Tropical Storm Idalia has formed in the Gulf of Mexico on a potential track to come ashore in the southern U.S. as a hurricane

Florence Pugh claimed the independent film community were "really p***** off" when she joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as Yelena Belova in 'Black Widow'.

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By Luc Cohen NEW YORK The sole person convicted at trial of defrauding donors to an online campaign

Britney Spears shot to fame as the quintessential sugar-pop princess but, in 2003, she showed her serious side with the moving hit ‘Everytime’. And now, the track has acquired a whole new meaning in the light of revelations made in her upcoming memoir ‘The Woman in Me’. In the autobiography, Spears, 41, claims that she fell pregnant during her three-year relationship with fellow superstar Justin Timberlake. And while she’d been convinced that she and the NSYNC heartthrob would have children together “one day”, she said he “definitely wasn’t happy” about the news. The singer wrote in an excerpt published by People on Tuesday: “I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated. “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.” She went on: “I’m sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby. I don’t know if that was the right decision. If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.” Spears then revealed that she had an abortion in late 2000 when she was just 18 or 19 years old, and said the procedure was “one of the most agonizing things” she had ever experienced. Inevitably, the deeply personal disclosure soon dominated social media, with fans convinced that ‘Everytime’ was, in fact, a tribute to her lost, unborn child. They swiftly scanned the music video and performances for clues – and the evidence seems pretty convincing. In the end, the ‘Baby One More Time’ star went on to have two sons — Sean Preston, who is now 18, and Jayden James, who is 17 – with her ex-husband Kevin Federline. Meanwhile, Timberlake also has two sons – Silas, 8, and Phineas, 3 – with his wife Jessica Biel. The ‘Cry me a River’ idol had apparently been “concerned” about what Spears was going to write about him in her book, which will be released on 224 October. “It’s eating at him,” one insider told Page Six. Maybe now, to quote ‘Everytime’, it will haunt him, too. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Cooper Flagg, the consensus top player in the 2024 recruiting class, says his focus is on the tragedy of a mass shooting in his home state of Maine, an indication that an announcement on where he will play college basketball could be delayed

Mason Mount could be out until the October international break following reports of hamstring injury and up to six week absence.

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Al-Jazeera says its chief correspondent in Gaza has lost three members of his family in an Israeli airstrike

SAN FRANCISCO & CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 23, 2023--

We've compiled a full list of all the Pokemon GO Spotlight Hour events taking place this month, June 2022.

Alcohol addiction ruins millions of lives every year, but scientists may have found a cure for this terrible affliction. A new treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) has been trialled in monkeys with impressive results and, if these translate to human trials, the impact could be monumental. A team of neuroscientists and physiologists from across the US tested a new type of gene therapy to see if they could directly target the underlying brain circuitry associated with sustained heavy drinking. As they noted, in the journal Nature Medicine, people suffering from AUD commonly return to alcohol use even if they attempt to quit. This is largely to do with what’s known as mesolimbic dopamine (DA) signalling – meaning how the central nervous system circuit communicates the feelgood neurotransmitter dopamine. A protein called glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is key to keeping these neurons in this reward circuitry functioning. However, experts have found that levels of GDNF are reduced in people with AUD during periods of alcohol abstinence, most notably in a region of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), as IFLScience notes. Therefore, the researchers decided to test whether using gene therapy to deliver more GDNF to the VTA could help reinforce this crucial dopaminergic signalling and prevent patients from suffering an alcoholic relapse. The team of scientists explained how alcohol consumption in non-addicts prompts the release of dopamine, creating a pleasurable buzz feeling, but chronic alcohol use causes the brain to adapt and stop releasing so much dopamine. “So when people are addicted to alcohol, they don’t really feel more pleasure in drinking,” Dr Kathleen Grant, a senior co-author of the study, said in a statement. “It seems that they’re drinking more because they feel a need to maintain an intoxicated state.” For their research, Dr Grant and her colleagues used eight rhesus macaque monkeys, who were exposed to increasing concentrations of alcohol over four 30-day “induction” periods. The monkeys then had free access to alcohol and water for 21 hours a day for six months, during which they developed heavy drinking behaviours. This was then followed by a 12-week abstinence phase, with the GDNF treatment performed four weeks in for half of the subjects. The gene therapy was delivered using a a viral vector containing a copy of the human GDNF gene injected directly into the primate’s VTA, according to IFLScience. And the results were truly jaw-dropping. “Drinking went down to almost zero,” Dr Grant said. “For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether. They decreased their drinking to the point that it was so low we didn’t record a blood-alcohol level.” The most exciting aspect of their findings is the suggestion that gene therapy could offer a permanent solution for people with the most severe cases of AUD. This will be a welcome glimmer of hope to many, given that some 29.5 million people were diagnosed with AUD in the US alone in 2021, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Of these 29.5 million sufferers, almost a million (894,000) were aged between 12 and 17. It’ll likely be some time before we know for sure whether the gene therapy can be rolled out in humans, but it’s an important first step in tackling this devastating disorder. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.