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Pandit Tulsidas, 52, was resting under a tree by a road junction in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where he had begged for years. When an official approached him about a government scheme that would teach him job skills, he rejected the offer. "But when he told me I was guaranteed a job, I accepted," he says, fearing that otherwise: "After the training, I'd end up back on the streets, because how can I eat without an income?" Six months on and Tulsidas works at a snack stand outside a Jaipur hospital. Getting people off the streets is usually done by bundling them into a police van and hauling them away to a crowded, dirty shelter. Keeping them off the streets is a problem India has so far failed to crack. The Rajasthan Skill and Livelihood Development Corporation (RSLDC) has developed a four-month scheme for 100 men interested in developing their skills and who have families to support. After an assessment, it's established that some can cook, some know a little bookkeeping, others can bake and so on. For four months, trainers then work to build on these skills. Employers are enlisted to provide jobs and can visit the training centre. The men are given shelter and food and receive 230 rupees (Ł2.30) a day, slightly more than India's minimum wage. Without counselling, many of the men would drop out. Rakesh Jain, RSLDC's deputy general manager, believes it is a crucial aspect of rehabilitation. "The counselling is as important as the training," says Jain. It is this holistic aspect that accounts for its initial success.
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The nature of work has undergone a lot of changes during the coronavirus pandemic. In Congress, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation to make a 32-hour workweek standard. This "great reassessment" of labor feels revolutionary. But we have been here before. In 1933, the Senate passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported, a bill to reduce the standard workweek to only 30 hours. In the 1830s, workers in manufacturing were on the job roughly 70 hours a week, often in horrendous and even deadly conditions. By the 1890s that had dropped to about 60 hours. This period also saw the rise of labor unions [and] the creation of Labor Day as a national holiday. The eight-hour day picked up in popularity in the decades preceding the Great Depression. Federal workers, railroad workers and Ford Motor employees all moved to eight-hour shifts. As soon as Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into a special session. On April 6, the Senate passed [Sen. Hugo] Black's 30-hour week bill. Meanwhile at the White House, as Roosevelt worked on a comprehensive recovery plan, he began to turn against the 30-hour week. What if, rather than sharing available work, there was just more work? As the plan for a massive public works program took shape, support for the 30-hour week collapsed. Instead, Roosevelt used the threat of it as leverage to get industry leaders to agree to ban child labor, set a modest minimum wage and limit the standard workweek at 40 hours.
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Julia Davies had one only goal in mind when she sold her share of the outdoor equipment company Osprey Europe a few years ago. The entrepreneur decided she was going to spend her millions ... by returning swathes of the British farmland to wilderness. Nature is in crisis in the UK, she argues, and its threatened wildlife needs all the protection it can get. A few months ago, the first steps towards her rewilding dreams were taken with the purchase of 170 hectares of fields and meadows that surround Court Farm, near Bere Regis, Dorset. The land cost almost Ł4m but thanks to the prospect of a bridging loan from Davies, Dorset Wildlife Trust has been able to acquire ownership. Pastures where Friesian cattle once grazed and fields of wheat, maize and barley – which fed the Court Farm herd – will now be returned to nature. New woodland will spread over the pastures, wildlife and plants from hedgerows will colonise fields while a network of deep ditches which have drained the farm for decades will be filled in and blocked. Wetlands will return to the landscape – along with populations of frogs and newts. Crucially, the plan adopted by Davies – a commercial lawyer turned green activist – could serve as a template for future rewilding projects as the UK struggles to counter its mounting biodiversity crisis. "Rather than buy my own piece of land to rewild it, I decided to lend money so that conservation groups such as wildlife trusts could get control of a piece of land. Then they could pay me back."
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Having learned from other cities' attempts to address homelessness, Albuquerque, New Mexico, has opened a village of tiny homes (THV). It hopes fostering a sense of community will prepare residents for permanent housing. But villagers aren't supposed to spend too much time in their new homes. The center of the community is the "Village House," where residents can cook, do laundry, hold meetings, go to the library, and watch television. They also do chores and help run the village. When people experiencing homelessness move off the street, "they lose [their] community," says Ilse Biel, resource manager for the THV. "It takes forever to forge a new community." "With this model we're almost trying to force the issue," she adds. The THV provides access to an occupational therapist and psychiatric nurse, as well as volunteers who help residents with computer skills, rĂ©sumĂ© building, and mock interviews. What Henry Esquivel likes most about his new house is the blast of cold air it delivers when he walks in. It's a big change from the Ford F-150 he used to sleep in. It's more spacious too, despite his new house being just one room. And it comes with neighbors – all of whom, like him, recently experienced homelessness. A few doors down is Mark Larusch. The father of three has potted plants and an Adirondack chair on his patio. A few doors further away is the woman whose large, black Labrador, Dottie, greets Mr. Esquivel excitedly every day.
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Fifteen years ago, when darkness used to fall in Yobe Nkosi, a remote village in northern Malawi, children did their school homework by candlelight: there was no electricity. But that started to change in 2006, when villager Colrerd Nkosi finished secondary school in Mzimba, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) away, and returned home -- and found he could no longer live without power. Aged 23 at the time, Nkosi soon figured out that a stream gushing past the house where he grew up had just enough force to push the pedals on his bicycle. He created a makeshift dynamo that brought power into his home. Word spread quickly among the cluster of brick houses and neighbours began paying regular visits to charge their mobile phones. "I started getting requests for electricity (and) decided to upgrade," said Nkosi, now 38, sawing through machinery on his veranda in blue overalls. With no prior training, he turned an old fridge compressor into a water-powered turbine and put it in a nearby river, generating electricity for six households. Today, the village is supplied by a bigger turbine, built from the motor of a disused maize sheller - a machine that skims kernels of corn off the cob. The gadget has been set up on the village outskirts. The power is carried along metal cables strung from a two-kilometre (one-mile) line of tree trunks topped with wooden planks. The users pay no fee for the power but give Nkosi some money for maintenance - slightly more than $1.00 (0.85 euros) per household per month.
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Fungi have been around for billions of years, setting the stage for humanity by supporting, carrying and converting life. But for complex political reasons, these organisms are still shrouded in mystery. One man, however, is determined to lift the veil on the magical world of mushrooms. Enter Stamets, a bespectacled author and researcher whose mission to decode nature's hidden language and explore "altered states of consciousness" is chronicled in the documentary "Fantastic Fungi," which was recently made available to stream on Netflix. While the film aims to destigmatize hallucinogenic mushrooms, it also demonstrates why we should legitimize the studies of all mushrooms. Contemporary experts in neurology, psychiatry and biology in the film show that fungal genomes can solve a host of mental, physical and environmental problems. From healing bacterial infections to cleaning petroleum spills, fungi possess unique, almost godlike properties that are otherwise unseen in nature. For instance, lion's mane, an edible white mushroom that tastes like lobster, stimulates nerves in order to grow, suggesting that it could potentially cure degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Ultimately, when Stamets discusses altered states of consciousness, it's ... about accepting a different state of being. For some people – especially those who live in pain – the film posits that mushrooms can be the answer they've been looking for.
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Across the world, about 80 percent of wastewater is dumped back into the ecosystem without being treated. Untreated wastewater leads to a range of problems and contributes to faecal contamination of drinking water sources for about 1.8 billion people. Treating wastewater requires treatment plants that can be expensive. Now, a Bengaluru-based startup ECOSTP Technologies has developed a new and efficient design for sewage treatment plants that takes inspiration from the digestive system of cows. It is so efficient that it does not even need the power to run. Cows have a powerful digestive system made up of four chambers containing bacteria that do not need oxygen. As grass passes through these chambers, the bacteria break it down into smaller parts eventually converting it to gas, nutrients, water, and waste. [Bengaluru-resident Tharun] Kumar and his team developed a treatment plant to mimic this structure and used the bacteria from cow dung to break down the waste in wastewater. Their plants do not even require power. Instead, they use gravity to move wastewater across chambers. In the treatment plant, the further wastewater travels, the cleaner it gets. Eventually, the solid waste settles down, and the wastewater is converted into gas and clear water, which can be safely reused. "Since inception, we have saved 280 million litres of water and have saved 315 MW of power which is equivalent to powering 35 villages for a year," Kumar, co-founder, and CEO of ECOSTP Technologies [said].
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Carissa Moore wore a white and yellow plumeria pinned next to her ear for her victory-lap interviews after making history as the first Olympic gold medalist at surfing's historic debut. Her mother – crowned the Honolulu Lei Queen in 2016 – had given her the flower hair clip before she left for Tokyo to remind the only Native Hawaiian Olympic surfer of where she came from. At this pinnacle point, Moore is still in disbelief when she's compared to Duke Kahanamoku, the godfather of modern surfing who is memorialized in Hawaii with a cherished monument. Moore has now become a realization of Kahanamoku's dream, at once the symbol of the sport's very best and a validating force for an Indigenous community that still struggles with its complex history. "It's a reclaiming of that sport for our native community," said KĹ«hiĹŤ Lewis, president of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, which convenes the largest annual gathering of Native Hawaiians. Lewis said all the locals he knew were texting each other during the competition, glued to the TV and elated, even relieved, by Moore's "surreal" win. He called it a "come to home moment" for a community that may never reconcile its dispossession. Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898. "At times, we're an invisible people. Our sport is being defined by other groups. This puts it into perspective," Lewis said. "It feels like an emerging of a people, of a native community that has been invisible to many."
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When Victoria Nyanjura was abducted from her Catholic boarding school in northern Uganda by members of the Lord's Resistance Army, she prayed to God asking to die. She was 14 when she was taken, along with 29 others, in the middle of the night. During the next eight years in captivity she was subjected to beatings, starvation, rape and other horrors. Nyanjura gave birth to two children. After a dramatic escape one rainy night, Nyanjura was able to return to her family with her children, go back into education and start the process of healing. Now, her work has helped push through a major law reform in Uganda. She coordinated the Women's Advocacy Network, made up of more than 900 women who were also survivors of the war in northern Uganda. Together they launched a petition in 2014 asking the Ugandan parliament to address the challenges they faced as they tried to rebuild their lives. The petition asked for free healthcare and better access to services, funding to support children born in captivity, training for teachers on how to work with trauma and a review of laws that require information on paternity, among other things. Officials listened to their accounts and demands for change, and in 2019 the government passed a transitional justice policy to remedy the plight of survivors. "I need to tell the story of change," [Nyanjura] says. "I want to make people smile, and use my voice to see global change in stopping violence."
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What Washington musician Yoko Sen describes as the "soundtrack of her life" is not one of the songs she wrote for the band Dust Galaxy, but the alarm of the heart monitor at her hospital bedside. When the U.S.-based Japanese artist fell ill in 2012 and had to spend weeks in hospitals, she found the jarring sounds there detrimental to her healing. "I thought it was torture, the cacophony of alarms, beeps, doors slamming, the squeaking of carts, people screaming." At the time, it wasn't clear if Sen would make a full recovery. She was connected to four different machines, and each emitted a different sound. Her sensitive ears were especially bothered by the constant beeping of her heart monitor. "Sound is largely ignored in healthcare even though the aesthetics of it could have a great impact on our sense of wellbeing and dignity," Sen realized. When Sen recovered, she was determined to follow her new mission: to "humanize" hospital sounds. How does healing sound? Or love? Are there tunes that foster recovery? She founded SenSound in 2015, a social enterprise to reimagine the acoustic environment in hospitals. [The] 41-year-old Sen is addressing a massive, often overlooked problem. On average, a patient endures 135 different alarms each day, hospitals are often louder than a highway during rush hour and sleep deprivation is a common complaint. Many wish for the sounds of nature, the laughter of children, or the voice of a loved one.
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It's official: in the first half of 2020, and for the first time, Europe generated more electricity from renewable sources than from fossil fuels. Not only that, but electricity is proving cheaper in countries that have more renewables. From January to June, wind, solar, hydro and bioenergy generated 40% of the electricity across the EU's 27 member states, while fossil fuels generated 34%. In the United States, by way of contrast, fossil fuels generated more than 62% of electricity last year, while renewables accounted for less than 18%. The EU figures, gathered and analyzed by U.K. climate think-tank Ember, represent a rapid acceleration in the decarbonization of the bloc's electricity supply. Just five years ago, Europe generated twice as much electricity from coal as it did from wind and solar. Now, coal makes up just 12% of the EU-27's electricity generation, while wind and solar alone provide 21%. The rosy results for green energy are in part a result of ... a reduction in activity caused by the coronavirus crisis. More broadly, the figures reflect the results of national energy policies, resulting in a 32% drop in electricity generated from coal across the EU. Austria and Sweden closed their last remaining coal-fired power plants in March, while Spain closed its coal fleet in June. Portugal's coal generation fell a whopping 95%, and Greece's dropped by a half. In Germany, Europe's most populous country, electricity from coal dropped 39%–the largest fall in absolute terms.
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Hundreds of households in New Mexico and Arizona recently had their medical debts eliminated, thanks to St. Bede's Episcopal Church in Santa Fe. The church worked through a nonprofit organization called RIP Medical Debt that buys up medical debt and then uses donations to pay it off. "The driving force behind this was our pastor, Rev. Catherine Volland," said Peg Maish, a spokeswoman for St. Bede's. "She was really advocating for it. In all, it was about a year and a half in the making, from researching it to making a final decision." In total, 234 households in New Mexico and 548 in Arizona had their medical debt paid off. St. Bede's settled all of the New Mexico debt held by RIP Medical Debt, enabling the church to also reach out to Arizona. St. Bede's paid off medical debt in Arizona areas with a heavy Native American population. Native American areas are often poor and have many healthcare problems. St. Bede's settled all the debt for $15,000, even though the actual debt was $1,380,119. The reason is that RIP Medical Debt purchases the debt for pennies on the dollar. RIP Medical Debt was founded in 2014 by Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton, two former debt collection executives. The nonprofit organization selects families and individuals whose income is no more than twice the federal poverty level and whose debts exceed their assets. RIP sends a letter to each debtor and contacts credit agencies to inform them that the debt has been paid.
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Every so often, Jim Williams wakes up in the middle of the night and lies awake inside his prison cell, thinking about quilt designs. As his fellow inmates at South Central Correctional Center snore and shift in their sleep, Williams mulls over the layout of cloth shapes, rearranging them in his mind. "I'm kind of a perfectionist," he said. "I'll wake up at 2:30 in the morning and think, â€That color really isn't going to work.'" It wasn't always this way. Williams had never touched a sewing machine until last year, when he was recruited to sew face masks for prison inmates and staff during the pandemic. Now he's part of a small group of volunteers at the Licking, Missouri, prison who spend their days making intricately designed quilts for charity. The quilting program offers the men a temporary "escape from the prison world" and a chance to engage with the community, said Joe Satterfield, case manager at South Central. To join the group, an inmate cannot have any recent conduct violations on his record. "You can see a change in their attitude," said Satterfield, who runs the program. "A light flips on like, â€Oh, this is a new avenue. I can actually be a part of something.'" The project hinges on the concept of restorative justice, which emphasizes community-building and rehabilitation over punitive measures. In the sewing room at South Central, members of the close-knit group are working toward a common goal: finishing more than 80 unique quilts for children in the Texas County foster care system.
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Quanesha Burks ordered medium fries with no salt and a side of sweet and sour sauce at McDonald's. She doesn't do this often, but the day after making her first Olympic team, she decided to treat herself. "I just ate it with so much gratitude in my mouth," Burks says. Before Burks was a full-time professional long jumper, her only previous job experience was working at the McDonald's in Hartselle, Ala., as a 17-year-old. The town of 14,000 people was also where she and her siblings were raised by her grandparents. She remembers the early years as a struggle, watching her family live paycheck to paycheck. While at Hartselle High School, Burks quickly took notice of her classmates using sports as a way to get college scholarships. When track season rolled around ... she finished third at the 2012 USATF National Junior Olympics. "I remember looking up the requirements to earn a full scholarship and I wrote those goals down," Burks says. "I jumped 20 feet and that's when everything changed." At Alabama, she became the first in her family to attend college and went on to have a successful career by setting school records, earning All-America honors and winning the 2015 NCAA outdoor and 2016 NCAA indoor long jump titles."It felt like all the odds were against me," Burks says. "I was facing so much, but I kept going back to when I worked at McDonald's. I had my goals set and I knew I could do it."
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By mimicking how a spider spins silk at room temperature, an Oxford University venture has created a high performance, biodegradable textile that is 1,000 times more efficient than current methods for making man-made fabrics, which emit tons of carbon. Over the course of millions of years, spiders have evolved the ability to create one of the world's strongest and most adaptable materials–silk. The secret to a spider's ability to create silk lies within their spinnerets, a specialized organ that turns the liquid silk gel within the spider's abdomen into a solid thread. After years of research into this unique mechanism, Spintex has managed to mimic the spider's amazing ability: The company has created a process to spin textile fibers from a liquid gel, at room temperature, with water and biodegradable textile fibers as the only outputs. Last week, the nonprofit Biomimicry Institute awarded $100,000 to the English researchers, naming Spintex the winner of this year's Ray of Hope Prize, which honors the world's top nature-inspired startups. More than 50% of silk's environmental footprint lies in the raw material processing, which uses thousands of liters of water that must be boiled every day, so it's very energy intensive. Currently, there are no sustainable alternatives to traditional silk. "Spintex provides the only truly sustainable option for silk production that can produce bers with the quality, performance and luster of traditional silk," says the company website.
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A bill in Connecticut makes calls from prison free for the inmates and their families, becoming the first state to do so. The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Josh Elliott and Sen. Martin M. Looney, will make all voice communication, including video and electronic mail services, free to those incarcerated and those who are receiving the communication. According to the bill, the services will also be free of charge to those in juvenile detention facilities. Inmates will get 90 minutes of phone calls at no charge and the cost will be provided by the taxpayers. Gov. Ned Lamont signed the bill into law June 16, and it will go into effect on October 22, 2022, for adult facilities and October 1, 2022, for juvenile facilities. "Today, Connecticut made history by becoming the first state to make prison calls, and all other communication, free," Bianca Tylek ... of Worth Rises, a non-profit that works for prison reform, said. "This historic legislation will change lives: It will keep food on the table for struggling families, children in contact with their parents, and our communities safer." In 2019, New York became the first major city to offer inmates free calls.
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When Madrid's schools were closed in January due to the coldest weather in fifty years, parents living in the Entrepatios cooperative housing development already had a model that would have made many parents struggling through pandemic closures jealous. Their onsite "school" was inaugurated. "It's like a village," says Cintia DĂaz-Silveira, who moved into the new cooperative housing apartment block at the end of 2020 with her partner and two children. For DĂaz-Silveira and her fellow inaugural residents, their new living situation is their answer to the refrain "it takes a village to raise a child." "We have our own bar, our own hairdressers, our own consumer group. We don't need to go shopping because everything gets delivered," she joked of the apartment building she shares with 16 other families and 23 children. The complex is the first of its kind in Madrid, and part of a cooperative housing movement that's starting to expand in Spain and elsewhere. By "the bar," DĂaz-Silveira is referring to Friday afternoons, when fellow residents have band practice, and many more residents go up to the terrace to enjoy a beer and live music. The "hairdresser" is a neighbor who's good at cutting the children's hair. "Someone gives great massages and someone else does yoga. We share our know-how with the group, and all our needs when it comes to parenting too," she said. There's not much need to hire babysitters, either, with some parents banding together to cover child care.
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Throughout high school and college, Jennifer Rocha would plant strawberries with her parents from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. Then she'd sleep a few hours and get ready for school. On June 13, Rocha graduated from the University of California, San Diego, and she wanted to honor her parents' hard work. So she coordinated a photo shoot in the strawberry fields they worked night after night. "Through drops of sweat, tears, back aches, they were able to get their three daughters through college. They deserve all the recognition in the world and for them to be an inspiration to other immigrant parents ... that it is not impossible for their kids to chase their dreams," Rocha [said]. In her college career, when she felt like quitting Rocha said she'd think back to her work in the fields and what her degree would mean to her family. Rocha hopes her photos bring awareness to the farmworker community and the impact of their work. She said it's easy for Americans to pick up vegetables and fruits from the grocery store without appreciation for the workers who made it possible. "Farmworkers do not deserve to be paid minimum wage. They worked throughout the whole pandemic risking their health and risking the health of their families not knowing if they would come home with something," Rocha said. "No matter if your parents work in domestic labor jobs where the pay is minimum wage, with hard work, sacrifice, discipline, and dedication it can be done."
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A flood of donations to support COVID-19 relief and racial justice efforts, coupled with stock market gains, led Americans to give a record US$471 billion to charity in 2020. The total donated to charity rose 3.8% from the prior year in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the latest annual Giving USA report from the Giving USA Foundation, released in partnership with the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IUPUI. In contrast, total charitable giving only grew 2.8% in 2019 – a year of economic expansion and stock gains. As two of the lead researchers who produced this report, we observed that giving bucked historical trends in three ways. The total increased despite a recession; foundations' giving surged; and gifts to a variety of nonprofits providing social services, supporting people in need and protecting civil rights grew the most. Food banks, homeless shelters, youth programs and other organizations that meet basic needs, collectively known as human services groups, received an outpouring of support in 2020. Those donations grew 8.4%, in inflation-adjusted dollars, to $65 billion. This additional giving responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic troubles it brought about, as well as broad calls for racial justice. Giving to public-society benefit organizations grew the most, a 14.3% increase to $48 billion. This broad category includes the United Way and its local branches, which pool donations raised in workplaces, from corporations and other sources.
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People recovering from a stroke will soon have access to a device that can help restore a disabled hand. The Food And Drug Administration has authorized a device called IpsiHand, which uses signals from the uninjured side of a patient's brain to help rewire circuits controlling the hand, wrist and arm. NeuroLutions ... was founded by Dr. Eric Leuthardt. Leuthardt had been puzzled by something he often heard from patients who'd lost the use of hand after a stroke. "If you talk to a stroke patient, they can imagine moving their hand," he says. "They can try to move their hand. But they just can't actually move it." So Leuthardt had been looking for the source of those thoughts. Usually ... the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. But ... control signals [are] also present on the ipsilateral side – the same side of the brain as the limb being controlled. Leuthardt's team built a system that could detect and decode those ipsilateral signals. Then they connected it to a device that would open and close a patient's disabled hand for them when they imagined the action. But a mechanical hand wasn't Leuthardt's ultimate goal. He wanted to help his patients regain the ability to move their hand without assistance. And that meant answering a question: "Can we use this device that controls their affected limb to essentially encourage the brain to rewire?" Early experiments suggested the approach worked. NeuroLutions tested the device on 40 patients for 12 weeks. All of them got better.
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