• 5 AI prompts to put serious money in your pocket

    close A majority of small businesses are using artificial intelligence A majority of small businesses are using artificial intelligence and finding out it can save time and money. So, you want to start making money using AI but you’re not trying to build Skynet or learn 15 coding languages first? Good, because neither am I. You don’t need to become the next Sam Altman or have a Ph.D. in machine learning to turn artificial intelligence into real income. What you do need is curiosity, a dash of creativity, and the right prompts. Enter to win for you and for your favorite person or charity in our Pay It Forward Sweepstakes. Hurry, ends soon!I’ve pulled together five powerful, practical prompts you can throw into ChatGPTto help you start earning extra cash this week. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams or K-a-month YouTube ad schemes. They’re doable, even if your calendar is already packed.5-MINUTE CLEANUP FOR YOUR PHONE AND COMPUTERLet’s get to it.1. Fast-Track Your Freelance LifePrompt to use:"Act as a freelance business coach. Suggest 3 services I can offer on Fiverr or Upwork using AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney or Canva. I haveexperience."Why this works:Freelance work is exploding right now. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are filled with small businesses and entrepreneurs who need help—but don’t have the budget to hire full-time staff. If you’ve got any kind of professional background, you can use AI tools to turbocharge your services. Writing blog posts? ChatGPT can give you a draft. Creating logos or social media templates? Midjourney and Canva are your new best friends.You don’t need a team. You don’t need fancy software. You just need a good prompt and the confidence to say, "Yes, I can do that." AI helps you scale what you already know how to do. A man is pictured with a smartphone and laptop computer on January 31, 2019. 2. Make Product Descriptions Sexy AgainPrompt to use:"Rewrite this Etsy or Shopify product description to make it more compelling and SEO-friendly. Target audience:. Here’s the original:."Why this works:Let’s face it—most product descriptions online are a snooze. But good copy sells. Whether you’re running your own shop or helping someone else with theirs, compelling product descriptions convert clicks into customers. Use ChatGPT to punch up the language, fine-tune for SEO, and speak directly to your ideal buyer.DON’T SCAM YOURSELF WITH THE TRICKS HACKERS DON’T WANT ME TO SHARERemember: people don’t just want to buy a weird mug. They want to buy what it says about them. That’s where a smart rewrite can turn browsers into buyers.3. Social Posts That SellPrompt to use:"Create 5 attention-grabbing Instagram captions to promote this. Keep the toneand include a strong call to action."Why this works:We live in a scroll-happy world. Your social captions need to grab attention in less than three seconds. But not everyone’s a copywriter—and not everyone has time to be. AI can help you crank out engaging content in the tone and style that fits your brand. Add a great photo, post consistently, and you’re suddenly a one-person content agency without the overhead. A photo taken on October 4, 2023 in Manta, near Turin, shows a smartphone and a laptop displaying the logos of the artificial intelligence OpenAI research company and ChatGPT chatbot.If you’re managing social for clients or your own biz, this prompt is gold. Use it to build content calendars, write reels scripts, or even draft ad copy.4. Polite Emails That You MoneyPrompt to use:"Write a short, polite email to ask for a lower rate or discount on. Mention that I’m a loyal customer comparing alternatives."Why this works:Negotiating discounts doesn’t always feel comfortable but it absolutely works. Companies often have unpublished deals, especially for longtime users or small businesses. And customer service reps? They're human beings. A kind, well-written email might be all it takes to get a discount on that software you’re using every month.20 TECH TRICKS TO MAKE LIFE BETTER, SAFER OR EASIERI’ve personally saved hundreds of dollars just by sending quick, respectful emails like this. AI can help you strike the perfect tone confident but kind, assertive but not pushy.5. Your Passive Income KitPrompt to use:"Give me 3 high-demand, low-competition ideas for a short e-book or low-content book I can sell on Amazon. I have experience in."Why this works:You have knowledge people want. Package it. Sell it. Repeat. Whether it’s a short guide on starting a backyard garden or a workbook for productivity hacks, e-books and low-content bookssell surprisingly well. And AI can help you brainstorm ideas, outline chapters, even draft content to polish up. In this photo illustration the logo of Apple Mail Programme Mail can be seen on a smartphone next to a finger on March 27, 2024 in Berlin, Germany.Upload it to Amazon KDP or Gumroad, and now you’ve got a digital product that can earn money in your sleep. People pay for convenience, and you have life experience worth sharing.Final ThoughtYou don’t need to master AI to start earning with it. You just need to start using it. These five prompts are a low-risk, high-potential way to get your feet wet. And if you need a hand turning these sparks into something bigger, I’m here.I built my multimillion-dollar business with no investors and no debt. I’ve done this without a big team or expensive consultants. And I’d love to help you do the same.Drop me a note. I read every one.Get tech-smarter on your scheduleAward-winning host Kim Komando is your secret weapon for navigating tech.National radio: Airing on 500+ stations across the US - Find yours or get the free podcast.Daily newsletter: Join 650,000 people who read the CurrentWatch: On Kim’s YouTube channelCopyright 2025, WestStar Multimedia Entertainment. All rights reserved. 
    #prompts #put #serious #money #your
    5 AI prompts to put serious money in your pocket
    close A majority of small businesses are using artificial intelligence A majority of small businesses are using artificial intelligence and finding out it can save time and money. So, you want to start making money using AI but you’re not trying to build Skynet or learn 15 coding languages first? Good, because neither am I. You don’t need to become the next Sam Altman or have a Ph.D. in machine learning to turn artificial intelligence into real income. What you do need is curiosity, a dash of creativity, and the right prompts.💸 Enter to win for you and for your favorite person or charity in our Pay It Forward Sweepstakes. Hurry, ends soon!I’ve pulled together five powerful, practical prompts you can throw into ChatGPTto help you start earning extra cash this week. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams or K-a-month YouTube ad schemes. They’re doable, even if your calendar is already packed.5-MINUTE CLEANUP FOR YOUR PHONE AND COMPUTERLet’s get to it.1. Fast-Track Your Freelance LifePrompt to use:"Act as a freelance business coach. Suggest 3 services I can offer on Fiverr or Upwork using AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney or Canva. I haveexperience."Why this works:Freelance work is exploding right now. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are filled with small businesses and entrepreneurs who need help—but don’t have the budget to hire full-time staff. If you’ve got any kind of professional background, you can use AI tools to turbocharge your services. Writing blog posts? ChatGPT can give you a draft. Creating logos or social media templates? Midjourney and Canva are your new best friends.You don’t need a team. You don’t need fancy software. You just need a good prompt and the confidence to say, "Yes, I can do that." AI helps you scale what you already know how to do. A man is pictured with a smartphone and laptop computer on January 31, 2019. 2. Make Product Descriptions Sexy AgainPrompt to use:"Rewrite this Etsy or Shopify product description to make it more compelling and SEO-friendly. Target audience:. Here’s the original:."Why this works:Let’s face it—most product descriptions online are a snooze. But good copy sells. Whether you’re running your own shop or helping someone else with theirs, compelling product descriptions convert clicks into customers. Use ChatGPT to punch up the language, fine-tune for SEO, and speak directly to your ideal buyer.DON’T SCAM YOURSELF WITH THE TRICKS HACKERS DON’T WANT ME TO SHARERemember: people don’t just want to buy a weird mug. They want to buy what it says about them. That’s where a smart rewrite can turn browsers into buyers.3. Social Posts That SellPrompt to use:"Create 5 attention-grabbing Instagram captions to promote this. Keep the toneand include a strong call to action."Why this works:We live in a scroll-happy world. Your social captions need to grab attention in less than three seconds. But not everyone’s a copywriter—and not everyone has time to be. AI can help you crank out engaging content in the tone and style that fits your brand. Add a great photo, post consistently, and you’re suddenly a one-person content agency without the overhead. A photo taken on October 4, 2023 in Manta, near Turin, shows a smartphone and a laptop displaying the logos of the artificial intelligence OpenAI research company and ChatGPT chatbot.If you’re managing social for clients or your own biz, this prompt is gold. Use it to build content calendars, write reels scripts, or even draft ad copy.4. Polite Emails That You MoneyPrompt to use:"Write a short, polite email to ask for a lower rate or discount on. Mention that I’m a loyal customer comparing alternatives."Why this works:Negotiating discounts doesn’t always feel comfortable but it absolutely works. Companies often have unpublished deals, especially for longtime users or small businesses. And customer service reps? They're human beings. A kind, well-written email might be all it takes to get a discount on that software you’re using every month.20 TECH TRICKS TO MAKE LIFE BETTER, SAFER OR EASIERI’ve personally saved hundreds of dollars just by sending quick, respectful emails like this. AI can help you strike the perfect tone confident but kind, assertive but not pushy.5. Your Passive Income KitPrompt to use:"Give me 3 high-demand, low-competition ideas for a short e-book or low-content book I can sell on Amazon. I have experience in."Why this works:You have knowledge people want. Package it. Sell it. Repeat. Whether it’s a short guide on starting a backyard garden or a workbook for productivity hacks, e-books and low-content bookssell surprisingly well. And AI can help you brainstorm ideas, outline chapters, even draft content to polish up. In this photo illustration the logo of Apple Mail Programme Mail can be seen on a smartphone next to a finger on March 27, 2024 in Berlin, Germany.Upload it to Amazon KDP or Gumroad, and now you’ve got a digital product that can earn money in your sleep. People pay for convenience, and you have life experience worth sharing.Final ThoughtYou don’t need to master AI to start earning with it. You just need to start using it. These five prompts are a low-risk, high-potential way to get your feet wet. And if you need a hand turning these sparks into something bigger, I’m here.I built my multimillion-dollar business with no investors and no debt. I’ve done this without a big team or expensive consultants. And I’d love to help you do the same.Drop me a note. I read every one.Get tech-smarter on your scheduleAward-winning host Kim Komando is your secret weapon for navigating tech.National radio: Airing on 500+ stations across the US - Find yours or get the free podcast.Daily newsletter: Join 650,000 people who read the CurrentWatch: On Kim’s YouTube channelCopyright 2025, WestStar Multimedia Entertainment. All rights reserved.  #prompts #put #serious #money #your
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    5 AI prompts to put serious money in your pocket
    close A majority of small businesses are using artificial intelligence A majority of small businesses are using artificial intelligence and finding out it can save time and money. So, you want to start making money using AI but you’re not trying to build Skynet or learn 15 coding languages first? Good, because neither am I. You don’t need to become the next Sam Altman or have a Ph.D. in machine learning to turn artificial intelligence into real income. What you do need is curiosity, a dash of creativity, and the right prompts.💸 Enter to win $500 for you and $500 for your favorite person or charity in our Pay It Forward Sweepstakes. Hurry, ends soon!I’ve pulled together five powerful, practical prompts you can throw into ChatGPT (or your AI tool of choice) to help you start earning extra cash this week. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams or $10K-a-month YouTube ad schemes. They’re doable, even if your calendar is already packed.5-MINUTE CLEANUP FOR YOUR PHONE AND COMPUTERLet’s get to it.1. Fast-Track Your Freelance LifePrompt to use:"Act as a freelance business coach. Suggest 3 services I can offer on Fiverr or Upwork using AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney or Canva. I have [insert skill: writing/design/admin/accounting/managerial] experience."Why this works:Freelance work is exploding right now. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are filled with small businesses and entrepreneurs who need help—but don’t have the budget to hire full-time staff. If you’ve got any kind of professional background, you can use AI tools to turbocharge your services. Writing blog posts? ChatGPT can give you a draft. Creating logos or social media templates? Midjourney and Canva are your new best friends.You don’t need a team. You don’t need fancy software. You just need a good prompt and the confidence to say, "Yes, I can do that." AI helps you scale what you already know how to do. A man is pictured with a smartphone and laptop computer on January 31, 2019.  (Neil Godwin/Future via Getty Images)2. Make Product Descriptions Sexy AgainPrompt to use:"Rewrite this Etsy or Shopify product description to make it more compelling and SEO-friendly. Target audience: [insert group]. Here’s the original: [paste description]."Why this works:Let’s face it—most product descriptions online are a snooze. But good copy sells. Whether you’re running your own shop or helping someone else with theirs, compelling product descriptions convert clicks into customers. Use ChatGPT to punch up the language, fine-tune for SEO, and speak directly to your ideal buyer.DON’T SCAM YOURSELF WITH THE TRICKS HACKERS DON’T WANT ME TO SHARERemember: people don’t just want to buy a weird mug. They want to buy what it says about them. That’s where a smart rewrite can turn browsers into buyers.3. Social Posts That SellPrompt to use:"Create 5 attention-grabbing Instagram captions to promote this [product/service]. Keep the tone [fun, confident, expert] and include a strong call to action."Why this works:We live in a scroll-happy world. Your social captions need to grab attention in less than three seconds. But not everyone’s a copywriter—and not everyone has time to be. AI can help you crank out engaging content in the tone and style that fits your brand. Add a great photo, post consistently, and you’re suddenly a one-person content agency without the overhead (or endless Zoom meetings). A photo taken on October 4, 2023 in Manta, near Turin, shows a smartphone and a laptop displaying the logos of the artificial intelligence OpenAI research company and ChatGPT chatbot. (MARCO BERTORELLO/AFP via Getty Images)If you’re managing social for clients or your own biz, this prompt is gold. Use it to build content calendars, write reels scripts, or even draft ad copy.4. Polite Emails That Save You MoneyPrompt to use:"Write a short, polite email to ask for a lower rate or discount on [tool/service/platform]. Mention that I’m a loyal customer comparing alternatives."Why this works:Negotiating discounts doesn’t always feel comfortable but it absolutely works. Companies often have unpublished deals, especially for longtime users or small businesses. And customer service reps? They're human beings. A kind, well-written email might be all it takes to get a discount on that software you’re using every month.20 TECH TRICKS TO MAKE LIFE BETTER, SAFER OR EASIERI’ve personally saved hundreds of dollars just by sending quick, respectful emails like this. AI can help you strike the perfect tone confident but kind, assertive but not pushy.5. Your Passive Income KitPrompt to use:"Give me 3 high-demand, low-competition ideas for a short e-book or low-content book I can sell on Amazon. I have experience in [insert topic]."Why this works:You have knowledge people want. Package it. Sell it. Repeat. Whether it’s a short guide on starting a backyard garden or a workbook for productivity hacks, e-books and low-content books (like journals or planners) sell surprisingly well. And AI can help you brainstorm ideas, outline chapters, even draft content to polish up. In this photo illustration the logo of Apple Mail Programme Mail can be seen on a smartphone next to a finger on March 27, 2024 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo Illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)Upload it to Amazon KDP or Gumroad, and now you’ve got a digital product that can earn money in your sleep. People pay for convenience, and you have life experience worth sharing.Final ThoughtYou don’t need to master AI to start earning with it. You just need to start using it. These five prompts are a low-risk, high-potential way to get your feet wet. And if you need a hand turning these sparks into something bigger, I’m here.I built my multimillion-dollar business with no investors and no debt. I’ve done this without a big team or expensive consultants. And I’d love to help you do the same.Drop me a note. I read every one.Get tech-smarter on your scheduleAward-winning host Kim Komando is your secret weapon for navigating tech.National radio: Airing on 500+ stations across the US - Find yours or get the free podcast.Daily newsletter: Join 650,000 people who read the Current (free!)Watch: On Kim’s YouTube channelCopyright 2025, WestStar Multimedia Entertainment. All rights reserved. 
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  • Tolkien Collectible Book Sets Are Up For Preorder - Myths, Legends, Tales Of Middle-earth

    Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set| Releases June 10 Preorder The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set| Releases August 19 Preorder SeeJ.R.R. Tolkien fans can soon add two display-worthy book box sets to their collection. Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set, which features lesser-known original works and translations of classic English literature, releases on June 10. It will be followed up on August 19 by new editions of The Great Tales of Middle-earth, which is comprised of the final three prose novels set in Tolkien's iconic fantasy world. The new hardcover box sets feature lavish cover art and display cases. They are considered the fifth and sixth entries in a series of hardcover book box sets that debuted last year with the The History of Middle-earth, which was published by William Morrow in its entirety across four beautiful collections. Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set| Releases June 10 The Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set is a unique collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, because it doesn't contain stories about Middle-earth. Instead, as the title suggests, it compiles classic myths and legends, two of which were written by the author, while the other two were personal translations of some of his favorite works that inspired him.Like the vast majority of his posthumously published work, these were pieced together and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Each hardcover book comes with a double-sided dust jacket. Just like The History of Middle-earth Box Sets, one side features elaborate artwork, while the other side has a more subdued aesthetic with solid colors. The four books come packaged in an eye-catching display case. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Orfeo / Pearl: Translations of a trio of classic epic poems juxtaposed with Tolkien's famous 1953 lecture on Sir Gawain.The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: An epic verse poem by Tolkien. It was inspired by classic poetry and Norse mythology. Along with Tolkien's composition, you'll find notes and commentary from Christopher Tolkien.The Fall of Arthur: A narrative poem written by Tolkien that chronicles King Arthur's final days. The book includes extensive notes made by Tolkien while drafting his only Arthurian legend. Fans of The Silmarillion will want to read this one, as it clearly inspired the plot of Tolkien's Arthurian-esque Middle-earth book.Beowulf: One of the most famous--and the oldest known---epic poem of Old English literature, Beowulf has received many translations. Tolkien wrote his translation in 1926 and then circled back later. In addition to the translation of the original poem, this book contains a plethora of commentary by Tolkien himself, which will give readers a glimpse into the mind of Tolkien the scholar.If you're interested in the Myths and Legends Box Set, you should also check out The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, a massive three-volume hardcover box that released last fall. The gorgeous box set, which is on sale for nearly 50% off, compiles Tolkien's life's work as a poet and clocks in at over 1,700 pages. Preorder The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set| Releases August 19 The Great Tales of Middle-earth is a must-read collection for all dedicated fans of The Lord of the Rings. Though understandably not nearly as well-known as The Hobbit, LOTR, or even The Silmarillion, the trio of novels in this set are the final pieces of prose fiction that take place across the author's iconic brilliant fantasy world. All of the stories take place during Middle-earth's First Age, so while written and published later than Tolkien's other books, these are the oldest full-length stories in Middle-earth.The new 2025 hardcover editions come with reversible dust jackets and feature special color plates, pencil drawings, and illustrated maps by Christopher Tolkien and beloved LOTR illustrator Alan Lee.Here are the three books you'll find in the beautiful display case, which features a fire-breathing dragon.The Children of Húrin: Written after The Silmarillion as a standalone prequel story, The Children of Húrin takes place 6,000 years before the events of LOTR. The story follows the cursed son of Húrin, named Túrin, during an era of intense and constant war and widespread devastation caused by the Dark Lord Morgoth. If you've read The Silmarillion, you will recognize some of the names found in this novel.Beren and Lúthien: Another very early tale set in Middle-earth, Beren and Lúthien was reworked and revised over time and eventually became part of The Silmarillion. This compilation of Lúthien and Beren's story was originally published in 2017. It shows the evolution of the love story between the mortal man Beren and immortal elf Lúthien.The Fall of Gondolin: Founded by King Turgon, the eponymous city of elves was concealed for many years before Lord Morgoth's quest to destroy elven life across Middle-earth. The Fall of Gondolin's main protagonist is Túrin's cousin, Tuor, and his family. Tuor is married to Turgon's daughter, Idril. The story follows their attempt to save their child after the Gondolinfalls.It's worth noting that The Great Tales of Middle-earth is already available as a hardcover box set. While it won't match Myths and Legends or the four History of Middle-earth Box Sets, the 2018 hardcover collection is on sale for only. Alternatively, you can purchase each book individually in hardcover or paperback.The Great Tales of Middle-earth Editions:The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set--The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set-- | Releases August 19The Children of Hurin--The Children of Hurin--Beren and Lúthien--Beren and Lúthien--The Fall of Gondolin--The Fall of Gondolin--Preorder SeeThe Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box SetSee The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box SetsJ.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-earth Box SetsThe History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 1--The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 2--The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 3--The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 4--The Complete History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set--The History of Middle-earth Paperback Box Set--The History of Middle-earth was originally published over a 14-year stretch from 1983 to 1996. While creating his fantasy world, Tolkien took extensive notes, building a backstory for Middle-earth across three different ages and 6,500-plus years. You could argue that the author's dedication to crafting the setting that would become home to a pair of landmark fantasy novels turned Middle-earth into the most believable character Tolkien created. His mythopoeic writings formed what is commonly referred to as Tolkien's legendarium.At the time of Tolkien's death in 1973, the exhaustive backstory of Middle-earth remained unpublished. Over the next few years, his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, undertook the daunting project of editing, expanding, and curating the legendarium into publishable works. The legendarium would become a 12-volume series titled The History of Middle-earth.Continue Reading at GameSpot
    #tolkien #collectible #book #sets #are
    Tolkien Collectible Book Sets Are Up For Preorder - Myths, Legends, Tales Of Middle-earth
    Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set| Releases June 10 Preorder The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set| Releases August 19 Preorder SeeJ.R.R. Tolkien fans can soon add two display-worthy book box sets to their collection. Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set, which features lesser-known original works and translations of classic English literature, releases on June 10. It will be followed up on August 19 by new editions of The Great Tales of Middle-earth, which is comprised of the final three prose novels set in Tolkien's iconic fantasy world. The new hardcover box sets feature lavish cover art and display cases. They are considered the fifth and sixth entries in a series of hardcover book box sets that debuted last year with the The History of Middle-earth, which was published by William Morrow in its entirety across four beautiful collections. Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set| Releases June 10 The Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set is a unique collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, because it doesn't contain stories about Middle-earth. Instead, as the title suggests, it compiles classic myths and legends, two of which were written by the author, while the other two were personal translations of some of his favorite works that inspired him.Like the vast majority of his posthumously published work, these were pieced together and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Each hardcover book comes with a double-sided dust jacket. Just like The History of Middle-earth Box Sets, one side features elaborate artwork, while the other side has a more subdued aesthetic with solid colors. The four books come packaged in an eye-catching display case. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Orfeo / Pearl: Translations of a trio of classic epic poems juxtaposed with Tolkien's famous 1953 lecture on Sir Gawain.The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: An epic verse poem by Tolkien. It was inspired by classic poetry and Norse mythology. Along with Tolkien's composition, you'll find notes and commentary from Christopher Tolkien.The Fall of Arthur: A narrative poem written by Tolkien that chronicles King Arthur's final days. The book includes extensive notes made by Tolkien while drafting his only Arthurian legend. Fans of The Silmarillion will want to read this one, as it clearly inspired the plot of Tolkien's Arthurian-esque Middle-earth book.Beowulf: One of the most famous--and the oldest known---epic poem of Old English literature, Beowulf has received many translations. Tolkien wrote his translation in 1926 and then circled back later. In addition to the translation of the original poem, this book contains a plethora of commentary by Tolkien himself, which will give readers a glimpse into the mind of Tolkien the scholar.If you're interested in the Myths and Legends Box Set, you should also check out The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, a massive three-volume hardcover box that released last fall. The gorgeous box set, which is on sale for nearly 50% off, compiles Tolkien's life's work as a poet and clocks in at over 1,700 pages. Preorder The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set| Releases August 19 The Great Tales of Middle-earth is a must-read collection for all dedicated fans of The Lord of the Rings. Though understandably not nearly as well-known as The Hobbit, LOTR, or even The Silmarillion, the trio of novels in this set are the final pieces of prose fiction that take place across the author's iconic brilliant fantasy world. All of the stories take place during Middle-earth's First Age, so while written and published later than Tolkien's other books, these are the oldest full-length stories in Middle-earth.The new 2025 hardcover editions come with reversible dust jackets and feature special color plates, pencil drawings, and illustrated maps by Christopher Tolkien and beloved LOTR illustrator Alan Lee.Here are the three books you'll find in the beautiful display case, which features a fire-breathing dragon.The Children of Húrin: Written after The Silmarillion as a standalone prequel story, The Children of Húrin takes place 6,000 years before the events of LOTR. The story follows the cursed son of Húrin, named Túrin, during an era of intense and constant war and widespread devastation caused by the Dark Lord Morgoth. If you've read The Silmarillion, you will recognize some of the names found in this novel.Beren and Lúthien: Another very early tale set in Middle-earth, Beren and Lúthien was reworked and revised over time and eventually became part of The Silmarillion. This compilation of Lúthien and Beren's story was originally published in 2017. It shows the evolution of the love story between the mortal man Beren and immortal elf Lúthien.The Fall of Gondolin: Founded by King Turgon, the eponymous city of elves was concealed for many years before Lord Morgoth's quest to destroy elven life across Middle-earth. The Fall of Gondolin's main protagonist is Túrin's cousin, Tuor, and his family. Tuor is married to Turgon's daughter, Idril. The story follows their attempt to save their child after the Gondolinfalls.It's worth noting that The Great Tales of Middle-earth is already available as a hardcover box set. While it won't match Myths and Legends or the four History of Middle-earth Box Sets, the 2018 hardcover collection is on sale for only. Alternatively, you can purchase each book individually in hardcover or paperback.The Great Tales of Middle-earth Editions:The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set--The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set-- | Releases August 19The Children of Hurin--The Children of Hurin--Beren and Lúthien--Beren and Lúthien--The Fall of Gondolin--The Fall of Gondolin--Preorder SeeThe Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box SetSee The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box SetsJ.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-earth Box SetsThe History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 1--The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 2--The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 3--The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 4--The Complete History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set--The History of Middle-earth Paperback Box Set--The History of Middle-earth was originally published over a 14-year stretch from 1983 to 1996. While creating his fantasy world, Tolkien took extensive notes, building a backstory for Middle-earth across three different ages and 6,500-plus years. You could argue that the author's dedication to crafting the setting that would become home to a pair of landmark fantasy novels turned Middle-earth into the most believable character Tolkien created. His mythopoeic writings formed what is commonly referred to as Tolkien's legendarium.At the time of Tolkien's death in 1973, the exhaustive backstory of Middle-earth remained unpublished. Over the next few years, his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, undertook the daunting project of editing, expanding, and curating the legendarium into publishable works. The legendarium would become a 12-volume series titled The History of Middle-earth.Continue Reading at GameSpot #tolkien #collectible #book #sets #are
    WWW.GAMESPOT.COM
    Tolkien Collectible Book Sets Are Up For Preorder - Myths, Legends, Tales Of Middle-earth
    Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases June 10 Preorder at Amazon The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases August 19 Preorder at Amazon See at Amazon (2018 set) J.R.R. Tolkien fans can soon add two display-worthy book box sets to their collection. Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set, which features lesser-known original works and translations of classic English literature, releases on June 10. It will be followed up on August 19 by new editions of The Great Tales of Middle-earth, which is comprised of the final three prose novels set in Tolkien's iconic fantasy world. The new hardcover box sets feature lavish cover art and display cases. They are considered the fifth and sixth entries in a series of hardcover book box sets that debuted last year with the The History of Middle-earth, which was published by William Morrow in its entirety across four beautiful collections. Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases June 10 The Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set is a unique collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, because it doesn't contain stories about Middle-earth. Instead, as the title suggests, it compiles classic myths and legends, two of which were written by the author, while the other two were personal translations of some of his favorite works that inspired him.Like the vast majority of his posthumously published work, these were pieced together and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Each hardcover book comes with a double-sided dust jacket. Just like The History of Middle-earth Box Sets, one side features elaborate artwork, while the other side has a more subdued aesthetic with solid colors. The four books come packaged in an eye-catching display case. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Orfeo / Pearl: Translations of a trio of classic epic poems juxtaposed with Tolkien's famous 1953 lecture on Sir Gawain.The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: An epic verse poem by Tolkien. It was inspired by classic poetry and Norse mythology. Along with Tolkien's composition, you'll find notes and commentary from Christopher Tolkien.The Fall of Arthur: A narrative poem written by Tolkien that chronicles King Arthur's final days. The book includes extensive notes made by Tolkien while drafting his only Arthurian legend. Fans of The Silmarillion will want to read this one, as it clearly inspired the plot of Tolkien's Arthurian-esque Middle-earth book.Beowulf: One of the most famous--and the oldest known---epic poem of Old English literature, Beowulf has received many translations. Tolkien wrote his translation in 1926 and then circled back later. In addition to the translation of the original poem, this book contains a plethora of commentary by Tolkien himself, which will give readers a glimpse into the mind of Tolkien the scholar.If you're interested in the Myths and Legends Box Set, you should also check out The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, a massive three-volume hardcover box that released last fall. The gorgeous box set, which is on sale for nearly 50% off, compiles Tolkien's life's work as a poet and clocks in at over 1,700 pages. Preorder at Amazon The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases August 19 The Great Tales of Middle-earth is a must-read collection for all dedicated fans of The Lord of the Rings. Though understandably not nearly as well-known as The Hobbit, LOTR, or even The Silmarillion, the trio of novels in this set are the final pieces of prose fiction that take place across the author's iconic brilliant fantasy world. All of the stories take place during Middle-earth's First Age, so while written and published later than Tolkien's other books, these are the oldest full-length stories in Middle-earth.The new 2025 hardcover editions come with reversible dust jackets and feature special color plates, pencil drawings, and illustrated maps by Christopher Tolkien and beloved LOTR illustrator Alan Lee.Here are the three books you'll find in the beautiful display case, which features a fire-breathing dragon.The Children of Húrin (2007): Written after The Silmarillion as a standalone prequel story, The Children of Húrin takes place 6,000 years before the events of LOTR. The story follows the cursed son of Húrin, named Túrin, during an era of intense and constant war and widespread devastation caused by the Dark Lord Morgoth. If you've read The Silmarillion, you will recognize some of the names found in this novel.Beren and Lúthien (2017): Another very early tale set in Middle-earth, Beren and Lúthien was reworked and revised over time and eventually became part of The Silmarillion. This compilation of Lúthien and Beren's story was originally published in 2017. It shows the evolution of the love story between the mortal man Beren and immortal elf Lúthien.The Fall of Gondolin (2018): Founded by King Turgon, the eponymous city of elves was concealed for many years before Lord Morgoth's quest to destroy elven life across Middle-earth. The Fall of Gondolin's main protagonist is Túrin's cousin, Tuor, and his family. Tuor is married to Turgon's daughter, Idril. The story follows their attempt to save their child after the Gondolin (unsurprisingly) falls.It's worth noting that The Great Tales of Middle-earth is already available as a hardcover box set. While it won't match Myths and Legends or the four History of Middle-earth Box Sets, the 2018 hardcover collection is on sale for only $50 (was $100) at Amazon. Alternatively, you can purchase each book individually in hardcover or paperback.The Great Tales of Middle-earth Editions:The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2018) (3 Books) -- $50 ($100)The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2025) (3 Books) -- $125 | Releases August 19The Children of Hurin (Paperback) -- $10.70 ($19)The Children of Hurin (Hardcover) -- $14 ($35)Beren and Lúthien (Paperback) -- $13.69 ($19)Beren and Lúthien (Hardcover) -- $22.50 ($35)The Fall of Gondolin (Paperback) -- $11.69 ($19)The Fall of Gondolin (Hardcover) -- $14.41 ($35) Preorder at Amazon See at Amazon (2018 set) The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2018) $50 (was $100) See at Amazon The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Sets (2024)J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-earth Box Sets (2024)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 1 (4 Books) -- $63.37 ($125)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 2 (3 Books) -- $57.18 ($100)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 3 (4 Books) -- $73.60 ($125)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 4 (4 Books) -- $68 ($125)The Complete History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (3 Books) -- $138 ($250)The History of Middle-earth Paperback Box Set (5 Books) -- $28 ($50)The History of Middle-earth was originally published over a 14-year stretch from 1983 to 1996. While creating his fantasy world, Tolkien took extensive notes, building a backstory for Middle-earth across three different ages and 6,500-plus years. You could argue that the author's dedication to crafting the setting that would become home to a pair of landmark fantasy novels turned Middle-earth into the most believable character Tolkien created. His mythopoeic writings formed what is commonly referred to as Tolkien's legendarium.At the time of Tolkien's death in 1973, the exhaustive backstory of Middle-earth remained unpublished. Over the next few years, his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, undertook the daunting project of editing, expanding, and curating the legendarium into publishable works. The legendarium would become a 12-volume series titled The History of Middle-earth.Continue Reading at GameSpot
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  • New Class of Drugs Blocks Wakefulness Chemical and Offers Relief from Insomnia

    May 21, 202510 min readSleep Better with New Drugs, Select Cannabinoids and Wearable DevicesDrugs that target wakefulness, molecules in cannabis and wearable devices that modulate brain activity could help people with insomniaBy Rachel Nuwer carlofranco/Getty ImagesThis Nature Outlook is editorially independent, produced with financial support from Avadel.Miranda cannot remember a time in her life when she did not have insomnia. The 23 year old, who asked for her last name to be withheld, started struggling with sleep when she was a child. As she’s grown older, it’s only become worse. She takes “a myriad of medications” each night, she says, but usually still cannot fall asleep until the early hours of the morning. “I can’t get up and be functional until halfway through the day,” she says. She had to drop out of university because she couldn’t attend classes, and she can’t hold down a job. Her insomnia exacerbates other medical conditions as well, including migraines and the pain condition fibromyalgia. “It’s hugely debilitating,” she says. “It affects everything.”In the United States, about 12% of adults have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia — when a person struggles to sleep for more than three nights each week for at least three months, and experiences daytime distress as a result. Research suggests that the worldwide figure is 10–30%. It also often co-occurs with and creates a vicious cycle with other conditions, including chronic pain, depression and anxiety.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Fortunately for Miranda and millions of others with chronic insomnia, new treatments are arriving. The emergence of a class of pharmaceuticals that induces sleep through a different brain pathway from existing drugs is a welcome development, and molecules in cannabis and specialized medical devices to promote sleep are also showing potential as sleep aids. Soon, those struggling with sleep could have a range of new options available to help.Imperfect solutionsCognitive behavioural therapy for insomniais usually the recommended first treatment. This specialized talking therapy focuses on establishing healthy sleep behaviours and addressing thoughts that can interfere with sleep. But CBT-I is not covered by all health-care insurance plans in the United States. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, public health-care systems usually provide it, but waiting times can be long. This is because, around the world, there is a limited availability of therapists, says Andrew Krystal, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We keep hiring new people, but almost immediately their schedules are completely filled and the wait list is a year.”CBT-I also doesn’t work for everyone. Miranda has tried it and has received conventional talking therapy for over a decade, with limited success. “It only helps so much,” she says.Pharmacological interventions are the next line of defence, Krystal says. Benzodiazepines and a class of medicines called Z-drugs, which include zolpidem, are among the most prescribed insomnia medications. These sedative hypnotics enhance the effects of the neurotransmitter GABA, thereby dampening brain activity. They also reduce anxiety. But they can create a hangover effect and increase the risk of falls in older people. These drugs also have the potential for misuse and can cause dependence. Some studies have even found an association between long-term use of Z-drugs and benzodiazepines and an increased risk of death.Miranda tried Ambien, but says that she quickly became chemically dependent. She eventually weaned herself off it and switched to benzodiazepines, but she began developing a tolerance to them, too — she once wound up in hospital with withdrawal symptoms after she tried to cut back on her dosage. “They’re horrible drugs to be on,” she says. But she cannot fall asleep without them. Each night, she now takes two benzodiazepines, as well as gabapentin, an anticonvulsant medication that is sometimes given off-label for insomnia.Physicians frequently provide other off-label prescriptions for insomnia, including trazodone, which is approved for depression. Over-the-counter products such as antihistamines are also used for sleeplessness. None are ideal, however, because they have not been evaluated as sleep aids, says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep-medicine researcher at Stanford University in California.Miranda has experience with many of these products. When she first developed chronic insomnia as a child, her paediatrician recommended melatonin, which is available without a prescription in the United States. It helped her fall asleep, but it did not keep her asleep. During her teenage years, different neurologists prescribed off-label antidepressants and other mood medications, including trazodone and mirtazapine. But they came with what she calls “torturous” side effects: she felt constantly anxious and exhausted during the day, and her memory became “incredibly foggy”.Blocking wakefulnessMignot was studying narcolepsy, a chronic disorder that affects sleep–wake cycles and causes people to fall asleep suddenly, when he inadvertently helped to pave the way towards the latest means of treating insomnia. He discovered that dogs with narcolepsy have a genetic mutation that affects one of two receptors used by the neurotransmitter orexin, the primary role of which was initially thought to be the regulation of appetite. Mignot then found that people with narcolepsy lack orexin, confirming the chemical’s main job: promoting wakefulness. If drugs could be developed to prevent orexin from binding to its receptors, Mignot thought, then people with insomnia would become “narcoleptic for one night”.In 2007, researchers at the pharmaceutical firm Actelionshowed that blocking orexin’s two receptors induced sleep in rats, dogs and people. In 2014, the biopharmaceutical company Merck, received US Food and Drug Administrationapproval for the first dual orexin receptor antagonistdrug, suvorexant. In 2019, another DORA drug — lemborexant— was approved, followed, in 2022, by daridorexant.Compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, which inhibit activity all over the brain, DORA drugs affect only the neurons activated by orexins. “The beauty of it is it does nothing but block the stimulation of wakefulness,” says neurologist Joe Herring, who heads neuroscience clinical research at Merck in Rahway, New Jersey. “It’s a physiologically better way to promote sleep.”Alisdair Macdonald/NatureDaridorexant is the only DORA drug for which data are available about daytime functioning, says Antonio Olivieri, chief medical officer at Idorsia, which produces daridorexant. In clinical trials, Idorsia showed that, compared with those given a placebo, people who received daridorexant experienced significant improvements in daytime insomnia symptoms the following day. Data reported in the approvals database of the FDA also indicate that daridorexant has the lowest fatigue and drowsiness scores of the three DORA drugs, possibly because it leaves the body the quickest.So far, there have been no one-to-one comparisons of DORA drugs. “Ideally, you’d have direct evidence of how those drugs compare to each other,” says Daniel Buysse, a sleep scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. “But we rarely have such evidence, so instead, we have to rely on statistical techniques that allow you to make indirect comparisons.” It’s also difficult to say definitively how DORA drugs compare with older treatments for insomnia, but Buysse says that drug registration trials suggest that DORA drugs have fewer adverse cognitive or hangover effects compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, as well as less potential for dependence and misuse. The European Insomnia Guideline 2023 placed daridorexant as the next recommended insomnia treatment after CBT-I.The main drawback to DORA drugs, Buysse says, is not medical but financial: their high cost keeps them out of reach of many people who could benefit from them. “There are many patients I would like to prescribe these drugs for, but I know in order for them to get one of these medications we’ll have to go through trials of several other drugs before the request will be considered,” Buysse says. DORA drugs are also available only in a few countries, so far.Given her long history of insomnia, Miranda was given a prescription for suvorexant. Her psychiatrist recommended the drug to her about a year ago. “I was really sceptical that an anti-wakefulness drug would be any different to a pro-sleep drug,” she says. But she quickly felt the difference, and has now come to see the drug as “a saviour”. Without the drug, she says, “I’d probably be on a much higher benzodiazepine dose than I am.” She hopes her suvorexant dose can continue to increase, so that some of her other medications can be reduced.Expanding availabilityOther drugs that target the orexin system are in the clinical pipeline. Seltorexant, for example, is being developed by the US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson for people with both major depressive disorder and insomnia. Around 70% of people with depression have insomnia, so having a medication that treats both of those disorders “has the potential to fill an important gap”, says Krystal, who has consulted for Johnson & Johnson on the drug. In a phase III trial, participants who took the drug experienced meaningful improvement in both sleep and depressive symptoms, with an antidepressant effect that seemed to be independent of the participants getting better sleep. Seltorexant might have an antidepressant effect because it is designed to block only one of the two types of orexin receptor, Krystal adds, whereas other DORA drugs block both receptor types.Investigations of already-approved DORA drugs are also expanding into other populations. Merck has sponsored investigator-led studies of suvorexant in people with insomnia as well as depression or substance-use disorders, and Idorsia is sponsoring studies of daridorexant’s safety and efficacy in sub-groups of people who have insomnia and other conditions.In 2020, suvorexant became the first medication to be approved for treating sleep disorders in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Insomnia is often a precursor to and co-morbid with Alzheimer’s, and the disease seems to manifest differently in people with the condition. In one study comparing older people with insomnia with those with both insomnia and Alzheimer’s, people with both conditions had a number of extra changes to their sleep patterns, including less time spent in deep sleep — sometimes called slow-wave sleep because that describes the pattern of the brain’s electrical activity during these intervals. Sleep problems in people with Alzheimer’s also seem to have a causal role in increasing levels of toxic substances in the brains of those individuals. Preliminary data suggest that suvorexant could also help to reduce toxic brain proteins. The results of a follow-up study testing that finding are expected in 2026.In the weedsSleeplessness is already among the most common conditions for the medicinal use of the drug cannabis. Miranda, for example, supplements her nightly pharmaceutical regimen with a cannabis tincture that contains a few of the plant’s 100-plus cannabinoids. “It’s definitely a key player in my sleep-medication arsenal,” she says.Yet, scientifically, little is known about which cannabinoids — if any — promote sleep, and what a safe and effective dose is. “Tens of millions of people around the world are probably using cannabinoids for insomnia, but we have very little good-quality evidence to support that,” says Iain McGregor, director of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney in Australia.McGregor is investigating cannabinol, a molecule that develops in cannabis as the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinoloxidizes. His group reported that CBN increased sleep in rats to a similar degree as zolpidem, but without the drug’s known negative side effect of suppressing rapid-eye-movement sleep. Unpublished data of a single-night trial with 20 people with insomnia disorder show that people fell asleep 7 minutes faster after taking 300 milligrams of CBN compared with those taking a placebo; participants also reported subjective improvements in sleep and mood. Although 7 minutes “doesn’t sound like a lot”, it is on a par with what benzodiazepines and Z-drugs typically accomplish, says Camilla Hoyos, a sleep researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, who led the work. McGregor, Hoyos and their colleagues are aiming to follow up the work with a large, community-based trial in which people with insomnia take either CBN or a placebo for six weeks at home.As for cannabidioland THC — the most well-known cannabinoids — the prospects for efficacy against insomnia are doubtful, at least for the doses used in trials so far. Several small studies have failed to find a sleep benefit from taking CBD. In one experiment, researchers observed that participants in a study who received 10 milligrams of THC and 200 milligrams of CBD actually slept for 25 minutes less compared with when they received a placebo. Several other company-sponsored trials of low-dose CBD for insomnia were not published, McGregor adds, because they found no significant improvement. “It’s been one failure after the next,” he says.Insomnia’s new frontiersThe search for more effective insomnia treatments continues in other realms, as well. Some research groups are experimenting with different receptors that they hope could lead to new classes of drugs. Gabriella Gobbi, a clinical psychiatrist and research neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, for example, has homed in on one of the brain’s two melatonin receptors, MT2. “We want to find an alternative mechanism without any addiction liability and with fewer side effects, especially for use in children and elderly people,” she says. A molecule that the team developed that binds to MT2 increased the time that rats spent in deep sleep by 30%. Gobbi aims to launch clinical trials in the next two to three years.A few companies and health systems, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, have also created or are developing digital platforms for delivering CBT-I. These apps take users through regimens that are tailored to their symptoms. SleepioRx, for example, is a 90-day digital programme that has been evaluated in more than two dozen clinical trials and has showed efficacy as high as 76%. This includes helping people to fall asleep faster, sleep better throughout the night and feel better the next day. In August 2024, the programme, developed by Big Health in San Francisco, California, received FDA clearance. A 2024 meta-analysis of 15 studies that compare in-person and electronically delivered CBT-I concluded that the two approaches were equally effective.Uptake among physicians has been slow so far, Krystal says. But once practitioners catch on, he adds, “I can imagine a world where you have digital care as your first stop, and if that’s not successful, you see a therapist.”Some studies suggest that insomnia can stem from a high level of underlying brain activity during sleep. This raises the question of whether reducing this activity could treat insomnia, says Ruth Benca, a psychiatrist at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. Companies and academic research groups are beginning to test this proposition with wearable devices that use auditory tones or mild electrical stimulation to increase slow-wave activity in the brain. Some devices are already on the market, and evidence suggests that they can increase the duration of deep sleep. Last June, for example, researchers at Elemind Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirmed that auditory stimuli delivered in sync with specific brain-wave rhythms generated in a headband allowed people who usually struggle for more than 30 minutes to fall asleep to shave an average of 10.5 minutes off that time.In the coming years, according to Benca, researchers hope to learn enough about insomnia’s causes and treatments to be able to recommend personalized therapies based on an individual’s specific demographics, genetics and co-morbidities. These are the frontiers people are working at, she says.Even after a lifetime of struggling to find safe and effective help, Miranda says that she still holds out hope that better treatments for insomnia are on the horizon. “I can’t be on these medications forever,” she says. “They’re going to take years off my life.”
    #new #class #drugs #blocks #wakefulness
    New Class of Drugs Blocks Wakefulness Chemical and Offers Relief from Insomnia
    May 21, 202510 min readSleep Better with New Drugs, Select Cannabinoids and Wearable DevicesDrugs that target wakefulness, molecules in cannabis and wearable devices that modulate brain activity could help people with insomniaBy Rachel Nuwer carlofranco/Getty ImagesThis Nature Outlook is editorially independent, produced with financial support from Avadel.Miranda cannot remember a time in her life when she did not have insomnia. The 23 year old, who asked for her last name to be withheld, started struggling with sleep when she was a child. As she’s grown older, it’s only become worse. She takes “a myriad of medications” each night, she says, but usually still cannot fall asleep until the early hours of the morning. “I can’t get up and be functional until halfway through the day,” she says. She had to drop out of university because she couldn’t attend classes, and she can’t hold down a job. Her insomnia exacerbates other medical conditions as well, including migraines and the pain condition fibromyalgia. “It’s hugely debilitating,” she says. “It affects everything.”In the United States, about 12% of adults have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia — when a person struggles to sleep for more than three nights each week for at least three months, and experiences daytime distress as a result. Research suggests that the worldwide figure is 10–30%. It also often co-occurs with and creates a vicious cycle with other conditions, including chronic pain, depression and anxiety.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Fortunately for Miranda and millions of others with chronic insomnia, new treatments are arriving. The emergence of a class of pharmaceuticals that induces sleep through a different brain pathway from existing drugs is a welcome development, and molecules in cannabis and specialized medical devices to promote sleep are also showing potential as sleep aids. Soon, those struggling with sleep could have a range of new options available to help.Imperfect solutionsCognitive behavioural therapy for insomniais usually the recommended first treatment. This specialized talking therapy focuses on establishing healthy sleep behaviours and addressing thoughts that can interfere with sleep. But CBT-I is not covered by all health-care insurance plans in the United States. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, public health-care systems usually provide it, but waiting times can be long. This is because, around the world, there is a limited availability of therapists, says Andrew Krystal, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We keep hiring new people, but almost immediately their schedules are completely filled and the wait list is a year.”CBT-I also doesn’t work for everyone. Miranda has tried it and has received conventional talking therapy for over a decade, with limited success. “It only helps so much,” she says.Pharmacological interventions are the next line of defence, Krystal says. Benzodiazepines and a class of medicines called Z-drugs, which include zolpidem, are among the most prescribed insomnia medications. These sedative hypnotics enhance the effects of the neurotransmitter GABA, thereby dampening brain activity. They also reduce anxiety. But they can create a hangover effect and increase the risk of falls in older people. These drugs also have the potential for misuse and can cause dependence. Some studies have even found an association between long-term use of Z-drugs and benzodiazepines and an increased risk of death.Miranda tried Ambien, but says that she quickly became chemically dependent. She eventually weaned herself off it and switched to benzodiazepines, but she began developing a tolerance to them, too — she once wound up in hospital with withdrawal symptoms after she tried to cut back on her dosage. “They’re horrible drugs to be on,” she says. But she cannot fall asleep without them. Each night, she now takes two benzodiazepines, as well as gabapentin, an anticonvulsant medication that is sometimes given off-label for insomnia.Physicians frequently provide other off-label prescriptions for insomnia, including trazodone, which is approved for depression. Over-the-counter products such as antihistamines are also used for sleeplessness. None are ideal, however, because they have not been evaluated as sleep aids, says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep-medicine researcher at Stanford University in California.Miranda has experience with many of these products. When she first developed chronic insomnia as a child, her paediatrician recommended melatonin, which is available without a prescription in the United States. It helped her fall asleep, but it did not keep her asleep. During her teenage years, different neurologists prescribed off-label antidepressants and other mood medications, including trazodone and mirtazapine. But they came with what she calls “torturous” side effects: she felt constantly anxious and exhausted during the day, and her memory became “incredibly foggy”.Blocking wakefulnessMignot was studying narcolepsy, a chronic disorder that affects sleep–wake cycles and causes people to fall asleep suddenly, when he inadvertently helped to pave the way towards the latest means of treating insomnia. He discovered that dogs with narcolepsy have a genetic mutation that affects one of two receptors used by the neurotransmitter orexin, the primary role of which was initially thought to be the regulation of appetite. Mignot then found that people with narcolepsy lack orexin, confirming the chemical’s main job: promoting wakefulness. If drugs could be developed to prevent orexin from binding to its receptors, Mignot thought, then people with insomnia would become “narcoleptic for one night”.In 2007, researchers at the pharmaceutical firm Actelionshowed that blocking orexin’s two receptors induced sleep in rats, dogs and people. In 2014, the biopharmaceutical company Merck, received US Food and Drug Administrationapproval for the first dual orexin receptor antagonistdrug, suvorexant. In 2019, another DORA drug — lemborexant— was approved, followed, in 2022, by daridorexant.Compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, which inhibit activity all over the brain, DORA drugs affect only the neurons activated by orexins. “The beauty of it is it does nothing but block the stimulation of wakefulness,” says neurologist Joe Herring, who heads neuroscience clinical research at Merck in Rahway, New Jersey. “It’s a physiologically better way to promote sleep.”Alisdair Macdonald/NatureDaridorexant is the only DORA drug for which data are available about daytime functioning, says Antonio Olivieri, chief medical officer at Idorsia, which produces daridorexant. In clinical trials, Idorsia showed that, compared with those given a placebo, people who received daridorexant experienced significant improvements in daytime insomnia symptoms the following day. Data reported in the approvals database of the FDA also indicate that daridorexant has the lowest fatigue and drowsiness scores of the three DORA drugs, possibly because it leaves the body the quickest.So far, there have been no one-to-one comparisons of DORA drugs. “Ideally, you’d have direct evidence of how those drugs compare to each other,” says Daniel Buysse, a sleep scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. “But we rarely have such evidence, so instead, we have to rely on statistical techniques that allow you to make indirect comparisons.” It’s also difficult to say definitively how DORA drugs compare with older treatments for insomnia, but Buysse says that drug registration trials suggest that DORA drugs have fewer adverse cognitive or hangover effects compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, as well as less potential for dependence and misuse. The European Insomnia Guideline 2023 placed daridorexant as the next recommended insomnia treatment after CBT-I.The main drawback to DORA drugs, Buysse says, is not medical but financial: their high cost keeps them out of reach of many people who could benefit from them. “There are many patients I would like to prescribe these drugs for, but I know in order for them to get one of these medications we’ll have to go through trials of several other drugs before the request will be considered,” Buysse says. DORA drugs are also available only in a few countries, so far.Given her long history of insomnia, Miranda was given a prescription for suvorexant. Her psychiatrist recommended the drug to her about a year ago. “I was really sceptical that an anti-wakefulness drug would be any different to a pro-sleep drug,” she says. But she quickly felt the difference, and has now come to see the drug as “a saviour”. Without the drug, she says, “I’d probably be on a much higher benzodiazepine dose than I am.” She hopes her suvorexant dose can continue to increase, so that some of her other medications can be reduced.Expanding availabilityOther drugs that target the orexin system are in the clinical pipeline. Seltorexant, for example, is being developed by the US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson for people with both major depressive disorder and insomnia. Around 70% of people with depression have insomnia, so having a medication that treats both of those disorders “has the potential to fill an important gap”, says Krystal, who has consulted for Johnson & Johnson on the drug. In a phase III trial, participants who took the drug experienced meaningful improvement in both sleep and depressive symptoms, with an antidepressant effect that seemed to be independent of the participants getting better sleep. Seltorexant might have an antidepressant effect because it is designed to block only one of the two types of orexin receptor, Krystal adds, whereas other DORA drugs block both receptor types.Investigations of already-approved DORA drugs are also expanding into other populations. Merck has sponsored investigator-led studies of suvorexant in people with insomnia as well as depression or substance-use disorders, and Idorsia is sponsoring studies of daridorexant’s safety and efficacy in sub-groups of people who have insomnia and other conditions.In 2020, suvorexant became the first medication to be approved for treating sleep disorders in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Insomnia is often a precursor to and co-morbid with Alzheimer’s, and the disease seems to manifest differently in people with the condition. In one study comparing older people with insomnia with those with both insomnia and Alzheimer’s, people with both conditions had a number of extra changes to their sleep patterns, including less time spent in deep sleep — sometimes called slow-wave sleep because that describes the pattern of the brain’s electrical activity during these intervals. Sleep problems in people with Alzheimer’s also seem to have a causal role in increasing levels of toxic substances in the brains of those individuals. Preliminary data suggest that suvorexant could also help to reduce toxic brain proteins. The results of a follow-up study testing that finding are expected in 2026.In the weedsSleeplessness is already among the most common conditions for the medicinal use of the drug cannabis. Miranda, for example, supplements her nightly pharmaceutical regimen with a cannabis tincture that contains a few of the plant’s 100-plus cannabinoids. “It’s definitely a key player in my sleep-medication arsenal,” she says.Yet, scientifically, little is known about which cannabinoids — if any — promote sleep, and what a safe and effective dose is. “Tens of millions of people around the world are probably using cannabinoids for insomnia, but we have very little good-quality evidence to support that,” says Iain McGregor, director of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney in Australia.McGregor is investigating cannabinol, a molecule that develops in cannabis as the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinoloxidizes. His group reported that CBN increased sleep in rats to a similar degree as zolpidem, but without the drug’s known negative side effect of suppressing rapid-eye-movement sleep. Unpublished data of a single-night trial with 20 people with insomnia disorder show that people fell asleep 7 minutes faster after taking 300 milligrams of CBN compared with those taking a placebo; participants also reported subjective improvements in sleep and mood. Although 7 minutes “doesn’t sound like a lot”, it is on a par with what benzodiazepines and Z-drugs typically accomplish, says Camilla Hoyos, a sleep researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, who led the work. McGregor, Hoyos and their colleagues are aiming to follow up the work with a large, community-based trial in which people with insomnia take either CBN or a placebo for six weeks at home.As for cannabidioland THC — the most well-known cannabinoids — the prospects for efficacy against insomnia are doubtful, at least for the doses used in trials so far. Several small studies have failed to find a sleep benefit from taking CBD. In one experiment, researchers observed that participants in a study who received 10 milligrams of THC and 200 milligrams of CBD actually slept for 25 minutes less compared with when they received a placebo. Several other company-sponsored trials of low-dose CBD for insomnia were not published, McGregor adds, because they found no significant improvement. “It’s been one failure after the next,” he says.Insomnia’s new frontiersThe search for more effective insomnia treatments continues in other realms, as well. Some research groups are experimenting with different receptors that they hope could lead to new classes of drugs. Gabriella Gobbi, a clinical psychiatrist and research neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, for example, has homed in on one of the brain’s two melatonin receptors, MT2. “We want to find an alternative mechanism without any addiction liability and with fewer side effects, especially for use in children and elderly people,” she says. A molecule that the team developed that binds to MT2 increased the time that rats spent in deep sleep by 30%. Gobbi aims to launch clinical trials in the next two to three years.A few companies and health systems, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, have also created or are developing digital platforms for delivering CBT-I. These apps take users through regimens that are tailored to their symptoms. SleepioRx, for example, is a 90-day digital programme that has been evaluated in more than two dozen clinical trials and has showed efficacy as high as 76%. This includes helping people to fall asleep faster, sleep better throughout the night and feel better the next day. In August 2024, the programme, developed by Big Health in San Francisco, California, received FDA clearance. A 2024 meta-analysis of 15 studies that compare in-person and electronically delivered CBT-I concluded that the two approaches were equally effective.Uptake among physicians has been slow so far, Krystal says. But once practitioners catch on, he adds, “I can imagine a world where you have digital care as your first stop, and if that’s not successful, you see a therapist.”Some studies suggest that insomnia can stem from a high level of underlying brain activity during sleep. This raises the question of whether reducing this activity could treat insomnia, says Ruth Benca, a psychiatrist at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. Companies and academic research groups are beginning to test this proposition with wearable devices that use auditory tones or mild electrical stimulation to increase slow-wave activity in the brain. Some devices are already on the market, and evidence suggests that they can increase the duration of deep sleep. Last June, for example, researchers at Elemind Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirmed that auditory stimuli delivered in sync with specific brain-wave rhythms generated in a headband allowed people who usually struggle for more than 30 minutes to fall asleep to shave an average of 10.5 minutes off that time.In the coming years, according to Benca, researchers hope to learn enough about insomnia’s causes and treatments to be able to recommend personalized therapies based on an individual’s specific demographics, genetics and co-morbidities. These are the frontiers people are working at, she says.Even after a lifetime of struggling to find safe and effective help, Miranda says that she still holds out hope that better treatments for insomnia are on the horizon. “I can’t be on these medications forever,” she says. “They’re going to take years off my life.” #new #class #drugs #blocks #wakefulness
    WWW.SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM
    New Class of Drugs Blocks Wakefulness Chemical and Offers Relief from Insomnia
    May 21, 202510 min readSleep Better with New Drugs, Select Cannabinoids and Wearable DevicesDrugs that target wakefulness, molecules in cannabis and wearable devices that modulate brain activity could help people with insomniaBy Rachel Nuwer carlofranco/Getty ImagesThis Nature Outlook is editorially independent, produced with financial support from Avadel.Miranda cannot remember a time in her life when she did not have insomnia. The 23 year old, who asked for her last name to be withheld, started struggling with sleep when she was a child. As she’s grown older, it’s only become worse. She takes “a myriad of medications” each night, she says, but usually still cannot fall asleep until the early hours of the morning. “I can’t get up and be functional until halfway through the day,” she says. She had to drop out of university because she couldn’t attend classes, and she can’t hold down a job. Her insomnia exacerbates other medical conditions as well, including migraines and the pain condition fibromyalgia. “It’s hugely debilitating,” she says. “It affects everything.”In the United States, about 12% of adults have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia — when a person struggles to sleep for more than three nights each week for at least three months, and experiences daytime distress as a result. Research suggests that the worldwide figure is 10–30%. It also often co-occurs with and creates a vicious cycle with other conditions, including chronic pain, depression and anxiety.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Fortunately for Miranda and millions of others with chronic insomnia, new treatments are arriving. The emergence of a class of pharmaceuticals that induces sleep through a different brain pathway from existing drugs is a welcome development, and molecules in cannabis and specialized medical devices to promote sleep are also showing potential as sleep aids. Soon, those struggling with sleep could have a range of new options available to help.Imperfect solutionsCognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is usually the recommended first treatment. This specialized talking therapy focuses on establishing healthy sleep behaviours and addressing thoughts that can interfere with sleep. But CBT-I is not covered by all health-care insurance plans in the United States. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, public health-care systems usually provide it, but waiting times can be long. This is because, around the world, there is a limited availability of therapists, says Andrew Krystal, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We keep hiring new people, but almost immediately their schedules are completely filled and the wait list is a year.”CBT-I also doesn’t work for everyone. Miranda has tried it and has received conventional talking therapy for over a decade, with limited success. “It only helps so much,” she says.Pharmacological interventions are the next line of defence, Krystal says. Benzodiazepines and a class of medicines called Z-drugs, which include zolpidem (Ambien), are among the most prescribed insomnia medications. These sedative hypnotics enhance the effects of the neurotransmitter GABA, thereby dampening brain activity. They also reduce anxiety. But they can create a hangover effect and increase the risk of falls in older people. These drugs also have the potential for misuse and can cause dependence. Some studies have even found an association between long-term use of Z-drugs and benzodiazepines and an increased risk of death.Miranda tried Ambien, but says that she quickly became chemically dependent. She eventually weaned herself off it and switched to benzodiazepines, but she began developing a tolerance to them, too — she once wound up in hospital with withdrawal symptoms after she tried to cut back on her dosage. “They’re horrible drugs to be on,” she says. But she cannot fall asleep without them. Each night, she now takes two benzodiazepines, as well as gabapentin, an anticonvulsant medication that is sometimes given off-label for insomnia.Physicians frequently provide other off-label prescriptions for insomnia, including trazodone, which is approved for depression. Over-the-counter products such as antihistamines are also used for sleeplessness. None are ideal, however, because they have not been evaluated as sleep aids, says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep-medicine researcher at Stanford University in California.Miranda has experience with many of these products. When she first developed chronic insomnia as a child, her paediatrician recommended melatonin, which is available without a prescription in the United States. It helped her fall asleep, but it did not keep her asleep. During her teenage years, different neurologists prescribed off-label antidepressants and other mood medications, including trazodone and mirtazapine. But they came with what she calls “torturous” side effects: she felt constantly anxious and exhausted during the day, and her memory became “incredibly foggy”.Blocking wakefulnessMignot was studying narcolepsy, a chronic disorder that affects sleep–wake cycles and causes people to fall asleep suddenly, when he inadvertently helped to pave the way towards the latest means of treating insomnia. He discovered that dogs with narcolepsy have a genetic mutation that affects one of two receptors used by the neurotransmitter orexin, the primary role of which was initially thought to be the regulation of appetite. Mignot then found that people with narcolepsy lack orexin, confirming the chemical’s main job: promoting wakefulness. If drugs could be developed to prevent orexin from binding to its receptors, Mignot thought, then people with insomnia would become “narcoleptic for one night”.In 2007, researchers at the pharmaceutical firm Actelion (part of which is now Idorsia Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland) showed that blocking orexin’s two receptors induced sleep in rats, dogs and people. In 2014, the biopharmaceutical company Merck, received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the first dual orexin receptor antagonist (DORA) drug, suvorexant (Belsomra). In 2019, another DORA drug — lemborexant (Dayvigo) — was approved, followed, in 2022, by daridorexant (Quviviq).Compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, which inhibit activity all over the brain, DORA drugs affect only the neurons activated by orexins (see ‘Blocking wakefulness’). “The beauty of it is it does nothing but block the stimulation of wakefulness,” says neurologist Joe Herring, who heads neuroscience clinical research at Merck in Rahway, New Jersey. “It’s a physiologically better way to promote sleep.”Alisdair Macdonald/NatureDaridorexant is the only DORA drug for which data are available about daytime functioning, says Antonio Olivieri, chief medical officer at Idorsia, which produces daridorexant. In clinical trials, Idorsia showed that, compared with those given a placebo, people who received daridorexant experienced significant improvements in daytime insomnia symptoms the following day. Data reported in the approvals database of the FDA also indicate that daridorexant has the lowest fatigue and drowsiness scores of the three DORA drugs, possibly because it leaves the body the quickest.So far, there have been no one-to-one comparisons of DORA drugs. “Ideally, you’d have direct evidence of how those drugs compare to each other,” says Daniel Buysse, a sleep scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. “But we rarely have such evidence, so instead, we have to rely on statistical techniques that allow you to make indirect comparisons.” It’s also difficult to say definitively how DORA drugs compare with older treatments for insomnia, but Buysse says that drug registration trials suggest that DORA drugs have fewer adverse cognitive or hangover effects compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, as well as less potential for dependence and misuse. The European Insomnia Guideline 2023 placed daridorexant as the next recommended insomnia treatment after CBT-I.The main drawback to DORA drugs, Buysse says, is not medical but financial: their high cost keeps them out of reach of many people who could benefit from them. “There are many patients I would like to prescribe these drugs for, but I know in order for them to get one of these medications we’ll have to go through trials of several other drugs before the request will be considered,” Buysse says. DORA drugs are also available only in a few countries, so far.Given her long history of insomnia, Miranda was given a prescription for suvorexant. Her psychiatrist recommended the drug to her about a year ago. “I was really sceptical that an anti-wakefulness drug would be any different to a pro-sleep drug,” she says. But she quickly felt the difference, and has now come to see the drug as “a saviour”. Without the drug, she says, “I’d probably be on a much higher benzodiazepine dose than I am.” She hopes her suvorexant dose can continue to increase, so that some of her other medications can be reduced.Expanding availabilityOther drugs that target the orexin system are in the clinical pipeline. Seltorexant, for example, is being developed by the US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson for people with both major depressive disorder and insomnia. Around 70% of people with depression have insomnia, so having a medication that treats both of those disorders “has the potential to fill an important gap”, says Krystal, who has consulted for Johnson & Johnson on the drug. In a phase III trial, participants who took the drug experienced meaningful improvement in both sleep and depressive symptoms, with an antidepressant effect that seemed to be independent of the participants getting better sleep. Seltorexant might have an antidepressant effect because it is designed to block only one of the two types of orexin receptor, Krystal adds, whereas other DORA drugs block both receptor types.Investigations of already-approved DORA drugs are also expanding into other populations. Merck has sponsored investigator-led studies of suvorexant in people with insomnia as well as depression or substance-use disorders, and Idorsia is sponsoring studies of daridorexant’s safety and efficacy in sub-groups of people who have insomnia and other conditions.In 2020, suvorexant became the first medication to be approved for treating sleep disorders in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Insomnia is often a precursor to and co-morbid with Alzheimer’s, and the disease seems to manifest differently in people with the condition. In one study comparing older people with insomnia with those with both insomnia and Alzheimer’s, people with both conditions had a number of extra changes to their sleep patterns, including less time spent in deep sleep — sometimes called slow-wave sleep because that describes the pattern of the brain’s electrical activity during these intervals. Sleep problems in people with Alzheimer’s also seem to have a causal role in increasing levels of toxic substances in the brains of those individuals. Preliminary data suggest that suvorexant could also help to reduce toxic brain proteins. The results of a follow-up study testing that finding are expected in 2026.In the weedsSleeplessness is already among the most common conditions for the medicinal use of the drug cannabis. Miranda, for example, supplements her nightly pharmaceutical regimen with a cannabis tincture that contains a few of the plant’s 100-plus cannabinoids (she lives in a state where cannabis use is legal). “It’s definitely a key player in my sleep-medication arsenal,” she says.Yet, scientifically, little is known about which cannabinoids — if any — promote sleep, and what a safe and effective dose is. “Tens of millions of people around the world are probably using cannabinoids for insomnia, but we have very little good-quality evidence to support that,” says Iain McGregor, director of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney in Australia.McGregor is investigating cannabinol (CBN), a molecule that develops in cannabis as the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) oxidizes. His group reported that CBN increased sleep in rats to a similar degree as zolpidem, but without the drug’s known negative side effect of suppressing rapid-eye-movement sleep. Unpublished data of a single-night trial with 20 people with insomnia disorder show that people fell asleep 7 minutes faster after taking 300 milligrams of CBN compared with those taking a placebo; participants also reported subjective improvements in sleep and mood. Although 7 minutes “doesn’t sound like a lot”, it is on a par with what benzodiazepines and Z-drugs typically accomplish, says Camilla Hoyos, a sleep researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, who led the work. McGregor, Hoyos and their colleagues are aiming to follow up the work with a large, community-based trial in which people with insomnia take either CBN or a placebo for six weeks at home.As for cannabidiol (CBD) and THC — the most well-known cannabinoids — the prospects for efficacy against insomnia are doubtful, at least for the doses used in trials so far. Several small studies have failed to find a sleep benefit from taking CBD. In one experiment, researchers observed that participants in a study who received 10 milligrams of THC and 200 milligrams of CBD actually slept for 25 minutes less compared with when they received a placebo. Several other company-sponsored trials of low-dose CBD for insomnia were not published, McGregor adds, because they found no significant improvement. “It’s been one failure after the next,” he says.Insomnia’s new frontiersThe search for more effective insomnia treatments continues in other realms, as well. Some research groups are experimenting with different receptors that they hope could lead to new classes of drugs. Gabriella Gobbi, a clinical psychiatrist and research neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, for example, has homed in on one of the brain’s two melatonin receptors, MT2. “We want to find an alternative mechanism without any addiction liability and with fewer side effects, especially for use in children and elderly people,” she says. A molecule that the team developed that binds to MT2 increased the time that rats spent in deep sleep by 30%. Gobbi aims to launch clinical trials in the next two to three years.A few companies and health systems, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, have also created or are developing digital platforms for delivering CBT-I. These apps take users through regimens that are tailored to their symptoms. SleepioRx, for example, is a 90-day digital programme that has been evaluated in more than two dozen clinical trials and has showed efficacy as high as 76%. This includes helping people to fall asleep faster, sleep better throughout the night and feel better the next day. In August 2024, the programme, developed by Big Health in San Francisco, California, received FDA clearance. A 2024 meta-analysis of 15 studies that compare in-person and electronically delivered CBT-I concluded that the two approaches were equally effective.Uptake among physicians has been slow so far, Krystal says. But once practitioners catch on, he adds, “I can imagine a world where you have digital care as your first stop, and if that’s not successful, you see a therapist.”Some studies suggest that insomnia can stem from a high level of underlying brain activity during sleep. This raises the question of whether reducing this activity could treat insomnia, says Ruth Benca, a psychiatrist at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. Companies and academic research groups are beginning to test this proposition with wearable devices that use auditory tones or mild electrical stimulation to increase slow-wave activity in the brain. Some devices are already on the market, and evidence suggests that they can increase the duration of deep sleep. Last June, for example, researchers at Elemind Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirmed that auditory stimuli delivered in sync with specific brain-wave rhythms generated in a headband allowed people who usually struggle for more than 30 minutes to fall asleep to shave an average of 10.5 minutes off that time.In the coming years, according to Benca, researchers hope to learn enough about insomnia’s causes and treatments to be able to recommend personalized therapies based on an individual’s specific demographics, genetics and co-morbidities. These are the frontiers people are working at, she says.Even after a lifetime of struggling to find safe and effective help, Miranda says that she still holds out hope that better treatments for insomnia are on the horizon. “I can’t be on these medications forever,” she says. “They’re going to take years off my life.”
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  • UK Fraud Bill targets benefit claimants for mass surveillance

    Ming - stock.adobe.com

    Opinion

    UK Fraud Bill targets benefit claimants for mass surveillance
    The UK government’s proposed Fraud Bill will disproportionately place millions of benefit claimants under constant surveillance, creating a two-tier system where people are automatically suspected of wrongdoing for seeking welfare

    By

    Anna Dent

    Published: 21 May 2025

    Earlier this month the House of Lords had its first debate on the Public AuthoritiesBill. 
    The Bill aims to reduce government losses to benefit fraud and error, and would give the Department for Work and Pensionsunprecedented powers of investigation to routinely and covertly check benefit claimants' bank accounts, the right to enter private homes, and to seize drivers' licenses or money from bank accounts.
    Expert organisations including Justice, the Public Law Project and Big Brother Watch warn that although the aim of the Bill is hugely important, the proposed powers are disproportionate and represent a breach of human rights. As Baroness Finn remarked in the Lords, "support for the goal must not mean silence about the means."
    The Bill promises an expanded regime of digital surveillance for people in receipt of Universal Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, and State Pension Credit. This includes the introduction of an 'Eligibility Verification Measure'which would enable DWP to direct banks to check millions of bank accounts for as yet unspecified indicators of benefit fraud and error. 
    DWP already has similar powers but crucially can only use them where it has 'reasonable grounds' to suspect fraud is taking place, which is the standard threshold for many comparable state powers. This Bill would completely remove that threshold, and enable intrusive surveillance without any justification.
    Details on exactly how the EVM will be used are sparse, but it could theoretically result in every single claimant’s bank account being checked, with no suspicion or indication of any fraud, error or over-payment needed. 
    Accounts flagged through these checks would then be passed to a member of DWP staff for further investigation, but what this will involve is still unclear. A code of practice to accompany the Bill is still unpublished, so we don't actually know what sequence of events would play out.
    Will individuals be informed when they are being investigated? Will their benefits be suspended during an investigation? Will their claim be assessed by other fraud algorithms?
    In some circumstances, the Department could automatically take money from the bank accounts of people no longer on benefits if they are deemed to have committed fraud or been accidentally overpaid. Banks will be prevented from informing their customers that this recovery process is happening, so the first that a customer might know is when money disappears from their account. 
    The finance industry has expressed concern about tensions between the obligations the Bill would create and financial institutions' consumer obligations, the risks of financial harm to vulnerable customers, and the lack of robust safeguards for the transfer of banking data.
    Others are concerned about the potential for miscarriages of justice which many will be unable to effectively challenge: the benefits covered by the Bill are only available to people on a low income, who are unlikely to have the means to engage in legal action.
    These powers would apply to both fraud and error, including over-payments caused by the Department's own mistakes.
    Overpayments can be caused by myriad mistakes on the part of DWP or claimant, or both, and the complexity of making claims is well known. But under the Bill, fraud and error will be treated the same, with the same digital surveillance deployed and the same powers to seize money and other assets.
    Universal Credit already appears to be particularly prone to mistakes and over-payments. Rather than punishing people after the fact, it would be better for DWP to work out why it is particularly vulnerable, do more to help people avoid mistakes, and reduce the rate at which their own mistakes cause over-payments.
    Treating all claimants like intentional fraudsters stigmatises people on benefits, and risks people who need financial support disengaging from the benefit system.
    Rather than focus on professional criminals who are actively defrauding the Department, the bill scoops everyone up and places them all under suspicion.
    It creates a two-tier system in which benefit claimants would be subject to an invasion of privacy not applied to the rest of the population: millions of people who have done nothing wrong will be laid open to mass surveillance.
    DWP officers would be given police-like powers of entry to private premises and seizure of private property. This is an extraordinary expansion of very serious powers targeted at one section of society. It fundamentally undermines basic rights to privacy and to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. 
    Whether the ends justify these heavy-handed means is doubtful.
    The Department's own impact assessment estimates that just 2% of social security fraud and error over-payments will be clawed back through the use of these powers over 10 years: a disproportionate invasion of privacy for little benefit.
    The finance industry also warns that the organised gangs who carry out large-scale benefit fraud using sophisticated methods to avoid detection will easily find ways to work around the new powers. 
    Also on its way through the legislative process is the Data Use and Access Bill, which proposes to reduce the requirement for human oversight of automated decisions within government. If both Bills pass into law as currently drafted, there is a potential future in which the human-in-the-loop safeguards relating to digital bank surveillance are no longer legally required.
    This leaves the door open to hugely consequential decisions being made entirely by automated systems. We know that existing DWP fraud algorithms generate bias; the introduction of more automation and digital surveillance and the potential for less human oversight should trouble us all. 
    Increasing the number of people that are flagged for investigation via these new powers could put thousands more through the difficult process of fraud investigation. DWP’s own figures show that three-quarters of people whose benefit claims are flagged as suspicious actually have no fraud or error related to their claim at all.
    Ten million people receive the benefits that will be covered by the new powers: if even 1% of claimants are wrongly investigated many thousands of people will be affected. 
    As well as the immediate impact of these disproportionate powers, politicians need to be aware of the precedents they are setting, and how the legislation could be used by other administrations in future.
    Eliminating the need for the government to justify wholesale digital surveillance removes a basic protection against state over-reach. Only the state pension is explicitly excluded from the powers in the Bill: a government with an even more single-minded obsession with efficiency and fraud could roll out the bank surveillance to many, many other people.
    What will affect a minority now could become the norm for the majority.
    Anna Dent is an independent researcher and policy consultant, working on the digital welfare state and human-centred technology

    about digital surveillance

    UK government outlines plan to surveil migrants with eVisa data: Electronic visa data and biometric technologies will be used by the UK’s immigration enforcement authorities to surveil migrants living in the country and to ‘tighten control of the border’, attracting strong criticism from migrant support groups.
    AI surveillance towers place migrants in ‘even greater jeopardy’: The use of autonomous surveillance towers throughout the English coast forces migrants into increasingly dangerous routes and contributes to their criminalisation.
    Invasive tracking ‘endemic’ on sensitive support websites: Websites set up by police, charities and universities to help people get support for sensitive issues like addiction and sexual harassment are deploying tracking technologies that harvest information without proper consent.

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    #fraud #bill #targets #benefit #claimants
    UK Fraud Bill targets benefit claimants for mass surveillance
    Ming - stock.adobe.com Opinion UK Fraud Bill targets benefit claimants for mass surveillance The UK government’s proposed Fraud Bill will disproportionately place millions of benefit claimants under constant surveillance, creating a two-tier system where people are automatically suspected of wrongdoing for seeking welfare By Anna Dent Published: 21 May 2025 Earlier this month the House of Lords had its first debate on the Public AuthoritiesBill.  The Bill aims to reduce government losses to benefit fraud and error, and would give the Department for Work and Pensionsunprecedented powers of investigation to routinely and covertly check benefit claimants' bank accounts, the right to enter private homes, and to seize drivers' licenses or money from bank accounts. Expert organisations including Justice, the Public Law Project and Big Brother Watch warn that although the aim of the Bill is hugely important, the proposed powers are disproportionate and represent a breach of human rights. As Baroness Finn remarked in the Lords, "support for the goal must not mean silence about the means." The Bill promises an expanded regime of digital surveillance for people in receipt of Universal Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, and State Pension Credit. This includes the introduction of an 'Eligibility Verification Measure'which would enable DWP to direct banks to check millions of bank accounts for as yet unspecified indicators of benefit fraud and error.  DWP already has similar powers but crucially can only use them where it has 'reasonable grounds' to suspect fraud is taking place, which is the standard threshold for many comparable state powers. This Bill would completely remove that threshold, and enable intrusive surveillance without any justification. Details on exactly how the EVM will be used are sparse, but it could theoretically result in every single claimant’s bank account being checked, with no suspicion or indication of any fraud, error or over-payment needed.  Accounts flagged through these checks would then be passed to a member of DWP staff for further investigation, but what this will involve is still unclear. A code of practice to accompany the Bill is still unpublished, so we don't actually know what sequence of events would play out. Will individuals be informed when they are being investigated? Will their benefits be suspended during an investigation? Will their claim be assessed by other fraud algorithms? In some circumstances, the Department could automatically take money from the bank accounts of people no longer on benefits if they are deemed to have committed fraud or been accidentally overpaid. Banks will be prevented from informing their customers that this recovery process is happening, so the first that a customer might know is when money disappears from their account.  The finance industry has expressed concern about tensions between the obligations the Bill would create and financial institutions' consumer obligations, the risks of financial harm to vulnerable customers, and the lack of robust safeguards for the transfer of banking data. Others are concerned about the potential for miscarriages of justice which many will be unable to effectively challenge: the benefits covered by the Bill are only available to people on a low income, who are unlikely to have the means to engage in legal action. These powers would apply to both fraud and error, including over-payments caused by the Department's own mistakes. Overpayments can be caused by myriad mistakes on the part of DWP or claimant, or both, and the complexity of making claims is well known. But under the Bill, fraud and error will be treated the same, with the same digital surveillance deployed and the same powers to seize money and other assets. Universal Credit already appears to be particularly prone to mistakes and over-payments. Rather than punishing people after the fact, it would be better for DWP to work out why it is particularly vulnerable, do more to help people avoid mistakes, and reduce the rate at which their own mistakes cause over-payments. Treating all claimants like intentional fraudsters stigmatises people on benefits, and risks people who need financial support disengaging from the benefit system. Rather than focus on professional criminals who are actively defrauding the Department, the bill scoops everyone up and places them all under suspicion. It creates a two-tier system in which benefit claimants would be subject to an invasion of privacy not applied to the rest of the population: millions of people who have done nothing wrong will be laid open to mass surveillance. DWP officers would be given police-like powers of entry to private premises and seizure of private property. This is an extraordinary expansion of very serious powers targeted at one section of society. It fundamentally undermines basic rights to privacy and to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise.  Whether the ends justify these heavy-handed means is doubtful. The Department's own impact assessment estimates that just 2% of social security fraud and error over-payments will be clawed back through the use of these powers over 10 years: a disproportionate invasion of privacy for little benefit. The finance industry also warns that the organised gangs who carry out large-scale benefit fraud using sophisticated methods to avoid detection will easily find ways to work around the new powers.  Also on its way through the legislative process is the Data Use and Access Bill, which proposes to reduce the requirement for human oversight of automated decisions within government. If both Bills pass into law as currently drafted, there is a potential future in which the human-in-the-loop safeguards relating to digital bank surveillance are no longer legally required. This leaves the door open to hugely consequential decisions being made entirely by automated systems. We know that existing DWP fraud algorithms generate bias; the introduction of more automation and digital surveillance and the potential for less human oversight should trouble us all.  Increasing the number of people that are flagged for investigation via these new powers could put thousands more through the difficult process of fraud investigation. DWP’s own figures show that three-quarters of people whose benefit claims are flagged as suspicious actually have no fraud or error related to their claim at all. Ten million people receive the benefits that will be covered by the new powers: if even 1% of claimants are wrongly investigated many thousands of people will be affected.  As well as the immediate impact of these disproportionate powers, politicians need to be aware of the precedents they are setting, and how the legislation could be used by other administrations in future. Eliminating the need for the government to justify wholesale digital surveillance removes a basic protection against state over-reach. Only the state pension is explicitly excluded from the powers in the Bill: a government with an even more single-minded obsession with efficiency and fraud could roll out the bank surveillance to many, many other people. What will affect a minority now could become the norm for the majority. Anna Dent is an independent researcher and policy consultant, working on the digital welfare state and human-centred technology about digital surveillance UK government outlines plan to surveil migrants with eVisa data: Electronic visa data and biometric technologies will be used by the UK’s immigration enforcement authorities to surveil migrants living in the country and to ‘tighten control of the border’, attracting strong criticism from migrant support groups. AI surveillance towers place migrants in ‘even greater jeopardy’: The use of autonomous surveillance towers throughout the English coast forces migrants into increasingly dangerous routes and contributes to their criminalisation. Invasive tracking ‘endemic’ on sensitive support websites: Websites set up by police, charities and universities to help people get support for sensitive issues like addiction and sexual harassment are deploying tracking technologies that harvest information without proper consent. In The Current Issue: UK critical systems at risk from ‘digital divide’ created by AI threats UK at risk of Russian cyber and physical attacks as Ukraine seeks peace deal Standard Chartered grounds AI ambitions in data governance Download Current Issue Microsoft entices developers to build more Windows AI apps – Cliff Saran's Enterprise blog Red Hat launches llm-d community & project – Open Source Insider View All Blogs #fraud #bill #targets #benefit #claimants
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    UK Fraud Bill targets benefit claimants for mass surveillance
    Ming - stock.adobe.com Opinion UK Fraud Bill targets benefit claimants for mass surveillance The UK government’s proposed Fraud Bill will disproportionately place millions of benefit claimants under constant surveillance, creating a two-tier system where people are automatically suspected of wrongdoing for seeking welfare By Anna Dent Published: 21 May 2025 Earlier this month the House of Lords had its first debate on the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill.  The Bill aims to reduce government losses to benefit fraud and error, and would give the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) unprecedented powers of investigation to routinely and covertly check benefit claimants' bank accounts, the right to enter private homes, and to seize drivers' licenses or money from bank accounts. Expert organisations including Justice, the Public Law Project and Big Brother Watch warn that although the aim of the Bill is hugely important, the proposed powers are disproportionate and represent a breach of human rights. As Baroness Finn remarked in the Lords, "support for the goal must not mean silence about the means." The Bill promises an expanded regime of digital surveillance for people in receipt of Universal Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, and State Pension Credit. This includes the introduction of an 'Eligibility Verification Measure' (EVM) which would enable DWP to direct banks to check millions of bank accounts for as yet unspecified indicators of benefit fraud and error.  DWP already has similar powers but crucially can only use them where it has 'reasonable grounds' to suspect fraud is taking place, which is the standard threshold for many comparable state powers. This Bill would completely remove that threshold, and enable intrusive surveillance without any justification. Details on exactly how the EVM will be used are sparse, but it could theoretically result in every single claimant’s bank account being checked, with no suspicion or indication of any fraud, error or over-payment needed.  Accounts flagged through these checks would then be passed to a member of DWP staff for further investigation, but what this will involve is still unclear. A code of practice to accompany the Bill is still unpublished, so we don't actually know what sequence of events would play out. Will individuals be informed when they are being investigated? Will their benefits be suspended during an investigation? Will their claim be assessed by other fraud algorithms? In some circumstances, the Department could automatically take money from the bank accounts of people no longer on benefits if they are deemed to have committed fraud or been accidentally overpaid. Banks will be prevented from informing their customers that this recovery process is happening, so the first that a customer might know is when money disappears from their account.  The finance industry has expressed concern about tensions between the obligations the Bill would create and financial institutions' consumer obligations, the risks of financial harm to vulnerable customers, and the lack of robust safeguards for the transfer of banking data. Others are concerned about the potential for miscarriages of justice which many will be unable to effectively challenge: the benefits covered by the Bill are only available to people on a low income, who are unlikely to have the means to engage in legal action. These powers would apply to both fraud and error, including over-payments caused by the Department's own mistakes. Overpayments can be caused by myriad mistakes on the part of DWP or claimant, or both, and the complexity of making claims is well known. But under the Bill, fraud and error will be treated the same, with the same digital surveillance deployed and the same powers to seize money and other assets. Universal Credit already appears to be particularly prone to mistakes and over-payments. Rather than punishing people after the fact, it would be better for DWP to work out why it is particularly vulnerable, do more to help people avoid mistakes, and reduce the rate at which their own mistakes cause over-payments. Treating all claimants like intentional fraudsters stigmatises people on benefits, and risks people who need financial support disengaging from the benefit system. Rather than focus on professional criminals who are actively defrauding the Department, the bill scoops everyone up and places them all under suspicion. It creates a two-tier system in which benefit claimants would be subject to an invasion of privacy not applied to the rest of the population: millions of people who have done nothing wrong will be laid open to mass surveillance. DWP officers would be given police-like powers of entry to private premises and seizure of private property. This is an extraordinary expansion of very serious powers targeted at one section of society. It fundamentally undermines basic rights to privacy and to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise.  Whether the ends justify these heavy-handed means is doubtful. The Department's own impact assessment estimates that just 2% of social security fraud and error over-payments will be clawed back through the use of these powers over 10 years: a disproportionate invasion of privacy for little benefit. The finance industry also warns that the organised gangs who carry out large-scale benefit fraud using sophisticated methods to avoid detection will easily find ways to work around the new powers.  Also on its way through the legislative process is the Data Use and Access Bill, which proposes to reduce the requirement for human oversight of automated decisions within government. If both Bills pass into law as currently drafted, there is a potential future in which the human-in-the-loop safeguards relating to digital bank surveillance are no longer legally required. This leaves the door open to hugely consequential decisions being made entirely by automated systems. We know that existing DWP fraud algorithms generate bias; the introduction of more automation and digital surveillance and the potential for less human oversight should trouble us all.  Increasing the number of people that are flagged for investigation via these new powers could put thousands more through the difficult process of fraud investigation. DWP’s own figures show that three-quarters of people whose benefit claims are flagged as suspicious actually have no fraud or error related to their claim at all. Ten million people receive the benefits that will be covered by the new powers: if even 1% of claimants are wrongly investigated many thousands of people will be affected.  As well as the immediate impact of these disproportionate powers, politicians need to be aware of the precedents they are setting, and how the legislation could be used by other administrations in future. Eliminating the need for the government to justify wholesale digital surveillance removes a basic protection against state over-reach. Only the state pension is explicitly excluded from the powers in the Bill: a government with an even more single-minded obsession with efficiency and fraud could roll out the bank surveillance to many, many other people. What will affect a minority now could become the norm for the majority. Anna Dent is an independent researcher and policy consultant, working on the digital welfare state and human-centred technology Read more about digital surveillance UK government outlines plan to surveil migrants with eVisa data: Electronic visa data and biometric technologies will be used by the UK’s immigration enforcement authorities to surveil migrants living in the country and to ‘tighten control of the border’, attracting strong criticism from migrant support groups. AI surveillance towers place migrants in ‘even greater jeopardy’: The use of autonomous surveillance towers throughout the English coast forces migrants into increasingly dangerous routes and contributes to their criminalisation. Invasive tracking ‘endemic’ on sensitive support websites: Websites set up by police, charities and universities to help people get support for sensitive issues like addiction and sexual harassment are deploying tracking technologies that harvest information without proper consent. In The Current Issue: UK critical systems at risk from ‘digital divide’ created by AI threats UK at risk of Russian cyber and physical attacks as Ukraine seeks peace deal Standard Chartered grounds AI ambitions in data governance Download Current Issue Microsoft entices developers to build more Windows AI apps – Cliff Saran's Enterprise blog Red Hat launches llm-d community & project – Open Source Insider View All Blogs
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  • Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale

    Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice BiennaleSave this picture!© Federico CairoliThe proposal by Argentinian architects Marco Zampieron and Juan Manuel Pachué for the Argentinian Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 is clear from the outset: upon entering Siestario, visitors are immersed in a space of dim lighting and evocative sound, and immediately encounter—at the center of the room, stretched across its width, and acting as the undeniable protagonist—a large, inflated pink bag that instinctively invites repose. This is a silobag, an object commonly used in the Argentinian countryside to store grain and a potent symbol of the country’s export-driven economy. In this setting, the silobag becomes more than a spatial intervention; it also introduces a temporal dimension: an invitation to pause and reflect amid the relentless rhythm of the Biennale.
    this picture!Under the motto “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”, general curator and Italian architect Carlo Ratti invites participants to explore and debate the many meanings of these terms, setting the stage for a critical rethinking of contemporary architecture. Within this framework, both national pavilions and individual projects and installations engage with the tensions and possibilities that emerge between the natural, the artificial, and the collective—each from their own distinct perspective.this picture!Marco Zampieron and Juan Manuel Pachué — Rosario-based architects and co-founders of Cooperativa — were selected through a public competition organized by the Argentine Foreign Ministry, in partnership with the Chamber of Urban Developers, with their winning project to represent Argentina in this edition of the Biennale. Related Article Bahrain Wins the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale this picture!With the support of CEDU and Base Proyectos, ArchDaily was present at the inauguration of the Argentine Pavilion on May 9, at the extraordinary Arsenale in Venice. During the first days of the event, we had the opportunity to speak with the authors of Siestario about their experience participating in the Biennale, the creative process of the project, and other aspects related to their practice and understanding of architecture.this picture!AD: What was your motivation to participate in the competition to represent Argentina at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025?Marco Zampieron & Juan Manuel Pachué: As Cooperativa, our group is deeply engaged with competitions. We participate regularly, advocate for them as a valuable tool, and truly enjoy the process they entail. This one, in particular, stood out because, while it’s a national competition, it offers a strong international platform: it’s about representing the country on one of the most important global stages for architecture. Our studio operates as a collaborative collective that expands or contracts depending on the nature of each project. At its core, our practice revolves around competitions. We see them as a way to access commissions without requiring an extensive portfolio, a strong reputation, or an established body of work. That’s why we especially value competitions that are anonymous and transparent — they open the door to meaningful opportunities, such as building a public-scale pavilion with high visibility, through a more horizontal and equitable framework.this picture!AD: How does Siestario relate to the theme proposed by the Venice Biennale 2025 — Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective — and what possible interpretations did you envision based on that premise?MZ & JP: These mottos or curatorial texts often tend to be quite ambiguous — and we see that as something positive, because it opens the door to multiple interpretations. With so many people participating in the Biennale through diverse projects, it’s valuable for the thematic framework to be broad: it allows for a wide range of perspectives and approaches. From there, the question of how to represent Argentina naturally arises. Where do you anchor that representation? In our proposal, what comes through is our way of thinking about architecture, our understanding of the Biennale, and our perspective on the collective.Not only were the notions of intelligence, nature, and collectivity present, but there was also something that moved away from the idea of one place, one solution—a concept that truly captivated us. We find the idea of artificial intelligence somewhat challenging... perhaps we’re a bit romantic in that sense; there’s a certain resistance on our part. When we look at some international pavilions, we see a strong emphasis on technology and technical prowess. And while the artificial and the natural are in constant dialogue, what interests us is thinking about the artificial through the lens of local production—through cultural construction. Not as a race toward technological advancement, but as a way of drawing from the depth of knowledge that already exists within our own culture.It is also important that these competitions are resolved quickly, and often one starts from previous ideas or works. In our case, the collective already had a background, a sensitive research on the territory linked to art and certain key elements. This allowed us to connect with the Biennale's themes more deeply in a short time. We see this in other pavilions as well: many have a foundation of prior work and research. In our architecture — and also in art and other disciplines with which we engage — each person brings a background, certain interests, preferences, and tastes. From the place one comes from, what one observes, all of that forms a layer of information from which we project. We try to reflect on this to make it as conscious as possible, so that we can create something that feels close and authentic to us.this picture!Representing Argentina also forces us to ask ourselves what we want to say, how we want to speak about who we are. We are interested in a certain metaphor, a certain poetics. We think about the conditions the country is currently going through, both economically and politically, and this image of Argentina resting upon the Argentine countryside emerges, along with the cost of this rest. The proposal of Siestario suggests that the visitor to the Biennale, weary from seeing so much, could climb uphill to a silobag — that iconic symbol of Argentina's agricultural production — and rest, take a nap. But of course, that silobag is the one that stores soybeans, and soybeans, with all their symbolic, productive, and also destructive weight: they contaminate water, devastate forests, and affect local communities. So, Siestario doesn’t just offer a break; it also questions what that rest truly means. There’s a critique, a political stance, a reading on the artificial, on comfort, on the cost of being at ease. All of this emerges when the concepts are linked: the natural, the artificial, the collective. And here, the siesta also appears as a gesture, as a metaphor, as a critique, as a refuge.this picture!AD: What motivated you to use the silobag as the central element of the project? How was the process of re-signifying this object within the exhibition context of the Biennale? MZ & JP: The relationship with the silobag is not new to us; in fact, we had already worked with this element in previous projects, documenting and traveling through different towns. This prior research allowed us to see the silobag not just as a functional element, but also as an object loaded with meaning. The process of re-signifying it here at the Biennale involves decontextualizing it. We wanted to change its scale, give it a new role, and use it as a place for a nap, a space for rest. By doing so, the silobag transforms, ceasing to be just an agricultural object and becoming something more playful, connected to the body, fatigue, and the intimacy of the siesta. It’s a simple gesture, but a profound one: it proposes a space for people to recline and feel comfortable in it.Furthermore, the silobag becomes an object that, although it has strong rural and economic connotations, is reinterpreted within the exhibition context, adding a layer of reflection on the everyday and the collective. The intimacy of the siesta becomes social, as the act of resting in a shared space like this creates a collective moment. In the pavilion, we also worked with the atmosphere: the environment is designed to darken, with sounds and lights that induce a sense of relaxation, contributing to creating the right space for that collective rest.this picture!AD: What were you hoping to convey through this installation, and how did you expect visitors to experience or interpret the act of "pausing" within the exhibit's journey?MZ & JP: The proposal for this installation revolves around the idea of "stopping." Stopping to think, to look at what you’re doing, to know yourself, to decide. Ultimately, it’s an invitation to stop, to rest, to sleep. We aim for visitors to find that pause within themselves, to disconnect from the fast pace of their surroundings. Furthermore, this act of "pausing" becomes something desirable, almost like an object of desire: the urge to try it, to climb onto the silobag. We wanted to create a physical and experiential experience, not just a contemplative one. Walking through the pavilion becomes an invitation to interact with the space. It even allows walking on the silobag, changing heights, lying down, and resting.We know that at the Biennale, visitors tend to walk a lot and want to see as much as possible. However, this space demands that you stop, that you dedicate time to the experience. It’s not a place to just pass through quickly; it’s a space that asks you to stay for at least 15 or 20 minutes, to climb onto the silobag, to experience the physical effort of doing so, because it’s not a comfortable chair — it’s an experience that requires an investment of time and attention.The curation and design of the rest of the space, along with the projections, are intended so that the installation partially disappears as one moves through it, creating a visual and spatial effect that forces visitors to interact with the place, to stay alert. The project takes a risk; we know that, in the frenetic pace of the Biennale, some may not pay attention to this proposal. But we believe that, to truly enjoy it, it’s necessary to take that time, lie down, listen to the sounds, and be present.this picture!AD: How did you approach the relationship between architecture, space, and time within the Argentinian Pavilion?MZ & JP: Our approach has always been to give prominence to the public and collective. In the projects we develop, we try to make the ground floors open and accessible spaces where people can enter spontaneously, without the design being entirely directed toward exclusive use. We are interested in simplicity and clarity, in being radical in the sense of the purity of the idea. This pavilion, for example, uses a single element to express and resolve multiple layers of meaning. The design process seeks to simplify and refine complex ideas, ensuring that the result is direct and clear.In relation to time, we are interested in how architecture, over time, ages and transforms. In Venice, for example, one can see how the city and architecture are not static, how the passage of time causes materials to change, deteriorate, and feel lived in. This concept is present not only in the built architecture but also in the thinking and creation process. For us, time is not just a factor that affects buildings, but a constant in the design process. We value the time spent on physical models, on hand drawing, on processes that endure and allow us to generate something with more depth.this picture!this picture!AD: There is something disruptive about Siestario: by not displaying so much information or explicit context, the space becomes entirely an experience. What place did you give to the sensory aspect compared to the more direct information exhibition?MZ & JP: This approach is carried over to all our projects, not just the pavilion. We are interested in making spaces sensory experiences, where people not only see but also feel. We seek the space to invite reflection, but also for the enjoyment of the body, for people to engage directly with the environment. In the pavilion, in particular, we wanted the images to function as thresholds, leading you to other places, to the world of the dreamlike. This project, in particular, emphasizes the idea of pause, of stopping to reflect and rest, which connects with our broader vision of how we understand architecture: not just as something built, but as a lived experience.What we aim to create are silent spaces, ones that impose nothing, but at the same time offer power in their simplicity. This is something noticeable in other projects we've done, where the intervention is almost invisible, yet has a significant impact on people's experience, providing a space for them to claim it and inhabit it in their own way.this picture!AD: How was the curatorial process in constructing the space through the projections on the sides of the space?MZ & JP: 
    The curatorial proposal was built with the aim of integrating architecture, art, and landscape, bringing together the different actors. From the outset, we decided to organize the curation of images into three groups: one linked to architecture, another to art, and another to the very recording of the silobag in the field. This division not only provided the visitor with information about the origin and context of the project but also sought to establish a dialogue between architecture and art, something that is fundamental for us. Through the arts, we wanted to tell the story of our landscape and our territory, and we feel that artists have a special sensitivity to read and construct that landscape in a different way.The curatorial line was also guided by an idea that particularly interested us: that from naps emerge dreams, desires, and aspirations of a country. We wanted to propose a positive perspective within a critical reading, showcasing an Argentina that also produces art and architecture. The selected images engage in dialogue with the territory, and they do not respond to a specific temporal cut but rather bring together works from different moments, generating intersections across diverse times. We were interested in showing how these works relate to one another and how, through them, the variable of time appears in architectural production, in the territory, and in the contexts in which these works are being built.this picture!Additionally, there was significant archival work: we incorporated original drawings and unpublished material to add historical value. The selection included examples from across the country, even works that are not always associated with formal architecture, such as recreational or leisure spaces. We aimed to represent not only the major cities but also other realities, histories, and geographies. We also included maps and references to historical processes of urbanization and territorial defense, combining them with contemporary works to build the narrative.this picture!this picture!AD: What does it mean for you to represent Argentina at an event like the Venice Biennale, and how do you experience the responsibility and opportunity that this entails?MZ & JP: Representing Argentina at the Venice Biennale carries significant weight in the national architectural sphere. Winning the competition gave us a certain level of acceptance within the architecture community in Argentina. It’s difficult to fully reflect on the impact of this, as we are still in the process, but we do notice there is recognition. Our motivation was, above all, a genuine interest in participating in the competition, but upon taking on this responsibility, we realized the importance of representing our country at such a prominent event. For our careers, our studio, and our aspirations, this opportunity is significant. Being part of the Venice Biennale is something that makes us feel good because we know that what we do is part of a system that, although imperfect, allows us to reach places like this. It’s an important point in our trajectory and an achievement that fills us with satisfaction.this picture!

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    Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale
    Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice BiennaleSave this picture!© Federico CairoliThe proposal by Argentinian architects Marco Zampieron and Juan Manuel Pachué for the Argentinian Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 is clear from the outset: upon entering Siestario, visitors are immersed in a space of dim lighting and evocative sound, and immediately encounter—at the center of the room, stretched across its width, and acting as the undeniable protagonist—a large, inflated pink bag that instinctively invites repose. This is a silobag, an object commonly used in the Argentinian countryside to store grain and a potent symbol of the country’s export-driven economy. In this setting, the silobag becomes more than a spatial intervention; it also introduces a temporal dimension: an invitation to pause and reflect amid the relentless rhythm of the Biennale. this picture!Under the motto “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”, general curator and Italian architect Carlo Ratti invites participants to explore and debate the many meanings of these terms, setting the stage for a critical rethinking of contemporary architecture. Within this framework, both national pavilions and individual projects and installations engage with the tensions and possibilities that emerge between the natural, the artificial, and the collective—each from their own distinct perspective.this picture!Marco Zampieron and Juan Manuel Pachué — Rosario-based architects and co-founders of Cooperativa — were selected through a public competition organized by the Argentine Foreign Ministry, in partnership with the Chamber of Urban Developers, with their winning project to represent Argentina in this edition of the Biennale. Related Article Bahrain Wins the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale this picture!With the support of CEDU and Base Proyectos, ArchDaily was present at the inauguration of the Argentine Pavilion on May 9, at the extraordinary Arsenale in Venice. During the first days of the event, we had the opportunity to speak with the authors of Siestario about their experience participating in the Biennale, the creative process of the project, and other aspects related to their practice and understanding of architecture.this picture!AD: What was your motivation to participate in the competition to represent Argentina at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025?Marco Zampieron & Juan Manuel Pachué: As Cooperativa, our group is deeply engaged with competitions. We participate regularly, advocate for them as a valuable tool, and truly enjoy the process they entail. This one, in particular, stood out because, while it’s a national competition, it offers a strong international platform: it’s about representing the country on one of the most important global stages for architecture. Our studio operates as a collaborative collective that expands or contracts depending on the nature of each project. At its core, our practice revolves around competitions. We see them as a way to access commissions without requiring an extensive portfolio, a strong reputation, or an established body of work. That’s why we especially value competitions that are anonymous and transparent — they open the door to meaningful opportunities, such as building a public-scale pavilion with high visibility, through a more horizontal and equitable framework.this picture!AD: How does Siestario relate to the theme proposed by the Venice Biennale 2025 — Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective — and what possible interpretations did you envision based on that premise?MZ & JP: These mottos or curatorial texts often tend to be quite ambiguous — and we see that as something positive, because it opens the door to multiple interpretations. With so many people participating in the Biennale through diverse projects, it’s valuable for the thematic framework to be broad: it allows for a wide range of perspectives and approaches. From there, the question of how to represent Argentina naturally arises. Where do you anchor that representation? In our proposal, what comes through is our way of thinking about architecture, our understanding of the Biennale, and our perspective on the collective.Not only were the notions of intelligence, nature, and collectivity present, but there was also something that moved away from the idea of one place, one solution—a concept that truly captivated us. We find the idea of artificial intelligence somewhat challenging... perhaps we’re a bit romantic in that sense; there’s a certain resistance on our part. When we look at some international pavilions, we see a strong emphasis on technology and technical prowess. And while the artificial and the natural are in constant dialogue, what interests us is thinking about the artificial through the lens of local production—through cultural construction. Not as a race toward technological advancement, but as a way of drawing from the depth of knowledge that already exists within our own culture.It is also important that these competitions are resolved quickly, and often one starts from previous ideas or works. In our case, the collective already had a background, a sensitive research on the territory linked to art and certain key elements. This allowed us to connect with the Biennale's themes more deeply in a short time. We see this in other pavilions as well: many have a foundation of prior work and research. In our architecture — and also in art and other disciplines with which we engage — each person brings a background, certain interests, preferences, and tastes. From the place one comes from, what one observes, all of that forms a layer of information from which we project. We try to reflect on this to make it as conscious as possible, so that we can create something that feels close and authentic to us.this picture!Representing Argentina also forces us to ask ourselves what we want to say, how we want to speak about who we are. We are interested in a certain metaphor, a certain poetics. We think about the conditions the country is currently going through, both economically and politically, and this image of Argentina resting upon the Argentine countryside emerges, along with the cost of this rest. The proposal of Siestario suggests that the visitor to the Biennale, weary from seeing so much, could climb uphill to a silobag — that iconic symbol of Argentina's agricultural production — and rest, take a nap. But of course, that silobag is the one that stores soybeans, and soybeans, with all their symbolic, productive, and also destructive weight: they contaminate water, devastate forests, and affect local communities. So, Siestario doesn’t just offer a break; it also questions what that rest truly means. There’s a critique, a political stance, a reading on the artificial, on comfort, on the cost of being at ease. All of this emerges when the concepts are linked: the natural, the artificial, the collective. And here, the siesta also appears as a gesture, as a metaphor, as a critique, as a refuge.this picture!AD: What motivated you to use the silobag as the central element of the project? How was the process of re-signifying this object within the exhibition context of the Biennale? MZ & JP: The relationship with the silobag is not new to us; in fact, we had already worked with this element in previous projects, documenting and traveling through different towns. This prior research allowed us to see the silobag not just as a functional element, but also as an object loaded with meaning. The process of re-signifying it here at the Biennale involves decontextualizing it. We wanted to change its scale, give it a new role, and use it as a place for a nap, a space for rest. By doing so, the silobag transforms, ceasing to be just an agricultural object and becoming something more playful, connected to the body, fatigue, and the intimacy of the siesta. It’s a simple gesture, but a profound one: it proposes a space for people to recline and feel comfortable in it.Furthermore, the silobag becomes an object that, although it has strong rural and economic connotations, is reinterpreted within the exhibition context, adding a layer of reflection on the everyday and the collective. The intimacy of the siesta becomes social, as the act of resting in a shared space like this creates a collective moment. In the pavilion, we also worked with the atmosphere: the environment is designed to darken, with sounds and lights that induce a sense of relaxation, contributing to creating the right space for that collective rest.this picture!AD: What were you hoping to convey through this installation, and how did you expect visitors to experience or interpret the act of "pausing" within the exhibit's journey?MZ & JP: The proposal for this installation revolves around the idea of "stopping." Stopping to think, to look at what you’re doing, to know yourself, to decide. Ultimately, it’s an invitation to stop, to rest, to sleep. We aim for visitors to find that pause within themselves, to disconnect from the fast pace of their surroundings. Furthermore, this act of "pausing" becomes something desirable, almost like an object of desire: the urge to try it, to climb onto the silobag. We wanted to create a physical and experiential experience, not just a contemplative one. Walking through the pavilion becomes an invitation to interact with the space. It even allows walking on the silobag, changing heights, lying down, and resting.We know that at the Biennale, visitors tend to walk a lot and want to see as much as possible. However, this space demands that you stop, that you dedicate time to the experience. It’s not a place to just pass through quickly; it’s a space that asks you to stay for at least 15 or 20 minutes, to climb onto the silobag, to experience the physical effort of doing so, because it’s not a comfortable chair — it’s an experience that requires an investment of time and attention.The curation and design of the rest of the space, along with the projections, are intended so that the installation partially disappears as one moves through it, creating a visual and spatial effect that forces visitors to interact with the place, to stay alert. The project takes a risk; we know that, in the frenetic pace of the Biennale, some may not pay attention to this proposal. But we believe that, to truly enjoy it, it’s necessary to take that time, lie down, listen to the sounds, and be present.this picture!AD: How did you approach the relationship between architecture, space, and time within the Argentinian Pavilion?MZ & JP: Our approach has always been to give prominence to the public and collective. In the projects we develop, we try to make the ground floors open and accessible spaces where people can enter spontaneously, without the design being entirely directed toward exclusive use. We are interested in simplicity and clarity, in being radical in the sense of the purity of the idea. This pavilion, for example, uses a single element to express and resolve multiple layers of meaning. The design process seeks to simplify and refine complex ideas, ensuring that the result is direct and clear.In relation to time, we are interested in how architecture, over time, ages and transforms. In Venice, for example, one can see how the city and architecture are not static, how the passage of time causes materials to change, deteriorate, and feel lived in. This concept is present not only in the built architecture but also in the thinking and creation process. For us, time is not just a factor that affects buildings, but a constant in the design process. We value the time spent on physical models, on hand drawing, on processes that endure and allow us to generate something with more depth.this picture!this picture!AD: There is something disruptive about Siestario: by not displaying so much information or explicit context, the space becomes entirely an experience. What place did you give to the sensory aspect compared to the more direct information exhibition?MZ & JP: This approach is carried over to all our projects, not just the pavilion. We are interested in making spaces sensory experiences, where people not only see but also feel. We seek the space to invite reflection, but also for the enjoyment of the body, for people to engage directly with the environment. In the pavilion, in particular, we wanted the images to function as thresholds, leading you to other places, to the world of the dreamlike. This project, in particular, emphasizes the idea of pause, of stopping to reflect and rest, which connects with our broader vision of how we understand architecture: not just as something built, but as a lived experience.What we aim to create are silent spaces, ones that impose nothing, but at the same time offer power in their simplicity. This is something noticeable in other projects we've done, where the intervention is almost invisible, yet has a significant impact on people's experience, providing a space for them to claim it and inhabit it in their own way.this picture!AD: How was the curatorial process in constructing the space through the projections on the sides of the space?MZ & JP:  The curatorial proposal was built with the aim of integrating architecture, art, and landscape, bringing together the different actors. From the outset, we decided to organize the curation of images into three groups: one linked to architecture, another to art, and another to the very recording of the silobag in the field. This division not only provided the visitor with information about the origin and context of the project but also sought to establish a dialogue between architecture and art, something that is fundamental for us. Through the arts, we wanted to tell the story of our landscape and our territory, and we feel that artists have a special sensitivity to read and construct that landscape in a different way.The curatorial line was also guided by an idea that particularly interested us: that from naps emerge dreams, desires, and aspirations of a country. We wanted to propose a positive perspective within a critical reading, showcasing an Argentina that also produces art and architecture. The selected images engage in dialogue with the territory, and they do not respond to a specific temporal cut but rather bring together works from different moments, generating intersections across diverse times. We were interested in showing how these works relate to one another and how, through them, the variable of time appears in architectural production, in the territory, and in the contexts in which these works are being built.this picture!Additionally, there was significant archival work: we incorporated original drawings and unpublished material to add historical value. The selection included examples from across the country, even works that are not always associated with formal architecture, such as recreational or leisure spaces. We aimed to represent not only the major cities but also other realities, histories, and geographies. We also included maps and references to historical processes of urbanization and territorial defense, combining them with contemporary works to build the narrative.this picture!this picture!AD: What does it mean for you to represent Argentina at an event like the Venice Biennale, and how do you experience the responsibility and opportunity that this entails?MZ & JP: Representing Argentina at the Venice Biennale carries significant weight in the national architectural sphere. Winning the competition gave us a certain level of acceptance within the architecture community in Argentina. It’s difficult to fully reflect on the impact of this, as we are still in the process, but we do notice there is recognition. Our motivation was, above all, a genuine interest in participating in the competition, but upon taking on this responsibility, we realized the importance of representing our country at such a prominent event. For our careers, our studio, and our aspirations, this opportunity is significant. Being part of the Venice Biennale is something that makes us feel good because we know that what we do is part of a system that, although imperfect, allows us to reach places like this. It’s an important point in our trajectory and an achievement that fills us with satisfaction.this picture! Image gallerySee allShow less About this authorPaula PintosAuthor••• Cite: Pintos, Paula. "Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale"15 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . < ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream #rest #experience #space #rich #with
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    Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale
    Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice BiennaleSave this picture!© Federico CairoliThe proposal by Argentinian architects Marco Zampieron and Juan Manuel Pachué for the Argentinian Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 is clear from the outset: upon entering Siestario, visitors are immersed in a space of dim lighting and evocative sound, and immediately encounter—at the center of the room, stretched across its width, and acting as the undeniable protagonist—a large, inflated pink bag that instinctively invites repose. This is a silobag, an object commonly used in the Argentinian countryside to store grain and a potent symbol of the country’s export-driven economy. In this setting, the silobag becomes more than a spatial intervention; it also introduces a temporal dimension: an invitation to pause and reflect amid the relentless rhythm of the Biennale. Save this picture!Under the motto “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”, general curator and Italian architect Carlo Ratti invites participants to explore and debate the many meanings of these terms, setting the stage for a critical rethinking of contemporary architecture. Within this framework, both national pavilions and individual projects and installations engage with the tensions and possibilities that emerge between the natural, the artificial, and the collective—each from their own distinct perspective.Save this picture!Marco Zampieron and Juan Manuel Pachué — Rosario-based architects and co-founders of Cooperativa — were selected through a public competition organized by the Argentine Foreign Ministry, in partnership with the Chamber of Urban Developers (CEDU), with their winning project to represent Argentina in this edition of the Biennale. Related Article Bahrain Wins the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Save this picture!With the support of CEDU and Base Proyectos, ArchDaily was present at the inauguration of the Argentine Pavilion on May 9, at the extraordinary Arsenale in Venice. During the first days of the event, we had the opportunity to speak with the authors of Siestario about their experience participating in the Biennale, the creative process of the project, and other aspects related to their practice and understanding of architecture.Save this picture!AD (Paula Pintos): What was your motivation to participate in the competition to represent Argentina at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025?Marco Zampieron & Juan Manuel Pachué (MZ & JP): As Cooperativa, our group is deeply engaged with competitions. We participate regularly, advocate for them as a valuable tool, and truly enjoy the process they entail. This one, in particular, stood out because, while it’s a national competition, it offers a strong international platform: it’s about representing the country on one of the most important global stages for architecture. Our studio operates as a collaborative collective that expands or contracts depending on the nature of each project. At its core, our practice revolves around competitions. We see them as a way to access commissions without requiring an extensive portfolio, a strong reputation, or an established body of work. That’s why we especially value competitions that are anonymous and transparent — they open the door to meaningful opportunities, such as building a public-scale pavilion with high visibility, through a more horizontal and equitable framework.Save this picture!AD: How does Siestario relate to the theme proposed by the Venice Biennale 2025 — Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective — and what possible interpretations did you envision based on that premise?MZ & JP: These mottos or curatorial texts often tend to be quite ambiguous — and we see that as something positive, because it opens the door to multiple interpretations. With so many people participating in the Biennale through diverse projects, it’s valuable for the thematic framework to be broad: it allows for a wide range of perspectives and approaches. From there, the question of how to represent Argentina naturally arises. Where do you anchor that representation? In our proposal, what comes through is our way of thinking about architecture, our understanding of the Biennale, and our perspective on the collective.Not only were the notions of intelligence, nature, and collectivity present, but there was also something that moved away from the idea of one place, one solution—a concept that truly captivated us. We find the idea of artificial intelligence somewhat challenging... perhaps we’re a bit romantic in that sense; there’s a certain resistance on our part. When we look at some international pavilions, we see a strong emphasis on technology and technical prowess. And while the artificial and the natural are in constant dialogue, what interests us is thinking about the artificial through the lens of local production—through cultural construction. Not as a race toward technological advancement, but as a way of drawing from the depth of knowledge that already exists within our own culture.It is also important that these competitions are resolved quickly, and often one starts from previous ideas or works. In our case, the collective already had a background, a sensitive research on the territory linked to art and certain key elements. This allowed us to connect with the Biennale's themes more deeply in a short time. We see this in other pavilions as well: many have a foundation of prior work and research. In our architecture — and also in art and other disciplines with which we engage — each person brings a background, certain interests, preferences, and tastes. From the place one comes from, what one observes, all of that forms a layer of information from which we project. We try to reflect on this to make it as conscious as possible, so that we can create something that feels close and authentic to us.Save this picture!Representing Argentina also forces us to ask ourselves what we want to say, how we want to speak about who we are. We are interested in a certain metaphor, a certain poetics. We think about the conditions the country is currently going through, both economically and politically, and this image of Argentina resting upon the Argentine countryside emerges, along with the cost of this rest. The proposal of Siestario suggests that the visitor to the Biennale, weary from seeing so much, could climb uphill to a silobag — that iconic symbol of Argentina's agricultural production — and rest, take a nap. But of course, that silobag is the one that stores soybeans, and soybeans, with all their symbolic, productive, and also destructive weight: they contaminate water, devastate forests, and affect local communities. So, Siestario doesn’t just offer a break; it also questions what that rest truly means. There’s a critique, a political stance, a reading on the artificial, on comfort, on the cost of being at ease. All of this emerges when the concepts are linked: the natural, the artificial, the collective. And here, the siesta also appears as a gesture, as a metaphor, as a critique, as a refuge.Save this picture!AD: What motivated you to use the silobag as the central element of the project? How was the process of re-signifying this object within the exhibition context of the Biennale? MZ & JP: The relationship with the silobag is not new to us; in fact, we had already worked with this element in previous projects, documenting and traveling through different towns. This prior research allowed us to see the silobag not just as a functional element, but also as an object loaded with meaning. The process of re-signifying it here at the Biennale involves decontextualizing it. We wanted to change its scale, give it a new role, and use it as a place for a nap, a space for rest. By doing so, the silobag transforms, ceasing to be just an agricultural object and becoming something more playful, connected to the body, fatigue, and the intimacy of the siesta. It’s a simple gesture, but a profound one: it proposes a space for people to recline and feel comfortable in it.Furthermore, the silobag becomes an object that, although it has strong rural and economic connotations, is reinterpreted within the exhibition context, adding a layer of reflection on the everyday and the collective. The intimacy of the siesta becomes social, as the act of resting in a shared space like this creates a collective moment. In the pavilion, we also worked with the atmosphere: the environment is designed to darken, with sounds and lights that induce a sense of relaxation, contributing to creating the right space for that collective rest.Save this picture!AD: What were you hoping to convey through this installation, and how did you expect visitors to experience or interpret the act of "pausing" within the exhibit's journey?MZ & JP: The proposal for this installation revolves around the idea of "stopping." Stopping to think, to look at what you’re doing, to know yourself, to decide. Ultimately, it’s an invitation to stop, to rest, to sleep. We aim for visitors to find that pause within themselves, to disconnect from the fast pace of their surroundings. Furthermore, this act of "pausing" becomes something desirable, almost like an object of desire: the urge to try it, to climb onto the silobag. We wanted to create a physical and experiential experience, not just a contemplative one. Walking through the pavilion becomes an invitation to interact with the space. It even allows walking on the silobag, changing heights, lying down, and resting.We know that at the Biennale, visitors tend to walk a lot and want to see as much as possible. However, this space demands that you stop, that you dedicate time to the experience. It’s not a place to just pass through quickly; it’s a space that asks you to stay for at least 15 or 20 minutes, to climb onto the silobag, to experience the physical effort of doing so, because it’s not a comfortable chair — it’s an experience that requires an investment of time and attention.The curation and design of the rest of the space, along with the projections, are intended so that the installation partially disappears as one moves through it, creating a visual and spatial effect that forces visitors to interact with the place, to stay alert. The project takes a risk; we know that, in the frenetic pace of the Biennale, some may not pay attention to this proposal. But we believe that, to truly enjoy it, it’s necessary to take that time, lie down, listen to the sounds, and be present.Save this picture!AD: How did you approach the relationship between architecture, space, and time within the Argentinian Pavilion?MZ & JP: Our approach has always been to give prominence to the public and collective. In the projects we develop, we try to make the ground floors open and accessible spaces where people can enter spontaneously, without the design being entirely directed toward exclusive use. We are interested in simplicity and clarity, in being radical in the sense of the purity of the idea. This pavilion, for example, uses a single element to express and resolve multiple layers of meaning. The design process seeks to simplify and refine complex ideas, ensuring that the result is direct and clear.In relation to time, we are interested in how architecture, over time, ages and transforms. In Venice, for example, one can see how the city and architecture are not static, how the passage of time causes materials to change, deteriorate, and feel lived in. This concept is present not only in the built architecture but also in the thinking and creation process. For us, time is not just a factor that affects buildings, but a constant in the design process. We value the time spent on physical models, on hand drawing, on processes that endure and allow us to generate something with more depth.Save this picture!Save this picture!AD: There is something disruptive about Siestario: by not displaying so much information or explicit context, the space becomes entirely an experience. What place did you give to the sensory aspect compared to the more direct information exhibition?MZ & JP: This approach is carried over to all our projects, not just the pavilion. We are interested in making spaces sensory experiences, where people not only see but also feel. We seek the space to invite reflection, but also for the enjoyment of the body, for people to engage directly with the environment. In the pavilion, in particular, we wanted the images to function as thresholds, leading you to other places, to the world of the dreamlike. This project, in particular, emphasizes the idea of pause, of stopping to reflect and rest, which connects with our broader vision of how we understand architecture: not just as something built, but as a lived experience.What we aim to create are silent spaces, ones that impose nothing, but at the same time offer power in their simplicity. This is something noticeable in other projects we've done, where the intervention is almost invisible, yet has a significant impact on people's experience, providing a space for them to claim it and inhabit it in their own way.Save this picture!AD: How was the curatorial process in constructing the space through the projections on the sides of the space?MZ & JP:  The curatorial proposal was built with the aim of integrating architecture, art, and landscape, bringing together the different actors. From the outset, we decided to organize the curation of images into three groups: one linked to architecture, another to art, and another to the very recording of the silobag in the field. This division not only provided the visitor with information about the origin and context of the project but also sought to establish a dialogue between architecture and art, something that is fundamental for us. Through the arts, we wanted to tell the story of our landscape and our territory, and we feel that artists have a special sensitivity to read and construct that landscape in a different way.The curatorial line was also guided by an idea that particularly interested us: that from naps emerge dreams, desires, and aspirations of a country. We wanted to propose a positive perspective within a critical reading, showcasing an Argentina that also produces art and architecture. The selected images engage in dialogue with the territory, and they do not respond to a specific temporal cut but rather bring together works from different moments, generating intersections across diverse times. We were interested in showing how these works relate to one another and how, through them, the variable of time appears in architectural production, in the territory, and in the contexts in which these works are being built.Save this picture!Additionally, there was significant archival work: we incorporated original drawings and unpublished material to add historical value. The selection included examples from across the country, even works that are not always associated with formal architecture, such as recreational or leisure spaces. We aimed to represent not only the major cities but also other realities, histories, and geographies. We also included maps and references to historical processes of urbanization and territorial defense, combining them with contemporary works to build the narrative.Save this picture!Save this picture!AD: What does it mean for you to represent Argentina at an event like the Venice Biennale, and how do you experience the responsibility and opportunity that this entails?MZ & JP: Representing Argentina at the Venice Biennale carries significant weight in the national architectural sphere. Winning the competition gave us a certain level of acceptance within the architecture community in Argentina. It’s difficult to fully reflect on the impact of this, as we are still in the process, but we do notice there is recognition. Our motivation was, above all, a genuine interest in participating in the competition, but upon taking on this responsibility, we realized the importance of representing our country at such a prominent event. For our careers, our studio, and our aspirations, this opportunity is significant. Being part of the Venice Biennale is something that makes us feel good because we know that what we do is part of a system that, although imperfect, allows us to reach places like this. It’s an important point in our trajectory and an achievement that fills us with satisfaction.Save this picture! Image gallerySee allShow less About this authorPaula PintosAuthor••• Cite: Pintos, Paula. "Rest as an Experience in a Space Rich with Symbolism: Insights from the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale" [El Pabellón Argentino en la Bienal de Venecia 2025: La siesta como experiencia en un espacio cargado de simbolismos] 15 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1030139/rest-as-an-experience-in-a-space-rich-with-symbolism-insights-from-the-argentinian-pavilion-at-the-2025-venice-biennale&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream
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  • Norovirus vaccine pill protects against winter vomiting bug

    Illustration of norovirus particlesJ Marshall/Tribaleye Images/Alamy
    A norovirus vaccine pill that cuts the risk of infection could be available in a few years, after it showed promise in a trial where people were intentionally exposed to the virus.
    The highly contagious virus infects the stomach and intestines, causing vomiting and diarrhoea that typically resolve within a few days. “Billions are lost from the economy globally every year because of the lost days of work and hospitalisation,” says Sarah Caddy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
    Advertisement
    Sean Tucker at biotech company Vaxart in San Francisco and his colleagues previously developed an oral vaccine that boosted levels of IgA antibodies that can block norovirus from entering cells, suggesting it could prevent infections.
    Now, the researchers have tested this on 141 people aged between 18 and 49, about half of whom took the pill, while the others took a placebo. A month later, all the participants intentionally swallowed a high dose of the GI.1 strain of norovirus in liquid form, while in quarantine. “In the real-world setting, you need 10 to 100 viral particles to be infected, and we use 1 million particles,” says Tucker. This helped to ensure enough people got infected, he says.
    In the following week, 82 per cent of those in the placebo group became infected, but only 57 per cent of vaccinated participants did.

    Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday.

    Sign up to newsletter

    “I think most individuals would be interested in takingif you can reduce your risk by aroundand avoid getting really debilitating symptoms,” says Caddy, who wasn’t involved in the study.
    The team also found that vaccinated participants shed substantially less virus in their stool and vomit than those who took the placebo. This suggests the vaccine could slow the spread of the virus, although that needs to be directly tested, says Caddy.
    In another analysis, the scientists confirmed that the vaccine probably works by boosting levels of protective IgA antibodies in saliva and in the gut, blood and nose.
    However, it is unclear how long this protection would last. Further work is also needed to verify the findings in young children and older adults, who are especially at risk of being hospitalised, says Caddy.
    Most noroviruses that infect humans belong to two groups, known as GI and GII. Based on unpublished work by his team, the GI.1 vaccine would probably protect against other closely related GI variants, says Tucker. The team is also developing a vaccine that can protect against GI and GII viruses.
    If all goes well, Tucker hopes the GI.1 vaccine could be rolled out in two to three years.
    Journal reference:Science Translational Medicine DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adh9906
    Topics:
    #norovirus #vaccine #pill #protects #against
    Norovirus vaccine pill protects against winter vomiting bug
    Illustration of norovirus particlesJ Marshall/Tribaleye Images/Alamy A norovirus vaccine pill that cuts the risk of infection could be available in a few years, after it showed promise in a trial where people were intentionally exposed to the virus. The highly contagious virus infects the stomach and intestines, causing vomiting and diarrhoea that typically resolve within a few days. “Billions are lost from the economy globally every year because of the lost days of work and hospitalisation,” says Sarah Caddy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Advertisement Sean Tucker at biotech company Vaxart in San Francisco and his colleagues previously developed an oral vaccine that boosted levels of IgA antibodies that can block norovirus from entering cells, suggesting it could prevent infections. Now, the researchers have tested this on 141 people aged between 18 and 49, about half of whom took the pill, while the others took a placebo. A month later, all the participants intentionally swallowed a high dose of the GI.1 strain of norovirus in liquid form, while in quarantine. “In the real-world setting, you need 10 to 100 viral particles to be infected, and we use 1 million particles,” says Tucker. This helped to ensure enough people got infected, he says. In the following week, 82 per cent of those in the placebo group became infected, but only 57 per cent of vaccinated participants did. Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday. Sign up to newsletter “I think most individuals would be interested in takingif you can reduce your risk by aroundand avoid getting really debilitating symptoms,” says Caddy, who wasn’t involved in the study. The team also found that vaccinated participants shed substantially less virus in their stool and vomit than those who took the placebo. This suggests the vaccine could slow the spread of the virus, although that needs to be directly tested, says Caddy. In another analysis, the scientists confirmed that the vaccine probably works by boosting levels of protective IgA antibodies in saliva and in the gut, blood and nose. However, it is unclear how long this protection would last. Further work is also needed to verify the findings in young children and older adults, who are especially at risk of being hospitalised, says Caddy. Most noroviruses that infect humans belong to two groups, known as GI and GII. Based on unpublished work by his team, the GI.1 vaccine would probably protect against other closely related GI variants, says Tucker. The team is also developing a vaccine that can protect against GI and GII viruses. If all goes well, Tucker hopes the GI.1 vaccine could be rolled out in two to three years. Journal reference:Science Translational Medicine DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adh9906 Topics: #norovirus #vaccine #pill #protects #against
    WWW.NEWSCIENTIST.COM
    Norovirus vaccine pill protects against winter vomiting bug
    Illustration of norovirus particlesJ Marshall/Tribaleye Images/Alamy A norovirus vaccine pill that cuts the risk of infection could be available in a few years, after it showed promise in a trial where people were intentionally exposed to the virus. The highly contagious virus infects the stomach and intestines, causing vomiting and diarrhoea that typically resolve within a few days. “Billions are lost from the economy globally every year because of the lost days of work and hospitalisation,” says Sarah Caddy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Advertisement Sean Tucker at biotech company Vaxart in San Francisco and his colleagues previously developed an oral vaccine that boosted levels of IgA antibodies that can block norovirus from entering cells, suggesting it could prevent infections. Now, the researchers have tested this on 141 people aged between 18 and 49, about half of whom took the pill, while the others took a placebo. A month later, all the participants intentionally swallowed a high dose of the GI.1 strain of norovirus in liquid form, while in quarantine. “In the real-world setting, you need 10 to 100 viral particles to be infected, and we use 1 million particles,” says Tucker. This helped to ensure enough people got infected, he says. In the following week, 82 per cent of those in the placebo group became infected, but only 57 per cent of vaccinated participants did. Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday. Sign up to newsletter “I think most individuals would be interested in taking [the vaccine] if you can reduce your risk by around [25 percentage points] and avoid getting really debilitating symptoms,” says Caddy, who wasn’t involved in the study. The team also found that vaccinated participants shed substantially less virus in their stool and vomit than those who took the placebo. This suggests the vaccine could slow the spread of the virus, although that needs to be directly tested, says Caddy. In another analysis, the scientists confirmed that the vaccine probably works by boosting levels of protective IgA antibodies in saliva and in the gut, blood and nose. However, it is unclear how long this protection would last. Further work is also needed to verify the findings in young children and older adults, who are especially at risk of being hospitalised, says Caddy. Most noroviruses that infect humans belong to two groups, known as GI and GII. Based on unpublished work by his team, the GI.1 vaccine would probably protect against other closely related GI variants, says Tucker. The team is also developing a vaccine that can protect against GI and GII viruses. If all goes well, Tucker hopes the GI.1 vaccine could be rolled out in two to three years. Journal reference:Science Translational Medicine DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adh9906 Topics:
    0 Σχόλια 0 Μοιράστηκε
  • Principal Concept Artist (Characters) - Unpublished R&D Product at Riot Games
    Principal Concept Artist (Characters) - Unpublished R&D ProductRiot GamesLos Angeles, California, United States2 hours agoApplyAs a Character Concept Artist at Riot, you will bring characters and creatures to life.
    Drawing inspiration from as little as a napkin sketch or as much as a full-blown narrative concept, you will generate ideas and craft designs that are resonant, compelling, and iconic.
    As a problem solver, first and foremost, you will help come up with visual solutions for game concepts.As a Principal Character Concept Artist on the Unpublished R&D Product team, you’ll be responsible for designing characters that fit the thematics and tone of the game, while helping to define a unique interpretation of the IP that fits within our genre and gameplay needs.
    You’ll partner with the Art Director and character art leaders as you work across disciplines to shape the visual identity of new characters.
    You will also collaborate closely with designers, writers, and producers to bring these characters to life through strong, story-driven designResponsibilities:Ideate and create highly varied character conceptsExpress character and story through your designsExplore creative solutions to establish a unique visual identity for the characters in the gameCraft detailed concept art for 3D artists and outsourcingWork with game designers to understand and fulfill the needs of gameplayCollaborate with the other artists on the team by providing and receiving creative/team feedback and providing clear creative goals and outcomes to your teamWork closely with the Art Director to explore and define new styles and tones in the IPDiscover and incorporate interesting trends and non-traditional referenceContinuously deliver concept assets that fulfill the requirements of the project’s game and visual designCollaborate with artists on the team by providing and receiving creative/team feedback and providing clear creative goals and outcomes to your teamGuide and mentor junior members of the teamRequired Qualifications:10+ years of concept design experience in gaming or equivalent industry5+ years of professional experience working in Photoshop or equivalent softwareExperience in a Principal or Lead role that involved establishing style or setting vision for the productDesired Qualifications:Experience shipping at least one AAA game titleExperience working on a highly recognizable stylized gameExperience working in pre-production for at least one game titleExperience with creating character conceptsExperience working in Fantasy character conceptsFamiliarity with Riot’s Live IPsWhen submitting your application, please provide a portfolio of your high-quality concept art - including stylized artwork.Our Perks:Riot has a focus on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy, in addition to other perks such as flexible work schedules.
    We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner and children, and a 401k with company match.
    Check out our benefits pages for more information.Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code .
    Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work.
    We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do, and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect.
    We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming .It’s our policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and members of Riot Games, Inc.
    Riot Games makes reasonable accommodations for handicapped and disabled Rioters and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, handicap, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law.
    We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company dataCommunication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minorsAccessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networksEnsuring a safe interactive environment for players and other RiotersThese duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization.
    Please note that job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security.
    Create Your Profile — Game companies can contact you with their relevant job openings.
    Apply
    Source: https://gamejobs.co/Principal-Concept-Artist-Characters-Unpublished-R-D-Product-at-Riot-Games-6494" style="color: #0066cc;">https://gamejobs.co/Principal-Concept-Artist-Characters-Unpublished-R-D-Product-at-Riot-Games-6494
    #principal #concept #artist #characters #unpublished #rampampd #product #riot #games
    Principal Concept Artist (Characters) - Unpublished R&D Product at Riot Games
    Principal Concept Artist (Characters) - Unpublished R&D ProductRiot GamesLos Angeles, California, United States2 hours agoApplyAs a Character Concept Artist at Riot, you will bring characters and creatures to life. Drawing inspiration from as little as a napkin sketch or as much as a full-blown narrative concept, you will generate ideas and craft designs that are resonant, compelling, and iconic. As a problem solver, first and foremost, you will help come up with visual solutions for game concepts.As a Principal Character Concept Artist on the Unpublished R&D Product team, you’ll be responsible for designing characters that fit the thematics and tone of the game, while helping to define a unique interpretation of the IP that fits within our genre and gameplay needs. You’ll partner with the Art Director and character art leaders as you work across disciplines to shape the visual identity of new characters. You will also collaborate closely with designers, writers, and producers to bring these characters to life through strong, story-driven designResponsibilities:Ideate and create highly varied character conceptsExpress character and story through your designsExplore creative solutions to establish a unique visual identity for the characters in the gameCraft detailed concept art for 3D artists and outsourcingWork with game designers to understand and fulfill the needs of gameplayCollaborate with the other artists on the team by providing and receiving creative/team feedback and providing clear creative goals and outcomes to your teamWork closely with the Art Director to explore and define new styles and tones in the IPDiscover and incorporate interesting trends and non-traditional referenceContinuously deliver concept assets that fulfill the requirements of the project’s game and visual designCollaborate with artists on the team by providing and receiving creative/team feedback and providing clear creative goals and outcomes to your teamGuide and mentor junior members of the teamRequired Qualifications:10+ years of concept design experience in gaming or equivalent industry5+ years of professional experience working in Photoshop or equivalent softwareExperience in a Principal or Lead role that involved establishing style or setting vision for the productDesired Qualifications:Experience shipping at least one AAA game titleExperience working on a highly recognizable stylized gameExperience working in pre-production for at least one game titleExperience with creating character conceptsExperience working in Fantasy character conceptsFamiliarity with Riot’s Live IPsWhen submitting your application, please provide a portfolio of your high-quality concept art - including stylized artwork.Our Perks:Riot has a focus on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy, in addition to other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code . Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work. We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do, and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect. We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming .It’s our policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and members of Riot Games, Inc. Riot Games makes reasonable accommodations for handicapped and disabled Rioters and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, handicap, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law. We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company dataCommunication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minorsAccessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networksEnsuring a safe interactive environment for players and other RiotersThese duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization. Please note that job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security. Create Your Profile — Game companies can contact you with their relevant job openings. Apply Source: https://gamejobs.co/Principal-Concept-Artist-Characters-Unpublished-R-D-Product-at-Riot-Games-6494 #principal #concept #artist #characters #unpublished #rampampd #product #riot #games
    Principal Concept Artist (Characters) - Unpublished R&D Product at Riot Games
    Principal Concept Artist (Characters) - Unpublished R&D ProductRiot GamesLos Angeles, California, United States2 hours agoApplyAs a Character Concept Artist at Riot, you will bring characters and creatures to life. Drawing inspiration from as little as a napkin sketch or as much as a full-blown narrative concept, you will generate ideas and craft designs that are resonant, compelling, and iconic. As a problem solver, first and foremost, you will help come up with visual solutions for game concepts.As a Principal Character Concept Artist on the Unpublished R&D Product team, you’ll be responsible for designing characters that fit the thematics and tone of the game, while helping to define a unique interpretation of the IP that fits within our genre and gameplay needs. You’ll partner with the Art Director and character art leaders as you work across disciplines to shape the visual identity of new characters. You will also collaborate closely with designers, writers, and producers to bring these characters to life through strong, story-driven designResponsibilities:Ideate and create highly varied character conceptsExpress character and story through your designsExplore creative solutions to establish a unique visual identity for the characters in the gameCraft detailed concept art for 3D artists and outsourcingWork with game designers to understand and fulfill the needs of gameplayCollaborate with the other artists on the team by providing and receiving creative/team feedback and providing clear creative goals and outcomes to your teamWork closely with the Art Director to explore and define new styles and tones in the IPDiscover and incorporate interesting trends and non-traditional referenceContinuously deliver concept assets that fulfill the requirements of the project’s game and visual designCollaborate with artists on the team by providing and receiving creative/team feedback and providing clear creative goals and outcomes to your teamGuide and mentor junior members of the teamRequired Qualifications:10+ years of concept design experience in gaming or equivalent industry5+ years of professional experience working in Photoshop or equivalent softwareExperience in a Principal or Lead role that involved establishing style or setting vision for the productDesired Qualifications:Experience shipping at least one AAA game titleExperience working on a highly recognizable stylized gameExperience working in pre-production for at least one game titleExperience with creating character conceptsExperience working in Fantasy character conceptsFamiliarity with Riot’s Live IPsWhen submitting your application, please provide a portfolio of your high-quality concept art - including stylized artwork.Our Perks:Riot has a focus on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy, in addition to other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code . Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work. We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do, and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect. We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming .It’s our policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and members of Riot Games, Inc. Riot Games makes reasonable accommodations for handicapped and disabled Rioters and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, handicap, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law. We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company dataCommunication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minorsAccessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networksEnsuring a safe interactive environment for players and other RiotersThese duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization. Please note that job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security. Create Your Profile — Game companies can contact you with their relevant job openings. Apply
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