Latest news with #Gorham
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Classic Rock Guitarist, 74, Reveals He ‘Actually Died' During Recent Operation
The rock world nearly lost Thin Lizzy's Scott Gorham. Gorham, who joined Phil Lynott's band in 1974, is recuperating after nearly dying on the operating table. "I had a health issue scare about a year ago with a kidney that had to be removed, and I got sepsis from it," Gorham said on the May 21 episode of Darren Paltrowitz's Paltrocast podcast. "And the second surgeon said I actually died on the operating table and all that. And I was, like, 'Really, man? What the hell is all that about?'" Though Gorham wasn't a founding member, he's considered an essential part of Thin Lizzy. He was one of the band's "twin lead guitarists" and Scott played on albums like Nightlife, Fighting and Jailbreak (which featured the band's biggest U.S. hit, "The Boys Are Back In Town"). Gorham reformed Thin Lizzy in 1996, 13 years after the band broke up and a decade after Lynott's death. He also played in the Thin Lizzy spin-off band, Black Star Riders, before departing in 2021 to focus strictly on Thin Lizzy. In November, Gorham discussed putting together "just an absolute kick-[explicative] Thin Lizzy band" together for a tour, but he told Paltrocast that he's not ready to get back on the road. "And now I had a third operation, and [my doctor] said, 'Maybe you should take some time out and just kind of rehabilitate and all that, get your strength back and all that.' So that's what I'm doing," said Gorham. "And in the meantime, I've got the drawing to keep me occupied," he said. Last year, Gorham revealed his secret passion as an artist and held his first art exhibition in London. "[Drawing] is the new thing for me," said Gorham. "It's something that I thought I'd never really do as a constant thing. So I'm kind of enjoying this kind of break from the music right now and going into this little bit of a different direction." This doesn't mean his music career is over. Scott said that he hopes to "get my buns back out on the road" sometime Rock Guitarist, 74, Reveals He 'Actually Died' During Recent Operation first appeared on Parade on May 23, 2025
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Come for the pizza, stay for the scuttlebutt at this Canandaigua Lake favorite
Some stop by for help with cell phones or their laptops. Some come in with the report of a lost dog, knowing that word — and maybe a search party — will soon get out. Others gather for service club meetings, and some have learned how to run for elected office here. Some come by to lend a helping hand. Some on their visit drop spare change in a donation jar at the front checkout, because there's always someone somewhere needing help. Some arrive looking for help planning and arranging funerals. Back in 2013, some may have come in to hear the latest about the attempt — successfully at that — to get a law passed overturning Gorham's status as a dry town. More recently, they may have wanted to learn more about the effort — again, successfully at that — to overturn a local law prohibiting the sale of retail cannabis, so they turned up again. While many walk in or arrive by car, at least one customer has been known to take his lawnmower for a spin to this popular destination in Gorham's hamlet of Crystal Beach. 'People go in for their scuttlebutt,' said Elke Schmitt, who is a regular. Oh yes, they all come, whether locals or tourists, for grocery items and beer, pizza and wings, subs and other hot breakfast, lunch and dinner fare. Because after all, the popular St. George's Grocery and Pizza Sangiorgi — there's a fun video on YouTube that will help you with the pronounciation of the name — is a business, although when it comes down to it, husband-and-wife owners Annie and Chuck St. George are really in the people business. Inside, customers sit in booths or at the counter, and conversation is perhaps the most popular appetizer even if it's not on the menu. 'People come to us for all sorts of stuff,' said Annie, who also is regional manager of the Cooperative Funeral Fund, hence the end-of-life advice. Chuck said this is what they envisioned — for the most part — in the days they used to drive by what was formerly a convenience store and thought, what if? Chuck, who was in the engineering field, and his wife were on the road a lot at the time, missing their kids' games and other activities. 'Finally, we said, 'You know what? We've got to get off the road.' Let's throw an offer out there, low risk,' he said. 'Shoot, we got a call back the next day and they said, 'We'll take it.'' While a grand idea to sell ice cream did not pan out — the grocery business did and so did the pizza and deli, which they added on soon after taking over. 'We figured we'd do it until the kids are out of college. Well, that's five years passed now,' Chuck said. 'We're still here. We're enjoying it, no doubt about it.' While convenient for folks who don't want to drive into the city of Canandaigua, it's more than a convenience store. And they've made a ton of friends along the way. When people came in, the St. Georges would ask what kind of beer they like, for example, and they would carry it for them. They picked up a lot of customers that way. If it's not available, just ask, as Schmitt did, spilling the beans on her love for sour gummy candies to Annie. 'Next day, there they were,' Schmitt said. The St. Georges feed their family of customers well. 'You'll see pizzas flying out of there, subs flying out of there. Their breakfast sandwiches are awesome,' said Schmitt, drawing out the word to awesome effect. 'Their food is doggone good.' The thinking when they started was, 'Nobody does pizza down here, but it's got to be good,' Chuck said. They try to have fun with what they offer, especially with pizza slices. In addition to fixing up a slice of pickle pie, a recent special offered customers cheeseburger slices. Philly cheesesteak pizza has done well too. 'The contractors who come in appreciate it because it's not the same thing every time,' Annie said. Everybody seems to love their wings, but It's not the sauces, Annie said; it's their size — they're jumbo wings and they don't overcharge for them, Annie said. 'Maybe it's the way we cook them,' Annie said. Through the years they've been open, improvements to the business have included a paved driveway and new sign outside, but they're thrilled by the impacts they've made on another important asset — the people who have worked there and helped make it the place people want to come to again and again. A recent addition is a Wall of Fame listing of former employees, 70 or so and counting. Both Annie and Chuck said they have tried to treat their employees well. Many of them started as students, and the St. Georges not inly provided them with their first paychecks, but also guidance and encouragement as they discover what they want to do with the rest of their lives. 'We've been blessed and lucky. We feel like we've raised 70 kids into the world,' Annie said. 'I'm like, 'I'm not expecting you to be here when you're my age, unless you buy me out.'' How they treat their employees is a big deal and a real testimonial to their integrity, but they treat customers the same way, Schmitt said. Once, when her boyfriend stopped in without her, Annie sent him home with a cupcake and note for her. 'I know that sounds silly, but it's a comforting feeling to know you have a tight-knit community,' Schmitt said. 'They care about our well-being and they're sincere about it.' And until someone buys the St. Georges out, people like Schmitt will continue to see the couple at the register, or in the deli making subs or in the kitchen cooking or at the center of the conversation or doing whatever it is they're asked. 'Someone comes in and says, 'Hey, do you mind if' ... 'No, not at all,'' Annie said. 'It's nice to be able to offer that.' St. George's Grocery and Pizza Sangiorgi is at 4502 E. Lake Road, Gorham. For details, visit Mike Murphy covers Canandaigua and other communities in Ontario County and writes the Eat, Drink and Be Murphy food and drink column. Follow him on X at @MPN_MikeMurphy. This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Finger Lakes grocery, pizza place offers up small-town atmosphere
WIRED
19-03-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Synchron's Brain-Computer Interface Now Has Nvidia's AI
Mar 19, 2025 8:00 AM The company has partnered with Nvidia to develop 'cognitive AI,' which it says will allow people with severe physical disabilities to have more natural interactions with the world around them. Neurotech company Synchron has unveiled the latest version of its brain-computer interface, which uses Nvidia technology and the Apple Vision Pro to enable individuals with paralysis to control digital and physical environments with their thoughts. In a video demonstration at the Nvidia GTC conference this week in San Jose, California, Synchron showed off how its system allows one of its trial participants, Rodney Gorham, who is paralyzed, to control multiple devices in his home. From his sun-filled living room in Melbourne, Australia, Gorham is able to play music from a smart speaker, adjust the lighting, turn on a fan, activate an automatic pet feeder, and run a robotic vacuum. Gorham has lost the use of his voice and much of his body due to having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The degenerative disease weakens muscles over time and eventually leads to paralysis. He received Synchron's implantable brain-computer interface, or BCI, in 2020. He could initially use his BCI to type on a computer, iPhone, and iPad. Now, using the Apple Vision Pro, he can look at various devices in his home and see a drop-down menu overlaid on his physical environment. With his BCI, he can then select from various actions, such as adjusting the temperature on his air-conditioning unit just by thinking. BCIs decode signals from brain activity and translate them into commands on an output device. To improve the speed and accuracy of decoding, Synchron is using Nvidia's Holoscan, an AI sensor-processing platform. Faster and more accurate decoding would mean a shorter delay between a user's intended movement and the time it takes for a BCI system to execute a command, plus more precise control. Excitement for BCIs has been building in recent years as Elon Musk's Neuralink and other companies have emerged to commercialize what was once clunky technology used in academic labs into practical assistive devices. Though they're still experimental, implantable BCIs are showing promise at restoring some lost functionalities to people with paralysis. But most demonstrations of BCIs have been of one-off capabilities—playing a video game, moving a robotic arm, or piloting a drone, for instance. Synchron is aiming to build a BCI system able to seamlessly perform a wide range of tasks in the home environment. 'It's running in real time, in a real environment 24/7, making predictions where context really matters,' Tom Oxley, Synchron's CEO, told WIRED in an exclusive interview. To do that, Synchron's BCI will need to be trained on a lot of brain data. As part of its collaboration with Nvidia, the two companies are developing what Oxley has dubbed 'cognitive AI,' the combination of large amounts of brain data with advanced computing to create more intuitive BCI systems. Oxley sees cognitive AI as the next phase of AI development following agentic AI, which can act and make decisions independently, and physical AI, the integration of AI with robots and other physical systems. 'What we saw Rodney do is a start, but there are so many more interactions that you can actually begin bringing here,' says David Niewolny, senior director of health care and medtech at Nvidia. With cognitive AI, he says, the mind will be the 'ultimate user interface.' Currently, BCIs are trained with data from a single person. An individual with a BCI is asked to perform a specific task, such as thinking about moving a cursor left or right. An electrode array collects neural activity from the brain while the person is doing that task and researchers 'label' that brain data. In other words, they indicate what the subject was doing at each time point that the brain signal was being measured. That labeled data is used to build an AI model that learns to relate that specific pattern of brain activity to a movement intention. To achieve its vision of cognitive AI, Synchron plans to use brain data from its current and future trial participants to build an AI model. Maryam Shanechi, a BCI researcher at the University of Southern California and founding director of its Center for Neurotechnology, says a brain foundation model could improve the accuracy of Synchron's BCI and allow it to perform a more diverse set of functions without having to collect hours of training data from individual patients. 'This model would be more generalizable, more accurate, and then you can fine-tune it in each subject,' she says. 'Because this AI has been trained on the brains of many people, it has essentially learned how to learn, how to think, and then you have this brainlike AI system that you can use for a variety of tasks.' Some training will still be needed for each new BCI user. Users learn how to operate a BCI with prompts such as 'squeeze your fist' or 'press down like a brake pedal.' A paralyzed person may not be able to make that motion, but the neurons in their brain's motor cortex still fire up when they attempt to do so. Those intended movement signals are what BCIs decode. Oxley says Synchron will use Cosmos, Nvidia's new family of AI models, to generate photorealistic simulations of the user's body, allowing them to watch an avatar of their own movement and mentally rehearse it. Cosmos can also generate tokens about each avatar movement that act like time stamps, which will be used to label brain data. Labeling data enables an AI model to accurately interpret and decode brain signals and then translate those signals into the intended action. All of this data will be used to train a brain foundation model, a large deep-learning neural network that can be adapted to a wide range of uses rather than needing to be trained on each new task. 'As we get more and more data, these foundation models get better and become more generalizable,' Shanechi says. 'The issue is that you need a lot of data for these foundation models to actually become foundational.' That is difficult to achieve with invasive technology that few people will receive, she says. Synchron's device is less invasive than many of its competitors'. Neuralink and other companies' electrode arrays sit in the brain or on the brain's surface. Synchron's array is a mesh tube that's inserted at the base of the neck and threaded through a vein to read activity from the motor cortex. The procedure, which is similar to implanting a heart stent in an artery, doesn't require brain surgery. 'The big advantage here is that we know how to do stents in the millions around the globe. In every part of the world, there's enough talent to go do stents. A normal cath lab can do this. So it's a scalable procedure,' says Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, one of Synchron's investors. As many as 2 million people in the United States alone receive stents every year to prop open their coronary arteries to prevent heart disease. Synchron has surgically implanted its BCI in 10 subjects since 2019 and has collected several years' worth of brain data from those people. The company is getting ready to launch a larger clinical trial that is needed to seek commercial approval of its device. There have been no large-scale trials of implanted BCIs because of the risks of brain surgery and the cost and complexity of the technology. Synchron's goal of creating cognitive AI is ambitious, and it doesn't come without risks. 'What I see this technology enabling more immediately is the possibility of more control over more in the environment,' says Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University who has written extensively about the ethics of BCIs. In the longer term, Farahany says that as these AI models get more sophisticated, they could go beyond detecting intentional commands to predicting or making suggestions about what a person might want to do with their BCI. 'To enable people to have that kind of seamless integration or self-determination over their environment, it requires being able to decode not just intentionally communicated speech or intentional motor commands, but being able to detect that earlier,' she says. It gets into sticky territory about how much autonomy a user has and whether the AI is acting consistently with the individual's desires. And it raises questions about whether a BCI could shift someone's own perception, thoughts, or intentionality. Oxley says those concerns are already arising with generative AI. Using ChatGPT for content creation, for instance, blurs the lines between what a person creates and what AI creates. 'I don't think that problem is particularly special to BCI,' he says. For people with the use of their hands and voice, correcting AI-generated material—like autocorrect on your phone—is no big deal. But what if a BCI does something that a user didn't intend? 'The user will always be driving the output,' Oxley says. But he recognizes the need for some kind of option that would allow humans to override an AI-generated suggestion. 'There's always going to have to be a kill switch.'
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Town's museums could be taken over by council
The running of Scarborough's museums and galleries could be handed back to a council after being operated by a charity for two decades. Scarborough Art Gallery, the Rotunda Museum and Woodend Gallery and Studios and their collections are owned by North Yorkshire Council, but since 2005 their day-to-day management has been handled by Scarborough Museums Creative and Cultural Trust (SMCCT). However, the trust said that arrangement was no longer viable and had asked the council to explore if it could take over their running. Sally Gorham, SMCCT chair, said: "With the economic pressures facing the trust, we believe handing the service back to the council offers the best guarantee for the future." Options to be discussed by councillors later this month included incorporating the running and management of the museums and galleries into the council's wider culture and archives service, according to North Yorkshire Council. It was estimated the move could provide annual savings of more than £50,000, with support service and management costs reduced, a council spokesperson said. Museums and galleries in Harrogate and Skipton, including Craven Museum and the Royal Pump Room, are among the award-winning cultural sites already run by the authority. Ms Gorham said: "All the trustees have been impressed by North Yorkshire Council's commitment to arts and culture." Simon Myers, the council's executive member for culture and arts, said Scarborough's museums and galleries were "cultural assets enjoyed by local communities and visitors". "It is vital we do everything we can to protect and enhance these assets, as well as their collections and the displays on show," he said. Myers added that if the move went ahead, it would present an opportunity to "save taxpayers money and protect the future of the town's museums and galleries". An alternative proposal for the running of the venues could see the council provide additional financial and management support to SMCCT. North Yorkshire Council officers were continuing to work alongside the charity and its staff during the period of decision-making, the council spokesperson said. A report to be considered by councillors also identified that, to allow necessary repairs to be completed, the Rotunda Museum could be temporarily closed at some point in the next year. The future running of the museums is due to be discussed by members of the council's executive on Tuesday 18 March. Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North. Scarborough historic museum to undergo repairs Scarborough Museums and Galleries North Yorkshire Council
BBC News
13-03-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Museums in Scarborough could be taken over by council
The running of Scarborough's museums and galleries could be handed back to a council after being operated by a charity for two Art Gallery, the Rotunda Museum and Woodend Gallery and Studios and their collections are owned by North Yorkshire Council, but since 2005 their day-to-day management has been handled by Scarborough Museums Creative and Cultural Trust (SMCCT).However, the trust said that arrangement was no longer viable and had asked the council to explore if it could take over their Gorham, SMCCT chair, said: "With the economic pressures facing the trust, we believe handing the service back to the council offers the best guarantee for the future." Options to be discussed by councillors later this month included incorporating the running and management of the museums and galleries into the council's wider culture and archives service, according to North Yorkshire was estimated the move could provide annual savings of more than £50,000, with support service and management costs reduced, a council spokesperson and galleries in Harrogate and Skipton, including Craven Museum and the Royal Pump Room, are among the award-winning cultural sites already run by the Gorham said: "All the trustees have been impressed by North Yorkshire Council's commitment to arts and culture." Simon Myers, the council's executive member for culture and arts, said Scarborough's museums and galleries were "cultural assets enjoyed by local communities and visitors"."It is vital we do everything we can to protect and enhance these assets, as well as their collections and the displays on show," he added that if the move went ahead, it would present an opportunity to "save taxpayers money and protect the future of the town's museums and galleries".An alternative proposal for the running of the venues could see the council provide additional financial and management support to Yorkshire Council officers were continuing to work alongside the charity and its staff during the period of decision-making, the council spokesperson said.A report to be considered by councillors also identified that, to allow necessary repairs to be completed, the Rotunda Museum could be temporarily closed at some point in the next future running of the museums is due to be discussed by members of the council's executive on Tuesday 18 March. Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
