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10 Cozy Detective Series You Need In Your Life – CrimeReads

If I were to sum up what makes a cozy mystery in just one word, the word I would choose is connection. Yes, cozies have other characteristics, including no graphic violence, no profanity, and no overt sexual behavior, but at their core these stories are about how we connect with one another. Its these connections and the loyalties that come with them that motivate the protagonist to try to solve the crime. Its these same bondsor lack of themthat motivate others to help or hinder these efforts. And one of the reasons cozy mysteries are so popular with readers is because they feel a connection to the characters as well.

Traditionally, cozy mysteries are set in a small townSt. Marys Mead in Agatha Christies classic Miss Marple novels and Cabot Cove, Maine, in the popular TV show, Murder She Wrote. My own Magical Cats series takes place in Mayville Heights, Minnesota, which in some ways is like the small town where I grew up. But there are also cozies that take place in big cities. Cleo Coyles Coffeehouse series is set in New York, Greenwich Village to be specific. Leslie Budewitzs Spice Shop mysteries are based in Seattle, while Los Angeles is the setting for Jennifer Chows Sassy Cat books.

Whether the plot unfolds in a charming small town or a bustling metropolis, its the relationships the main character has with the people in her town or her neighborhoodfriends, family, coworkersthat make her uniquely able to solve the crime that has disrupted her community. The conventional cozy sleuth isnt a professional. She doesnt work for the police. Shebecause the character has almost always been femaleis often a white woman between the ages of about 30 and 45, not withstanding Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher. However, those traditional parameters are expanding as we look to our entertainment choices to be more reflective of our lives and our world. As new authors join the genre, more cozy mysteries are featuring protagonists that dont fit the traditional amateur sleuth definition with respect to gender, age and ethnicity, allowing more readers to see themselves reflected in the stories.

EJ Coppermans (Jeff Cohen) Aspergers Mysteriesthere are five books in the seriesfeature Samuel Hoenig, who has Aspergers Syndrome. Samuels strength is his logical and literal way of looking at things. Jane Darrowfield from Barbara Rosss Jane Darrowfield Mysteries is retired and bills herself as a professional busybody.

Alexia Gordons Gethsemane Brown is African-American. Mimi Lee from Jennifer Chows Sassy Cat mysteries is Chinese, while Raquel Reyes new Caribbean Kitchen mysteries showcase cooking show star and amateur sleuth, Miriam Quiones-Smith, who is Cuban-American. Frank Anthony Politos new cozy series, which debuted in May, features gay couple, Peter and JP. Like the classic cozy sleuths that came before them, its the connections these new characters have in their communities that help them solve a crime.

Here are ten cozy mysteries that all expand the classic definition of an amateur sleuth.

Mimi Lee Gets a Clue by Jennifer J. Chow

Mimi Lee has a lot on her plate. Shes started a pet grooming business, her mother is determined to find her a husband, and shes the number one suspect in the murder of a local pet breeder.

Murder in G Major by Alexia Gordon

Classically trained musician, Gethsemane Brown, is stranded in the Irish countryside, tasked with turning a group of boys into an orchestra. At least shes staying in a cozy cottage. Theres just one small problem. Its haunted by the ghost of the murdered owner who wants Gethsemane to clear his name.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

The Thursday Murder Club meets each week at their retirement home to talk about unsolved crimes. When a local developer is found dead, the four friends find themselves caught up in a current case.

The Question of the Missing Head by EJ Copperman & Jeff Cohen

Samuel Hoenig answers questions for a living and his Aspergers Syndrome gives him a unique perspective on the world. So will he be able to answer the latest question posed to him: Who stole a head from the Garden State Cryonics Institute?

Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chien

Lana Lee is home waiting tables at her familys restaurant as she gets her life back on track. When the buildings property manager dies after eating a batch of the restaurants shrimp dumplings everyone at the restaurant comes under suspicion. Its up to Lana to find a killerand maybe get to know a handsome detective a little better!

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

Lila Macapagal moved back home to nurse a broken heart and gets pulled into trying to save her Tita Rosies restaurant. When her ex-boyfriendwho also happens to be a food criticdies after an argument with Lila, she suddenly finds herself the prime suspect in a murder.

Mango, Mambo and Murder by Raquel V Reyes

Miriam Quiones-Smith has relocated to Coral Shores, Miami. She misses her job teaching Carribean food culture in New York. Now shes dealing with a snobby mother-in-law, a distant husband and her new job as a food expert on local TV. And shes rapidly becoming the main suspect in a murder!

Renovated to Death by Frank Anthony Polito

Peter PJ Penwell and his partner, JP Broadway, are the producers and stars of the hit home renovation show, Domestic Partners. When the two men discover a dead body in their latest renovation project they may have to add catch a killer to their list of tasks

Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody by Barbara Ross

Jane Darrowfield has gone undercover at a 55 plus condo community, tasked with smoothing relations between the various cliques. Any progress shes made is quickly derailed when one of the residents is bludgeoned with a golf club. Now Jane is on the trail of a killer.

The Plot is Murder by V.M. Burns

Samantha Washington is about to see her long held dreams of owning a mystery bookstore and writing a novel come true. Then an unscrupulous real estate agent is found dead in Samanthas backyard and she soon becomes a suspect. With some help from her grandmother, Nana Jo, and the older womans friends Samantha vows to clear her name.

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Gotham Knights: Release Date and Everything We Know – WhatIfGaming

Gotham Knights release date is close, and weve been seeing a lot of marketing and gameplay demos From WB Games Montral. We have had several lengthy trailers showcasing different aspects of the videogame and even trailers for the villains and the city itself. It is always a good sign when developers are keen on showing off what they are working on, and it also helps us make better purchasing decisions.

Gotham Knights is an action RPG made by the studio that bought us Batman Arkham Origins. This time around, however, you wont be playing as Batman. Yes, that also came as a shocker to us, but the team has done a great job of developing 4 separate Bat-family characters with distinct fighting styles. Youll also be taking on the Court of Owls, the secret society within Gotham that controls everything behind the scenes.

We have a lot of information about Gotham Knights gathered from different previews, trailers, and gameplay demo showcases held by the developers. We also combed through interviews given to different news outlets to provide a comprehensive report about Gotham Knights. If you are on the fence about the game, they are here to fully explain everything.

After delaying the game to 2022 last year, Warner Bros officially announced the new launch date of October 21, 2022. The game was slated to release on October 25 but they are releasing it a little earlier than planned. It was delayed from last year to 2022 in order to bring the best possible experience for players.

Gotham Knights release date has seen one major delay. The game was first officially announced during DC FanDome on August 22, 2022, and was aiming for a 2021 release. But the stars didnt align for the Gotham Knights release date and the game was pushed to October 25, 2022. The release date changed again at Gamescom 2022, but this time around it was moved four days earlier.

We are hoping that extra time given to the developers will yield a polished game. Of course, it is, after all, a modern-day open-world game, so there are bound to be some bugs, but we are hoping WB Montral was able to crush the major ones.

Lets get the bad news out of the way, Gotham Knights was planned to be released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One series of consoles. However, the developers decided that the old gen versions werent working well, and PS4 and Xbox One versions were scrapped completely.

So Gotham Knights is releasing on PlayStation 5, Xbox series X/S, and PC.

There are no versions planned for the last generation of consoles or Nintendo Switch. It is a little disappointing for those who still havent gotten the next-gen consoles and wanted to play Gotham Knights. If the rumors are true, the Batman Arkham Trilogy could be making its way to the Switch.

At the end of the day, the developers know best, and if they think the older consoles were able to handle Gotham, wed have to believe them. They made the right decision of pushing the Gotham Knights release date. Weve seen how Cyberpunk struggled to run on base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

To provide players with the best possible gameplay experience, the game will release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC and will not be available for PlayStation 4 or Xbox One consoles, a developer stated on the official Gotham Knights website.

Gotham Knights is set in an open-world Gotham city. Just like in previous Arkham games, youll be able to explore Gotham at your own pace. Unlike the Arkham games, Batman is dead. Thats right; the Bat is said to have died along with police Commissioner Jim Gordon. This means there is a power vacuum in Gotham city, and crime is on the rise.

Thankfully, Batman foresaw this happening and left a prerecorded message for his prodigies. The Gotham Knights step up to the plate and continue the legacy of Batman in protecting their beloved city. The main story follows four bat-family characters as they uncover the mystery of Batmans death. There is also a secret criminal society called the Court of Owls, which is somehow connected not only to Batmans death but also to Gothams elite.

The developers have stressed that Batman is really gone and his family is left to pick up the pieces. The Batman family faced the death of Bruce Wayne, and lost their father figure and mentor. They are, in a way, orphans now, twice in the case of some characters.

They also said their goal was to explore the aspects of the Batman universe that dont see a lot of limelight in video games. With the Batman gone, the bat family has a chance to really showcase their individuality and grow into the role over the course of the game.

The developers have stated that the Gotham City in their game is a living breathing city. It will feature citizens roaming around and doing their day-to-day routines. There will also be criminal factions and Easter eggs for you to discover. Youve spotted several noteworthy iconic locations pulled directly from the Batman universe across media.

There are five different sections of Gotham to explore, each with its own unique identity. Will there be more areas to explore after the Gotham Knights release date? Hopefully, yes.

There are four bat family characters that you can play in Gotham Knights. Red Hood, Nightwing, Batgirl, and Robin all have distinct fighting styles and gadgets at their disposal. Some of their moves and traversal are reminiscent of the Batman games but they are mechanically different from each other as well as Batman.

Jason Todd is back from the dead and has some serious anger management issues. In all honesty, if someone were to brutally murder me and then another villain resurrected me without my consent, Id also have trouble curbing my anger. Red Hood in Gotham Knights is as close to a tank, he is strong and trained in multiple combat techniques.

His iconic dual pistols return but unlike the comics, Jason uses nonlethal combat rounds. Yes, we would love to see The Red Hood straight-up kill villains but it wont happen in this game (or would it?). Heres a dedicated Red Hood trailer released by WB Montral:

As the youngest member of the Batman family, Tim Drake is the smartest of the bunch. He adapted the deductive reasoning and deductive skills of Batman. He is also motivated by Batmans mission and truly believes that the city needs a hero. Robin brings his quarterstaff that is collapsible, which beautifully complements his agile combat style.

Moreover, he is also greatly skilled in the art of stealth, so if youre a fan of sneaking around and taking down the bad guys from the shadows, Robin might be your guy. Check out his flashy combat moves in his character trailer:

Barbara Gordon a.k.a. Oracle is the Batgirl in Gotham Knights. Despite her spinal injury, she is back after enduring years of pain and rehabilitation. Her tenure as the Oracle has made her an even better crime-fighting vigilante. She is steadfast, determined, and possesses unwavering willpower.

Barbara is an expert in various fighting styles including kickboxing, jujitsu, and capoeira. She will also be bringing her iconic tonfa to the fights. Take a look at how she fights in Gotham Knights in this trailer:

If youre looking to play with someone that has natural style and charisma, Nightwing might be the bat family character for you. He grew up in a circus family and had close bonds with not only his blood relatives but also his bat relatives. Dick Grayson is a natural leader and usually has a firm stance on things. He was Batmans first Robin and then ventured off to BludHaven to fight crime as Nightwing. After Batmans death, he is back in Gotham and has brought his signature aerobatics-based fighting style and dual escrima sticks. Check out his character trailer:

Batman makes an appearance at the start but developers are adamant that he is already dead. Alfred of course is in the game and we can hear him talk over the comms with the bat family. Renee Montoya is a Gotham City Police Department Detective and is probably your main contact at the GCPD. Commissioner Gordon is also dead so she will be your line to the law enforcement.

The villains in Gotham city play as big of a role as the protagonists. Without the Joker, there is no Batman, or so many people say. Thankfully, Gotham Knights is bringing multiple iconic villains for you to fight.

Mr. Freeze is a cryogenics expert that faced a catastrophic laboratory accident. Now he needs a cryogenics suit just to be alive. Mr. Freeze only wants to save his terminally ill wife but can resort to usual villainy to get his way.

Clayface is also in the game and will probably be up to his shape-shifting shenanigans. We have seen glimpses of a boss fight against him but the details are short on how he ties into the main story.

Harley Quinn in Gotham Knights is much wiser and clearer on what her identity is. The developers fundamentally changed her reason to be and her story in Gotham Knights. Of course, she is instantly recognizable with her look and voice acting but this time around shes going to be much more of a villain than a sidekick to Joker. This is a slightly older version of Harley Quinn and it shows in her boss fight as well.

The Court of Owls is a mysterious society within Gotham that secretly controls everything. In the comics, even Batman wasnt aware of their presence and that made them a very palpable and raw threat. Talon will feature prominently in the game and will pose a good combat-based challenge to take down.

We are sure Gotham Knights will feature some additional villains and we appreciate that they are being kept under wraps.

Lets make one thing clear, Gotham Knights is not an Arkham Style Batman game. It is an open-world RPG complete with characteristics and loot. Its more like the ill-fated Avengers game than it is like RockSteadys Arkham Games. This is however not a live service game, which is quite a relief. Its not to say that it will be received poorly, from what we have seen, the gameplay looks phenomenal.

Each of the four characters plays differently from the others and has separate skill trees and progression. The game allows you to play as four characters, Batgirl, Red Hood, Nightwing, and Robin. The whole game can be played single player or in co-op with one other player. This is a first for a Batman game and we cannot wait to see how the synergies of different characters combine during combat.

Apart from having different skill trees, styles, and gadgets at their disposal, for example, Nightwing is aerobatic and light on his feet, he effortlessly moves from one enemy to another pulling off somersaults and pirouettes. Red Hood on the other hand uses his handguns to take out enemies from range. The different gameplay of each character makes Gotham Knights a bigger game than previous Batman games.

The Batcave is gone as well, instead, Belfry takes its place. Batman has already left a bat computer there so the bat family wont be at a disadvantage technology-wise. The heroes would be able to hang out at that location during the day and go out at night to fight crime in the city.

Each hero has access to the bat cycle as well as a grapple to make traversal easier around the city. They also have unique traversal move that further enhances the exploration, for example, the Batgirl would be able to glide around using her cape while Robin has a short-distance teleportation mechanic in place.

Players will be able to select their hero, the gear, and their abilities before venturing out of the Belfrey. The game is a light RPG as well so youll be collecting resources when you fight crime across Gotham. The resources will be used to make suits, obtain new gear, and get upgrades. The experience earned during open-world activities raises hero levels and unlocks more skills and abilities in a tree thats unique to each hero.

Whats a superhero game without epic comic-inspired and original costumes? Not fun, I tell you. Thankfully, Gotham Knights comes with a slew of different costumes for your heroes to wear. Lets make one thing clear, there are two types of costumes:

There are 11 different suit styles for each character, so a total of 44 will be in the game. The developers stress that there wont be any Microtransactions in Gotham Knights either, so youll be able to obtain all suit styles with normal gameplay. A point to be noted here is that the Beyond and KnightWatch sets are tied to the Deluxe and Collectors Edition of the game.

You wont be able to mix and match different sets. Youll only be able to change certain elements of the suits and of course change the colors. The developers hired artists from France, Germany, Japan, Korea, and the US to contribute their unique ideas about the costumes.

Gotham Knights feature some level of customization on the suits too. Each suit style will have 4 adjustable elements: the logo, the cowl, the boots, and the gauntlets. In addition to those, youll have colorway, which changes the color of the suit style. Want to have a yellow-themed Nightwing? Now you can.

Gotham Knights is available for pre-order right now on all platforms. The game has three different editions for you to select, each with different bonuses depending on how much you spend on the game. WB is throwing in a 233 Kustom Batcycle Skin to everyone that preorders, even the standard edition.

The Co-op nature of Gotham Knights is a huge plus for gamers that just want to explore Gotham together. There isnt any tethering either, so you could potentially be on other sides of the map and still be in the same world. Will Gotham Knights be worthy of being on our Best Superhero games list? That remains to be seen.

Well see you gliding or teleporting or double jumping or grappling across Gotham when the game releases on October 21, 2022.

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Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of frozen bodies – Big Think

Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere. For a small group of fervent futurists, it is their lottery ticket to immortality. What are the chances that these bodies will be reanimated? Will baseball legend Ted Williams frozen head be awakened to coach fighter pilots or fused to a robot body to hit .400 again?

Cryonics attempting to cryopreserve the human body is widely considered a pseudoscience. Cryopreservation is a legitimate scientific endeavor in which cells, organs, or in rare cases entire organisms may be cooled to extremely low temperatures and revived somewhat intact. It occurs in nature, but only in limited cases.

Humans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads. Deprived of oxygen at room temperature, the brain dies within minutes. While the body may be reanimated, the person who lives is often in a permanent vegetative state. Cooling the body may give the brain a bit more time. During brain or heart surgery, circulation may be stopped for up to an hour with the body cooled to 20 C (68 F). A procedure to cool the body to 10 C (50 F) without oxygen for additional hours is still at the experimental research stage.

After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable.

This vessel lies within a second outer vessel, separated by a vacuum to avoid heat transfer from the outer room-temperature vessel wall to the cold inner vessel wall. Heat gradually transfers across anyway and boils away the LN, which must be periodically refilled. Bodies were originally, and may still be in some cases, cooled and frozen in whatever condition they were in at death, with better or worse preservation, as we shall see.

The early years of cryonics were grisly. All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality.

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Small freezing operations began in the late 1960s. While the practice of storing bodies has become more sophisticated over the past 50 years, in the early days, technicians cooled and prepared corpses with haste on dry ice before eventually cramming them into Dewar capsules. By in large, these preservations did not achieve preservation. They were nightmarish, gruesome failures. Their stories were researched and documented by people within the field, who published thorough and frank records.

The largest operation was run out of a cemetery in Chatsworth, California by a man named Robert Nelson. Four of his first clients were not initially frozen in LN but placed on a bed of dry ice in a mortuary. One of these bodies was a woman whose son decided to take her body back. He hauled (his dead mother) around in a truck on dry ice for some time before burying her.

The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post.

Eventually, the mortician was not pleased with the other bodies sitting around on beds of ice, so a LN Dewar capsule was secured for the remaining three. Another man was already frozen and sealed inside the capsule, so it was opened, and he was removed. Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people who may or may not have suffered thaw damage into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a puzzle. After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

Another group of three, including an eight-year-old girl, was packed into a second capsule in the Chatsworth vault. The LN system of this capsule subsequently failed without Nelson noticing. Upon checking one day, he saw that everyone inside had long thawed out. The fate of these ruined bodies is unclear, but they might have been refrozen for several more years.

Nelson froze a six-year-old boy in 1974. The capsule itself was well maintained by the boys father, but when it was opened, the boys body was found to be cracked. The cracking could have occurred if the body was frozen too quickly by the LN. The boy was then thawed, embalmed, and buried. Now that there was a vacancy, a different man was placed into the leftover capsule, but ten months had elapsed between his death and freezing, so his body was in rotten shape no pun intended from the get-go and was eventually thawed.

Every cryonic client put into the vault at Chatsworth and looked after by Nelson eventually failed. The bodies inside the Dewar capsules were simply left to rot. Reporters visited the crypt where these failed operations had taken place and reported a horrifying stench. The proprietor admitted to failure, bad decisions, and going broke. He further pointed out, Who can guarantee that youre going to be suspended for 10 or 15 years?

The worst fates of all occurred at a similar underground vault that stored bodies at a cemetery in Butler, New Jersey. The storage Dewar was poorly designed, with uninsulated pipes. This led to a series of incidents, at least one of which was failure of the vacuum jacket insulating the inside. The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post. Eventually the bodies had to be entirely thawed to unstick, then re-frozen and put back in. A year later, the Dewar failed again, and the bodies decomposed into a plug of fluids in the bottom of the capsule. The decision was finally made to thaw the entire contraption, scrape out the remains, and bury them. The men who performed this unfortunate task had to wear a breathing apparatus.

Out of all those frozen prior to 1973, one body remains preserved. Robert Bedford was sealed into a Dewar in 1967. Instead of leaving the body to meet a horrific fate under Nelsons care, Bedfords family took custody of the capsule, meticulously caring for it at their own expense. The body was handed off between professional cryonics operations, occupying multiple frozen tanks and facilities for 15 years or so. Eventually it ended up in the hands of the founders of Alcor a modern cryonics outfit one of whom wrote a heartfelt, slightly creepy piece about the body.

Credit: Jeff Topping / Getty Images

Alcor is the leading example of the current state of cryonics. While the ugly events above suggest that your remains might well end up as tissue sludge scraped out of a can, the professionalism of companies like Alcor may offer an increased chance for long-term preservation. This 501(c)(3) organization hosts researchers who work on methods to improve the freezing process, possibly increasing whatever slight odds exist that human popsicles will ever be brought back to life. At a more fundamental level, it appears to be stable and to have deep pockets, so there is a better chance that your corpse will be around long enough for some distant future doctor to recoil in horror at it.

The U.S. industry has consolidated around two main organizations. If not Alcor, your other choice is the Cryonics Institute, which has more than 200 bodies stored in giant tanks and accepts dozens more each year. Apparently, ten years ago, head storage alone at Alcor cost $80,000, while full body storage at the Cryonics Institute was only $30,000. There are international options as well. A Russian cryogenics company stores not only people but pets, including one entry under rodents, a deceased chinchilla named Button.

Modern cryonic preparations at Alcor employ a multistep process to prepare the body for storage. First, they begin to cool the body while anti-clotting agents and organ preservation solutions are injected into the bloodstream and circulated under CPR. The body is then transported to the companys main facility, where the original fluid is replaced with chemicals that vitrify turn to glass the bodys organs. This offers some hope for cutting down on structural damage during the subsequent cooling and storage. Then the body is entombed in its Dewar capsule.

That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, its not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? Thats probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking.

Credit: Annelisa Leinbach / Big Think

While cryonic preparation is now more advanced, the laws of physics demand that the structure of the body will break down rapidly after death, catastrophically upon freezing, and gradually over time, even while frozen. Think of how badly frozen food ages in your freezer. If the medical technology of the future becomes advanced enough, perhaps these corpses can be revived. But thats a big if. Lets say your body remains frozen until the 25th century. Then, lets say that future doctors are interested in reviving you. How much work will they have to do to fix you once youre thawed? The answer lies in the condition of the bodies once theyre thawed. Strangely enough, we know something about this.

In 1983, Alcor needed to lighten three cryonauts, reducing them from bodies to simply heads. (In one transhumanist conception of the future, medical science will be able to revive the brain and then simply make a new body or robot to which to attach it. Neuropreservation is cheaper and easier too.) The three corpses were removed from their Dewar capsules so that the heads could be cut off still frozen, so requiring a chainsaw and stored separately. Once the heads were sawed off and put away, Alcor employees got to work medically examining the state of the bodies. They wrote up their findings in great detail.

At first, things looked reasonably good. While the bodies were still frozen, their skin was only moderately cracked in a few places. But once the bodies thawed, things started to go downhill.

The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured.

Cracks appeared in the warming bodies, cutting through the skin and subcutaneous fat, all the way down to the body wall or muscle surface beneath. One patient displayed red traces across the skin following the paths of blood vessels that ruptured. Two of the patients had massive cutaneous ruptures over the pubis. The soft skin in these areas was apparently quite susceptible to cracking.

While the external damage was extensive, the internal damage was worse. Nearly every organ system inside the bodies was fractured. In one patient, every major blood vessel had broken near the heart, the lungs and spleen were almost bisected, and the intestines fractured extensively. Only the liver and kidneys werent completely destroyed.

The third body, which had been thawed very slowly, was in better condition externally, with only a few skin fractures and no obvious exploded blood vessels. However, the inside was even more annihilated than the others. The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured. The examiners injected dye into an artery in the arm. Rather than flow through blood vessels and into muscles, most of it pooled under the surface in pockets and leaked out of skin fractures.

The medical examiners extensively detailed the content of the blood, the texture of the muscles, and the extent of the damage. They included pictures. And they earnestly stated their conclusion up front: The tremendous tissue deterioration will require incredibly advanced medical technology to fix. Worse, the probable destruction at the cellular level may require rebuilding the body at the molecular level. Perhaps future medicine might be able to inject swarms of nanobots into your body to repair every bit of tissue, but dont bet on it happening any time soon.

Modern cryonics practices may ward off the horrific failures of the past. And we cant entirely rule out future medicine somehow finding fixes for the terrific damage incurred by the body in freezing, sitting, and thawing. But theres one more hurdle for the future revivification of your frozen form, the last great danger to your immortality: your crazy relatives. Several cases demonstrate the problem.

The family of a man frozen in 1978 eventually got tired of paying for him. The facility offered to cut off his head and store it for free, but the family turned them down. Instead, the body was thawed, submerged in a vat of formaldehyde like a laboratory specimen, and buried in that condition. Two further men were stored by their sons, one of whom had his father thawed, removed, and buried. The other son eventually buried his dads capsule in its entirety with the remains still inside.

Relatives can also go to court and battle over what happens to your corpse. Richard Orvilles family buried him against his wishes and was eventually forced by an Iowa court to dig up his body for preservation. A Colorado womans family went to court to fight Alcor for their mothers head. Alcor eventually got the head, to preserve as best they could. Conversely, another womans will stated that she did not want to be frozen. Her husband froze her anyway, and after a four-year court battle, the State of California ordered that she be thawed and buried.

One particularly well-known family affair is the story of a frozen Norwegian man who was initially stored at a California facility that worked with Alcor. He was removed by his daughter, who stored him in an ice shed behind her house in Colorado. The body was discovered when she was evicted from the property. The small town of Nederland, Colorado now has a Frozen Dead Guy Days celebration every year.

While the chances of immortality may be slim, dozens of people still commit their bodies or brains to cryonics each year. If their remains arent mismanaged or allowed to disintegrate, and if their relatives dont go to court over the body, there is now a good chance that they will remain frozen for decades. Unfortunately, they will come out of the process cracked into a million pieces, and the prospect of putting them back together again is purely science fiction for the foreseeable future. Its a grim practice with ghoulish results; at least it makes for some fascinating stories and a bit of dark humor.

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I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry – MIT Technology Review

Depending on whats being carried and how much they can pay, the patient or patients involved will choose either a hand-carry service, a commercial carrier such as DHL or FedEx, or something in between, such as the combination of commercial flights and local couriers that Loewen relied on during the pandemic. The cost of transporting my eggs with FlyVet Europa was 1,300 euros, or about $1,400 at the time. That includes the price of two one-way tickets for Paolo and the egg suitcase, and a few incidental expenses. (When I told Monaco how many eggs were traveling, he quipped, Uno squadro di calcio!a soccer team.)

CryoStork, the division of Cryoport devoted to the fertility sector, offers all three tiers of servicecommercial carriers for something that can be easily replaced (sperm, in other words), a middle-tier service using local couriers and air freight, and a door-to-door hand-carry servicefor prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to as much as $7,000 or $8,000 for an international hand-carry trip.

Ultimately, the pandemic boosted business for Loewen. Today, he and a team of eight colleagues, half employees and half working on a per-shipment basis, handle around 30 to 40 IVF-related shipments each month. Similarly, when the war in Ukraine began, Loewen and other colleagues received frantic requests from clients desperate to move their biomaterials out of the capital, Kiev, where most of the countrys IVF clinics and surrogacy agencies are based, and business shifted to nearby Georgia. But by September, Loewen was planning to once again deliver biomaterials to Ukraine. People want to have babiesconflict or not, he says.

What does it take to be a tissue courier, and how does one get into the field? Everyone I spoke to said that to succeed, you must love traveling, have a calm personality (in case, as happened to Loewen, youre ever surrounded by a knot of armed Belarusian soldiers at the airport and accused of trafficking human organs), and be adept at problem-solving.

Loewen looks for people with experience in the travel sector, who can navigate new cities and wont be rattled by a flight cancellation or a grumpy customs official. Mark Sawicki of Cryoport has several former pilots now working as couriers; their security clearances enable them to move through airports more easily than civilians.

Nicole Dorman, 43, has always loved children; she jokes that her current job as a courier is babysitting. She has three kids, aged 14 to 22, and has been a teachers aide and a school crossing guard, following four years in the US Army. When shes home for a week or two at a time with her kids in between gigs, she also makes deliveries for DoorDash in Clarksville, Tennessee.

WENN RIGHTS LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Dorman had begun by transporting stem cells for a Frankfurt-based courier service. When she was looking for work in November of 2020, she emailed a half-dozen IVF courier companies and heard back from Loewen within 15 minutes. She has been working for him ever since, and also does US shipments for the Ukrainian company ARK Cryo, as well as EmbryoPort, a UK-based firm.

Dorman is on the road roughly 70% of each month; when we spoke in mid-May, she was preparing for a weeklong trip beginning with a pickup in Indianapolis, a drop-off in Bratislava, a train ride from there to Prague for another pickup, and then a flight to Greece. Like all couriers whove been working for any length of time, she has frequent flier status. In the 18 months since she started, she has transported more than 90 shipments. Now I can pretty much do it in my sleep, she says.

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Best Non-Action Movies From the Most Popular Action Stars – 24/7 Wall St.

Special Report

September 13, 2022 11:00 am

It pays to be an action star. Tom Cruise reportedly could rake in $100 million for his recent Top Gun: Maverick military drama. With a box office haul of $1.4 billion worldwide, Cruise will pocket most of that salary from ticket sales.

But Cruise, like any other actor, likes to stretch his acting chops and do something different occasionally, even if the paycheck doesnt write in six figures. And he did that in the 2001 psychological thriller, Vanilla Sky. In it, he plays a decidedly un-action-like figure who is put in cryonic suspension after a terrible accident.

Other well-known action stars have veered into fresh cinematic territory and found critical acclaim and box office success. Beefy Gerard Butler starred in the tearjerker, Dear Frankie. Vin Diesel parked his car to play a stockbroker in 2000s Boiler Room. Chris Hemsworth, aka Thor, went back to college in the horror flick The Cabin in the Woods, released in 2011.

To identify the best non-action movies by Americas top action stars, 24/7 Tempo scored movies by indexing average ratings from Amazons online movie database IMDb, and audience and Tomatometer scores from online movie reviews website Rotten Tomatoes. We considered data for the more than 22,000 movies with more than 5,000 reviews on IMDb as of August 2022. Are they among the most popular action stars of all time?

Some action stars lent their name and voice to documentaries, as former 007 Pierce Brosnan did in the 2009 feature Oceans. A long-time environmentalist, Brosnan narrated the film about saving ocean wildlife. Several played historic figures, like Jackie Chan in 1911, a 2011 film about Chinas revolution. Russell Crowe played real-life Depression Era boxer James J. Braddock in 2005s Cinderella Man.

The non-action role doesnt have to be big to make an impact. Bruce Willis revived his sagging career with a relatively small part in 1994s Pulp Fiction. Slipping into another genre gives an action star a chance to play against type. Good guy Denzel Washington played a bad guy in 2007s American Gangster. On the other hand, these are the worst non-action movies from Hollywoods top action stars.

Click here for the best non-action movies from the most popular action stars

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We All Scream for Ice Cream Day | National Institute of Food and Agriculture – National Institute of Food and Agriculture

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! Each year, the third Sunday in July is designated National Ice Cream Day. It is a commemoration dating back to 1984, when President Ronald Reagan declared the first such day. At the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, we certainly believe National Ice Cream Day is worth celebrating! The agency is proud to support research that serves the U.S. dairy industry.

With NIFA funding, California State University Fresno is enhancing dairy processing education and student diversity in an effort to restore profitability to California dairy businesses, address the states dairy workforce shortage, and increase the number and diversity of students entering STEM programs.

Cornell University is designing and developing a system for cryogenics, mixing and flash freezing several liquid foods on demand, and applying it to the ice cream manufacturing industry. This approach will allow manufacture and delivery of freshly frozen or partially frozen liquid foods at point-of-use without added preservatives and in an economically attractive and environmentally sustainable manner.

Diseases that occur during the transition period of cows from late gestation to early lactation adversely affect the profitability of the U.S. dairy industry. Michigan State University is working to prevent the establishment of transition cow diseases by identifying and modulating oxidative stress in dairy cows, which is a key factor in the development of disease.

University of Missouri is working to improve the udder health status and productivity of dairy heifers. The project aims toincrease the understanding of strain-specific differences among common disease-causing bacteria and determining if these differences are consistently associated with specific udder health outcomes.

University of Pennsylvania is developing strategies and exploring pathways to make dairy farming more of the solution and less of a challenge to sustainable food security. Scientists are developing novel feeds via bioprocessing of food waste and crop residue biomass to support sustainable dairy production and enhance the nutritional value for dairy cows.

Photo:Left image of dairy researcher in the lab. Right image of freshly scooped ice cream cone. Both images courtesy of Adobe Stock.

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