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When life was smooth
and then everts,
your emotions jumbled.
They will hurt.

All the things we know.
All the things we do,
change for us,
when we move.

All the confusion,
not knowing where,
the tools we use,
gone, we are unaware.

Not just your life
will change,
but all your habits,
will be rearranged.

The trauma which
is upon you now,
is composed of
what, who and how.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Can you find two Earth shadows in today's image? It's a bit tricky. To find the first shadow, observe that the top part of the atmosphere appears pink and the lower part appears blue. This is because the top half is exposed to direct sunlight, while the lower part is not. The purple area in between is known as the Belt of Venus, even though Venus can only appear on the other side of the sky, near the Sun. The blue color of the lower atmosphere is caused by the Earth blocking sunlight, creating Earth shadow number 1. Now, where is the second Earth shadow? Take a look at the Moon. Do you notice something unusual about the lower left part? That area appears unusually dark because it is in the shadow of the Earth, creating Earth shadow number 2. To be precise, the Moon was captured during a lunar eclipse. This carefully timed image was taken in Sampieri, Sicily, Italy, in July 2018.

Photo by Marcella Giulia Pace

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

"Samples collected from a well that serve more than 40 homes in the idyllic Hannah Heights neighborhood showed some of the highest levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, recorded in Washington" More at The Seattle Times ➜

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe containing billions of stars and situated about 40 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Dolphinfish (Dorado), NGC 1566 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as a grand design spiral, NGC 1566 shows two prominent and graceful spiral arms that are traced by bright blue star clusters and dark cosmic dust lanes. Numerous Hubble Space Telescope images of NGC 1566 have been taken to study star formation, supernovas, and the spiral's unusually active center. Some of these images, stored online in the Hubble Legacy Archive, were freely downloaded, combined, and digitally processed by an industrious amateur to create the featured image. NGC 1566's flaring center makes the spiral one of the closest and brightest Seyfert galaxies, likely housing a central supermassive black hole wreaking havoc on surrounding stars and gas. Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Will our Sun look like this one day? The Helix Nebula is one of brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies about 700 light-years away towards the constellation of the Water Bearer (Aquarius) and spans about 2.5 light-years. The featured picture was taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) located atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii, USA. A close-up of the inner edge of the Helix Nebula shows complex gas knots of unknown origin.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Transformed into the petals of a flower, 16 exposures show the passage of day into night in this creative timelapse skyscape. Start at the top and move counterclockwise to follow consecutive moments as the twilight sky turns an ever darker blue and night blossoms. Each exposure was recorded on the evening of April 22, calculated to maintain a consistent balance of light and color. Close to the western horizon on that date, a crescent Moon and Venus are the two brightest celestial beacons. Petal to petal the pair spiral closer to the flower's center. In silhouette around the center of the twilight flower are Sicily's megalithic rocks of Argimusco.

Photo by Dario Giannobile

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Shackleton crater lies at the lunar south pole. Peaks along the 21 kilometer diameter are in sunlight, but Shackleton's floor is in dark permanent shadow. Still, this image of the shadowed rim wall and floor of Shackleton crater was captured from NASA's ShadowCam, an instrument on board the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) launched in August 2022. About 200 times more sensitive than, for example, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Narrow Angle Camera, ShadowCam was designed image the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar surface. Avoiding direct sunlight, those regions are expected to be reservoirs of water-ice and other volatiles deposited by ancient cometary impacts and useful to future Moon missions. Of course, the permanently shadowed regions are still illuminated by reflections of sunlight from nearby lunar terrain. In this stunningly detailed ShadowCam image, an arrow marks the track made by a single boulder rolling down Shackleton crater's wall. The image scale is indicated at the bottom of the frame.

The Biden administration on Thursday cautioned Americans about the growing risks of medical credit cards and other loans for medical bills, warning in a new report that high interest rates can deepen patients’ debts and threaten their financial security.

In its report, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimated that people in the U.S. paid $1 billion in deferred interest on medical credit cards and other medical financing in just three years, from 2018 to 2020.

The interest payments can inflate medical bills by almost 25%, the agency found by analyzing financial data that lenders submitted to regulators.

“Lending outfits are designing costly loan products to peddle to patients looking to make ends meet on their medical bills,” said Rohit Chopra, director of CFPB, the federal consumer watchdog. “These new forms of medical debt can create financial ruin for individuals who get sick.”

Nationwide, about 100 million people — including 41% of adults — have some kind of health care debt, KFF Health News found in an investigation conducted with NPR to explore the scale and impact of the nation’s medical debt crisis.

The vast scope of the problem is feeding a multibillion-dollar patient financing business, with private equity and big banks looking to cash in when patients and their families can’t pay for care, KFF Health News and NPR found. In the patient financing industry, profit margins top 29%, according to research firm IBISWorld, or seven times what is considered a solid hospital profit margin.

Millions of patients sign up for credit cards, such as CareCredit offered by Synchrony Bank. These cards are often marketed in the waiting rooms of physicians’ and dentists’ offices to help people with their bills.

The cards typically offer a promotional period during which patients pay no interest, but if patients miss a payment or can’t pay off the loan during the promotional period, they can face interest rates that reach as high as 27%, according to the CFPB.

Patients are also increasingly being routed by hospitals and other providers into loans administered by financing companies such as AccessOne. These loans, which often replace no-interest installment plans that hospitals once commonly offered, can add hundreds or thousands of dollars in interest to the debts patients owe.

A KFF Health News analysis of public records from UNC Health, North Carolina’s public university medical system, found that after AccessOne began administering payment plans for the system’s patients, the share paying interest on their bills jumped from 9% to 46%.

Hospital and finance industry officials insist they take care to educate patients about the risks of taking out loans with interest rates.

But federal regulators have found that many patients remain confused about the terms of the loans. In 2013, the CFPB ordered CareCredit to create a $34.1 million reimbursement fund for consumers the agency said had been victims of “deceptive credit card enrollment tactics.”

The new CFPB report does not recommend new sanctions against lenders. Regulators cautioned, however, that the system still traps many patients in damaging financing arrangements. “Patients appear not to fully understand the terms of the products and sometimes end up with credit they are unable to afford,” the agency said.

The risks are particularly high for lower-income borrowers and those with poor credit.

Regulators found, for example, that about a quarter of people with a low credit score who signed up for a deferred-interest medical loan were unable to pay it off before interest rates jumped. By contrast, just 10% of borrowers with excellent credit failed to avoid the high interest rates.

The CFPB warned that the growth of patient financing products poses yet another risk to low-income patients, saying they should be offered financial assistance with large medical bills but instead are being routed into credit cards or loans that pile interest on top of medical bills they can’t afford.

“Consumer complaints to the CFPB suggest that, rather than benefiting consumers, as claimed by the companies offering these products, these products in fact may cause confusion and hardship,” the report concluded. “Many people would be better off without these products.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.Subscribe to KFF Health News' free Morning Briefing.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Bright elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured in 2017 by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black hole. Giant of the Virgo galaxy cluster about 55 million light-years away, M87 is the large galaxy rendered in blue hues in this infrared image from the Spitzer Space telescope. Though M87 appears mostly featureless and cloud-like, the Spitzer image does record details of relativistic jets blasting from the galaxy's central region. Shown in the inset at top right, the jets themselves span thousands of light-years. The brighter jet seen on the right is approaching and close to our line of sight. Opposite, the shock created by the otherwise unseen receding jet lights up a fainter arc of material. Inset at bottom right, the historic black hole image is shown in context, at the center of giant galaxy and relativistic jets. Completely unresolved in the Spitzer image, the supermassive black hole surrounded by infalling material is the source of enormous energy driving the relativistic jets from the center of active galaxy M87. The Event Horizon Telescope image of M87 has now been enhanced to reveal a sharper view of the famous supermassive black hole. At NASA: Black Hole Week

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Galaxies are fascinating. In galaxies, gravity alone holds together massive collections of stars, dust, interstellar gas, stellar remnants and dark matter. Pictured is NGC 5128, better known as Centaurus A. Cen A is the fifth brightest galaxy on the sky and is located at a distance of about 12 million light years from Earth. The warped shape of Cen A is the result of a merger between an elliptical and a spiral galaxy. Its active galactic nucleus harbors a supermassive black hole that is about 55 million times more massive than our Sun. This central black hole ejects a fast jet visible in both radio and X-ray light. Filaments of the jet are visible in red in the upper left. New observations by the Event Horizon Telescope have revealed a brightening of the jet only towards its edges -- but for reasons that are currently unknown and an active topic of research. At NASA it's: Black Hole Week

Photo by Marco LorenziNatalia LewandowskaSUNY Oswego

If I tell you tomorrow,
about the love's lost,
will you tell me stories,
no matter the cost?