The Gophers football program continued to address its needs along the offensive line on Saturday, getting commitments from Washington left tackle Kahlee Tafai and Kentucky left guard Dylan Ray out of the NCAA transfer portal. ADVERTISEMENT The U has four starters leaving after this season, including both tackles — Aireontae Ersery to the NFL Draft and Phillip Daniels in a transfer to Ohio State — and both senior guards Quinn Carroll and Tyler Cooper. The Gophers have added 13 total players through the transfer portal, including right guard Marcellus Marshall (Central Florida). Tafai, who is listed at 6-foot-5 and 330 pounds, moved into the Huskies’ starting lineup during his freshman season in 2024. He has three years of eligibility remaining. A native of Lawndale, Calif., Tafai played 267 offensive snaps in the Big Ten last season but had a low 38.5 overall grade from Pro Football Focus in his first extensive college experience. He also played a few snaps at right tackle a year ago. ADVERTISEMENT Ray, who is listed at 6-6 and 310, has played more than 1,000 snaps over the last two seasons for Kentucky after beginning his career with two years at West Virginia. He started 10 games for the SEC program in 2023, but only two last year. The Noblesville, Ind., native had a near-average grade of 57.5 from PFF in 2024. He has one year of eligibility remaining for the U next fall. ______________________________________________________ This story was written by one of our partner news agencies. Forum Communications Company uses content from agencies such as Reuters, Kaiser Health News, Tribune News Service and others to provide a wider range of news to our readers. Learn more about the news services FCC uses here .
TransMedics to Participate in the 43rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
Jimmy Carter To Receive State Funeral: Trump Calls Him 'Truly A Good Man,' Biden Mourns Loss Of 'Extraordinary Leader'St. Thomas secures 100-61 win over Crown (MN)
United Way of Payne County reached its $1 million goal for 2024, said Executive Director Ruth Cavins. The nonprofit will now be able to continue benefiting the 24 nonprofits it supports in Stillwater. United Way of Payne County goal is to improve the lives of families and individuals by uniting resources, according to its website. By investing donated dollars and volunteer time in nonprofit partner agencies, United Way can focus on expanding education, improving health and safety and reducing poverty. “All of our partner agencies are accredited based on their missions and the work that they do in our community,” Cavins said. “Then they’re eligible to apply for grants through us.” Cavins said each agency or nonprofit requests a certain amount of money, and it’s United Way’s goal to raise that money during its campaign. “If we meet our campaign goal, it’s a huge celebration,” Cavins said. United Way focuses on trying to meet its campaign goal by the time the board holds its December meeting. This year, the board reached its $1 million goal, and celebrated by meeting Dec. 19 at the Stillwater YMCA to fill out the thermometer and take a group photo. Cavins said there are 37 board members who actively raise money for United Way, by collaborating with Stillwater businesses who participate in workplace campaigns, contacting their own social networks to raise individual funding or coordinating fundraising events throughout Stillwater. “That’s a lot of money for our community, and so (Dec. 19) was just a huge relief and big success – and a thank you to all of the individuals who participated in coordinating and making the campaign happen, and (also) acknowledging our incredible community that year after year, stands up and supports United Way’s mission,” Cavins said. Cavins said the goal is always to reach that amount, but “we also have to balance what we’re able to raise within our community.” Across Stillwater, the work of United Way continues to play an important part in meeting needs in the community such as health, youth opportunity, financial security and community resiliency in Stillwater, Perkins, Cushing, Glencoe, Ripley and Yale. In its annual report, United Way found that 20.2% of residents in Payne County live below the poverty line, 41% of residents are food insecure and there are 1,401 reports of child abuse. Payne County is ranked as one of the top five most expensive counties for housing in Oklahoma, according to the report. Last year, United Way partner agencies served 33,685 individuals and indirectly served 44,469 people. “The (annual report) was created to serve as an education piece for our community, because it’s very easy to live here and not be aware of the poverty rate or how many people are living on the streets – or especially (instances) of domestic violence, child abuse, substance abuse (and) mental illness,” Cavins said. Cavins said the cost of doing business has increased for everybody, and this can be challenging for those nonprofits requesting help from United Way. “Our nonprofit partners are continuing to request more year after year, because that’s what they need to be able to operate,” Cavins said. Since United Way started in 1952, the goal for campaigns has incrementally increased, she said. “United Way is a well-known brand, and I think, a well-trusted organization within our community,” Cavins said. The “beauty” of giving to United Way, Cavins said, is donors can know that their dollars are going to organizations that “are operating at really high standards for nonprofit management, and that they’re meeting very critical needs within our community. United Way is kind of a ‘one-stop shop’ to get the best bang for your buck when you contribute to a charity.” She pointed out Tommy’s Express Car Wash as an example of partnering with United Way, where proceeds from one day of sales were donated to United Way. Board members helped vacuum cars for customers. “That was a great way to raise money for United Way and show a public display of support for our nonprofit agencies,” Cavins said. Cavins said Logan Johns, manager at Tommy’s, will become a United Way board member next year. Serving on the board provides training for leadership development, especially for young professionals. “That’s just a grassroots example of how our community connects with businesses who are interested in supporting philanthropic needs within the community,” Cavins said. Cavins said United Way doesn’t raise all of the funding for agencies, but she said she’d like more nonprofits to know that there are fundraising opportunities coming in the new year.WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump's supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump's movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump's Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer , a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer's comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks , whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar." Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government , weighed in, defending the tech industry's need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump's world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift. His presidential transition team did not respond to questions about positions on visas for highly skilled workers or the debate between his supporters online. Instead, his team instead sent a link to a post on X by longtime adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller that was a transcript of a speech Trump gave in 2020 at Mount Rushmore in which he praised figures and moments from American history. Musk, the world's richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect , was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump's movement but his stance on the tech industry's hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry's need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent," he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Trump's own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration , including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order , which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Trump's businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club , and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country" and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country," he told the “All-In" podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump's budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes.
MACON, Ga. (AP) — Ahmad Robinson had 25 points in Mercer's 75-63 win over winless Chicago State on Sunday. Robinson shot 9 of 16 from the field and went 7 for 8 from the free-throw line for the Bears (6-4). Marcus Overstreet scored 10 points and grabbed seven rebounds. Angel Montas had nine points. Noble Crawford led the Cougars (0-12) with 20 points, nine rebounds, six assists and two steals. Cameron Jernigan added 18 points, seven rebounds, two steals and two blocks. Troy McCoy scored 11. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .
Q&A: Colorectal cancer patients are getting younger. Early screenings can helpAfter a sprawling hacking campaign exposed the communications of an unknown number of Americans, U.S. cybersecurity officials are advising people to use encryption in their communications. To safeguard against the risks highlighted by the campaign, which originated in China, federal cybersecurity authorities released an extensive list of security recommendations for U.S. telecom companies — such as Verizon and AT&T — that were targeted. The advice includes one tip we can all put into practice with our phones: “Ensure that traffic is end-to-end encrypted to the maximum extent possible.” End-to-end encryption, also known as E2EE, means that messages are scrambled so that only the sender and recipient can see them. If anyone else intercepts the message, all they will see is garble that can't be unscrambled without the key. Law enforcement officials had until now resisted this type of encryption because it means the technology companies themselves won't be able to look at the messages, nor respond to law enforcement requests to turn the data over. Here's a look at various ways ordinary consumers can use end-to-end encryption: Officials said the hackers targeted the metadata of a large number of customers, including information on the dates, times and recipients of calls and texts. They also managed to see the content from texts from a much smaller number of victims. If you're an iPhone user, information in text messages that you send to someone else who also has an iPhone will be encrypted end-to-end. Just look for the blue text bubbles, which indicate that they are encrypted iMessages. The same goes for Android users sending texts through Google Messages. There will be a lock next to the timestamp on each message to indicate the encryption is on. But there's a weakness. When iPhone and Android users text each other, the messages are encrypted only using Rich Communication Services, an industry standard for instant messaging that replaces the older SMS and MMS standards. Apple has noted that RCS messages “aren’t end-to-end encrypted, which means they’re not protected from a third party reading them while they’re sent between devices.” Samsung, which sells Android smartphones, has also hinted at the issue in a footnote at the bottom of a press release last month on RCS, saying, “Encryption only available for Android to Android communication.” To avoid getting caught out when trading texts, experts recommend using encrypted messaging apps. Privacy advocates are big fans of Signal, which applies end-to-end encryption to all messages and voice calls. The independent nonprofit group behind the app promises never to sell, rent or lease customer data and has made its source code publicly available so that it can be audited by anyone to examine it “for security and correctness.” Signal's encryption protocol is so reputable that it has been integrated into rival WhatsApp, so users will enjoy the same level of security protection as Signal, which has a much smaller user base. End-to-end encryption is also the default mode for Facebook Messenger, which like WhatsApp is owned by Meta Platforms. Telegram is an app that can be used for one-on-one conversations, group chats and broadcast “channels" but contrary to popular perception, it doesn't turn on end-to-end encryption by default. Users have to switch on the option. And it doesn’t work with group chats. Cybersecurity experts have warned people against using Telegram for private communications and pointed out that only its opt-in ‘secret chat’ feature is encrypted from end-to-end. The app also has a reputation for being a haven for scammers and criminal activity, highlighted by founder and CEO Pavel Durov's arrest in France. Instead of using your phone to make calls through a wireless cellular network, you can make voice calls with Signal and WhatsApp. Both apps encrypt calls with the same technology that they use to encrypt messages. There are other options. If you have an iPhone you can use Facetime for calls, while Android owners can use the Google Fi service, which are both end-to-end encrypted. The only catch with all these options is that, as with using the chat services to send messages, the person on the other end will also have to have the app installed. WhatsApp and Signal users can customize their privacy preferences in the settings, including hiding an IP address during calls to prevent your general location from being guessed. Receive the latest in local entertainment news in your inbox weekly!
These new California laws will go into effect in 2025WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump's supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump's movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump's Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer , a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer's comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks , whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar." Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government , weighed in, defending the tech industry's need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump's world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift. His presidential transition team did not respond to questions about positions on visas for highly skilled workers or the debate between his supporters online. Instead, his team instead sent a link to a post on X by longtime adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller that was a transcript of a speech Trump gave in 2020 at Mount Rushmore in which he praised figures and moments from American history. Musk, the world's richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect , was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump's movement but his stance on the tech industry's hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry's need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent," he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Trump's own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration , including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order , which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Trump's businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club , and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country" and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country," he told the “All-In" podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump's budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes.
A camera trap is a fairly unsophisticated piece of technology. A camera, a motion sensor, an SD card, and a handful of regular old double A batteries make up the inventory of the most important components. A million brands making a million different models are for sale all over the world. If you live in certain parts of the planet, you could decide you want a camera right now, and a guy will drop one off on your doorstep by this evening. It’s an unremarkable, easily accessible product. This is true. What’s also true is that a camera trap is a magical device that has the ability open a portal to a different world. A world far from air conditioning, TikTok, or even walls and ceilings. This is a forested world filled with a vast array of fascinating creatures. Sure we can enter the forest and walk around and feel like we’re somewhere new and different. The camera trap takes you a step further, into a forested world where no humans are present. In this place, the creatures that would never allow themselves to be seen by human beings are free to act naturally in their environment. This is why I love camera trapping. Every time I remove an SD card from a camera, place it into my computer, and click play, I’m transported to a different world, 20 seconds at a time. At the top of my list of creatures that I hope to see when I click play are . I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that in the forests around where I live, there are enormous spotted wild cats that weigh up to 200 pounds secretly living out their lives. And their lives really are mysterious. The people who are interested in learning more about what these cats are up to must rely on camera traps, along with footprints and scat, to give them clues as to where they’re living and how they’re living their lives. A few of these jaguar researchers have banded together to contribute to a database of living in Guanacaste. Each jaguar has a unique spot pattern and based on that pattern, they receive a name and are entered into the database. The database is always growing, but right now there are 100 or so known jaguars. In the last few months, I’ve been invited to send my jaguar videos to the keeper of the database so he can analyze each cat’s spotted coat, and we can all learn a little more about the jaguars that I’ve recorded. To my immense delight, I’ve learned that my camera traps have recorded at least 15 different jaguars (Maybe more. Sometimes it’s hard to see the spot pattern clearly.) Some of them are previously known individuals, already documented by a researcher. Just the other day, I sent a video to be analyzed, and it turned out to be a well-known individual that another researcher had recorded just hours before my video. We figured out that this male jaguar had marched 13 kilometers in a span of a few hours. While I love being able to add to the records of known individuals, what I find truly fantastic is identifying previously unknown animals. To date, I’ve been able to record 12 jaguars that are new to the database. That’s 12 massive wild cats that most likely nobody has ever seen before. Just walking around in the forest. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me to think about. Now take a look at the video below and join the handful of people who have ever seen these jaguars. Vincent Losasso, founder of , is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica. Learn more about his projects on or . You can also email him at:Kitchens will lead Tar Heels in Fenway Bowl against UConn. Another ex-Browns coach is standing byPHOENIX — You may be familiar with a range of tips for living a healthy life: Watch your weight, exercise, eat nutritious food and don’t smoke, for example. What if you could combine these lifestyle factors with a host of other variables to learn your risk of developing specific diseases, to help catch and treat them early or prevent them altogether? Victor Ortega, M.D., Ph.D. , associate director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine in Arizona, explains how science is drawing ever closer to making such personal health forecasts possible. Previously inconceivable, such personal guides to well-being are becoming increasingly possible because of new and sophisticated genome-wide technologies that capture data spanning entire genomes, Dr. Ortega says. The complex scores are compiled from a combination of data from thousands to hundreds of thousands of a person's DNA sequence variants. This type of large genome-wide data has the potential to predict disease risks, such as heart disease , diabetes , asthma and specific cancers . "Imagine knowing your genetic predisposition for having a heart attack in your 50s, or if you're in the top 5% of the population for the risk of cancer or diabetes based on data from your whole genome. With this knowledge, you could make informed lifestyle choices and receive enhanced screenings to mitigate that risk," Dr. Ortega says. As a pulmonologist and genomic scientist, Dr. Ortega is leading a charge to breathe new life into precision medicine advancements. His mission is rooted in a deep commitment to health equities and inspired by his grandmother. "My grandmother died of asthma, and that should not have happened. She was Puerto Rican like me, and Puerto Ricans have the highest severity and frequency of asthma of any ethnic group in the world," Dr. Ortega says. "They also represent less than 1% of people in genetic studies. So, I've made it a life mission to develop cures and diagnostics for people like my grandma, and for all people." Each person has millions of genetic variants, each having a small effect. But together, these variants can increase the risk of getting a condition. A polygenic risk score estimates the overall risk someone has of getting a disease by adding up the small effects of variants throughout an individual’s entire genome. Polygenic risk scores are not used to diagnose diseases. Some people who don't have a high-risk score for a certain disease still can be at risk of getting the disease or might already have it. Other people with high-risk scores may never get the disease. People with the same genetic risk can have different outcomes depending on other factors such as lifestyle which determine one’s lifelong environmental exposures, also called the exposome . Dr. Ortega says that getting to the point where all people know their polygenic risk scores will require a solid foundation of "omics" research and datasets, cutting-edge technologies and further discoveries of gene-disease links — all of which are within his team's expertise and capabilities. Omics is an emerging multidisciplinary field of biological sciences that encompasses genomics, proteomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and more. "It's going to take considerable work and planning, but it really is the way of the future," he says. In the shorter term, Dr. Ortega plans to transition more omics discoveries from research laboratories to the clinic. Omics data can help identify the molecular culprits driving a person's disease, as well as biomarkers that can lead to the development of targeted treatments and diagnostics. Recent omics discoveries at Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine have enabled scientists to predict antidepressant response in people with depression and discover a potential therapeutic strategy for bone marrow cancer. Scientists have also used omics to pinpoint genetic variations that potentially increase the risk for severe COVID-19, uncover potential clues for preventing and treating gliomas and unravel the genetic mystery of a rare neurodevelopmental disorder . Drawing from his years of extensive clinical experience in treating patients with severe respiratory illnesses, Dr. Ortega is also working to expand genomic testing to a broader set of diseases. He highlights the center's collaborative Program for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases as an effective model that he hopes to amplify. The Program for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases proactively engages healthcare teams across Mayo's clinical practice to conduct targeted genomic testing for patients with a suspected rare genetic disease. He says expanding this strategy to more diseases will help build collaborations across Mayo and educate more clinicians on genomics. It may also ensure the most effective genomic sequencing tests are given to patients, ultimately improving patient care and outcomes. Dr. Ortega is leading the development of a polygenic risk score framework for Mayo Clinic, beginning with interstitial lung disease . This condition, marked by progressive scarring of lung tissue, is influenced by both rare gene variants and a collection of more common variants, all of which are captured together in polygenic risk scores. ### About Mayo Clinic Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to innovation in clinical practice, education and research, and to providing compassion, expertise and answers to everyone who needs healing. Visit the Mayo Clinic News Network for additional Mayo Clinic news.TikToker teaching science hopes short-form video will become part of curriculum
