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This coming weekend, Canada's bobsleigh team will compete in Altenberg, Germany for its last chance to qualify a sled at the Milano Cortina Olympics beginning Feb. 6. Kelsey Mitchell, an Olympic track cycling champion who made the switch to bobsleigh in recent months, is hoping it will be her ticket to Milano Cortina.
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sanguinityIn these works, a human character experiences so much stress that they transform into a Pomeranian dog. They can only revert back to their human form if the stress is relieved via receiving love and affection from other people.
Form'd for Idleness and Ease
Keith & Ewen
Pomegaverse, Animal Transformation, Bad Things Always Happen to Keith, Let's Get That Man Some Affection For a Change, Or At Least a Mini-Vacay as a Beloved Lapdog
Captain Keith Windham's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day just got worse. Ewen, of course, is a perfect gentleman about it all.
soniaThe parties in the lawsuit John Doe, et al. v. Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc., et al., Case No. 3:23-cv-02865-EMC (N.D. Cal.) (“Action”) have reached a proposed settlement of claims (“Settlement”) in a pending class action against Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. (“Defendant”) and certain related entities. If approved, the Settlement will resolve this Action wherein Plaintiffs allege that Defendant’s websites and mobile applications disclosed their confidential personal information due to third-party software code. Plaintiffs allege that this code was embedded across Defendant’s platforms, including the secure patient portal, and transmitted information to third parties when users navigated these platforms. Defendant firmly denies the allegations, denying any liability or wrongdoing, and denies that Plaintiffs are entitled to any relief arising from this Action. Defendant also maintains that Plaintiffs have not suffered any damages arising from this Action.
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celebrity20in20 is a 20in20 community dedicated to making icons of actors and actresses. You have 20 days to make 20 icons about a celebrity of your choice, based on a set of themes for the round.
calimacreactor_feedPublished on January 16, 2026
reactor_feedPublished on January 16, 2026
Screenshot: Universal Pictures
Screenshot: Universal Pictures
If you, like me, are a lightly obsessive fan of Sam Esmail’s series Mr. Robot, you are probably always curious about what the man is going to do next. He didn’t get far with his Battlestar Galactica reboot (which I very much wanted to see). His take on Metropolis got scrapped during the 2023 writers’ strike. He did manage to make an eerie adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind—a movie which crops up in my mind every time I see too many Teslas on one block.
But that was in 2023. I have been waiting for a new Esmail project ever since. And now that, if slightly vague, news has come. The Hollywood Reporter says that Esmail has a new sci-fi project in the works called Tesseract, and it’s set to star the now-ubiquitous Glen Powell (Twisters, pictured above). Esmail will write and direct, and the film “has landed at Amazon MGM and United Artists” (producer Scott Stuber recently signed a deal with Amazon MGM).
THR offers only one other detail: “The project does call for two other lead roles, both females, according to sources.” The movie is not greenlit, but may shoot over the summer in Europe.
It’s not a lot to go on, but that title is intriguing, at least to Marvel fans and Madeleine L’Engle readers (and, I guess, geometry fans?). This is simply Tesseract, not The Tesseract; that title belongs to an existing film based on an Alex Garland novel.
Esmail has one project to finish before Tesseract gets going: the thriller Panic Carefully, which he also wrote and directed. It stars Julia Roberts, Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth Olsen, Joe Alwyn, Aidan Gillen, Brian Tyree Henry, and Ben Chaplin, and reportedly involves the hunt for a cyber-terrorist. No release dates have been announced for any upcoming Esmail projects. Yet.[end-mark]
The post Sam Esmail’s Next Sci-Fi Movie Will Star Glen Powell appeared first on Reactor.
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Blue Jays homegrown star Bo Bichette is leaving Toronto for the New York Mets, according to media reports. The Associated Press and ESPN report the deal is for $126 million US over three years.
fabiadrake posting in historiumin_the_pipeline_feedAh, G-protein coupled receptors. They’re an absolute mainstay of drug discovery and have been for many decades, and one of the first projects I worked in when I joined the industry was an effort to produce selective muscarinic M2 antagonists. A few years back I had the chance to meet Bob Lefkowitz (Nobel for GPCRs, along with Brian Kobilka), and I mentioned to him that back in the early 1990s when I was working on them I thought I understood them reasonably well. He grinned when I told him that as time went on I decided that I actually didn’t know jack #$! about them, and that this became more apparent every passing year. This new paper emphasizes that situation!
To recap for folks who don’t do this for a living, GPCRs are ubiquitous proteins found on the cell surface, which extend all the way to the inside cytoplasm. There are whole families of these things (with the classic opioid, dopamine, and serotonin ones being famous examples), and they are a way for cells to receive chemical signals from outside that get turned into intracellular changes as these receptors get activated or inactivated.
Those “G proteins” in the name are associated with the inner poking-into-the-cell region of the GPCR. The receptor itself changes shape as small molecule ligands (like dopamine!) bind to it or leave on the outside surface, and the activities of the G proteins on the inside change in response to those movements in turn. And those activities include formation or cleavage of a number of prominent “second messenger” molecules like cyclic AMP and others, which set off all kinds of activity as their concentrations move up and down. It’s really a sort of physical toggle switch to get signals through the cell membrane, and on close inspection they truly resemble an old Rube Goldberg machine where the cat jumps for the toy mouse, moving a lever that makes the ball go down and hit the bell that wakes up the bird, which flies over to the. . .
Complications ensue. As mentioned, there are often a whole list of GPCRs that respond to the same ligand but are hooked up to different second messengers and are found on different types of cells. That’s one level. Another is that the ligands that activate these receptors (“agonists” in the nomenclature) don’t always activate them to the same degree - there are “partial agonists” that can have different effects than the “full agonists”. Then you have molecules that bind to the receptor but don’t activate it (and in fact can keep agonists from binding while they’re around) - those are “antagonists”, and there are several ways that they can bind to make this happen. Yet another variation is the way that some receptors are set in the “always on” position, activating their second messenger proteins all the time, until a ligand comes along and binds to them to change their shape that then actually shuts them off instead. These are “inverse agonists”. Then you have the way that some particular GPCR subtypes seem to cluster together in defined groups on the cell surface and affect each other’s signaling and behavior as opposed to how they act when they’re studied in isolation. I’m not even going to start on the subtleties on the inner loops of these proteins; suffice it to say that there are whole other signaling families that can also bind down there in addition to the various G-proteins. Oh, it’s a mess.
This latest paper is actually trying to bring some of that mess into better focus, and they’re using my old friend and sparring partner the M2 muscarinic receptor as an example. It’s a good choice because it’s been shown to have some large structural changes on ligand binding. Through genetic manipulation and fluorescence microscopy, they’re able to set up a number of structural reporters for the physical state of the receptor protein (the fluorescent groups respond to changes in their environment, such as being shifted into a more or less polar region). And what they find is that this garden-variety GPCR has a whole range of behaviors when exposed to various agonist molecules, shifting around on millisecond time scales between several conformational states with equilibrium constants between each of them. Different agonist molecules hit in different ways when examined at this level of resolution - there are several distinct active states for this GPCR and they interact with the G-proteins in different ways.
The authors dryly note that “Overall, our study reveals that the activation of a GPCR in intact cells may be far more complex than previous biophysical studies with isolated receptors have suggested”. And as I mentioned above, it’s not like the previous studies have all led to a simple or orderly model themselves! But this is probably a first look at what’s really happening with these receptors, and we’re going to have to get more details as we try to figure out whether we can use this knowledge to our advantage with new ligands. One way or another, we all now officially know more about GPCRs than we did, and we all now officially understand them less. Welcome to the club!
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After more than 13 years at the helm of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down from the Star Wars factory founded by George Lucas.
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In the wake of a backlash sparked by a viral video, WestJet has cancelled a new seat configuration that squeezed an extra row on board many of its planes and left passengers with less legroom.
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Life is quieter in Kashechewan First Nation in northern Ontario. Some children can still be seen playing hockey on a snow-packed road, but that would have been more common three weeks earlier had the community's water-treatment plant not failed. Amid a state of emergency, about half of the 2,300 residents have already been evacuated to cities including Timmins, Kingston and Niagara Falls.
