Hasta La Gadget!

Just as we love to binge-watch our favorite HGTV shows, people are just as obsessed with figuring out whether or not certain parts of those shows are fake. 

Thanks to a recent New York Times interview with twins Jonathan and Drew Scott ― aka the “Property Brothers” ― we now have a better idea of what’s real and what’s simply recreated.

The piece starts out with Jonathan and a producer reshooting a scene for one of the twins’ shows, called “Brother vs. Brother.” For this particular shot, the 39-year-old HGTV star is “acting surprised” as he’s taking out a toilet from a house he’s working on. 

“Let’s do it one more time,” the producer tells Jonathan.

In another scene, Drew and his producer recreate a “high-intensity moment” for a chimney that ripped off the roof the previous day due to high winds. 

“At the end of the day, it has to be interesting television,” Jonathan told the Times. “But when we find a load-bearing wall, we are really finding a load-bearing wall.” 

There’s no doubt the “Property Brothers” are making interesting television, as their six spinoffs, book deals and dedicated following has helped them earn an estimated $5 to $10 million net worth. And it’s refreshing to hear them talk about certain scenes that are reshot and which ones aren’t. 

Other HGTV shows reportedly reshoot or tweak scenes, according to certain people who have come forward. 

David Ridley, who appeared on “Fixer Upper,” told Fox News last year that the house hunting part of the show isn’t what is seems. 

“You have to be under contract to be on the show. They show you other homes but you already have one,” Ridley told Fox. “After they select you, they send your house to Chip and Joanna and their design team.”

Looks like the Property Brothers are heading in a refreshingly transparent direction.

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At the urging of his daughter, Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump made sure to include a provision for six weeks of paid parental leave in the budget plan his administration released Tuesday.

This should be a welcome, landmark development for women in the U.S., the only developed country that doesn’t require some kind of paid time off for new mothers.  

Instead, it amounts to nothing more than a cruel joke in a budget that proposes gruesome reductions to social programs over the next decade. The plan includes a breathtaking overall cut of $1.4 trillion to Medicaid (a figure that presumes repeal of Obamacare) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. It also calls for a $193 billion slice out of food stamps and $272 billion in cuts to other programs that serve the poor.

The budget seeks $19 billion for paid parental leave over 10 years.

What good is the paid leave if you can’t afford to feed yourself, take your baby to the doctor, pay your hospital bills, or get access to quality pre- or post-natal care?

Advocates for paid leave, who’ve been fighting for years for change, were near universal in their condemnation of the proposal. “World’s worst parental leave plan,” said Katie Bethell, the founder of Paid Leave for the United States, a nonprofit group.

“It’s a testament to the national movement to solve the paid leave crisis that the Trump administration is even expected to offer a parental leave plan in its proposed budget. Unfortunately, based on details released so far, the proposal falls far short,”  Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said in a statement.

Even if the leave provision did not come wrapped in a package of brutal cuts to social services, the policy still falls down in its details.

Trump did expand the six weeks of leave to fathers and adoptive parents, who were excluded from the plan rolled out during his presidential campaign. However, the policy leaves out those workers who would need time off in case of serious illness or to care for ailing relatives, considered a standard part of family leave.

The 1993 federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave to workers at companies with more than 50 employees, includes that type of time off ― as do state paid-leave plans in Rhode Island, California, New Jersey, and the one scheduled to go into effect next year in New York.

For funding, the Trump leave plan would rely on the unemployment insurance system, already under-financed and under-utilized. The White House leaves the details entirely to the states to work out.

Unemployment benefits are woefully inadequate, paying an average of $344 week, according to the National Employment Law Project. In 14 states unemployed workers get less than $300 a week. Fewer unemployed women typically qualify for unemployment insurance.

Theoretically, Trump’s leave plan could help someone like Regina Mays, who took six weeks of unpaid leave from her job that pays her about $10 an hour at a Walmart in High Point, North Carolina, after she had a baby girl last year

With no money coming in, she struggled to feed herself and her four other children at home. “There was time when I paid the bills and I literally didn’t have money for food,” Mays told HuffPost recently. A relative came by with groceries for her and her kids so they didn’t go hungry.

There was at least one thing Mays said she didn’t have to worry about: paying her hospital or doctor bills, which were covered by Medicaid.

Trump’s budget would rip that rug out from under mothers like Mays who theoretically would get about $1,800 for her six weeks at home, but without healthcare would also be on the hook for potentially tens of the thousands of dollars in medical bills.

The math is terrifying.

Cutting Medicaid would be devastating for all low-income Americans, but particularly for women and mothers: 45 percent of childbirths in the U.S. were funded by Medicaid in 2010, according to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  

Trump’s budget also cuts funding for after-school programs for children and support for domestic violence victims.

The budget proposal lays bare a perverse, reverse Robin Hood administration ― taking from the poor to give tax cuts to the wealthy (proposed earlier this month).

But on the bright side, like most White House budgets, Trump’s is unlikely to become reality. As for the parental leave plan, Democrats see it as too skimpy. And there’s little indication that GOP lawmakers, who are typically eager to cut taxes and slash social programs, would want to give Americans what the Republicans likely view as a new entitlement.

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Michał Filipiak, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University

Dead wood-eating beetles, such as termites, can cause damage to residential properties. But they repay humans by performing a priceless service: helping us recycle decomposing dead trees.

Decomposition may have an unpleasant ring to it but it is a fundamental process in a functioning ecosystem, ensuring that we are not buried under the huge mass of dead organic matter that is produced every year right on our own doorsteps.

Dead wood-eating beetles are among the insect world’s best decomposers – organisms that digest dead matter and make their own living cells and tissues out of the acquired atoms.

The vast majority of organic matter produced worldwide every year is stored in wood, which is tough, and hard to digest and decompose. Worse yet, wood is nutritionally stingy. Dead wood is rich in sugars (cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin), but try surviving on sugar alone!

Digested wood may be source of energy, but it is insufficiently nutritious so that all the organisms developing in dead wood – beetles but also flies, moths, and bacteria – struggle with growth, development and maturation.

Still, dead wood eaters are able to survive and thrive on this low-quality food source. How they do it?

Sugar-craving wood eaters

All living organisms have their own ecosystems, with digestive tracts inhabited by symbionts, the scientific term for organisms living in symbiosis.

Common knowledge would suggest that the activity of wood-eating beetles’ symbionts provides them with nutritionally balanced diets. And we know that beetles are able to synthesise important organic compounds out of nutrients furnished by their primary food, the dead wood.

But according to the law of conservation of mass, which dictates that the mass of the products in a chemical reaction must equal the mass of the reactants, a complete diet based on pure wood would be impossible. The atoms composing nutrients cannot be created out of nothing.

The problem is the organic composition of wood. Even if sugars (chemical structure CxH2yOy) are split into atoms, they are a source of only three chemical elements: carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. This is not enough to live off even when we consider that sybionts have the ability to assimilate the fourth element, nitrogen, directly from the air.

It has been estimated that for wood-eating beetles to consume the atomic composition of their bodies from wood alone would require approximately 40 years for males and 85 years for females, which are bigger. In fact, the beetle’s growth period spans at most three to four years in nature.

Beetles must therefore have a source of proper food, offering the needed atoms in the right proportions, and it cannot be the wood that seemingly comprises the whole of their diet. Where do they get the nutrients needed to grow and mature?

Dead wood

The answer is fungi.

During the first few years of decay after living wood dies, its nutritional composition is changed by fungi. Fungal tissues growing inside of dead wood are connected to nutritionally-rich areas of the environment outside of the wood.

These may consist of either protein-rich organic matter or of minerals and rocks. Rocks may be disintegrated by fungi, and are sources of specific atoms utilised to build fungal tissues. Fungi may even “predate” on soil fauna.

Acquired nutrients are translocated from the outside of dead wood to the inside via the fungal mycelium (that is, mushroom “body”). By consuming decomposed wood that is rich in fungal tissues, the dead wood eater is able to grow, develop and reach maturity.

But even then its growth is constrained. To cope with the nutritional limitations of dead wood, these beetles prolong their development, slowly growing over several years. During this time, they are able to gather all the necessary building blocks (atoms) for their adult bodies.

Their prolonged development time is made possible by the relative safety and climatic comfort of living inside logs and tree trunks, as opposed to in the outside world, which reduces mortality.

Ecological interactions

Growth and development of dead-wood eating beetles are co-limited by the scarcity of non-sugar nutrients rich in essential bioelements, such as nitrogen, phosphporous, potassium, sodium, magnesium, zinc and copper. Atoms of these elements have the nutrients used for building and maintaining the bodies of growing dead wood-eaters.

Fungi utilise dead wood as a source of energy, and as they sprout all over logs during the first four or five years of decay, they nutritionally enrich and rearrange dead wood. In doing so, they create a nutritional niche for dead wood-eaters, allowing them to undergo growth and development to maturity.

In turn, deadwood-eaters affect the wood, fragmenting and shredding it and producing what’s known as frass (wood pieces mixed with excrement that may be further decomposed by microorganisms). Beetles therefore contributing to further wood decomposition and nutrient cycling on the forest floor.

Thanks to complicated ecological interactions between dead wood, fungi and dead wood-eaters, the huge mass of the most common organic matter in land ecosystems is being continuously decomposed in forest ecosystems. It’s nature’s own recycling system.

Michał Filipiak, Environmental Biologist, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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UPDATE 12:45 p.m. ET:  The “Dangerous Woman” tour has not been canceled, Entertainment Weekly reported. Ariana Grande’s team is currently assessing their options, and the London arena where she is slated to perform later this week is standing by for an announcement, the venue tweeted. 

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Ariana Grande has reportedly suspended the remainder of her “Dangerous Woman” world tour after a terrorist attack during her performance at Manchester Arena on Monday killed 22 and injured at least 59. 

ISIS has since claimed responsibility for the attack, which included children among the dead and injured. 

TMZ was first to report the tour had been “indefinitely suspended.” CNN reported that the singer was “physically unharmed.” HuffPost has reached out to Grande’s representatives and will update this post accordingly.

A fan-run “Dangerous Woman” Twitter account called on Grande’s fans to focus on the tragedy and its victims instead of the tour, stating: “I’m sorry but the remaining tour dates aren’t very important at the moment.”

Grande was meant to perform Thursday and Friday in London before moving on to other European countries including Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy. “Dangerous Woman” was then scheduled to move to South America and Australia.

“From the bottom of my heart, i am so so sorry. i don’t have words,” the singer tweeted soon after the attack.

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The city of Manchester, England, united to help those affected by Monday night’s devastating terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert.

Following the attack, which left at least 22 people dead and 59 injured, residents banded together to offer free rides, accommodations, food, drinks and blood donations to first responders and victims of the blast.

Here are just a few of the heroic and generous acts of kindness:

Taxi drivers offered stranded concert-goers free rides out of the city.

As concert attendees fled Manchester Arena following the explosion, authorities shut down transportation networks so security services could investigate the attack, which left people stranded. 

So taxi drivers turned off their meters and offered free rides.

A.J. Singh, a taxi driver in Manchester, is one of those drivers who helped out.

“I’ve had people who needed to find loved ones, I’ve dropped them off to the hospital, they’re not had any money, they’ve been stranded,” he told Channel 4 News.

“Manchester, we’re glue and we stick together,” he added.

A company called Street Cars Manchester also helped out.

Some social media users also reported that black cabs offered free rides throughout the night.

Residents, places of worship and hotels provided shelter for the night.

Manchester residents began using the hashtag #roomformanchester shortly after the attack to offer free shelter to those in need.

Hotels and pubs near the venue also offered to take in people caught up in the attack.

Sikh temples also offered food and accommodations.

A rabbi brought police officers coffee and pastries.

Rabbi Shneur Cohen brought officers standing outside Manchester Arena some refreshments on Tuesday morning.

 Residents and restaurants offered free food and drinks.

Signs of solidarity spread across the city.

A charity offered free counseling to those affected by the attack.

People gave money and donated blood. 

The local newspaper Manchester Evening News set up a JustGiving page, which has raised more than $530,000 for families of victims.

Muslims for Manchester also set up an online campaign to raise funds. 

Others flocked to blood banks to donate their blood. 

A Twitter user said merchandise vendors outside the arena tended to the victims, using T-shirts as bandages.

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