Stuns Scientists

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  • Study on pork and muscle growth: Researchers led by Nicholas Burd and Žan Zupančič at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign conducted a trial published September 7, 2025, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition to investigate how fat content in pork affects post-exercise muscle protein synthesis in 16 young active adults.
  • Meal design: Participants consumed either lean or high-fat ground pork burgers with equal protein after leg press and extension exercises, or a carbohydrate drink, using isotope-labeled amino acids to track synthesis.
  • Muscle biopsies: Biopsies taken before and after exercise and feeding measured protein synthesis rates over five hours.
  • Blood amino acids: Lean pork group showed highest increases in total and essential amino acids in blood compared to high-fat pork or carbohydrate.
  • Synthesis rates: Lean pork enhanced muscle protein synthesis more than high-fat pork after training, surprisingly unlike prior findings with eggs and salmon.
  • Previous research: Earlier studies found whole eggs and salmon superior to processed proteins or egg whites for post-exercise synthesis.
  • Processing effects: Grinding pork may have altered digestion kinetics, potentially blunting synthesis in high-fat version.
  • Key takeaway: Exercise drives most muscle response, but whole unprocessed foods like lean pork optimize nutritional stimulus for gains.

Fitness Man Upper Body Strength Energy

Scientists discovered that lean pork boosted muscle growth after exercise more than fattier pork, challenging expectations about dietary fat and protein. Credit: Stock

Lean pork enhanced muscle growth after training better than high-fat pork, despite equal protein amounts.

A recent study examined how adults respond to weight training when followed by a meal containing the same amount of protein but with different fat content. Participants consumed either a high-fat or a lean ground pork burger, and researchers measured the resulting muscle-building activity.

The outcome surprised the scientists, reinforcing the idea that the process of muscle-protein synthesis after exercise depends not only on the amount of protein consumed but also on the type of food providing it.

The findings were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Whole foods versus processed proteins

“What we’re finding is that not all high-quality animal protein foods are created equal,” said Nicholas Burd, a professor of health and kinesiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who led the research with graduate student Žan Zupančič.

Earlier research from Burd’s group demonstrated that eating whole eggs after weight training stimulated muscle-protein synthesis more effectively than eating only egg whites, despite equal protein content. Another experiment from the same lab showed that salmon supported greater post-exercise muscle growth than a processed mixture engineered to contain the same nutrients in identical ratios.

Together, these findings suggest that whole foods generally provide stronger stimulation of protein synthesis than processed alternatives, and in some cases, the fat content of whole foods may even enhance muscle-building, Burd noted.

Designing the pork patties for study

For this latest trial, researchers applied advanced tracing methods to measure muscle-protein synthesis in 16 young, physically active adults. To create the test meals, they collaborated with the University of Illinois Meat Science Laboratory, which carefully prepared the pork patties for the study.

“That took us a year because it was so hard to get those fat ratios correct,” Burd said. All the meat used in the study came from a single pig, and the researchers sent the patties off to another laboratory for analysis. Once the lean-to-fat ratios and other macros were confirmed, the pork burgers were frozen until needed in the feeding part of the study.

Prior to the exercise and feeding portion of the study, each participant was given an infusion of isotope-labeled amino acids. This technique enabled the researchers to follow how rapidly these labeled amino acids were incorporated into muscle tissue. Blood samples were also collected at multiple points to monitor amino acid concentrations in circulation.

Žan Zupančič and Nicholas Burd

Graduate student Žan Zupančič, left, health and kinesiology professor Nicholas Burd and their colleagues found that processing high-protein whole foods may alter the foods’ muscle-building potential in unexpected ways. Credit: Fred Zwicky

To establish a baseline for muscle-protein synthesis, the team performed muscle biopsies on participants both before the infusion began and again after the first two hours.

“And then we took them to the gym,” Burd said. “And they were wheeling that infusion pump and everything else with them.”

Testing exercise and feeding interventions

At the gym, the study subjects engaged in an acute bout of leg presses and leg extensions and then returned to the lab for a meal of either a high-fat pork burger, a lean pork burger or a carbohydrate drink. Five hours after the meal, another muscle biopsy was taken to measure protein synthesis in response to the weight-training and feeding intervention.

After a break of a few days, 14 of the 16 participants “crossed over, switching to a different feeding intervention to minimize the impact of individual differences in muscle-building responses,” Burd said.

The analysis revealed, as expected, that the amino acid content of the blood was significantly higher in those who ate pork than in those who consumed a carbohydrate drink. But the lean-pork group saw the greatest gains in amino acid levels in the blood. This was true for total and essential amino acids, the team found.

“When you see an increased concentration of amino acids in the blood after you eat, you get a pretty good idea that that is coming from the food that you just ate,” Burd said.

Lean pork supports more protein synthesis

Those who consumed the lean pork burger after a bout of weight training also had a greater rate of muscle-protein synthesis than those who ate the high-fat pork burger. This was a surprise to Burd, as “the previous studies using fattier foods, such as whole eggs or salmon, generally showed enhanced post-exercise muscle-protein synthesis compared with lower fat food such as egg whites or nutritional supplements,” he said.

Although weight training boosted muscle-protein synthesis in the groups eating pork, the protein in the high-fat burger seemed to have no added benefit in the hours after participants consumed it, while the protein in the lean pork gave muscle-protein synthesis a boost.

“For some reason, the high-fat pork truly blunted the response,” Burd said. “In fact, the people who ate the high-fat pork only had slightly better muscle-building potential than those who drank a carbohydrate sports beverage after exercise.”

Exercise remains the primary driver

Interpreting the results of this study for people who want to optimize muscle gains from weight-training is tricky, Burd said. It could be that processing the ground pork patties, which involved grinding the meat and adding the fattier meat to the lean, affected the kinetics of digestion.

“There was a little larger rise in the amino acids available from eating lean pork, so it could have been a bigger trigger for muscle-protein synthesis,” Burd said. “But that seems to be specific to the ground pork. If you’re eating other foods, like eggs or salmon, the whole foods appear to be better despite not eliciting a large rise in blood amino acids.”

Burd stresses that exercise is the strongest stimulus for muscle-protein synthesis.

“Most of the muscle response is to weight-training, and we use nutrition to try to squeeze out the remaining potential,” he said. “When it comes to eating after weight-training, what we’re finding is that some foods, particularly whole, unprocessed foods seem to be a better stimulus.”

Reference: “Ingestion of a lipid-rich meat matrix blunts the postexercise increase of myofibrillar protein synthesis rates in healthy adults: a randomized controlled trial” by Žan Zupančič, Andrew T Askow, Takeshi M Barnes, Max T Deutz, Alexander V Ulanov, Ryan N Dilger, Anna C Dilger, Jared W Willard, Richard WA Mackenzie, Jocelyn E Harseim, Diego Hernández-Saavedra and Nicholas A Burd, 7 September 2025, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2025.09.001

The National Pork Board’s Pork Checkoff program supported this research.

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