Archives for September 2021

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s newest Mars rover has successfully collected its first rock sample for return to Earth, after last month’s attempt came up empty.

The Perseverance rover’s chief engineer, Adam Steltzner, called it a perfect core sample.

“I’ve never been more happy to see a hole in a rock,” he tweeted Thursday.

A month ago, Perseverance drilled into much softer rock, and the sample crumbled and didn’t get inside the titanium tube. The rover drove a half-mile to a better sampling spot to try again. Team members analyzed data and pictures before declaring success.

Perseverance arrived in February at Mars’ Jezero Crater — believed to be the home of a lush lakebed and river delta billions of years ago — in search of rocks that might hold evidence of ancient life. NASA plans to launch more spacecraft to retrieve the samples collected by Perseverance; engineers are hoping to return as many as three dozen samples in about a decade.

“Be patient, little sample, your journey is about to begin,” Steltzner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — In a soccer world increasingly embracing technology to make sure referees’ on-field decisions are correct, CONCACAF appears content to live with blown calls in its most important games.

While the Union of European Football Associations started using Video Assistant Referees in all World Cup qualifiers this week, replays will not be used to help get calls right in qualifiers involving the United States.

U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter criticized the Confederation of North and Central American and Caribbean Association Football for its failure to adopt VAR, which was started by Major League Soccer in the second half of the 2017 season.

FIFA used VAR for the 2018 men’s World Cup and the 2019 Women’s World Cup. The Premier League adopted video reviews for 2019-20 and UEFA for the European Champions League that same season. UEFA’s executive committee said in July that VAR will be used in all World Cup qualifiers across Europe starting this month.

CONCACAF said in April that it was using VAR for the remainder of its 2021 Champions League, for the Nations League final four and for the Gold Cup. But it did not include it for World Cup qualifiers, seen by many as its most important competition.

“I think it’s an error by CONCACAF,” Berhalter said Wednesday, a day before the U.S. opened World Cup qualifying at El Salvador. “I’m going to speak freely and say that because that’s part of the game. VAR, I think it was great that they implemented it in Nations League and Gold Cup, and it’s disappointing that it’s not part of qualifying. That’s where the modern game is going. We want to be right up there with the rest of the world, our region, in terms of the quality and the technology. And we need to find a way to get that done.”

FIFA’s World Cup regulations allow regional confederations to implement video review and goal line technology.

CONCACAF general secretary Philippe Moggio did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment on Berhalter’s criticism.

How VAR can change big games could be seen in the Olympic women’s soccer final last month in Yokohama, Japan. Sweden led Canada on a 34th-minute goal by Stina Blackstenius. Russian referee Anastasia Pustovoitova did not make an initial call when Canadian star Christine Sinclair was clipped by the foot of Amanda Ilestedt midway through the second half.

A penalty kick was awarded after a review by Germany’s Bibiana Steinhaus-Webb, the wife of England’s Howard Webb, who refereed the men’s 2010 World Cup final and was criticized for his failure to give the Netherlands’ Nigel De Jong a red card for his kick to the chest of Spain’s Xabi Alonso.

Jessie Fleming’s penalty kick tied the score in the 67th minute, and Canada went on to win its first soccer gold medal 3-2 in a shootout after a 1-1 draw.

Canada’s 1-0 upset of the United States in the semifinal turned when a video review by Poland’s Pawel Raczkowski led to a foul on Tierna Davidson for a challenge on Deanne Rose after no initial call by Ukrainian referee Kateryna Monzul. Fleming converted the penalty kick in the 74th minute.

Going back four years, the U.S. men were eliminated from contention in 2018 World Cup qualifying partly because Panama’s Gabriel Torres scored on a shot that did not appear to cross the goal line in a 2-1 win on the final night.

There were a record 16 penalty kicks awarded at this year’s European Championship (nine successful), up from 12 in 2016 and the previous high of 13 in 2000.

“One of the key points for this increase of penalties, of course, is related also to the implementation of VAR,” said UEFA chief refereeing officer Robert Rosetti, an Italian who refereed the 2008 Euro final.

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More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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A small jet crashed shortly after taking off from a small airport in Connecticut on Thursday morning, killing all four people aboard, officials said.

The jet took off just before 10 a.m. from the Robertson Airport before crashing into the building at Trumpf Inc., a manufacturing company, Farmington Police Lt. Tim McKenzie said.

“It appears there was some type of mechanical failure during the takeoff sequence that resulted in the crash behind us,” he said.

The plane, a Cessna Citation 560X, was headed to Dare County Regional Airport in Manteo, North Carolina, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Two pilots and two passengers aboard the plane were killed, McKenzie said. Their names were not immediately released.

The crash set off chemical fires inside the Trumpf building, Gov. Ned Lamont said. Everybody who was inside the Trumpf building has been accounted for and there were no serious injuries, McKenzie said

Lamont said authorities were in the process of identifying those who died on the plane. He said there was nothing left of it when first responders arrived.

“It was just a ball of fire, an explosion, and then the chemical fires afterwards,” he said.

“I think they are still trying to identify who was there, identify the next of kin before we can say anything else. I just know it was incredible. The thing was filled with jet fuel.”

Farmington is in central Connecticut, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of the state capital of Hartford.

McKenzie said an intense fire burned for over 20 minutes.

Caleb Vaichaus, who works near the crash site, said he ran to the scene after hearing a loud explosion and seeing billows of black smoke from the Trumpf building.

“I ran straight toward it to see if I could help. I got as close as I possibly could and the flames were extremely hot and the fire was just getting bigger,” he told WTIC-TV.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Joan MacDonald’s health was in shambles at age 71. She was overweight and on numerous medications with high cholesterol, rising blood pressure and kidney trouble.

Her daughter, a fitness coach, warned that she’d wind up an invalid if she didn’t turn things around. She did, hitting the gym for the first time and learning to balance her diet with the help of a brand new tool, an iPhone.

Now 75, MacDonald is a hype beast for health with a bodybuilder’s physique and 1.4 million loyal followers on Instagram.

She’s among a growing number of “grandfluencers,” folks 70 and up who have amassed substantial followings on social media with the help of decades-younger fans.

“It’s so rare to find someone her age being able to do all these things,” said one of her admirers, 18-year-old Marianne Zapata of Larchmont, New York. “It’s just such a positive thing to even think about.”

Both aspirational and inspirational, older influencers are turning their digital platforms into gold.

MacDonald has paid partnerships with the sportswear and supplement brand Women’s Best, and the stress-busting device Sensate. And she just launched her own health and fitness app not so many years after learning how to use digital technology herself.

On TikTok, four friends who go by @oldgays — the youngest is 65 — have 2.2 million followers, including Rihanna. They have an endorsement deal with Grindr as they delight fans with their clueless answers to pop culture questions.

Others focus on beauty and style, setting up Amazon closets with their go-to looks and putting on makeup tutorials live. Lagetta Wayne, at 78, has teens asking her to be their grandmother as she tends to her vegetables and cooks them up in Suisun City, California, as @msgrandmasgarden on TikTok.

Wayne, with 130,500 followers amassed since joining in June 2020, owes her social media success to a teenage granddaughter. Her very first video, a garden tour, clocked 37,600 likes.

“One day my garden was very pretty and I got all excited about that and I asked her if she would take some pictures of me,” Wayne recalled. “She said she was going to put me on TikTok and I said, well, what is TikTok? I had never heard of it.”

Most people ages 50 and up use technology to stay connected to friends and family, according to a 2019 survey by AARP. But less than half use social media daily for that purpose, relying on Facebook above other platforms.

Just 37% of those 70 and older used social media daily in 2019, the research showed. Since coronavirus struck, older creators have expanded their horizons beyond mainstay Facebook and gotten more voracious, often driven by the growing number of feeds by people their own age, said Alison Bryant, senior vice president for AARP.

In the California desert town of Cathedral City, Jessay Martin is the second youngest of the Old Gays at 68.

“I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life relaxing pretty much, and I do, but this is picking up more for us. I had a very structured week where Monday I worked the food bank at the senior center, Tuesday and Friday I did yoga for an hour and a half, Wednesday I was on the front desk at the senior center. I was just sort of floating by, not being social, not putting myself out there in the gay community. And boy, has the Old Gays changed that,” Martin said.

Like MacDonald, they do a lot of myth busting about what’s possible in life’s sixth, seventh and eighth decades.

“They’re showing that anybody can do these things, that you don’t have to be afraid of aging. The 20 and 30 somethings don’t often think about that,” Bryant said. “The authenticity that we’re seeing in some of these older influencers is really refreshing. That’s part of the complexity of their narratives. They’re bringing other parts of their lives to it. They’re grandparents and great-grandparents and spouses. They’re more comfortable in their own skins.”

Sandra Sallin, a blogger and artist, has slowly built her following to 25,300 on Instagram. Her reach recently extended to the British Olympic gold-medal diver Tom Daley, who raved about her mother’s cheesecake recipe after his coach spotted it online and made it for her athletes and staff. Sallin, a lover of lipstick who focuses on cooking and beauty, also shares photos from her past and other adventures, like her turn last year in a vintage Spitfire high above the Cliffs of Dover.

“I wanted to expand my world. I felt that I was older, that my world was shrinking. People were moving, people were ill,” Sallin said. “So I started my blog because I wanted to reach out. After that, I heard about this thing called Instagram. It was really hard learning it. I really stumbled my way in. I’m shocked because most people who follow me are 30 and 40 years younger. But there are people who are older, who have kind of given up and say, ‘You know, I’m going to start wearing lipstick.’”

Toby Bloomberg, 69, in Atlanta is a Sallin supporter. She discovered Sallin after Sallin competed on the short-lived Food Network show “Clash of the Grandmas.”

“She talks a lot about aging. That’s quite an unusual phenomenon on social media, which is obviously dominated by people far younger than we are,” Bloomberg said.

MacDonald said she was surprised at the beginning that people actually cared what she had to say.

“Why would people want to follow an old broad,” she giggled from her home in Ontario, Canada. “My daughter, Michelle, cleared that up. She said it’s what you’re representing, that people can do what they think they’ve not been able to do or were told that they couldn’t do.”

Grace Maier, 32, is home full time with her two kids, ages 6 months and 2. She follows Barbara Costello, a 72-year-old Connecticut grandmother who uses the handle @brunchwithbabs.

“She does these posts, ‘Did your mom ever tell you?’ and I followed her immediately on Instagram,” Maier said. “Her content brings me joy! She’s got all of these life hacks and tips that remind me of things my grandma shared with me before she passed. She also doesn’t take herself too seriously and just seems like the kind of person who would welcome you into her home.”

Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of the influencer marketing agency Obviously, has more than 100 influencers in her network between the ages of 60 and 80. With more than a billion users on Instagram alone, she points to the successes on that platform of 93-year-old Helen Ruth Elam (baddiewinkle), 67-year-old Lyn Slater (iconaccidental) and 100-year-old style legend Iris Apfel.

There’s another aspect to the reach of seniors: Grandparents and grandchildren who have teamed up to share their adventures together, from traveling the world to Nerf gun battles.

“Mainstream media, I would say, presents a really narrow viewpoint on this age group. What’s great about social media is you can follow a really cool 75-year-old woman who is just doing her thing in Florida and that’s fun. That’s different. And she’s funny,” Karwowski said. “The 21-year-old fashion model influencer is managed. She has a team. She has designers falling all over themselves to give her everything. She has professional photographers. A lot of these 70-plus influencers are doing it all.”

Candace Cima, 74, taught herself to shoot and edit video for Instagram by watching YouTube tutorials. She hopped on the platform in February 2019 as a fresh voice on fashion and style while encouraging her audience not to be afraid of aging. Her husband sometimes helps out with photos for @styleinyour70s.withleslieb (Leslie is her middle name).

“I’m still in that learning curve, I have to be honest. Two and a half years ago, I didn’t even know what an influencer was,” said Cima, in Ithaca, New York. “I’ve always had a lot of ideas about aging. I don’t understand why aging has such a negative connotation.”

With 37,900 followers, some of her youngest fans have shared with her why they care: “They don’t want to age the way they saw their relatives aging,” Cima said. “They feel like they can learn something.”

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Follow Leanne Italie on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie

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© 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

NEW YORK (AP) — Joan MacDonald’s health was in shambles at age 71. She was overweight and on numerous medications with high cholesterol, rising blood pressure and kidney trouble.

Her daughter, a fitness coach, warned that she’d wind up an invalid if she didn’t turn things around. She did, hitting the gym for the first time and learning to balance her diet with the help of a brand new tool, an iPhone.

Now 75, MacDonald is a hype beast for health with a bodybuilder’s physique and 1.4 million loyal followers on Instagram.

She’s among a growing number of “grandfluencers,” folks 70 and up who have amassed substantial followings on social media with the help of decades-younger fans.

“It’s so rare to find someone her age being able to do all these things,” said one of her admirers, 18-year-old Marianne Zapata of Larchmont, New York. “It’s just such a positive thing to even think about.”

Both aspirational and inspirational, older influencers are turning their digital platforms into gold.

MacDonald has paid partnerships with the sportswear and supplement brand Women’s Best, and the stress-busting device Sensate. And she just launched her own health and fitness app not so many years after learning how to use digital technology herself.

On TikTok, four friends who go by @oldgays — the youngest is 65 — have 2.2 million followers, including Rihanna. They have an endorsement deal with Grindr as they delight fans with their clueless answers to pop culture questions.

Others focus on beauty and style, setting up Amazon closets with their go-to looks and putting on makeup tutorials live. Lagetta Wayne, at 78, has teens asking her to be their grandmother as she tends to her vegetables and cooks them up in Suisun City, California, as @msgrandmasgarden on TikTok.

Wayne, with 130,500 followers amassed since joining in June 2020, owes her social media success to a teenage granddaughter. Her very first video, a garden tour, clocked 37,600 likes.

“One day my garden was very pretty and I got all excited about that and I asked her if she would take some pictures of me,” Wayne recalled. “She said she was going to put me on TikTok and I said, well, what is TikTok? I had never heard of it.”

Most people ages 50 and up use technology to stay connected to friends and family, according to a 2019 survey by AARP. But less than half use social media daily for that purpose, relying on Facebook above other platforms.

Just 37% of those 70 and older used social media daily in 2019, the research showed. Since coronavirus struck, older creators have expanded their horizons beyond mainstay Facebook, often driven by the growing number of feeds by people their own age, said Alison Bryant, senior vice president for AARP.

In the California desert town of Cathedral City, Jessay Martin is the second youngest of the Old Gays at 68.

“I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life relaxing pretty much, and I do, but this is picking up more for us. I had a very structured week where Monday I worked the food bank at the senior center, Tuesday and Friday I did yoga for an hour and a half, Wednesday I was on the front desk at the senior center. I was just sort of floating by, not being social, not putting myself out there in the gay community. And boy, has the Old Gays changed that,” Martin said.

Like MacDonald, they do a lot of myth busting about what’s possible in life’s sixth, seventh and eighth decades.

“They’re showing that anybody can do these things, that you don’t have to be afraid of aging. The 20 and 30 somethings don’t often think about that,” Bryant said. “The authenticity that we’re seeing in some of these older influencers is really refreshing. That’s part of the complexity of their narratives. They’re bringing other parts of their lives to it. They’re grandparents and great-grandparents and spouses. They’re more comfortable in their own skins.”

Sandra Sallin, a blogger and artist, has slowly built her following to 25,300 on Instagram. Her reach recently extended to the British Olympic gold-medal diver Tom Daley, who raved about her mother’s cheesecake recipe after his coach spotted it online and made it for her athletes and staff. Sallin, a lover of lipstick who focuses on cooking and beauty, also shares photos from her past and other adventures, like her turn last year in a vintage Spitfire high above the Cliffs of Dover.

At 69, Toby Bloomberg in Atlanta is a Sallin supporter. She discovered Sallin after watching her compete on the short-lived Food Network show “Clash of the Grandmas.”

“She talks a lot about aging. That’s quite an unusual phenomenon on social media, which is obviously dominated by people far younger than we are,” Bloomberg said.

Aging, in fact, is what drew Sallin to social media.

“I wanted to expand my world. I felt that I was older, that my world was shrinking. People were moving, people were ill,” she said. “So I started my blog because I wanted to reach out. After that, I heard about this thing called Instagram.

“I really stumbled my way in. I’m shocked because most people who follow me are 30 and 40 years younger. But there are people who are older, who have kind of given up and say, ‘You know, I’m going to start wearing lipstick.’”

___

Follow Leanne Italie on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie

Copyright
© 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.