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Quick pitch: The Good Care Group partners with online fitness and wellbeing provider Rosemary Online to offer wellness support to live-in carers during these challenging times.

10th April, 2020 - The Good Care Group, the UKs most awarded care company offering exceptional live-in-home care, announces a unique initiative; partnering with Rosemary Online to boost the physical and mental wellbeing of its carers who are working tirelessly through COVID-19 lockdown stipulations.

From today, and for the duration of twelve weeks, Rosemary Online will be offering The Good Care Groups carers free access to the highly successful exercise videos and healthy eating recipes, as well as chat forums, coaching support and blogs. This will be hugely beneficial to both the professional live-in carers, and also to their clients whilst in isolation.

Live-in carers currently offer vital support to the overstretched NHS by helping the extremely vulnerable - often with complicated medical or anxiety-based needs - to stay at home during the pandemic.

Dominique Kent, MD of The Good Care Group explains: The partnership with Rosemary Online came about because we wanted to do something to celebrate the amazing dedication of our wonderful carers, so many of whom are working for longer than usual at the sacrifice of seeing their own loved ones to ensure that our clients are safe. In addition, they are remaining inside in isolation with their clients to ensure they are not exposed to COVID-19.

"We recruit carers from overseas also, and with the travel restrictions currently in place many are not able to return home, so are instead choosing to isolate themselves in local hotels to minimise the risk to the clients. Our ethos at The Good Care Group is very much person-centred. It is not just about delivering high quality care, but also companionship whilst delivering the very best healthcare outcomes.

"Through maintaining the wellbeing of our staff, were helping them to be their best selves to support their clients through this intense and challenging time. As Rosemary Online has been helping people to feel good about themselves for many years, we feel that this is a really positive partnership.

Sarah Skelton CEO of Rosemary Online, adds: The Good Care Groups live-in carers do a wonderful job, but right now they will be experiencing high levels of loneliness in isolation, as they put the needs of their clients before their own. I hope that with free access to the full range of Rosemary Online resources carers will be able to maintain good health and nutrition as well as reach out for a friendly online chat. The Good Care Group is committed to excellence in their field, and recognising the need for staff and client wellness is a brilliant example of this.

This initiative is the first time that Rosemary Online (owned by Digital Wellbeing Limited) has worked with a care provider in this way.

Dominique Kent and Sarah Skelton are available for comment or interviews to discuss this initiative. The Good Care Group can also offer insights and thought leadership on broader challenges facing live-in carers and the profession.

For more information or to arrange an interview please contact Firgas Esack on 07540688506, firgasesack@publicist.com

Media assets available include: testimonials from The Good Care Groups carers, images including headshots

Notes to Editors:

The initiative will launch on 3rd April and run until 23nd June 2020

Rosemary Online has allocated 1000 places to carers, to access resources from the platform https://www.rosemaryconley.com/

About Rosemary Online:

Rosemary Online is one of the UK's leading online weight loss clubs.

Providing support and advice on fitness, wellbeing and weight-loss with real life qualified coaches, fitness videos, health and wellbeing articles healthy eating plans and over 2800 healthy recipes suitable for ages 18+.

About The Good Care Group:

The Good Care Group is a national provider of 24-hour live-in care that enables people to continue to live safely and happily in their own home, maintaining dignity and independence, with tailored support as required.

The Good Care Group specialises in the provision of live-in care for those with dementia, Parkinson's, MS and stroke-recovery, plus also respite and end of life palliative care.

The Good Care Group is the only Live-In care provider to be rated as Outstanding in all 5 domains by CQC and is the UK's most awarded care company offering quality live-in care at home.

Media ContactCompany Name: Rosemary OnlineContact Person: Media RelationsEmail: Send EmailCountry: United KingdomWebsite: https://www.rosemaryconley.com/

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Caring is Sharing: Rosemary Online brings good news to live-in carers - Press Release - Digital Journal

On April 11, 1970, at 19:13 GMT, Apollo 13 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atop the giant Saturn V booster sat Command Module 109 and Service Module 109, which together formed CSM-109 (otherwise known as Odyssey), and the lunar module (LM) Aquarius.

In the couches of the command module were mission commander James A. Lovell, Jr., age 42, a US Navy captain on his third space mission and his second visit to the Moon. Next to him was command module pilot John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr., 38, a space rookie who was a last-minute replacement for astronaut Ken Mattingly, who was scrubbed after being exposed to the measles. On the other side of Lovell was lunar module pilot Fred W. Haise, Jr., 35, on his first and only spaceflight.

This was to be the most ambitious Apollo mission to date. Building on the lessons learned from Apollo 12, it was to make a precise landing on the Moon in the highlands of the Fra Mauro region, farther north from the equator than Apollo 11 or 12, meaning that both the Saturn V booster and the lunar module carried more fuel than any other mission.

But another thing that marked the mission was a sense of complacency, even apathy. If the Apollo missions now seemed routine to the men and women of NASA, the public was downright indifferent. They'd been sold Apollo as a great adventure and they were getting bored with the repeats of the same plot. It was a sentiment shared by the US Congress. NASA's budget had been going down ever since the main work on Apollo was completed in 1964, but now Apollo 20 was canceled and the trimming looked set to go much deeper.A bomb aboardThis complacency wouldn't have lasted long if NASA knew Apollo 13 had a bomb on board. It wasn't the work of terrorists or enemy saboteurs but the result of the kind of oversight that can occur in any super-complex endeavor. In fact, it was a credit to NASA that such errors didn't happen more often. However, this time, the oversight was nearly fatal.

NASA

Behind the conical command module that acted as a home for the Apollo astronauts is the service module. This cylindrical assembly with a bell-like cone at one end contained the main engine and supplied Odyssey with oxygen, water, electricity, and long-range communications with Earth.

Inside the service module was a bay holding a number of systems, including two liquid oxygen tanks that were the primary source of oxygen for the command module. Also in the bay were a tank of liquid hydrogen and three fuel cells. The hydrogen and oxygen feeding into the fuel cells provided Odyssey with power and water.

There was a history to one of these units. The No. 2 oxygen tank had been previously installed in the service module of Apollo 10 but was then taken out for modification, during which it was damaged and then sent back to the factory for repairs. It was then installed in the Apollo 13 service module.

Like all NASA flight gear, the No. 2 tank was tested and retested even after installation. On March 16, 1970, the tank suddenly developed a fault. It wouldn't drain properly. It was finally decided to run the tank's electrical heater to boil the oxygen. This didn't resolve the problem entirely, but because the oxygen tanks didn't need to drain in space and due to time constraints, No. 2 was cleared for flight.

NASA

However, the heaters had been upgraded so that they could operate at 68 volts instead of the previous 28 volts, but the thermostatic switches that controlled the heaters weren't changed. As a result, during the final test, the switches welded shut and the wiring was frayed. Another problem was the use of aluminum components and Teflon insulation both of which burn in pure oxygen.

To put it more simply, No. 2 tank was now a bomb waiting to detonate.

There was no sign of any trouble as Apollo 13 lifted off from the pad. The weather was good and the only difference from previous Saturn V launches was that it cleared the tower a bit slower because of the extra fuel it carried. When the second stage fired, the center of the five engines started to go into severe pogo operations and shut down. The other four engines throttled up to compensate and Mission Control and the crew thought that the mission had passed its one major glitch.

NASA

Once the S-IVB third stage separated and fired for the first time, Apollo 13 settled into an orbit 120 mi (193 km) above the Earth. Two hours later, the rocket fired its engine again and the astronauts were on their way to the Moon. The CSM Odyssey then separated from the S-IVB, Swigert turned the craft around, docked with the lunar module Aquarius and eased it out. With a slight course correction, Apollo 13 was on a trajectory to circle the Moon, while the S-IVB went on a collision course with the lunar surface where it would impact three days later an event that would be recorded by the seismograph left behind by Apollo 12.

It was all like a Space Age milk run.

Everything was relaxed for the first two days of the mission. At 55 hours into the flight, Lovell used the command module's television camera to provide the audience back on Earth with a tour of Odyssey and Aquarius. Unfortunately, since none of the US networks carried the broadcast, the audience was reduced to Mission Control and a few of the astronauts' relatives.

At hour 56, 210,000 mi (330,000 km) from Earth, after completing the broadcast, NASA gave the men a few minutes to recover before they went back to work, with Lovell stowing the camera and Haise testing and shutting down the lunar module's systems. Meanwhile, Swigert was carrying out routine maintenance tests on the service module's oxygen tanks to track down a sensor malfunction.

NASA

Back at Mission Control in Houston, the Electrical, Environmental, and Communication officer (EECOM) Sy Liebergot asked Swigert to activate the fans to stir the liquid oxygen in No.2 tank, so it wouldn't settle into layers.

Then, 95 seconds later, things went wrong. There was a short circuit in the heater in tank No. 2, which started a fire. Pressure increased suddenly as the oxygen flashed into a gas, and the tank's structure gave way with explosive force.

Though an entire panel fore and aft on the service module was blasted away and there was extensive damage, the first clue the astronauts had that something was wrong was a loud bang. At the same time, telemetry with Earth went out for 1.8 seconds, the power readings on the instrument panel started fluctuating, and the spacecraft was jolting as the automatic pilot kept firing the attitude control thrusters to compensate against some unknown force.

NASA

Twenty-six seconds after the bang, Swigert called back to mission control, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."

Lovell then repeated and elaborated. "Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a Main B Bus undervolt."

The initial fear was that Odyssey or Aquarius had been hit by a meteorite and that one or both of the crew modules had been holed, but there was no evidence of a serious loss of pressure. The Main Bus B undervolt fault indicated that the service module's three fuel cells were malfunctioning. Then Bus A started losing power and two of the fuel cells were fading, with both dead in under half an hour.

The more Mission Control and the astronauts checked, the worse things looked. Oxygen tank No. 2 had zero pressure and No. 1 was leaking fast. Also, the computer had reset and was running a fault check, while the high gain antenna had switched to a secondary mode.

NASA

Back on Earth, Liebergot couldn't believe what he was seeing on his panel. The service module was designed with multiple redundancies and constructed out of components that didn't need maintenance in flight, but he saw numerous systems failures of the sort that one only saw in simulators when the operator wanted to make sure the astronauts were paying attention.

At first, Liebergot thought that it had to be an instrument failure, but Lovell reported that he could see debris outside the ship and an expanding cloud of gas. It was this that was pushing on Odyssey and against which the autopilot was fighting. Worse, No. 1 tank was leaking fast and when it went, the service module would start sucking oxygen from the command module's tiny reserve surge tank.

Lead Flight Director Gene Kranz, who had such high authority at Mission Control that the only way to veto his decisions was to fire him, ordered the command module surge tank sealed off, but the rapidly depleted tank No. 1 would only keep the remaining fuel cell going for about two hours. After that, the only power would be from the command module batteries, which were only meant to last a few hours.

NASA

It was obvious that the Odyssey was a dying ship and that the lunar landing was scrubbed. The most obvious next step was to preserve what was left in the command module's batteries by powering down its systems literally turning it off. This was something that had never been done on a mission before and the engineers weren't sure how to turn it back on again for the return to Earth. This raised two more obvious questions: How to get back to Earth and how to keep the three men alive during the trip.

The answer to the second question was to use the lunar module as a lifeboat a scenario that had already been considered as an emergency measure for Apollo 10, 11, and 12. It was possible. The LM was intact, had plenty of oxygen in its life support systems, engines, and spacesuit backpacks, but the LM was only designed to support two men for 45 hours. Now it had to keep three alive for four days.

One limiting factor was power. Instead of fuel cells, the LM used silver-oxide/zinc batteries with only 2,181 Ah capacity. Some of this was needed to keep the command module's batteries charged, so everything not absolutely essential on the LM was shut down and energy consumption kept below 20 percent.

NASA

It would be a very cold, dark journey home.

Water was another problem. It was not only required to keep the astronauts alive, but it was also used to cool the LM's systems. The crew was rationed to six ounces (177 ml) each a day and instructed to only eat wet-packed foods. Even then, the spacecraft would run out of water five hours before reentry, but experience on Apollo 11 indicated that the LM could continue to function for that long without it.

Under normal circumstances, the way to get Apollo 13 back to Earth would have been using a direct abort trajectory, which would have involved firing the service module's main engine to place the spacecraft in a truncated orbit home. This would have been the fastest way, but Kranz vetoed this because no one knew how badly damaged the engine was.

The alternative was to carry on, loop around the Moon, and swing back to earth, using the attitude control rockets for any course corrections. Had this been one of the earlier Apollo missions, such a free return orbit would have needed little more than sitting back and letting gravity do the work.

NASA

But that wasn't possible for Apollo 13 because its goal of landing in the lunar highlands put it in a hybrid orbit a variation of the free return orbit, except that it needed an engine burn to make actual reentry on reaching Earth. Otherwise, the craft would simply have swung back into deep space.

Since the service module was unavailable, this left the crew with only the less powerful descent stage engines on the LM. Before shutting down the command module, Lovell wrote down the guidance readouts regarding the spacecraft's orientation and did the calculations (without a calculator but with Mission Control checking his sums) needed to feed the data into the LM's guidance system. However, making the necessary maneuvers using the LM required both Lovell and Haise at the controls and a lot of learning by doing.

There was also the question of whether to jettison the service module. This would have meant less weight for the lunar module's engine to push and cut the return trip by 36 hours. Unfortunately, this would have meant exposing the Command Module's phenol resin heat shield to the cold of space and the engineers weren't sure what damage this would do, so the service module stayed.

NASA

A 34-second burn with the LM's engine put the craft back on a free return trajectory but more burns would be needed if the command module was to land on Earth where it could be recovered safely. This meant one of three options: The Indian Ocean, where the US had few recovery units; the South Atlantic Ocean, where the same problem arose; and the South Pacific, where a recovery fleet was already steaming.

In the end, NASA opted to make another engine burn two hours after Apollo 13 passed its closest point to the Moon and 73 hours, 46 minutes into the flight. This would shorten the return by 12 hours and put the command module in the Pacific. This second four-minute burn was difficult enough, but with all the debris floating around it wasn't possible to orient the spacecraft using the stars, as was standard procedure, so the crew lined up using the Sun and the Moon again, using the LM's guidance system. This brought them to within a half a degree of the desired angle.

There was still much to do on the way back to Earth, but a more immediate problem was the men's own breath, which was pumping carbon dioxide into the confined space of the LM. At first, this wasn't a threat because there were lithium hydroxide canisters that scrubbed the CO2 from the air. However, these were meant for two men for 45 hours and within 36 hours after moving into the LM, the atmosphere warning light came on. The air in Aquarius was turning deadly and, if the problem wasn't solved, the crew would be dead a day before reaching Earth.

NASA

In an ideal world, this would have been an easy fix. The command module also had scrubber canisters more than enough for the trip home. Why not just move them over and plug them in? The crew couldn't because the canisters aboard Aquarius were round and the ones from Odyssey were square. Like a bad joke, the round holes of Aquarius' life support system wouldn't accept Odyssey's square pegs.

Like those school exercises where students are given a bag of items and are told to build a crane or a hovercraft, NASA engineers had to as quickly as possible figure out how to build an adapter using materials known to be on the spacecraft, write up clear and detailed instructions on how to assemble it, and relay this to the astronauts.

According to Apollo astronaut Ken Mattingly, the solution was from a simulator exercise for training the Apollo 8 mission crew, where a similar emergency was solved by blowing air through a canister using the spacecraft's vacuum cleaner hose.

NASA

They soon came up with a contraption called the "mailbox," which was made from plastic, covers from procedure manuals, vent hoses, and other bits and pieces, all held together with duct tape. Just reading the procedures over the radio took an hour.MiseryOnce the burns were completed, all but the most essential lunar module systems were shut down. This helped to conserve precious resources, but it also made the spacecraft a miserable place to be as both the command module and the LM went dark and dropped to the temperature of a refrigerator, reaching as low as 3 C (38 F).

There were the spacesuits, but their non-porous rubberized construction would have made the astronauts unbearably hot and sweat too much. Since they had only their flight suits, Lovell and Haise put on their EVA boots, while Swigert wore an extra coverall. Swigert was especially uncomfortable because his feet were wet after a spill while filling bags with drinking water.

NASA

As if to add insult to injury, the crew couldn't even dump their urine overboard for fear of altering the spacecraft's trajectory, so more plastic bags were used for storing the waste. The cold also caused the moisture in the air to condense on the bulkheads and behind the equipment panels in both the CM and the LM. Fortunately, the electronics were all well-insulated, but it was still like living in a leaky tin shed during a winter rainstorm.

Using the Earth's terminator line between day and night as a target, the LM made two more course corrections, which was tricky because the LM's computer had been shut down to conserve power.

About half an hour later, the service module was jettisoned by firing the explosive bolts that secured it to the command module. As it drifted away, the astronauts could see the damage caused by the explosion, including to the main engine, showing that the decision to not use it was justified.

NASA

However, they were not home free. Powering up the command module was hard enough, the protocols having been worked out in only three days, but without the reaction thrusters on the service module, the LM couldn't be jettisoned because the command module couldn't move away. This was solved by closing the hatches between Aquarius and Odyssey, leaving the air in the trunk instead of depressurizing. As the clamps were released, the air pushed the two craft apart as it escaped.

As Odyssey entered the Earth's atmosphere, the build-up of hot, ionized plasma around the capsule caused a radio blackout. If you saw the film Apollo 13, you may remember the tense scene as Mission Control waited anxiously to reestablish radio contact. This wasn't just a bit of Hollywood suspense building. The four-minute blackout stretched to six minutes, raising the fear that the heat shield had failed.

Fortunately, it did work, though exactly why the blackout was so long is still not entirely explained.

On April 17, 1970, at 18:07 GMT, Odyssey splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean and was recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima. The mission lasted five days, 22 hours, 54 minutes, and 41 seconds.

The astronauts were in good condition despite being dehydrated and losing 50 percent more weight than any other space crew, though Haisse did have a serious urinary tract infection due to his lack of water.

NASA

When the crew of Apollo 13 stepped onto the deck of the Iwo Jima, they were unaware that the whole world had been following their ordeal in numbers not seen since Apollo 11.

"Nobody believes me, but during this six-day odyssey we had no idea what an impression Apollo 13 made on the people of Earth," said Lovell. "We never dreamed a billion people were following us on television and radio, and reading about us in banner headlines of every newspaper published. We still missed the point onboard the carrier Iwo Jima, which picked us up, because the sailors had been as remote from the media as we were. Only when we reached Honolulu did we comprehend our impact: there we found President Nixon and [NASA Administrator] Dr. Paine to meet us, along with my wife Marilyn, Fred's wife Mary, and bachelor Jack's parents, in lieu of his usual airline stewardesses."

So what really got Apollo 13 home when the odds were so stacked against them? Certainly, courage played a part. All three men were test pilots and reacted like test pilots. Knowing that panic would do nothing other than waste precious time, they concentrated on the job at hand. Training was also important, as was innovation, as was the combination of relentless training combined with quick, expert thinking from the team on the ground.

NASA

But a later NASA report showed that luck had its part to play as well. This isn't to diminish the part played by the astronauts, NASA, or the contractors, because luck favors the prepared.

For one thing, it was fortunate that Gene Kranz and Glynn Lunny, the most experienced flight directors, were present when the accident happened. It was also good fortune that the LM had extra fuel aboard for the course corrections. In addition, Lovell had extensive carrier landing experience, allowing him to adapt quickly to the spacecraft's counterintuitive gyrations.

There was also the timing of the accident. If the explosion had occurred while the Odyssey was undocked from Aquarius, the crew would have been without their lifeboat and the engine needed to return to Earth.

NASA

Then there was the high-gain antenna surviving the explosion despite being damaged. This meant less than two seconds of vital data was lost. The timing of the explosion coming just after the television broadcast meant that some of the LM's systems were powered up, so emergency power wasn't needed to turn the spacecraft on. The broadcast also meant that the crew was not sleeping as scheduled, so they were already alert and active when the accident happened.

Even tragedy helped. The Apollo 1 fire in 1967 led to improvements in CM design, such as a better caution and warning system, and there were extensive electrical insulation improvements, protecting the systems against water damage.

In the short term, Apollo 13 was the mission that NASA wanted to forget. Despite the daring rescue, it was like Dunkirk a successful defeat. The space agency played down the event. The command module was gutted as part of the accident investigation and the capsule itself was unceremoniously carted off to the Muse de l'air et de l'espace in Paris, though it has since been, put back together, and is on display at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas.

NASA

But the years have a way of changing things. In the past half-century, the legend of Apollo 13 has grown. Many lessons were learned from the harrowing adventure that were used to improve the design of later spacecraft and how they were operated. The story became the stuff of a number of best-selling books, two television plays, a feature film, and many documentaries. It's a story that continues to inform and inspire.

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"Houston, we've had a problem": The story of NASA's most successful failure - New Atlas

In the mid-2010s, an outbreak of Ebola ravaged West Africa. Between December 2013 and June 2016, the disease officially killed 11,308 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, although the World Health Organisation (WHO) believes the real figure is probably much higher.

Ebola's virulence and lethality it has a mortality rate of around 40 per cent; Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, kills roughly one per cent of sufferers, although the exact number is currently unclear made containing it an international priority. By mobilising labs around the world, a prophylactic Ebola vaccine rVSV-ZEBOV was rushed through development. In December last year, six years after the first cases were discovered in West Africa, and three years after the outbreak was officially deemed over, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally OKed it for use in the US. Compared to the normal timelines for these things, that still represents astonishing speed.

In the wake of the Ebola outbreak, WHO has taken a front-foot approach. Every year it publishes a list of key diseases it sees as the major issues the medical research community needs to tackle. The Blueprint For Diseases, as its called, highlights the diseases that could break out into epidemics in the next 12 months. It's a guide for the research community, an attempt to steer its resources to where they're most required. Currently, Covid-19 tops the list. Lurking at the bottom, as it has been every year since the Blueprint was first published in 2016, is something that sounds like it's been pulled from the pages of a comic: Disease X.

To create a vaccine in 18 months is unprecedented in human history. No vaccine has ever been developed at that speed.

Thats the unknown, brand new pathogen that springs up, says Rachel Grant, of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. CEPI was formed in 2017, after the Ebola crisis made apparent the lack of a single, coordinating voice in the research and development (R&D) of vaccines. Its founding partners included the nation of Norway, the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the UK Research Foundation. (Since then, Germany and Japan have signed up, too.) What happened with Ebola was the world tragically realised they reacted too late," says Grant. "The whole system was too fragmented to respond in an effective way.

Disease X has long been recognised as an issue. Before coronavirus, the last brand new pathogen to spring up was the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which infected an estimated half-a-million people between 2015 and 2016. At the time of writing, Covid-19 had infected at least 1.5 million people and killed 90,000 (see the most recent numbers at Johns Hopkins Universitys live map of global cases).

The focus of the R&D world is now squarely on Covid-19, and the race is on to develop a vaccine. If the boffins and academics are to succeed, they will have to move at a previously unheard-of pace. Vaccine researchers are used to working on vaccines for decades, but with coronavirus, we cant wait that long. More than 60 teams across the globe are trying to find a way to protect the worlds population up from around 40 two weeks ago and the more optimistic among them think there could be a vaccine ready in 12 to 18 months. That is unprecedented in human history, says Grant. No vaccine has ever been developed at that speed. But they have to try.

Professor Katie Ewer hated immunology when she was an undergraduate. She had been interested in biology since she was a child, fascinated by seemingly endless processes that occur in our cells and organs every second of our lives without us knowing about it. When she didn't get into medical school she trained as a microbiologist instead, and grew fascinated by infectious diseases. Ive always had a real obsession with the human body, anatomy and how it works, she says. Eventually, she came to see immunology as its "ultimate expression". After a PhD in the subject she landed at Oxford University's Jenner Institute, and has spent the 13 years since working on a malaria vaccine, to try and halt the spread of a disease that kills 500,000 people every year.

Pedro VilelaGetty Images

Thirteen years may sound like a long time, but vaccines are difficult to develop, especially when they're for diseases that largely impact the poorer parts of the world. A malaria vaccine would save tens of millions of lives, but it would be less profitable than, say, a drug that reverses hair loss or makes you lose weight. So not-for-profits like the Jenner Institute, where Ewer is a senior scientist, do the work that big pharma won't prioritise. According to The Global Fund, $5 billion is needed to keep development of a malaria vaccine on track. In 2018, researchers received $2.8 billion, a drop from the year before. That Covid-19 has spread through the global west has, perversely, probably accelerated the search for its vaccine.

To create a vaccine, you need to know what you're fighting, which is why, on 11 January, researchers in Shanghai leaked the genetic sequence of the coronavirus, after realising that Chinese authorities had no intention of releasing it globally. The next day, their lab was closed for "rectification". Their sacrifice enabled teams around the world to mobilise.

"We go round the lab with a tape measure, measure two metres, work out the number of people who can safely work in a particular area"

Vaccines work by training your body to react in a certain way, like teaching a child to catch a ball. The first time you throw it, it bounces off them. The second time, maybe they put up an arm to protect themselves. Eventually, they'll learn to predict its flight, get their hands in the right place, and time when they should wrap their fingers around the ball. It's become an innate reaction that happens almost without thinking.

In the same way, the first time your body is exposed to a new virus, it doesn't know how to react. Being infected with Covid-19 is like turning a tennis ball launcher on that child before they've learnt to catch they'll be overwhelmed. But introduce a measured, non-fatal dose and our body learns to battle it, even when confronted by a larger amount. This is done by injecting antigens (or small molecules of the virus, which is a pathogen) into the body. The immune system recognises a harmful alien presence and, through a process of trial and error, creates antibodies to battle it. Once it's been destroyed, your body remembers the specific antibodies it needs to produce if the virus returns say, through live infection so it can mobilise more quickly. (This is also why those who've already been infected almost certainly can't catch Covid-19 a second time, unless the virus mutates.)

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Before the advent of genetic medicine, vaccines worked by injecting patients with either a dead form of a virus, so it couldn't replicate inside the body, or a similar but less harmful pathogen (Edward Jenner, for whom the Jenner Institute is named, all-but invented vaccination in the 1790s when he realised that if you deliberately infected someone with the comparatively harmless cowpox virus, they wouldn't catch smallpox). Today, making a vaccine isn't simple, but it is standardised. The actual platform the backbone of the vaccine is always the same, whatever the disease, says Ewer. Researchers just slot in a little bit of the genetic information from the new virus.

The Jenner Institute develops a multitude of different vaccines at any one time, and at the start of the year, Ewers colleague, Professor Theresa Lamb, was handling its coronavirus research. By the middle of February, the Institute had recognised that the early stages of their vaccine production had gone well, and were preparing to test it in a clinical trial. Suddenly the small number of people working on the vaccine under Lamb ballooned. Ewer was drafted to help in the effort, one of around 60 people including doctors and nurses who are screening potential trial participants and laboratory staff developing tests and assays working on the project. Many are working from home: the lab doesnt want people in unnecessarily, in case they contract or spread the disease. We go round [the laboratory] with a tape measure, we measure two metres, work out the number of people who can safely work at that distance in a particular area of the lab, says Ewer. Its really boring, just the same as any other supermarket or shop.

The potential outcome is far from boring. Covid-19 has changed our scientific landscape in terms of how fast things are moving, says Dr Melvin Sanicas, a vaccinologist and medical director at Takeda, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. Since its genetic sequence was released, two teams have got candidate vaccines into clinical trials. One is based on an Ebola vaccine, developed by CanSino Biological Inc, a Hong Kong company, in collaboration with the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology. The other is from a Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company, Moderna (who declined to speak for this story).

DOUGLAS MAGNOGetty Images

In the 70 years since the first identified coronavirus infection in humans, no vaccine has ever got beyond Phase II trials, which means labs are taking diverse approaches to finding one now. The Asian plan uses a non-replicating viral vector essentially, the dead vaccine. The Moderna plan uses an RNA vaccine, in which human cells are injected with the disease's RNA a simpler version of DNA, used by cellular organisms like viruses in the hope that it will absorb it and start to produce antibodies. The former isn't so different from Jenner's original method; the Moderna plan is based on science that, so far, is largely theoretical, but which will be much quicker to test and produce than those made by the traditional method. If it works.

But finding a vaccine that defeats a disease is merely step one. You test the vaccine candidates in cell cultures or animal models to see if the vaccine candidate is safe and whether its able to induce an immune response, says Sanicas. The right immune response sees the body fight back against the pathogen, without being overwhelmed by it some candidate vaccines have to be shelved because the virus wins. Get it to work in cell cultures or animal models, and youre through the pre-clinical phase. You can now try and test it in humans.

"With any vaccine there is a risk of rare serious adverse events."

Testing is the time-consuming part. The team at Oxford University recently put out a call for participants across the Thames Valley area, asking for 510 participants in total. More than half will be given the actual vaccine, and 250 will be given a control. Theyll be monitored over the next six months to see how the vaccine is working researchers are looking for an immune response, but also check for side-effects that might be worse than the disease. In exchange, the participants will get up to 625, and the pride of knowing theyre helping save the world. The amount is relatively low (participants in a botched clinical trial in the mid-2000s got 2,000 each), and the risk real: an accompanying document acknowledges with any vaccination there is a risk of rare serious adverse events.

All vaccines entering clinical trials on humans go through three stepped stages. The Oxford trial will test only a few people to start with, to make sure everything works correctly and safely, before increasing the numbers. Well try and get up to vaccinating some quite big numbers of people in a short space of time, says Ewer. In less urgent times, that means thousands of participants over several years, because it can take months for an immune response to show up in healthy subjects.

To progress, a vaccine needs to produce positive results at all three stages. Normally, that means an effectiveness of at least 97 per cent, says Sanicas, although the pandemic is so severe that any potential coronavirus vaccine could be rolled out with results as low as 70 per cent.

Next, you start applying to national regulatory bodies the FDA in the US, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in the UK, and the European Medicines Agency in the EU for approval. Once theyve determined the vaccine is safe, effective and made using quality production mechanisms, they approve the vaccine for use, says Sanicas. Getting from identification to commercial vaccine normally takes the best part of a decade.

Pedro VilelaGetty Images

Faced with a pandemic, there's always a temptation to cut corners. Every extra day jumping through red tape means thousands of people dead, tens of thousands more infected. But the scientific community has learned that a bad vaccine is worse than no vaccine. In the mid-2000s, trials of an experimental leukaemia drug in London went wrong, seriously damaging six participants without that testing, actual patients could have been given a drug that was more likely to kill them than their disease. And all vaccine development lives in the shadow of a terrible series of events in 1976, when the threat of a swine flu epidemic across the US led the government to instigate mass vaccination. To speed up production, they opted to use a "live" virus, rather than an inactive strain. Of the inoculated, one in 100,000 contracted a neurological disease called GuillainBarr syndrome, in which the bodys immune system attacks its own nerves, causing permanent paralysis. Since then, speed has always come second to safety.

But time can be saved if you can organise people properly. "Getting the regulatory authorities to focus, to come together, to really understand the data, all of that will make a difference to the timeframe for this," says Grant. Medical advances have also sped up the process of getting a vaccine to trial safely. The Oxford team is also changing the way they work, to speed things up without sacrificing safety, says Ewer. Were doing a lot of things in parallel that we would ordinarily do one after the other."

But they arent the only team on the cusp of clinical trials.

A tobacco warehouse in Owensboro, Kentucky may seem like an odd place for a coronavirus vaccine to emanate, but we live in strange times. British American Tobacco (BAT), which some might say is a company best known for killing people, has also entered the race to save lives. Right now, I would hope we could leave the politics of tobacco and smoking to one side," says Kingsley Wheaton, who leads marketing at BAT, "in order that we try and focus on the matter at hand right here, right now, which is solving this Covid-19 problem globally."

A few years ago, recognising it was selling fewer cigarettes every year, BAT invested in a company called Kentucky BioProcessing, to help find new uses for the tobacco plants it was growing but which people weren't smoking. They were especially interested in a protein that could be harvested and processed as animal feed. You take a small, hardy Australian tobacco varietal, and around halfway through its growing cycle impregnate it with an antigen for the protein. It replicates at a tremendous scale. The plant is a mini-factory, if you like, says Wheaton.

It became clear that this might also be a way to produce vaccines quickly and cheaply. Instead of an antigen developing a feedstock protein, Kentucky BioProcessing realised they could develop the antigens of viruses. You could clone in fields, rather than Petri dishes. In 2014, as Ebola was killing people in Africa, Kentucky BioProcessing put its newly acquired company to work. Improbably, Kentucky BioProcessing developed ZMapp, an Ebola drug that the World Health Organisation concluded, in 2018, had benefits [that] outweigh the risks (science has since thrown doubts on its effectiveness, however).

Every year since, Kentucky BioProcessing has worked on a seasonal flu vaccine; this year's was heading into the first stage of clinical trials when the coronavirus began its rampage across the globe. Now, the business has been reoriented to aid Covid-19 vaccine development: 50 staff members are devoted to growing an antigen that can create a vaccine in tobacco plants in a matter of weeks. You extract it, purify it and hey presto theres a vaccine. Results from pre-clinical trials in animals are pending, at which point it will move into clinical trials which may be anything from 12 to 18 months, even with a fair wind, Wheaton says.

What if they all worked together? Wouldnt it get done in half the time? No.

Not that theyre waiting that long. Even if BAT's vaccine is ineffective, its production technique could be a game-changer. Because a pandemic is different from an epidemic, and the need for a vaccine is everywhere and at the same time, youve also got to think about manufacturing capacity, says CEPIs Grant. If youre thinking about developing a vaccine for an epidemic, youre talking millions of doses of whatever it is youve developed. A pandemic, youre talking about billions.

BAT plans to start production on their vaccine even before it knows whether it works, making between one and three million a week, just in case. Wheaton is at pains to point out that if the vaccine isnt approved, it wont be used, but if it turns out our candidate vaccine is the right one, it would be good to have a stockpile of these things.

This is where research diversity becomes so important. People may look at the vast array of organisations, private companies, university laboratories and oddball developers trying to produce different vaccines simultaneously in all four corners of the world and think, What if they all worked together? Wouldnt it get done in half the time? Not so, says Grant, whose list of teams working on a vaccine tops 90. You are always better to have a diversified approach than you are to have a really narrow one, she says. You never want a single point of failure in a situation like this." With vaccines, there are too many potential failure points to count.

Pedro VilelaGetty Images

During the West African Ebola crisis, pharma giant Merck was one of the first to get a drug through clinical trials. Its vaccine, rVSV Zebov-GP, had 100 per cent efficacy, but a zero per cent chance of actually being used at scale; it needed to be stored at 80C. You try getting a vaccine supposed to be stored at 80C out to war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo and youve got massive supply problems, says Grant. Which is why it was handy there was investment in another vaccine, by Johnson & Johnson, that wasn't so temperamental.

Most drug research works on a winner-takes-all model: invent Viagra, or Minoxodil, or Oxycontin, and you get a 20-year exclusivity licence (in the US). That means you can charge as much for it as you like. Once the licence lapses, competitors can create generic versions and the price falls. With a pandemic vaccine, the rules of the marketplace make less sense. There's healthy competition, but its against nature, not each other.

"Im trying to do as much as I can do in the working day and then go home and try and be a mum to my kids at home."

That said, there are economic incentives at play: make the vaccine everyone wants and you can at least recoup the costs of developing it. CEPI has ploughed $23 million into the eight programmes it's supporting underway, and estimates it will cost something like $2 billion more to get three of those into clinical testing. Altruism is fuelling initial development, but at some point realism steps in. Still, any CEPI-developed vaccines wont result in a free-for-all (the US government's reported attempts to buy German pharmaceutical group CureVac, to get at its potential coronavirus vaccine first, hint at what could happen with international cooperation). CEPI has a stringent policy on equitable access and believes that work needs to be done now at an intra-governmental level to decide a way for people who need the vaccine most, such as healthcare workers and the vulnerable, to access it first.

Regardless, developers are keen to help in any way they can. Were one of many in that area, but wed also be delighted to take a candidate vaccine and become a fast-scale manufacturer through our plant-based system, says Wheaton.

For those in the labs, competition isn't a concern. They worry about the pressure of getting a vaccine right and getting it quickly. When I ask Ewer if the process of developing a vaccine has been stressful, she replies with one word: "Yes".

I try not to think about it too much, she eventually adds. Shes stopped watching the news; a regular Twitter user, shes now shunning the app. I had to stop engaging with it because if I think too much about it, I get really stressed. If I think too much about what happens if none of this works, then I feel a bit overwhelmed, so Im trying to do as much as I can do in the working day and then go home and try and be a mum to my kids at home, try and keep things as normal for them as possible, because its weird for the family as well as it is for everybody.

"Hopefully one of us will produce a vaccine that is effective. I dont really mind if its ours or anybody elses, as long as one of them works."

It can be easy to forget, as we praise our scientists and our doctors, our nurses and the collective brainpower of the experts working to lead us out of this crisis, that theyre human beings, too. The risks of getting it wrong are real and they feel them every day.

If you ask me whether I want this really quick, or I want a robust process, I would pick the safe and robust process, says Sanicas, who worries were all getting caught up in the hype around 18 months to a vaccine. I dont want this to be just a vaccine you bring quickly to the market but were not sure about the long-term effects. He thinks itll take two years for anything to come to fruition.

Near the end of our conversation, I ask Ewer if theres one thing she wishes the general public who are clamouring for a Covid-19 vaccine as eagerly as they are for sufficient testing capacity knew about her work. I expected her to explain the challenges of the vaccine, or to caution about its progress (she believes the best case scenario is that by autumn this year the Oxford team will have evidence of the vaccine being safe and able to induce a good immune response). I didnt expect her to answer as she did.

I think I would like people to know there are lots of people working very, very hard on this, she explains. Making vaccines is difficult and its expensive, but there are at least 30 different groups around the world, all trying to produce a vaccine against this disease, and hopefully one of us will produce a vaccine that is effective. I dont really mind if its ours or anybody elses, but as long as one of them works, thats the most important thing.

She pauses for a moment, then picks up her train of thought. As long as somebody gets there, we dont mind if its us, or Moderna, or anyone else. As long as one of us gets there, and we can make enough of it quickly enough to make an impact.

The information in this story is accurate as of the publication date. While we are attempting to keep our content as up-to-date as possible, the situation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic continues to develop rapidly, so it's possible that some information and recommendations may have changed since publishing. For any concerns and latest advice, visit the World Health Organisation. If you're in the UK, the National Health Service can also provide useful information and support, while US users can contact the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

For more advice, visit the following recommended websites:

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When Will There Be A Coronavirus Vaccine? - esquire.com

The Daily Bruin isnt printing this quarter, but this isnt the first time weve scaled back on print production.

Just this week, the Daily Bruins upper management announced that the Daily Bruin would cease print production through the end of the 2019-2020 academic year, in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

After all, it doesnt really make much sense to print 6,000 copies of a student newspaper every day when most of the student body has left campus and instruction is entirely remote.

Originally, managements plan was to cease printing until April 10 in line with the schools initial plans to return for in-person instruction by week three. But the ever-changing nature of the pandemic has lead to the extension of remote instruction and, consequently, the extension of digital-only production for the Daily Bruin.

The Daily Bruin staff had to make a similar decision regarding print production back in the 1940s, when the United States entered World War II. In Aprils updated letter from the editors, The Bruins upper management notes that this is the first time since World War II that the paper has ceased to be printed five days a week. However, this is the first time in our entire history that the paper has ceased printing entirely during the war, the paper continued printing three days a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

While the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on The Bruin certainly draws parallels to that of World War II, the situation necessitated different responses in the way the paper scaled back its print production. The response to the current situation came relatively swiftly, but in the 1940s, the shifts in the papers production cycle were much slower and evolved throughout the course of the war.

As UCLA alumnus George Garrigues noted in his history of the Daily Bruin, the U.S. entered World War II right around the same time students were gearing up for finals. Late in the evening on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, the papers staff scratched its original layout for Mondays front page and replaced it with a number of articles about the bombing of Pearl Harbor from the United Press wire service with the bold-faced headline Japan Declares War!

Print production didnt slow down right away. Through the end of the semester this was decades before the university switched over to the quarter system, of course Garrigues writes that war news blanketed The Bruins front page.

The paper did produce a shortened version on Dec. 11 this was, however, unintentional. During wartime, governments across the world used to impose blackouts, during which lights would be shut off for short periods of time, in an effort to prepare for potential attacks as well as to make it more difficult for bombers to navigate urban areas that would normally be well-lit at night. Garrigues writes that the first U.S. blackout of the war struck Southern California on Dec. 10, 1941 and the Daily Bruin editors had to publish a shortened three-page paper, composed of a broadsheet front page and two compact tabloid pages following it.

Due to the loss of time during last nights blackout the Daily Bruin today appears in a form unique in the annals of journalism a three-page paper, wrote the then-Editor-in-Chief Malcolm Steinlauf on the front page of the paper.

It wasnt until 1943 that the papers print format began to change for good. As staffers were drafted into the war, the size of the staff shrank, and so did the paper. On Jan. 4, 1943, The Bruin switched from the lengthy broadsheet layout it had been printing for decades before and as it is typically printed today to a smaller tabloid one, comparable in size and shape to that of papers like LA Weekly.

Later that year, the paper shifted to printing only three times a week. Following the publication of the papers 1943 Registration Issue, The Bruin began publishing three times a week during the week of July 5 (Interestingly, The Bruin only publishes a paper once a week during summer sessions nowadays).

In terms of wartime content, Garrigues notes that The Bruin took a largely liberal stance, with especial opposition against the internment of Japanese Americans; conservative groups in particular, those investigating communism at UCLA did not look upon The Bruin favorably. Then-dean Earl J. Miller even went as far as saying that UCLA would be better off without a school newspaper entirely, Garrigues writes.

Luckily, Miller didnt get his way as we all know, the paper survived opposition from conservative admins and readers. Following the end of the war, the paper resumed daily production, and has consistently published five days a week since fall of 1945. Until today, that is, when the pandemic once again puts us in a situation in which print production is not in the best interest of our students or staff.

Fortunately for the UCLA community, were living in an age in which cutting print production doesnt hold quite the same weight that it would have in the 1940s had the Daily Bruins then-upper management decided to cease printing the paper entirely, its possible there would have been no Daily Bruin at all. It goes without saying that temporarily switching to a digital-only media source would have been, well, impossible without any sort of internet to get things going.

While reading Daily Bruin stories online might not have the same novelty as picking up a paper and skimming through it on your daily walk to class, its a reminder that were all going through different adjustments to the current pandemic and doing our best to get through this safely and sanely. Just like The Bruin returned full-time in 1945, the papers staff is excited to come back to Kerckhoff Hall 118 and get the printers running once its safe to do so again whenever that may be.

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Press Pass: Looking back on when the Daily Bruin reduced print production during World War II - Daily Bruin

This story was initially printed on 2019/07/06 7:00am PDTJul 6, 2019 and final up to date 2020/04/09 2:25pm PDTApr 9, 2020.

With many people working from house, it may be exhausting to get paperwork signed and despatched the place they should go if you do not have a scanner round to show them into PDFs. Paper remains to be a persistent a part of life nowadays, even when it would really feel a bit dated, and coordinating the conversion from real-world object right into a file youll be able to e-mail may be obnoxious, however your telephone can really deal with it for you. The truth is, you could not even want to put in a separate app.

There are many methods youll be able to generate PDFs in a pinch, and possibly 100 apps that declare to do it, however well be specializing in three good methods from three particular and well-known apps to generate PDFs from real-world paperwork: Google Drive, Adobe Scan, and Microsoft Workplace Lens.

Since every has its personal benefits, youll be able to determine for your self. Basically, I would suggest Drive for those who solely have to scan a doc a few times, because its most likely already put in in your telephone and can prevent time. Nevertheless, our readers favourite is Workplace Lens, and for those whore coping with scanning paperwork continuously, it is undoubtedly your most suitable option.

The explanations to make use of Google Drive in your PDF wants are:

Creating PDFs in Google Drive on Android is straightforward:

Left: The floating motion button opens a menu (proper) which incorporates the Scan possibility for creating PDFs.

Simply open the app, faucet the + floating motion button within the nook, and within the ensuing menu, choose scan.

Line up, assessment, and tweak the images youre taking for PDFs in Drive.

Line up the doc within the viewfinder, making an attempt to verify all 4 corners are seen and that your view is largely flat, and take the photograph. (Holding the doc together with your fingers whereas scanning is feasible, however you may must be cautious.) After a little bit of processing, Drive then offers you the choice to assessment and settle for or reject the photograph earlier than importing it into the PDF. Faucet the large checkmark whenever you assume the photograph is nice sufficient, and the app will appropriate for some distortion and import the doc in black and white (by default) to the PDF.

Drive can robotically appropriate for perspective, too, so that you neednt fear too a lot if you cannot snag the proper shot, it would stretch and tweak issues to compensate all by itself, although some content material would possibly find yourself a bit off-kilter.

Extra choices are nested in different menus.

From this display youll be able to add extra pages to the present doc (+ icon), re-capture any web page that has already been added (the reload/redo icon), alter the crop/distortion correction (crop icon within the prime proper nook), change shade settings (palette icon within the prime proper nook), and delete, rotate, or rename the scan (all by the overflow three-dot menu prime proper). Additional choices within the nested settings menu can help you change paper dimension, orientation, and picture high quality, although the defaults must be high-quality for many of us.

When youre pleased with the outcomes, simply faucet the checkmark within the backside proper. Drive will ask you the place to put it aside in Google Drive and what to call it. After you faucet Save within the backside proper nook, it must be there. Congrats, youve got simply made a PDF together with your telephone.

Google Drive can do OCR, but it surelys a separate operate.

You may also get PDFs captured on this method to generate into textual content paperwork through OCR, but it surelys a multi-step course of. You may have to both open the PDF once more later in Google Docs as a doc or toggle a setting in Google Drive to vary how uploaded paperwork are dealt with (Convert uploaded information to Google Docs editor format in Settings -> Normal from the desktop website). Googles OCR is fairly good with textual content, however unusual formatting or uncommon languages, symbols, or graphics can typically confuse it, so plan to assessment it later for errors.

In the event you want a distinct set of options than what Google Drives app can present, and also youre keen to surrender the deeper integration with G Suites providers, Adobe Scan could also be extra your type. Its benefits embody:

The method for Adobe Scan is not rather more sophisticated than its on Drive, however Id say its a little much less user-friendly.

Adobe Scan can seize images robotically and do perspective correction, too.

While you open the app (and grant it the permissions it requires to operate), you may be introduced on to a digicam viewfinder. Scrolling left or proper by the carousel on the backside lets you choose between sorts of paperwork. The Aperture icon subsequent to the shutter button controls Auto-Seize, which permits Adobe Scan to take images of paperwork robotically as soon as theyre in body, and I would encourage you to have it on since it may possibly save a while. Both means, youll be able to nonetheless seize paperwork manually with the shutter button.

Adobe Scan is not fairly pretty much as good at selecting up the perimeters of paperwork for perspective correction in my expertise, but it surely affords the possibility to appropriate the crop for every merchandise as its scanned (by default, after sufficient scans it would ask if you would like to disable that).

The UI is not fairly as clear as Drive relating to advancing steps. The gallery icon is how you progress ahead as soon as youve got taken all of your images.

Upon getting captured the entire paperwork you wish to be included in a given PDF, faucet the gallery icon to the underside proper and it takes you to a display the place youll be able to assessment the contents.

Adobe Scan could make PDFs from photos youve got already taken or downloaded.

(In the event youd desire to make a PDF from photos that have been beforehand taken, the icon to the underside left on the seize display which appears to be like like a stack of images lets you import them into the app to generate a doc from.)

Choices for tweaking PDFs are higher labeled in Adobe Scan.

From the assessment display, youll be able to rename the PDF (textual content/pencil icon prime middle), or use the navigation bar on the backside to do issues like add extra pages, reorder gadgets, change the crop, rotate photos, choose shade settings, or delete pages.

When you may have the PDF and its contents in a spot that you just prefer it, tapping Save PDF within the prime left nook saves it domestically, dumping you to the default current record of paperwork in Adobe Scan.

A number of methods to open and share PDFs.

From right here youll be able to share present paperwork, open them in Acrobat, and fill them out/signal them through the Adobe Acrobat app. After a brief little bit of processing, the information listed right here additionally embody OCR textual content. If you might want to get them off of your machine (which might be the entire level of producing a PDF), youll be able to share the information through that aptly-named share button. Choices embody capturing off a hyperlink to the file saved on Adobes Doc Cloud, sending the file through E mail, or youll be able to cross the file to a different app through an intent with Share a duplicate.

One phrase of warning: Ive run into points with non-link, standalone PDF information generated by Adobe Scan. It is clear that Adobe tries to push customers into sharing PDFs through hyperlinks over providers it may possibly cost for slightly than the information instantly (there is no possibility to simply save/export the PDF as a file to a selected location, for instance). Nevertheless, a few of the information it has generated for me have had points and could not be opened, although the web hyperlinks created on the similar time labored high-quality. YMMV, in my expertise, Drive does a greater job dealing with PDFs as precise information.

Adding Microsoft Office Lens

Originally, this list didnt include Microsofts app, but we were urged to add it by our readers. They werent wrong, its the easiest and most intuitive scanning solution weve tried, and were sorry it took so long to check it out.

Of the three options here, Microsoft Office Lens is probably the best. Whether youre deeply integrated into Microsofts Office suite and services or not, its pretty fast and easy with a dead-simple interface and all the tools you probably need.

If youre scanning documents regularly from your phone, this is the app you should be using. Its perks include:

Of all of the apps on this record, it is the simplest to make use of:

Left: Firing up the app for the primary time. Middle: Viewfinder. Proper: Deciding on photos from the digicam roll.

Simply obtain the app, hearth it up, grant it the required permissions, and also youre off. Other than an interstitial display that you will see the very first time you launch it (above left), you may at all times be dumped straight to the viewfinder (above middle), as with Adobes app.

The viewfinder has all of the instruments you want instantly accessible with only a few faucets. Alongside the underside of the viewfinder, beneath the shutter, are completely different modes youll be able to change between primarily based on what you are scanning. You may most likely simply use the default doc mode, however youll be able to shortly change to scanning enterprise playing cards, images, and whiteboards as effectively, every of which triggers its personal preset modes. Above the shutter is your digicam roll, providing easy accessibility to photographs youve got already captured together with your digicam app simply faucet the photographs you want so as to add to a doc after which faucet the orange arrow that seems to the best of the shutter button (above proper). You may also faucet the /gallery icon to get to a file picker if you might want to manually navigate to photographs exterior the digicam roll.

While youve obtained the doc lined up within the viewfinder, an orange-red rectangle signifies that it has a stable lock on its perspective and dimensions (which it may possibly robotically crop and proper for). Simply be aware that for those who take images on a grid-like background such as you see pictured above, it would bug out a bit with that computerized cropping. Theres a guide crop instrument if that occurs, although, and solely very particular circumstances like that triggered any misbehavior for me.

Tweaking photos earlier than you flip them right into a doc could be very straightforward.

While youve captured a web page in your doc, the workflow to tweak its easy. If you might want to add one other web page to your doc, faucet the Add New button, and youre taken again to the viewfinder so as to add one other picture repeat that course of as obligatory with every web page of the doc.

When a number of photos are loaded in, youll be able to swipe between pages by scrolling left and proper. There are filters for those who desire to transform your paperwork to black and white, and many others., simply accessible with a fast swipe up.

Alongside the highest of the display, you may have many of the different, much less continuously used choices. You possibly can delete photos within the present doc, change their crop, rotate photos, change their doc kind (which adjusts pre-set filters), make a textual content overlay, or draw on the doc. With pinch-to-zoom working, youll be able to even add a signature or annotate, if you might want to.

Easy export course of.

While youre achieved, faucet Achieved, and also you get choices for how one can save your doc. In the event you reserve it to your Android telephones gallery, that saves it as a JPEG picture, however there are alternatives to save lots of a PDF file to your telephones storage as effectively. You may also ship the picture to OneDrive, PowerPoint, or OneNote, and paperwork may be imported to Microsoft Phrase for OCR for those who desire to transform it into textual content.

When the doc has been saved in a selected format, you are dumped to a listing of information youve got created within the app, from there youll be able to share or delete them through the three-dot menu on every. If I needed to provide you with one grievance about this app, it is that a share possibility may very well be built-in into the export display earlier than this one, however that is a really minor concern.

Now you already know three other ways of constructing a PDF in your Android-powered telephone. Drive is probably going essentially the most handy alternative for customers in a pinch, however for those who scan paperwork commonly, you owe it to your self to strive Microsoft Workplace Lens, it is simply the very best doc scanning resolution we have used.

No matter you select, youve got obtained choices greater than we even listed right here. So the following time you assume you may should discover a scanner to place collectively a PDF, keep in mind that the telephone in your pocket is completely able to dealing with it.

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Top 10 Best Weight Loss And Thermogenics 2020 - Best gaming pro

Intermittent fasting (IF) is not new. Many religious traditions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Orthodox Christianity have practiced forms of it. These methods were predominantly due to food shortages or spiritual pursuits. Today IF is most often promoted as a weight-loss regimen, and there is some evidence that it is useful in that capacity. One extensive review found that it not only helps with obesity, but also hypertension, inflammation, and insulin resistance.

Proponents swear by its efficacy. In reality, intermittent fasting is just about closing your feeding window: don't eat first thing in the morning (or breakfast at all), don't eat for two hours (or longer) before bed. It's a practical approach to eating, yet, as with everything in our time, it has to be packaged and marketed to be sold as a lifestyle. That's not to say that IF isn't effective. It's just not miraculous.

One honest debate that has persisted for years is how long to fast for. Twelve hours? Sixteen? Twenty? A new study, published in the journal Brain and Behavior, set out to answer this question with a specific goal in mind: how does intermittent fasting affect neurogenesis?

While neurogenesis is most active in embryos, neuron creation is possible throughout life. The more you can achieve this as you age, the better, especially in areas like your brain's hippocampusthe focus of this study. The main duties of the hippocampus is the consolidation of experiences and information as you store short-term memories as long-term memories and spatial navigation, which is another form of memory. In Alzheimer's disease, your hippocampus is usually the first brain region to suffer.

For this study, three groups of rats were tested, with a fourth control group receiving no eating restrictions. One group fasted for 12 hours, another for 16, and the final group fasted for 24 hours (on the second day they ate without restriction as well). All groups were given the same number of calories.

The three restricted groups all fared better in terms of hippocampal neurogenesis than the control group. Interestingly, the 16-hour group performed best, especially when tested for increased activation of the Notch signaling pathwayspecifically, the NOTCH1 pathway (mammals have four). This pathway is implicated in the brain's ability to form new neuronal connections. This process allows us to form new memories, which is one reason why hippocampal neurogenesis helps to keep dementia at bay.

The study adds another piece to the puzzle of how dietspecifically in this case, when you eataffects cognitive health. Judging by these results, it appears that restricting your feeding window to eight hours a day can have profound effects.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

The benefits do not stop with neurogenesis. As the Singapore-based team writes,

"Prophylactic IF has been shown to promote longevity as well as ameliorate the development and manifestation of agerelated diseases such as cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and metabolic diseases in many animal studies. It has also been postulated that IF is able to cause changes in the metabolic pathways in the brain, which leads to stress resistance capacity of brain cells."

This follows up previous research that found intermittent fasting has positive effects on the liver, immune system, heart, and brain, as well as the body's ability to fight cancer. While specifics, such as fasting duration and caloric load, remain to be seenmost likely, those will have to be decided on an individual basisthis is another win for the IF crowd. Closing your feeding window appears to have many beneficial effects for overall health.

--

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His next book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

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How intermittent fasting changes your brain - Big Think

The 2021 Lexus LC 500 and LC 500h luxury-performance coupe are now equipped with modest performance updates. Its now 22 pounds lighter than last years model, and it thankfully receives Android Auto along with standard Apple CarPlay and Amazon Alexa. Lexus refused to tinker with the LCs glorious 5.0-liter V8 engine, but it gave the new model a lighter and fresher set of legs to improve handling, stability, and driving feel.

Now, the Lexus LC was never intended for track duty, and nor was it conceived to break lap records. Instead, the LC is a fabulous GT car with dollops of comfort and the muscle to back up its supercar-inspired styling. But the biggest news for the 2021 LC is reduced unsprung weight, so maybe less is more in this case.

The weight loss is courtesy of lighter suspension components. Lexus installed new aluminum lower suspension arms and hollow stabilizers to shave weight. It also replaced the old coil springs for a set of high-strength springs crafted from new lightweight material. Oddly enough, Lexus replaced the 21-inch rear wheels for a set of lighter rims, but only in the back of the car, which may have something to do with weight balancing.

Once the weight loss regimen was complete, Lexus shifted its efforts is recalibrating the suspension tuning. The goal was to provide a supple ride without disconnecting the driver from the road, so Lexus tinkered with the electric front shocks and lengthened the suspension stroke, optimized the bound stopper rigidity, and firmed up the rear stabilizers. According to Lexus, the changes were enough to enhance the front turn-in stability of the coupe while providing a linear steering feel.

If all of this sounds like the recipe for tuning a track-ready sports car, youre right. But then again, the LC is not meant for track duty, but its clear Lexus was aiming for more athleticism without ruining the LCs aristocratic road manners. Theres also a new vehicle stability control system for the LC 500 and LC 500h. The new system now has active cornering assist (ACA) that automatically applies braking pressure on the inner wheels when cornering.

Next, Lexus shifted its efforts to the standard 10-speed automatic gearbox. In the 2021 LC 500, the transmissions new shift logic software allows the engine to cream further before shifting into the next gear. Meanwhile, the 2021 LC 500h will now execute downshifts in second gear (instead of third) when attacking fast, hairpin turns, allowing the hybrid coupe to rocket more aggressively like a true sports car.

The changes continue inside the car. New leather options include Circuit Red instead of the usual Rioja Red upholstery in the old car, but you can still have Black or Toasted Caramel upholstery if you dont like red leather seats. Theres also a meatier steering wheel to further bolster the new LCs athletic demeanor.

The 2021 Lexus LC 500 remains powered by a 5.0-liter V8 engine with 471-horsepower and 398 pound-feet of torque. With a revised 10-speed automatic gearbox and rear-wheel-drive, the LC can rocket to 60 mph in 4.4-seconds while still achieving a highway-rated 25 mpg.

Meanwhile, the 2021 Lexus LC 500h is equipped with a Multistage Hybrid System. It has a 3.5-liter V6 gasoline engine and two electric motors. With a combined output of 354 horsepower, the Lexus LC 500h is a technological showcase with a high-power battery pack and a revolutionary CVT transmission with four conventional gears.

Both the 2021 Lexus LC 500 and LC 500h are arriving at Lexus dealerships later this year. Pricing and other specifics will be announced at a later date. New paint colors for 2021 include Nori Green Pearl and Cadmium Orange.

More:
2021 Lexus LC 500 and LC 500h receive modest updates and Android Auto - SlashGear

Many of us are experiencing heightened anxiety during this global coronavirus crisis. In response, Tricycle is offering free access to select articles to support your practice during this uncertain time.

On March 5, 2020 at 7:23 p.m., I receive a WhatsApp message from a close friend in Bangkok:

Hey guys I think youre either just about arriving in the States or already there; hope the journey went smoothly. Ive been seeing a number of news articles lately about coronavirus-related racism against Asians in the US so be sure to stay safe both from the virus and the racism!

My husband and I do indeed land safely in California. Were wearing face masks, as are the majority of our fellow passengers on both legs of the journeyBangkok to Taipei, Taipei to San Francisco. I expect as much. Over the past two months, noses and chins and cheeks had been disappearing with increasing regularity on my metro rides in Bangkok; Id taken to admiring the colorful coverings on the faces around me.

Arriving in America, I anticipate coronavirus questionnaires, screening stations, informative signs from the Centers for Disease Controlhaving encountered all of these when I arrived at Taiwans Taoyuan airport on a February trip to Taipei. I am met with none of these at San Francisco International Airport. Its disconcerting. The level of concern about the rapidly spreading coronavirus seems strangely low here.

I suddenly feel self-conscious in my mask.

Most of my relatives live in China. Thailand, where I had been living since October 2018, was the first country outside of China to confirm a case of the novel coronavirus. It was on my radar well before the World Health Organization coined the names for the disease and the virus on February 11: COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2.

On March 16, the US president started using his own termthe Chinese virus. Despite the widespread use of an existing appellation that doesnt besmirch a geographic location or an entire group of people. Despite the stigmatizing effects of his word choice and the corresponding rise in verbal and physical attacks against Chinese (and other Asian) Americans.

Still, after eight months abroad, its good to be back in the country where I grew up, the country whose primary language became my mother tongue after I immigrated here at the age of four. I greet my in-laws at the airport with elation but, just to be safe, not hugs. At their house, showering is the first order of business, followed by washing my fabric mask in the sink and replacing its charcoal filter. I fight the urge to fall asleep at 5:00pm. I go for a walk outside, greedily breathing in the cool, fresh aira scarce commodity in Bangkok.

both from the virus and the racism

Reading our Thai friends text, I feel my breathing constrict. I may not be able to speak the national language with ease in Thailand, but I enjoy a privilege there that I seldom access in the US: being a member of the racial and religious majority, as a person of Asian heritage and a Buddhist. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a white Christian in Americanever having to give a second thought to whether the shape of your eyes or the religious icon around your neck makes you a target for harassment.

***

The unrelenting air pollution in Bangkok that ushered in the new year, compounded two weeks later by coronavirus fears that only increased with each passing day, kept me almost entirely homebound for the first two months of 2020. Finishing my book manuscript kept me occupied. Without realizing it, I was practicing what would soon be known as social distancing.

In those two months, I spent a lot of time on Angry Asian Buddhist. My late friend Aaron J. Lee started the blog in 2009 to counter the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Asian American Buddhists, who make up two-thirds of American Buddhists. Contrary to what his online moniker might suggest, Aaron was motivated to speak up out of love and concern for American Buddhist communities. His work inspired me to write a masters thesis on young adult Asian American Buddhists. Aarons death from cancer at the age of 34 impelled me not to give up in the struggle to secure a publisher for the book that emerged from that research project.

Contrary to some of his detractors accusations, Aaron did not hate white Buddhists. In fact, he often praised their efforts, as in an August 2011 blog post where he celebrated an essay by Soto Zen priest Alan Senuake titled On Race and Buddhism. In the essay, Rev. Senauke writes about how racism and white supremacy are rooted in seeing people as Otherand reminds us that American Buddhism is not free from these pernicious ideas, which are like a virus in society. Revisiting Alans words, I realize that SARS-CoV-2 is not the only virus we need to confront and protect ourselves against.

***

Eleven days after landing at SFO, our Bay Area county is placed under shelter-in-place orders. By March 19, all of California is under shelter-in-place orders. As the number of infections and deaths rise, and as the likelihood of my returning to Bangkok plummets, anxiety overwhelms me.

On March 22, I seek solace in a Zoom meeting for a recently established dharma circle for Buddhist practitioners of Asian heritage. The organizers had expected a handful of attendees, but there were fully eighteen of us on the call. After a lovingkindness meditation, each of the practitioners checks in one by one. I hear concerns about family members (How to make sure Mom and Dad and the in-laws stay safe? How to keep the kids entertained?). Aspirations to deepen Buddhist practice (How to meet empty shelves with greater equanimity? How to practice generosity when others are hoarding?). Someone relates her fear and frustration at the presidents repeated use of the phrase Chinese virus, and her hurt from an incident in which she was regarded with alarm and suspicion by a stranger on the street. Onscreen, heads nod in empathetic agreement.

At the end of our meeting, we read the Karaniya Metta Sutta together. For me, this moment of taking refuge in Buddhist teachingsand practicing with spiritual friendsprovides succor amid the panic.

This is what should be doneBy one who is skilled in goodnessAnd who knows the path of peaceLet none deceive another,Or despise any being in any state.Let none through anger or ill-willWish harm upon anotherThis is said to be the sublime abiding.By not holding to fixed views,The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,Being freed from all sense desires,Is not born again into this world

***

Of course, you and I have been born into this world, with a host of desires that may be asserting themselves more acutely than usual during this pandemic (Who knew a mountain of toilet paper could provide such a sense of security?). The practice of lovingkindness, which involves not holding to fixed views and loosening attachments, is just that: a practice. The fear and uncertainty and xenophobia that COVID-19 have unmasked present a challenge to practicea challenge in the sense of both obstacle and impetus.

The day after the Asian American dharma circle, a headline appears in the New York Times: Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety. That day, March 23, the president refrains from saying Chinese virus at his press briefing, but doesnt publicly condemn the racist attacks. Many wonder if it is too little, too late. The Times article explains that Asian Americans are afraid to wear face masks for fear of being targetedthough those who arent wearing masks have also been attacked. As Chinese American high school student Katherine Oung puts it, Not only do we have to be afraid about our health, we have to be afraid about being ourselves.

Reading the statisticsChina having flattened its curve, Italy and Spain and the US failing to do soone might imagine a world in which it would be white people who are being spit on, yelled at, attacked. Not that this thought brings any comfort. More to the point, such reverse racism scenarios erase historical and systemic realities: as many scholars and activists have pointed out, anti-Asian discriminationthe concept of the yellow peril and the lumping together of Asians into a monolithic mass of perpetual foreignershas a long history in America. Yet the saddest part of the Times article may be the reported rise in gun sales to first-time Chinese American buyers. A gun shop owner recounts how one woman teared up upon being asked why she was there: To protect my daughter.

Even as a mother protects with her lifeHer child, her only child,So with a boundless heartShould one cherish all living beings

In this surreal time, we hold these timeless wishes to be safe and happy, protected and cherished. Time marches on. We tune in to the news with heavy hearts. Time stands still. We pause to reflect on how we might alleviate even the tiniest portion of this crush of suffering. Time circles back. We turn to faith and ritual and story and the other inheritances that we are stewarding for future generations, at once retaining them for posterity and adapting them to ever-changing circumstances.

***

On March 5, 2020 at 9:40 p.m., I receive a WhatsApp message from a dear friend in San Francisco. Id hoped to see her in person this coming weekend, but shes already sheltering in place. Being overseas, Id missed our ten-year college reunion the previous autumn. I was especially sad not to be there to open the time capsule a small group of us had been saving for the occasion. Among the treasures in the capsule was a letter from one of our dorm mates who died in 2016.

The Whatsapp message my friend sends is a photo of that letter.

For the first time, I feel like I am letting myself feel the weight of a major life change as it is happening

What will these next years bring?

How will I do in life?

My health?

My friends health?

Its a letter to herself, but its also a letter to all of us. On the bottom third of that single sheet of lined notebook paper, each of us gets a line, our names followed by a string of qualities: honesty, caring, vigor, sincerity, dedication. And then, the last line.

Me: scared, loving, sad, grateful.

I read in that whisper of a word, me, the collective voice of this world in limbo that she isnt here to witness. I allow myself to be racked by sobs. I let myself grieve.

***

There will be grief to come. There will be sickness and death, the loss of jobs and dreams and lives. But there will also be hope. There will be health and (re)birth. There will be new livelihoods and new visions. Destruction will not foreclose creativity, tears will not eradicate laughter. Suffering sows the seeds of change; what these seeds will yield depends on how each and everyone one of us chooses to conduct ourselves in body, speech, and mind.

If this novel coronavirus is a Chinese virus, we are all Chinese. More accurately, it is a global virus that has already impacted all of us. The American president declares us at war with an invisible enemy, but I prefer less martial metaphors.

The Buddha is often likened to a physician. He diagnosed the unsatisfactoriness of the human condition and revealed its cause. The Buddha was no doomsayer, however: his teachings were treatments that promised a cure, an ultimate freedom from that which ails us. SARS-CoV-2 is a truth-teaching virus. It has revealed to me a deep well of fear: of my loved ones dying, of dying myself (or, during more mundane moments, of running out of brown rice). More incisively, it has revealed societys disturbing inequities and gross iniquities, forcing us to confront the truth of how the most vulnerable among usthe poor, the disabled, the unhoused, and the otherwise marginalizedbear the brunt of this crisis.

I hope we do everything we can to support these vulnerable populations, and to demand that our elected officials do the same. I hope we remember to wash our hands thoroughly and often, practicing physical distancing and social solidarity with inspiration and joy. I hope we stand against instances of racism against Asian Americans and other racial minoritiesduring this crisis, and after it has passed. I hope we seek support in Buddhist (and non-Buddhist) friends and teachers, stories and rituals, art and music.

May we be free from the ills that plague us. May we find and make the refuges we need, not only to survive the difficult now, but to thrive in our yet-to-be-determined shared future.

See more here:
Stay Safe Both from the Virus and the Racism - Tricycle

These days, death and the rites that come with it are quieter, more cautious affairs than before the coronavirus pandemic struck.

Many factors have combined to make this a bad time for funerals, whether someone has died from the coronavirus or not. There's a shelter-at-home order in effect to deter travel, and a Bay Area-wide limit of 10 people for funeral services. Households that have been exposed to the coronavirus are expected to self-quarantine.

And yet, with 43 COVID-19 related deaths in Santa Clara County and 21 reported in San Mateo County, as of Tuesday, the need for funerary and mortuary services remains high.

Local representatives from cemeteries, mortuaries and funeral homes spoke about the difficult balance they must strike as they seek to help survivors grieve for their loved ones in traditional manners without jeopardizing anybody's health or safety.

Death in the age of coronavirus

When someone dies from the coronavirus, a whole network of agencies, all well-adapted to minimizing exposure to germs, springs into action.

At the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office, staff are following existing sanitation protocols, according to Chief Medical Examiner Michelle Jorden. The medical examiner's office requires staff members to wear personal protective equipment when examining those who have died and practice good hand-washing hygiene. Now, they've also implemented social distancing protocols.

The county's morgue can hold about 112 bodies, said Jorden, and the medical examiner's office does have a mass fatality plan in place. It is prepared to handle an increased number of deaths, she said in a statement.

For people who work in mortuary or funeral industries and regularly interact with the bodies of those who have died from the coronavirus, the latest guidance on personal protection and hygiene is more or less in line with existing best practices.

Taking precautions to avoid infectious diseases isn't anything new, said Matt Cusimano, funeral director at Cusimano Family Colonial Mortuary, which has been in operation in Mountain View since 1957.

During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, when people still had many questions and fears about the HIV virus, there were similar concerns about how to keep those who work with decedents who had the virus safe, he said.

The mortuary follows the practices laid out by the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau and takes what are called universal precautions. Embalmers wear personal protective equipment such as a respirator and face plate, double their gloves and wear a smock.

"We're very careful with every case. I would imagine that when we do get a person who's passed away from coronavirus, that's what we would use," he said.

If there were to be a large number of deaths in Santa Clara County, Cusimano said, he believes that local funeral directors would come together to serve families and help them make arrangements.

"It'd be a really unusual funeral director that wouldn't want to participate in something like that," he said. "We all know each other."

Right now is a hard time for families and communities, he said. "It's just tough on everybody."

For family and friends of people who die from COVID-19, though, the latest public health guidelines may be new.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the coronavirus is believed to be transmitted primarily through an infected person's respiratory droplets. Therefore, getting sick from proximity to a person infected with the coronavirus through this mode of transmission is not a concern after death.

However, the CDC is still figuring out how the virus spreads, and it may be possible to get it from touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching one's nose or mouth. It advises people who are at high risk of developing complications from COVID-19, such as seniors and people with underlying health conditions, to consider not touching a body that has died from the coronavirus.

"There may be less of a chance of the virus spreading from certain types of touching, such as holding the hand or hugging after the body has been prepared for viewing," the health agency reports. It also advises avoiding kissing, washing or shrouding the body.

"If washing the body or shrouding are important religious or cultural practices, families are encouraged to work with their community cultural and religious leaders and funeral home staff on how to reduce their exposure as much as possible. At a minimum, people conducting these activities should wear disposable gloves," it adds.

Grieving-in-place

In many situations, figuring out how to celebrate the life of the deceased is the next big challenge. And it's a challenge made more complex by a strict shelter-in-place order that limits the number of people who can attend funerals to 10. Grieving families are faced with another difficult decision: Who gets to attend the service?

Cemeteries like the Gate of Heaven in Los Altos are having to adjust their procedures and help people find new ways to grieve and mourn that don't increase the risk of spreading the disease.

"We were one of the first to have to figure out, 'What is this going to look like? What kind of procedures do we need to put in place?'" said Heather Gloster, director of cemeteries for the Catholic Diocese of San Jose, which operates the Los Altos cemetery.

A member of the diocese was the first person in Santa Clara County to die of the coronavirus, said Gloster. She was a woman in her 60s who died March 9 at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View.

"We have to protect ourselves and the community," Gloster said, which means making some changes to how faithful Catholics might minister to one another. "We can't provide the physical comfort of a hug, or really cry with the family, (but) we can still pray with them," she said.

In some situations, even a limited number of family members are barred from attending. For instance, if a person dies from COVID-19 in their home, rather than at a hospital, where they may have been in isolation for some time, immediate family members in that household may be directed to self-quarantine for weeks, Gloster said.

In those scenarios, the diocese may conduct a direct burial, in which nobody is present except for cemetery staff and a priest. Families can livestream the burials, she said.

The shift to virtual services has happened rapidly. It was only a few weeks ago, when gatherings for mass were canceled, that the diocese acted to quickly adopt Zoom and video conferencing to provide religious services to homebound parishioners, she said.

Other local mortuaries have yet to see their first death from COVID-19.

"We're worried about it," said Sarah Tapia, an administrator at Spangler Mortuaries, which has locations in Mountain View, Los Altos and Sunnyvale. "We're unsure of what to expect."

The mortuary has switched to making funeral arrangements remotely, which has made the logistical work of funeral arrangements more difficult, Tapia said. "It's easier for things to slip through the cracks."

In addition, the mortuary recently set up the technology to offer livestreamed services. According to one staff member, the facility was in the process of organizing a livestreamed Hindu funeral service, which would be able to be attended virtually by friends and family members in India.

Delayed grief

Not being able to gather to mourn the loss of a loved one, on top of so much community upheaval, Gloster said, may lead people to experience a delayed sense of grief.

Pointing to the concept laid out in Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, she said, people often need to have their basic physical needs met before they can move on to addressing their emotional and mental health needs. Many people who lose a loved one right now are already dealing with so many changes a lost job, financial stress. As a result, many are focused more on surviving than grieving.

"Hopefully it won't be that long, and our churches will open back up," Gloster said. "Until then, people are repressing it to kind of survive."

Without hugs, religious rituals or large gatherings where survivors can see their loved one's impact on the community, traditional bereavement practices are being interrupted, said Monica Williams, director of Catholic cemeteries for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, which includes Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties. The archdiocese also oversees the Holy Cross Cemetery in Menlo Park.

"We really need, as a people, rituals to say goodbye and help our grieving process," she said. "Grief is difficult on a good day. Grief is much more complicated right now."

As alternatives, she said, they're encouraging families that can't meet in large groups to consider gathering on FaceTime or Zoom at a specific time to share remarks, tell stories, pray, or to plan a gathering of family and friends at a later date to celebrate the deceased.

"We all need to support each other safely and kindly during these times," she said.

Resources and best practices

If you are feeling grief due to the loss of a loved one, or fears, worries and anxieties because of the coronavirus pandemic, Nick Arnett and Janet Childs of Kara, a local grief support nonprofit in Palo Alto, in a recent blog post offer people a few pieces of advice:

Know that you're not alone.

Make sure you're choosing good information sources and getting the facts, not rumors.

Be gentle with yourself and realize that forming new habits in response to change is difficult.

Understand that stress from the pandemic can trigger past trauma that can "cause you to notice and feel the weight of old injuries much more than before the world changed," Arnett and Childs write. That may mean a tendency to become grumpier and more irritable. You can help by being a safe person for others to talk to, talking to a supportive person who will keep your conversation confidential or writing in a journal.

People can also work on strengthening their physical, mental and/or spiritual strength and resilience by getting enough sleep, exercising, eating well, staying connected with friends and family, and thinking about one's values and priorities with a big-picture perspective. Gratitude and generosity help, too.

To request grief support services, call Kara at 650-321-5272 or fill out an online form in English or Spanish.

Find comprehensive coverage on the Midpeninsula's response to the new coronavirus by Palo Alto Online, the Mountain View Voice and the Almanac here.

Kate Bradshaw writes for the Mountain View Voice, the sister publication of The Almanac.

Read more:
'Grief is difficult on a good day.' How the coronavirus pandemic is reshaping the ways we mourn - The Almanac Online

Whether you don't have access to gym equipment like dumbbells right now or just ~need~ a break from the day-to-day and are looking for a solo form of exercise, there's never been a better time to set a running goallike running a mile a day.

As long as you have a pair of sneakers and a safe place to put one foot in front of the other, you're just minutes away from basking in all of the endorphins (and hopefully the sun) that come with a good run.

Even if running has never been your thing, working toward a daily mile is totally doable. "Most peopleincluding kidscould safely run or walk a mile per day with little to no risk of injury," says Steve Stonehouse, CPT, USATF run coach, and director of education for STRIDE. (Yep, walking breaks are totally acceptable, guys!)

Even seasoned runners should consider running a mile every day. "If you already have a regular running routine, increasing up to daily runs could improve your stamina and mood, too," adds Rebecca Kennedy, CPT, Peloton Master Tread Instructor.

So, yeah, if you needed a little extra push to get moving, this is it. But before you set that daily reminder to get out there and log that mile, there are a few things the pros want you to keep in mind.

As long as you do it safely (more on that soon), running a mile a day is a great way to support your overall health and fitness.

"You get all the benefits of running in general, like supporting cardiorespiratory fitness and bone health, without the volume of mileage that can potentially cause injury," says Stonehouse.

It's also a great way to guarantee you spend some time outdoors every dayand exercising outside has been shown to have greater psychological benefits, like a boosted mood and feeling calm, than sweating indoors, according to research from the American Psychological Association. (If you log your mile on a tread, though, even looking at nature scenes on a screen enhances your run's happiness-inducing effect, found a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.)

The average 150-pound person burns about 370 calories in 30 minutes of running at a 10 minute/mile pace, according to Harvard Medical School. Run a single mile at that pace and you'll burn about 123 calories.

While that's definitely something, it's likely not going to keep you progressing toward your goals long-term. "Your body is an incredibly adaptive machine and will adapt to the stresses of running a mile a day relatively quickly," explains Stonehouse.

If weight loss is your ultimate goal, you'll want to focus on training that helps you burn fat efficiently and build muscle. Which is why, ultimately, just running a mile a day won't do much to move the needle towards your long-term weight-loss goals; it simply doesn't burn enough calories. (Need a little inspo? Try one of these top calorie-burning exercises instead.)

Though logging a daily mile can be a great way to get moving and support your health and fitness goals, whether or not it supports muscle growth, too, depends on how you run it.

"Low-intensity cardio does not lead to muscle gain, a.k.a. hypertrophy," says Kennedy. If you run a mile at an easier or more moderate pace, you rely on type I (a.k.a. slow-twitch) muscle fibers, which support endurance exercise. (Picture a marathon runner.)

However, "sprinting is a great way to focus on muscle gain," Kennedy says. Sprinting recruits more muscle fibers, specifically type II (a.k.a. fast-twitch) muscle fibers, which support power production.

A surefire way to build that muscle? This equipment-free workout sculpts your lower body from home:

That said, sprinting just a total of one mile a day likely isn't enough to make noticeable muscle gains, says Kennedy. "In order to really put on muscle, you need to lift weights, eat enough to support muscle tissue breakdown and protein synthesis, and get adequate recovery."

Ultimately, can sprints support your progress? Totally. But will they do the job on their own? Not so much.

Before you vow to lace up your running shoes seven days a week, consider this: "If you don't run regularly and begin running every day, the steep increase in stress and impact puts pressure on your joints and ligaments. This could lead to potential injury," Kennedy says. So, if you don't have a current running routine, start with just one day of running per week and work yourself up to every day over the course of several weeks, she recommends.

Still, though, "running daily is not for everyone, just like power lifting every day isn't advisable," Kennedy says. So don't feel like if you haven't tried running a mile a day that you're missing out. There are plenty of other ways to reap similar benefits.

One of the biggest things to keep in mind is that, while you can totally build a tolerance to daily runs, switching up how you move from day to day can keep you feeling fresh, both in body and in mind.

Kennedy says her go-to way of incorporating a one-mile run into daily exercise is as a finisher. "It's an incredible way to feel accomplished at the end of a workout," she says. Whatever gas you've got left in the tank, burn through it in that mile.

Or, if you take your daily mile at an easier pace, it works well as a warm-up, too.

The bottom line: Running a mile a day can support your overall fitness and cardiovascular health, but don't expect it to build major muscle or eliminate the need for other types of exercise.

Here is the original post:
Running A Mile A Day: The Pros And Cons For Your - Women's Health