“There must be another way”, I said to myself, and I didn’t stop until I found one.
I said this to myself in 1998, when I was deeply unhappy in a job, and I felt so STUCK.
I applied for lots of new jobs during that time, and eventually, after 2 years, the stars aligned, and I moved into a job a really liked and thrived in.
This new job, then led me onto an abundance of career opportunities…
First successful demonstration of quantum teleportation between two different quantum dots. An international team of researchers that includes scientists from Paderborn University has achieved a major milestone toward building a future quantum internet. For the first time, the polarization state of a single photon produced by one quantum dot has been successfully transferred to another […]
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When we discuss bacterial infections, we often think of exotoxins—those soluble proteins actively secreted by bacteria—while overlooking endotoxins, which are more insidious but equally dangerous. Endotoxins are not released by bacteria; rather, they are natural components residing in the bacterial cell wall’s outer membrane. When bacteria die or lyse, they may release endotoxins, triggering a…
A newly discovered gene switch may help turn chemotherapy-resistant pancreatic cancer into a treatable disease. Researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School have discovered a molecular “switch” that determines whether pancreatic cancer cells respond to chemotherapy or resist it—a finding that could help shift some of the most treatment-resistant tumors into forms that respond better to existing…
2000’s Track Of The Day: Fallin’ For You by @ColbieCaillat (2009) from Breakthrough
big news for a soft place to land omg.
so i’ve been thinking about rewriting ASPTL for a WHILE now since i’d like for it to read more like a book than just connected one-shots, and it hit me today.
i finally figured out how to start it, and i’m so excited.
i don’t know how long it will take, i don’t have all the plot line and logistics worked out yet, and i don’t know how much i want to have done before i start reposting it under its new format, but i’m getting excited about it again 🥹
i love this OC, and i wanna do right by her you know?
thank you to anybody who has ever taken the time to read ASPTL, it means so so much to me 💛
Researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich have demonstrated a way to reverse the polarity of a specialized ferromagnet using a focused laser beam. The advance points toward a future in which light could be used to design and reconfigure electronic circuits directly on a chip.
Ferromagnets function because vast numbers of tiny magnetic moments inside a material move in unison. Each…
A flash of laser light flips a magnet in major light-control breakthrough
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1285632747/
Natural gas is one of the most plentiful energy resources on Earth. It is made mostly of methane, along with ethane and propane. Today, it is primarily burned for heat and electricity, a process that releases greenhouse gases. For years, researchers and industry leaders have tried to find ways to convert these simple hydrocarbons directly into useful chemicals instead of burning them. The…
Scientists turn methane into medicine in stunning breakthrough
So I’m not sure how much I’m going to get done today. Both because work, and because I have little to no ideas of where to go from here. (If you’ve read the fic and have your own ideas, I will always love to hear them ^^)
BUT!
If you like my Breakthrough story, you might be interested to know that I am actually writing my own book! It… doesn’t have much written for it yet. But it’s fantasy and contains gods and magic and mysteries and truths being unwraveled! I don’t have a name yet, but that’ll come in time. Here’s a snippet for you guys:
Yes, life was simple for Vyla. And she was determined to keep it that way.
But of course, life always finds a way to change in the most unexpected ways.
And for 20-year-old Vyla, well… she would never have predicted what fate had in store for her.
I hope to have more of an update on the Breakthrough AU soon!
Happy reading!
A blue-light-powered iron catalyst just replaced rare metals — and unlocked a milestone in precision drug synthesis. Photocatalysts are materials that trigger chemical reactions when exposed to light. In modern organic chemistry, metal-based photocatalysts are especially valuable because they are stable and can be fine-tuned by adjusting the ligands attached to the central metal atom. […]
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Poster Design for the University of Bridgeport’s Shintaru Akatsu School of Design. The Shintaro Akatsu School of Design (SASD), formerly at the University of Bridgeport, had four undergraduate design programs that needed promoting to local high schoolers, encouraging those with an interest in art and design to apply to the specialized school.
S.A.S.D., the robotic mascot I invented as one of the SASD students involved with the promotional campaign, helps showcase them all in this poster made to be put around local high school campuses. Each part of S.A.S.D.’s body represents a different design major or concentration, including Graphic Design, Graphic Design: New Media, Interior Design, and Industrial Design.
Researchers in China have created a more efficient strategy for producing natural killer (NK) cells for use in cancer immunotherapy.
NK cells play a critical role in the body’s early defense against viruses and cancer, along with other immune functions. Because of their natural ability to detect and destroy abnormal cells, they are an attractive tool for cancer treatment. In chimeric antigen…
One stem cell generates 14 million tumor-killing NK cells in major cancer breakthrough
A newly identified lung cell “switch” could help doctors unlock the lungs’ natural ability to heal themselves. Scientists at Mayo Clinic have uncovered a molecular “switch” inside lung cells that determines whether those cells focus on healing damaged tissue or defending against infection. The discovery offers new insight that could shape future regenerative treatments for […]
Read more about…
A new theory reveals how even “frozen” particles can spark the emergence of order inside quantum matter. Researchers at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University have introduced a new theory that links two major perspectives in modern quantum physics. The work focuses on how a single unusual particle behaves inside a many-body system […]
Read more about this post…
Credits:…
Scientists can now see a hidden battery ingredient — and it could supercharge how fast and how long lithium-ion batteries last. Scientists at the University of Oxford have created an advanced technique that allows them to clearly see a crucial but previously hard-to-detect part of lithium-ion battery electrodes. The findings, published today (February 17) in […]
Read more about this…
Choosing Wrong
“How much?”
It came out strained. I could barely tell it had come from me, as I looked around the dull, lifeless area. It was large, of course. As large as a doublewide trailer could be anyway. It wasn’t quite enough space, but yet the empty room somehow loomed over me.
No matter how old, no matter how falling apart- every screw was rusted.
“ $1,600 a month.” I never saw the speaker.
I looked down at my hands, shaking. I had never made that much money before, not even when I was working. How was I to be able to afford this on my own?
I could get a roommate.
Could I get a roommate? This place is a slum.
I wandered over to the window, peering out to the gravel road, and the endless surmountable trees. Dead as they were, their company grand.
If I were to get this place, what would happen? Maybe some solace, maybe some peace? Light a fire in the living room floor? It would definitely liven up the place.
But I wouldn’t be able to keep my car- and being in the middle of nowhere, that’d mean I’d have to walk to work. There was just no way- even with a roommate, there was just no way. I could pin poison ivy over the walls and increase the value of this place.
I heave a sigh and look around once again.
If I’m going to choose a roof over my head, I’m going to have to go into the city. Work needs to be in reach. It only-
It only makes sense. I can’t have both- a car and a roof.
How much is peace going to cost?
I made my way back into town, to sit on a bench. I was counting what little cash I had left, a mere six hundred and some change. If that. This is what I was supposed to live off of?
The car payment was $350, the insurance was $229. I can live in my car again, or I can find shelter a brace for the coming storm. Everyone knew it was coming- how could they not?
The streets were bare, and lifeless. The world was cold and bare.
There was only one place that had drawn my attention. It was the only sector that seemed to have lights. They were dim, of course, flickering, even- but as the night drew on it looked to be the only welcoming place. It didn’t have a name. Just a large, intricate, metal archway tied into two brick pillars.
Inside, was a patio. There was nothing inherently special about it- litter spread across the ground, cigarette buds, weeds nearing the edge of the apartment complex. Everywhere you looked, the bricks rose into the sky. The only exit was the arch behind me.
To my left, was something of a trader. It had bars overing the glass, and a small hole where people could speak into. Beside it, a small alcove store. In front of me stood the lifeless windows, and to my right was the apartments. The windows were practically black, the doors closed. Only one light, shining among them all. Lights blazing without a care in the world.
I was far too focused on it to notice the people rushing in behind me. A woman and her two kids- one on her hip, the other being dragged along behind by his wrist. She looked panicked, her eyes wide, her breathing uneven. But even in this whole city, she was the first person I’d found. The first three.
She bumped my shoulder, and I caught one of the many bags she about dropped, as she hustled by.
“ Um. Hi-”
She froze, as if I had shocked her with the most unholiest of confessions.
“ You shouldn’t be hanging around here after dark! You shouldn’t-” she pulls her son closer, her gaze never steering to my face. Only over my shoulder. I could see her panic shift to sheer madness as she grabbed my hand and dragged me alongside her, “ Come with me! Quickly! Quickly!”
I didn’t question it. A mother and her children, groceries- They may need some help. I can help with the groceries, can’t I? And I can ask about the apartment. With the door open and the lights on. She pulls me up the stairs, and as luck would have it, she lived right next to the welcoming room.
She chains the door, closes the curtains and goes about lighting candles in the dim space. This was her home- but there was barely much to it. Blankets on the ground. She put her groceries in her cooler and eased some bread onto the counter.
“ You must be interested in that apartment next door. That’s the only reason any new ever comes to this sshiiii- apartment complex.”
Her eyes dodged around the room, looking for anyone who would have misheard her. Shit-hole. It was a shit-hole.
“Are you okay?” I ask, easing closer.
She swallows, visibly, before lowering her eyes and shaking her head.
“Can I help?”
She shakes her head again, before warming a small pot over a kettle. She dips a rag in the warmed water and goes about washing her children. I put on my best fake smile, and try to entertain the kids, until finally, they’re asleep. The woman puts them in a small closet in the hallway with blankets and pillows.
“ To keep them warm,” she insists, a meek smile on her face.
“ You don’t have electricity?”
“Can’t afford it. Barely the rent. Trying to save enough to move away, but- but it just seems impossible nowadays.” Her dry laughter resonated through the room, but ended with a cough.
“Why?”
“Damned Husband of mine. Damned police. He wasn’t the best of people, but inviting the police around here guarantees suicide.”
“ What, why?”
She shakes her head, leaning back against the wall and shoveling her arms into the blankets, “ I don’t know. No-one knows. I guess they just don’t like us. My husband had flown into a rage- one day, you know. I don’t even remember what it was for. Broke two doors, and put three holes in the wall before salvation came. They caught my husband standing over me with his grandmothers revolver.”
“ You- you stayed where he could find you?”
“ No where to go. It’s been three months and without him, I can barely afford the rent.” She lifts her hand, as if to explain, not that it was much better with him. No couch. No television. No radio or fridge. The counters and cabinets were all that furnished the room. It was a long rectangle, without even an extra bed to spare.
“They sure don’t make it easy,” I mumble. I thought briefly, about telling her about the trailer I had found in the woods. But the time I spent registering the thought was all the time it took for the door to start pounding again.
Loud, violent shaking- he called her name. She flinched, cowering into a corner.
“Why? Why? Why is he out? It hasn’t been that long! He tried to kill me, he- he-”
I had to- I had to help. I saw myself in her immediately. I was never forced to conceive. But there had been a time, where a man had backed me into a corner like this.
Many in fact.
And now there were children to protect.
There was only one, even remotely useable weapon. A small, metal, kids t-ball bat. It was any the door, with the umbrellas. He was shouting his slurs. Barely a thought would go into his sentence, and barely a thought was needed to process what I needed to do.
I peeked in the eyehole, but nothing could be seen. Her had gone silent. Eerily so, and panic surged. I couldn’t for sure say why until I opened the door. There was no-one there. His shadow broke into a run, but he disappeared, somehow.
“He’s going behind the apartment. He’s going to come in the rear.” She cried. She couldn’t stand. She couldn’t move.
And from what I could tell- there was no rear entrance to the apartment. I didn’t think twice, breaking into a sprint to follow. There were more people out, in the dead of night- three men, from three different apartments. I asked where he might’ve gone and both pointed me down, further.
Until the third apartment came into view.
“I-I’m sorry, has a man-”
“Yes, yes! No dark. Very dark.” They didn’t speak English. Not a lick of them. Surrounding me, were twenty-some people huddled in this one apartment, in an albino state of white, their skin, their clothes, even their eyes, looked to be plastered with flour. They urged me through, to the back of the apartment building. And it all looked fake. Cardboard and plaster, I chased this man to the back of where our back entrance should be.
Instead, he broke into the welcoming room. The sole apartment alit with light, it had new furnishings galore. One glance and you could tell it was being remodeled.
He tripped over someone’s paint. He fell through the open door, and down the stairs, without me moving an inch. And yet still, the room around me was pristine.
I rushed to his side, but he was gone, and it was only then that I noticed that two of the men who had pointed me his way, were aside me. I had barely had a chance to turn to them, before the lights lit around us. Not the sky, no.
The spotlights. The police lights. They were blinding.
The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, smiles at me, with the other womans’ husband in cuffs. She didn’t say anything. But I was a tad distracted by the other police, dragging behind her- away, one of the men who had been brave enough to help me. He was kind man, but he was hispanic.
Though he did nothing, really. And I had done nothing, as a white woman. And the African American man aside me- We each had done nothing, but yet, still, he was being arrested.
And a slow clap drew my attention away, “ Marvelous! Absolutely Marvelous.”
A man with a cane, and a crisp black suit stood apart form the scene, his eyes focused on me.
“ I- I didn’t do anything. He didn’t- Where are they taking him? He didn’t do anything.”
“ We need someone like you in this complex. Someone good! Someone caring.” The way he said caring, forged itself as an insult, but he masked himself in sparkles and charm, “ I’m the owner. I’d like to offer you this apartment! It’s freshly refurbished. I can go as low as $100 a month, would that suit you? I’ve never offered so low! I think you’d make a wonderful face for this area. It’s been getting so down, with crime recently.” He shakes his head, scrunching his nose ever so slightly- but an unsettling smirk stewed on his face. Never leaving.
With all the blinding lights, I didn’t know where to look. The apartment- it was magnificent. And it was cheap. I’m sure I could find work nearby to sustain, maybe I could keep my car- and! And!
“ I-I accept!”
I could share the apartment with the woman next door. She could save her money as we went about, couldn’t she? Her husband was going to be locked up, this time, yes? It had three bedrooms. I only needed the one.
A steal. A lure. Too good to be true. I wish I had thought of that.
I ran back into the womans’ apartment, excited to proposition her. She needed help, I needed help, we could work together.
None could survive alone, anymore, after all. And we had none aside ourselves.
She was excited for the news, but the light didn’t reach her eyes. I mean, why would it? Strangers, living together for no reason aside from escaping poverty.
“They need us to sing some papers.” She said, melancholy, “ I’ll show you where.”
She walks me back to the other side- where I had seen those shops, earlier in the dream. It was light out, now, and people had gathered in a line. Everyone was in rags. Dirty, impoverished, grumbling about the day. And behind the counter was a man, counting cash. An endless stream flows through the counter. More than I can hold in my hands, I’m certain.
“After fees, rent, and utilities-” he mutters.
He hands the man back $7 and some change.
The man looked defeated, but didn’t fight the keep. Instead he turned and left.
“ Go on! Go on!” That deceiving man ushered me to the front of the line. I didn’t see where he’d come from. Just that his tenants were enraged. They’d spent quite a while in this line, but said nothing.
I was urged to sign these papers without reading- because the store had closed, and they needed to usher us all out. Everyone who had been in the line, gave me disconcerning looks. Like they had some information I didn’t.
But again, they didn’t complain.
Not one person spoke.
As I went to collect the keys to my new apartment, the night started to fall, but the lights started to shine. Press lights. Flashes. The detective woman was there in a shiny red dress, smiling and waving to them, parading her success. They were standing under the archway and somehow I had ended up in the middle- when the shots went off. Chaos seemed to ensure.
Behind me was the woman I was going to help, and the African American man who did naught but lead the way. They were dressed up, together, aside each other, but now laying on the ground in pools of blood.
They were both shot to hell. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t.
“ Looks like her husband got her, after all.” Someone whispers, as the sharply dressed man falls to his knees in woe. He starts instructing people, ambulances, police.
But the Detective just stands there, smiling at me, watching the filly dressed man panics on behalf of everyone involved.
Very quickly do the means start to blur. The hospital lights, the beeps, and it’s only after the people clear the cement courtyard that I’m able to return.
The children. They were on the ground, near that man in the pristine suit. They were huddled at his legs, scared, shaking, begging for their mother.
“ You need to make a choice- these children, these children have nowhere to go now.” He smiles at me, his broad, devilish smile, “ They’re going to give them to their father if we don’t-”
“No! No, you can’t!”
Placed before me, on a table made of metal, was a paper, a stamp, and a gavel. I sat before them, in eagerness.
“Just stamp it, and bang the gavel.”
I don’t question. I just do.
The detective appears at the arch. Her calm and eased smile on her face.
“Give her the paper. She knows what to do.” The man coerced.
I looked to the kids and without another hesitation, rose and shoved the paper into the seemingly useless detectives chest.
“ That wasn’t the right decision.” but she didn’t put me down, for it. She didn’t accuse, or berate. Every instinct of mine assured me I was forgiven.
Looking back to the man in the suit- his cold eyes, but charming demeanor, I realized at last what had happened.
“Dear Gods what have I done?”
“ Nothing anyone else wouldn’t have.” She replies, drawing my attention back to her.
But when I turn back, I see them. The memory of them. It was older times. Simpler times. The detective and that man. They bought this complex together- they built it, managed it, and crafted it together. It used to be so lively, so full of spunk. They tricked it from under an icecream man.
And when I looked around they had disappeared. The children too.
In their place was a modest apartment furnished.
I couldn’t figure out why I was there, until the lock started to turn.
That woman. The mother of those two children, and that man. They were here together, well, now. After all was said and done.
“ What? What happened?” I muttered.
There wasn’t an ounce of shame on their faces. “ He offered us a new life. We traded ours for theirs.”
“Your- Your children? You gave them to him? For a life with a stranger?”
“ I couldn’t see another way out. But it’s okay. They made us disappear. We’re all happy now.”
We’re all happy now.
Lord, what have I done?
When I woke, I was trying to figure out who, of all of these people was considered to be the most evil?
The Detective, a false sense of security, who never acts with true justice in mind.
The Sharp Man, emotions and ideas entangled in everything, and enticing you to his side.
Me, the person who made all the decisions, controlling everyone’s’ fate.
