Small businesses are struggling to stay afloat in the wake of the deadly Los Angeles fires.Many structures have been destroyed, but others left standing are damaged, with no foot traffic driving business.For some industries with slim margins, just days without business has forced permanent closures.As deadly fires continue ripping through Los Angeles, leveling residential and commercial districts alike, even small business owners whose storefronts have been left standing aren't out of the woods.Though more than 12,300 structures have been destroyed by the fires, commercial buildings that haven't been totaled are still struggling with costly damages to repair and with no foot traffic driving business.For some industries with slim margins like bars and restaurants going just days without business has begun to force permanent closures.AccuWeather estimates the damages and economic loss from the wildfires totals between $250 billion and $275 billion, making it one of the costliest wildfire disasters in modern US history."We have come to the heartbreaking decision that at this time, operating The Ruby Fruit is no longer possible due to financial impact from the current natural disaster," Emily Bielagus and Mara Herbkersman, owners of The Ruby Fruit, a lesbian wine bar in the Silver Lake neighborhood, posted Sunday on the bar's Instagram page."Sadly, along with all the feelings of grief and shock that we have experienced over the last few days, also came this undeniable reality: that running our small business is no longer sustainable. The hospitality industry functions on a day-by-day basis and right now, as they say the math just isn't mathing," they wrote.The announcement was met with an outcry from fans and devoted patrons of the bar one of the city's only bars catering specifically to lesbians and "those who fall under the sapphic umbrella," according to the bar's website.Some customers, in the comments of the bar's closure announcement, begged Bielagus and Herbkersman to create a community fundraiser to save the business. The Ruby Fruit's GoFundMe campaign, raising money to provide wages for the bar's staff has raised about half its $15,000 goal in three days.Bielagus and Herbkersman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.Financial aid is available for small businesses trying to recover from the aftermath of the wildfires. The Small Business Administration's disaster loan program offers up to $2 million in loans with low interest rates for eligible businesses suffering economic losses and physical damage due toOn Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced extended tax filing deadlines and relief from interest and penalties for businesses impacted by the fires. However, tax breaks and interest-accruing loans are nothing compared to regular business, and the costs accrued from being closed stack up quickly."Thankfully we are safe and, as of now, able to operate," Betsy Martinez, owner of Fan Girl Cafe in West Hollywood, told BI. "However, business has definitely been impacted by the situation and we are navigating it the best we can."Martinez, who runs Fan Girl Cafe with her wife, said the pair lost roughly $5,000 in just two and a half days of closures, in addition to the slow business in the days since. As a new restaurant in its first year of operations, margins were already tight. They're now considering debt consolidation and taking out a new loan and have contacted their existing lenders asking for extensions on their bills.Some business owners are turning to the local community for financial support, but such funds are inconsistent and largely targeted toward businesses that have been destroyed. Restaurants, including Fox's Restaurant, The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, and The Reel Inn, have allburned down andhave started GoFundMe campaigns to raise money to rebuild.Martinez said she and her wife aren't comfortable starting a GoFundMe, given how tight funds are for everyone else and that other businesses are dealing with more severe losses."It's just a heavy time right now for everyone," she said. "Right now, we're just looking at who we can help, even those of us who need help."For now, many small business owners in the Los Angeles area are white-knuckling it through another costly disaster just a few short years after the COVID-19 pandemic saw more than 7,500 small businesses shutter across the county, the California Business Journal reported."We closed last week and are closing this week. We hope to reopen next week," the owners of Honey's at Star Love, a queer bar in Little Armenia, told BI in an email. "We're taking it all day by day."

By Matthew Gault Published January 14, 2025 | Comments (1) | Pioneer Natural Resources equipment near Midland, Texas, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. Michael Ciaglo/Bloomberg via Getty Images AI is power hungry and the companies behind the tech are striving to stand up nuclear reactors to feed it. But nuclear reactors take a long time to build and AI will need massive amounts of power years before theyre ready. So where will it come from? In the U.S., natural gas. The AI revolution will pump a lot more carbon into the air. A new report from the Financial Times detailed the coming natural gas boom. As climate change worsened, the world turned away from polluting sources of energy like coal and natural gas. The U.S. power grid was making progress on renewables and gas-based power production had slowed down over the past half decade.In 2024 it exploded thanks to data centers and AI. According to the Financial Times, the U.S. power grids reliance on gas will only go up. America will add upwards of 80 new gas power plants by 2030. Thats 20 percent more than was added in the last five years. On January 14, President Biden issued an executive order that cleared the way for even greater AI and energy infrastructure expansion. The order directed the Pentagon and the DOE to lease federal land to private companies looking to build gigawatt scale AI data centers.As part of the bargain, companies looking to build on federal land have to do it with so-called clean energy. To support these efforts, the Department of Interior will identify lands it manages that are suitable for clean energy that can support data centers on DOE and DOD sites, while enhancing permitting processes for geothermal projects, the order said. DOE will take further steps to promote distributed energy resources, advance siting of clean generation resources at existing points of interconnection, and support the safe and responsible deployment of nuclear energy.According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy, data center energy usage is expected to triple by 2028. This surge in data center electricity demand, however, should be understood in the context of the much larger electricity demand that is expected to occur over the next few decades from a combination of electric vehicle adoption, onshoring of manufacturing, hydrogen utilization, and the electrification of industry and buildings, the report said. Meta is researching nuclear energy, but it needs power now. The tech company is spending $10 billion in Louisiana on a data center and $3.2 billion on three new gas plants to power it. Microsoft is teaming up with Constellation to bring reactor unit three of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant back online. Last week, Constellation announced it was buying Calpine, an enormous gas power company, for $27 billion.American gas plants pumped more than 1 billion tonnes of carbon into the air last year. Thats the highest value ever recorded. There are ways to mitigate the carbon produced by natural gas plants, but many of the 80 slated for construction wont be equipped with carbon capture systems.According to the DOE, gas power plants and data centers are black boxes. While U.S. data centers are increasingly engaging in onsite electricity generation, power purchase agreements, and trade in various carbon credits, the lack of transparency around the details of these activities for all U.S. data center operators prevents including in the overall analysis, the DOE report said. Along with limiting the scope of this report, this lack of transparency highlights that data center growth is occurring with little consideration for how best to integrate these emergent loads with the expansion of electricity generation/transmission or for broader community development.In the announcement about Metas Louisiana data centers, Entergythe companys energy partnersaid it would add clean, efficient power plants to its system to meet growing power demands. It wasnt big on the exact details of its gas plants. Meta has pledged to match its electricity use with 100% clean and renewable energy and will be working with Entergy to bring at least 1,500 MW of new renewable energy to the grid through its Geaux Zero program, the press release said. The Geaux Zero program is a local tariff that encourages the purchase of solar power. Buying some renewable energy doesnt mean the carbon will stop being pumped into the sky, only that Meta has promised to buy some solar to go along with it.The dream, of course, is for all these new data centers and AI systems to run on renewable and nuclear energy. The reality is that nuclear energy moves slowly. It can take a decade to spin up a traditional reactor and many of the smaller cutting-edge systems are untested, undeployed, and unproven. Its possible that big tech is at the cusp of a nuclear revolution thanks to incentives created by AI. But itll have to burn a lot of natural gas to get there before the reactors come online.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Kyle Barr Published January 14, 2025 By Thomas Maxwell Published January 13, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published January 13, 2025 David T. Marshall, Auburn University; Teanna Moore, University of Kansas, and Timothy Pressley, Christopher Newport University Published January 12, 2025 By Todd Feathers Published January 10, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published January 10, 2025

If youve ever had a bad experience with a particular place and, in the future, physically feel anxious as you approach it again, theres a good reason: our brains may record and physically map that experience for future reference, a new study in PLOS Biology suggests.This has implications for mental health, because it helps us understand how worry works.The more that we understand how the mechanisms by which cognition works, the better we can help people who have problems with their cognition, says David Redish, a University of Minnesota neuroscientist and an author of the study. Anxiety and worry are very prevalent in humanity these days.Understanding Imagination Underneath AnxietyIn the study, scientists devised a scenario where rats would have to encounter something very negative to them a scary Lego robot scorpion to reach a treat.Imagination is a physical thing, says Redish. And that includes not just imagination about positive things, but also about negative things.They monitored different place cells neurons in their brains associated with memories of different specific locations. They followed which such cells were activated during different points in the encounter and also recorded which of those location-specific neurons reacted when the rat made different decisions. We're now able to, as I like to say, read rats' minds, says Redish.While other scientists have intimidated rats in similar experiments with the original involving a Robot Lego alligator this one takes it to another level, because the rat doesnt just encounter the scary robot, it must decide whether to pass it to reach its reward.By having them run past the robot, we were able to determine what the cells looked like when the animal was at that location, says Redish. We could then read when the animal thought about that location, and that was the key insight.Different Anxious BehaviorsWhen the rat rounded a corner for the first time, it would encounter the robot scorpion. The Lego creature sported a pincher on its head and brandished a whip-like tail. It would come out, it would screech, and it would do its little pincher thing, and the tail would come out," says Redish. The rat would back away in terror. They'd be scared and they'd go hide in the structure.During subsequent attempts, things got really interesting. The rats showed different behaviors associated with anxiety, depending on the situation. By examining which place cells activate at different locations and situations of the experiment, they could associate them with either the food or the robot.In one scenario, the rat would encounter the robot, hesitate, appearing to want to get the treat, but eventually retreat. The rats in these situations appeared to be thinking I'm going, no, I can't do it, says Redish. In these cases, they recorded electrical activity in place cells related to the robot, not the reward.In the second behavior, the rat would run forward, then pause in front of the robot. In these situations, they recorded impulses directed both toward parts of the brain associated with both the food and the robot, appearing to show the rat thinking about both and, perhaps weighing the risks versus the rewards.Finally, they monitored tentative rats peaking around the corner, catching a glimpse of the robot, appearing to think Am I gonna go, am I not, am I gonna go? says Redish. In these instances, they recorded short bursts of electrical activity in the place cells associated with the robot. Importantly, the place cells associated with the robot often remained active when the rats were in retreat, or when they were approaching the corner behind which the robot hid.What Does this Mean for Humans? Even though these experiments were with rats, there are obvious human parallels. For instance, someone walking up to an area where they were once attacked by a dog might have similar neural activity of that past event, because their brain once stuck the equivalent of a pin in that Google Maps part of the brain. The study boils anxiety down to the tension between approaching and avoiding conflict. Resolving that conflict involves imagining a positive future outcome. Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.

Nature, Published online: 14 January 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-04234-zLaura Arfi and Shannen Lau are automating routine tasks to free up time for more strategic work.

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The world of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is one where gruesome monsters are juxtaposed against beautiful landscapes, and everything is tied together with deep lore based on Chinese history and folklore. If youre interested in learning more about the game and its development, The Art of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is now available to preorder ahead of its July 7 release. The Art of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty $50 | Releases July 7 This hardcover art book spans 192 pages, each filled with character designs, creature designs, and various concept art for Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Along with hundreds of images, youll also get a detailed rundown of character profiles, world lore, and more. Considering the game has deep mythology to pull from, there should be plenty of incredible details packed between its covers. Wo Long was quite popular when it released in 2023--if youre worried about the art book selling out, consider landing a preorder soon. Note that the final cover art has not yet been revealed. Preorder at Amazon The book is being published by Udon Entertainment--a brand that has previously worked on art books for Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Monster Hunter. All of these earned positive reviews from readers, and The Art of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty should retain the brands high-quality publishing standards.These previous volumes also make great companions for the upcoming book, and since many are currently on sale, theyre worth checking out ahead of The Art of Wo Longs release in July. Heres a look at some of our favorite art book deals, including those from Udon Entertainment and beyond.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Rune Giant is the newest Epic Card to join the arena in Clash Royale. It's unlocked at the Jungle Arena (Arena 9), but players can claim one for free at the shop as part of the Rune Giant Launch offer. The offer is active until January 17th, 2025, after which the only way to unlock it would be from chests or the in-game shop.

If you, like me, have been looking for a place to bet in the UK for a long time due to Gamstop being blocked, then I can help you get around this and find places where you can bet without any problems. I have found a whole list of non Gamstop betting sites and thanks to that I have already chosen a place where I play now, you can also study everything in detail and choose for yourself exactly what you n

With the second season of Squid Game leaving us all in an emotional lurch and season 48 of Survivor more than a month away, Deathmatch Island is here to hold you over. The tabletop role-playing game takes inspiration from todays cultural landscape to drop you in the middle of a battle royale-style reality show. The only way to make it out alive is to gain followers and the only way to do that is to risk your life.As Polygon contributor Samantha Nelson explained in her interview with designer Tim Denee, character creation is randomized and simple: a name, a basic description, an occupation, a secret motivation, and a matching uniform. Aside from this, players have no knowledge of who they were before the game began, no idea of what this game is, or how they got there in the first place. All you have is a letter congratulating you on being chosen for the game where you can win fame, freedom, and unlimited wealth. Throughout the game, mystery mechanics controlled by the Producer (or game master) slowly reveal clues and flashes of memory.While the base game is lethal, there is a ruleset that offers a social-oriented mode of play. The foundations of the game are still the same, as the base stats are built off Survivor terminology like Social Game and Challenge Beast, though with a few uniquely horrifying ones like Deathmatch and [REDACTED]. Each time a player engages in a competition or a challenge, they have the opportunity to gain followers. The better you do, the more followers you gain. The more followers you have, the more the games producers favor you with higher dice to roll and better equipment to help you survive. In a social media ecosystem that often feels like a battle royale, with creators fighting algorithms and the whims of corporate overlords, the mechanic feels especially prescient.Like Triangle Agency, the game text is presented as a corporate handbook for employees and producers of Deathmatch Island, though the two games approach this presentation from drastically different angles (see Denees Derek Guy-style infothread about it). Rather than pretending to be your friend, the handbooks in-universe author presents the games dire circumstances matter-of-factly, despite having chapter titles like Building a Better You or Team Building.While Deathmatch Island can be played in a single session, campaigns of the game offer opportunities for in-depth alliance building, social manipulation, and rejection of the games central conceit a Battle Royale or Hunger Games-style ending. But the producers wont give up so easily. Even if your character dies, you wake up once again, in a new body, a new persona, wading into the game once more. The true secrets of the island will only be revealed after multiple seasons, and youll just have to play to win if you want to find out.

I've lived in Oregon for a decade, meaning I've experienced multiple wildfire seasons. You learn quickly, in these conditions, that staying on top of the air quality is essential: Prolonged exposure to poor air quality can have all kinds of negative affects on your health so you don't want to spend a lot of time outside if the air is bad.Breathable is a newly free app by the Portland-based app development agency Karbon that adds an Air Quality Index (AQI) widget for your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Install the application, then add the widget to your device to be passively aware of the air quality every time you pick up your phone. (Yes, you could check the AQI in the Apple Weather app, but it doesn't offer an AQI widget.)The application, while free, takes a little bit of work to set up. You'll need to get API keys from at least one service in order to use it. The good news is this process isn't long and there's very clear documentation. You'll need to head to IQAir.com, sign up for an account, choose the free plan, then copy the API key. You can repeat the process at Airnow.gov if you live in the United States and want access to information from the EPA. Then you'll need to specify, in the app's settings, which location you want to get AQI information for. Credit: Justin Pot After setup, though, you just need to add the widgets wherever you like. Breathable offers two widgets, one small and one medium. You can add these widgets to your homescreen on an iPhone or iPad, as a complication on your Apple Watch, or on your Mac desktop. All of those options give you the AQI as a number and in a chart.You can, optionally, customize the look of the widget with the font, gradient, and layout. It's not a lot of customization but you should be able to get it looking the way you like. Credit: Justin Pot You can also decide to show the AQI using an emoji scale instead of a numbersome people find this easier to parse at a glance. The default set uses faces, but you can customize the widget to use whatever emojis you like.The developers of Breathable say they wish it didn't have to exists, and I agree. Climate change is a reality, though, and tools like this help us deal with it a little bit.