Avoid putting off a roof repair for any length of time, even if it seems like a minor issue. Once a shingle or two have blown off, it’s much easier for the wind to get underneath the rest and blow them off too, one-by-one. Fixing your roof right away will minimize damage, saving you money.

You should have certain expectations of your roofer. For example, any shingles that fall down to the ground should be picked up and hauled off your property. In addition, the roofer should pick up the majority of the nails that fall down as well, although it is likely that a few may be missed. In general, your yard should be clean and picked up after the work is completed.

Never attempt to complete any roofing work alone. If you have an accident whilst working on your roof, you need to be sure that someone will be there to help you. This is because the long-term impact of a roofing accident injury is very often related to the time it takes to seek help after the accident occurs.

Don’t pay for the job in full before it’s even started. Normally, you pay 25% or so to start the job. You wouldn’t want them to perform less work than you anticipated.

To protect the integrity of your roof, clean the gutters regularly. Many roof problems, such as leaking, are caused by back-ups in the gutter system. Having a clogged gutter means that rain and snow cannot adequately drain and that puts an extra burden on your roofing materials. Buy tools to make cleaning the gutters faster and easier on you.

Find out about roofing warranties from your roofer. Roof replacement and repair can be expensive, so you should always choose a contractor that offers warranties for the work. Professional contractors usually offer full warranties on new roofs or roof replacements, but they may not on repairs. Always get a copy of your warranty when the work is done.

Check your rubber boots on your roof for cracking or dryness. This is a very common problem that quickly leads to leaks around the roof. Fortunately, they are easy to fix and can be found at most local hardware stores. However, if you do not feel comfortable doing it yourself you should certainly call a contractor.

If you’re unable to find where a leak is coming from in your roof, don’t get upset. Have another person inside the home and carefully use a hose to find the location of the leak. Communicating by mobile phone will be helpful to avoid lots of water entering your home.

There are several factors to consider when selecting a roof material besides cost and appearance. How easily it can be installed, the life span of the material, its fire resistance and how prone it is to dry rot, mold or mildew can impact your decision. Think about what’s most important to you before you buy something!

Ask as many questions of your roofer as you need to before you hire him. If you do not ask questions, you are much more likely to hire someone whose work you are ultimately unsatisfied with. Discuss the materials the person uses, the safety measures they take and more to get a sense of how they do their job.

Inspect, or have someone else inspect your roof regularly. Keeping your roof in good shape can help prevent a lot of problems in the future. Your roof is a very important part of your home and helps protect the inside and the outside. Making sure that things are the way they need to be.

Be sure to get a few quotes before you choose a roofing contractor to repair or replace your roof. There are companies out there that try to gouge their clients. To steer clear of rip-offs, make sure to do your research.

Make sure you get a detailed estimate by any contractor you are thinking of hiring to work on your roof. This estimate needs to include everything from permits, materials, cleanup and labor. It is also important that you get this estimate in writing. Any reputable business should be more than willing to provide you with one.

If you notice roof damage towards the middle of your roof, then it is likely you do not have water damage. Instead, you probably have dry rot, which occurs whenever the plywood is deteriorating. You can prevent this problem by putting in a ridge vent. However, in order to install this type of vent, you must have a properly running soffit vent. Drill holes through the soffit vent so cool air comes from the bottom and warm air is pushed out the top.

Ask your contractor how long he has been in business. Although a contractor with only one or two years’ experience may be excellent in what he does, it is better to be safe and select someone with a minimum of five years’ experience. Keep in mind that extra work experience does not always equal better work, but for the most part, this is the case.

Always check up on a roofing company on the Better Business Bureau before you hire them. By visiting this site, you will be able to see if any former customers had an issue with the company. If you see a problem, investigate whether or not the company made amends. Also take a look to see if the BBB gave the company a rating or not.

A roof that is in good shape will ensure that you and your family are always safe. It will also keep the rest of your house protected too. Be sure and use the advice mentioned above to help you with any and all your roofing concerns. You’ll be glad you did.

However, he left the court just before halftime holding his right hand in pain, and that turned out to be serious — he is done for the night with a fractured hand.

Robinson injured his hand setting a pick and Wizards guard Garrison Mathews ran into him.

It’s impossible to guess how long he will be out; it depends on the type of fracture and where it is in the hand. Most likely it is weeks, but how many remains unknown.

Robinson is averaging 8.4 points and 8.2 rebounds a game as the Knicks starting five this season.

In a new research paper, UniSA sleep experts Dr. Alex Agostini and Dr. Stephanie Centofanti confirm that sleep is intrinsically linked to mental health, but is commonly overlooked by health practitioners as a contributing factor.

Dr. Agostini says it’s imperative that parents and medical practitioners are aware of the bi-directional relationship between sleep and mental health, particularly across the teenage years.

“Getting enough sleep is important for all of us—it helps our physical and mental health, boosts our immunity, and ensures we can function well on a daily basis,” Dr. Agostini says.

“But for teenagers, sleep is especially critical because they’re at an age where they’re going through a whole range of physical, social, and developmental changes, all of which depend on enough sleep.

“Research shows that teenagers need at least eight hours of sleep each night. Without this, they’re less able to deal with stressors, such as bullying or social pressures, and run the risk of developing behavioral problems, as well as anxiety and depression.

“If sleep drops to less than six hours a night, research shows that teens are twice as likely to engage in risky behaviors such as dangerous driving, marijuana, alcohol or tobacco use, risky sexual behavior, and other aggressive or harmful activities.”

In Australia, almost one in seven children and adolescents (aged 4–17 years) will experience a mental health disorder. The World Health Organization says that while half of all mental health conditions start by age 14, most cases go undetected and untreated.

Co-researcher, Dr. Centofanti says while many factors contribute to later bedtimes for teenagers, technology is one of the greatest offenders.

“Teens spend a lot of time on devices, whether it’s texting friends, playing games, or watching videos, using technology late into the night is one of the most common disruptors of good sleep. Overuse of technology can also contribute to mental health issues likely to increase anxiety,” Dr. Centofanti says.

“Not only can technology use make us feel anxious and awake, but the blue light emitted from technology inhibits the production of the sleep hormone melatonin to delay the natural onset of sleep. This is problematic because teens already have a biological tendency to want to stay up late and sleep in.

“To make a real difference to teenage mental health, both parents and medical practitioners must understand how sleep can affect mental health in teenagers.”

The company, which now has more than 50 million daily active users, announced a $250 million fundraising round on Monday led by venture capital firm Vy Capital and added that it would use the new funds to expand further.

Reddit was valued at $3 billion in its last round in February 2019, and the surge in its value follows a 90% jump in advertising revenue from a year ago.

“We decided that now was the right opportunity to make strategic investments in Reddit including video, advertising, consumer products, and expanding into international markets,” the company said in a blog post. (bit.ly/3p37uC3)

The platform has garnered attention in the past month for the role of its forums in driving massive fluctuations in the share price of videogame retailer GameStop Corp, cinema operator AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc and a number of other mid-sized and previously unloved companies.

Reddit Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman told the Wall Street Journal it was a good market to raise funds. (on.wsj.com/2N5U62)

“Valuations are very high right now. It never hurts to raise money when there’s an opportunity to do so and Reddit had a strong year,” Huffman said, according to the WSJ report.

Reddit is not the only company to have benefited from the frenzy, with audio app Clubhouse also seeing its valuation surge to $1 billion after raising fresh funds last month.

Reddit, which counts the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Tencent Holdings among existing backers, was founded in 2005 by current CEO Steve Huffman, entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian and the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

It became popular due to its message boards that allow anyone to post messages or articles and ask the community to vote up or down on those topics.

It’s a smart move. TikTokers get to use more of the music they love as the soundtrack for their videos, the artists behind the works get paid, and UMG gets greater access to a proven viral hit-making machine. For better or for worse, TikTok is one of the biggest drivers of breakout hits online; if a song blows up on the app, it feels like it’s basically guaranteed a spot on the charts. (Though, of course, that’s not always true.) It’s also a sign that the music industry is recognizing that online influencers matter to their bottom lines.

The UMG deal follows other deals with major sectors of the music industry. In the last year, TikTok has forged similar partnerships with Sony Music, Merlin (which represents a large portion of indie labels), and Warner Music Group — and it means that TikTok now has deals with the companies that represent just about all of popular music. Which is all to say that to the music business, TikTok has become too important to fail.

MINEOLA, N.Y. — The 64-year-old father of rapper Nicki Minaj has died after being struck by a hit-and-run driver in New York, police said.

Robert Maraj was walking along a road in Mineola on Long Island at 6:15 p.m. Friday when he was hit by a car that kept going, Nassau County police said. Maraj was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead Saturday.

Police are asking any witnesses to the fatal crash to come forward.

Minaj, 38, was born Onika Tanya Maraj in Trinidad and was raised in the New York City borough of Queens. She has not made any public statement about her father’s death.

An email seeking comment was sent to a representative for Minaj.

Kyle Kuzma had 20 points and 10 rebounds for the defending NBA champions, while Davis finished two points shy of his season high in his return from a two-game absence with an Achilles injury.

Montrezl Harrell scored 14 points for Los Angeles, which extended its longest win streak in a year even after falling behind by 20 points in the first quarter. The Lakers also fell behind by 20 two nights ago before rallying to beat Oklahoma City, making them the third NBA team in the past two decades to win back-to-back games after falling behind by 20 in each contest.

“There’s a little frustration,” Kuzma said. “We should never be down 20 points at any point in time with the personnel that we have on our team. … But we’ve been through the fire, and we know how to walk people down. We’ve been having to walk people down a little too much lately.”

The Lakers took their first lead late in the third quarter while James scored 13 points in the period. They took control early in the fourth and wrapped up a perfect five-game homestand – even managing to avoid tying an NBA record by playing a fourth consecutive overtime game.

Grayson Allen scored 23 points and Ja Morant had 22 points and 10 assists in the Grizzlies’ fifth loss in six games. Memphis had just nine players in uniform.

“We definitely miss the guys that are out right now,” said Allen, who hit six 3-pointers. “We know they add a lot to our team, but I feel like the nine guys we had available for tonight did a great job of fighting. I don’t think there was any letdown or any factor of fatigue.”

Jonas Valanciunas had 22 points and eight rebounds for the Grizzlies, who hit 12 3-pointers after making a franchise-record 23 against Charlotte two nights earlier.

“Very proud of our effort tonight,” Memphis coach Taylor Jenkins said. “They turned it on in the third quarter. I thought we tried, but for the most part, really proud.”

Memphis opened with a 22-2 run, embarrassing the champions in the first six minutes. The Lakers finished their homestand with four consecutive terrible starts, yet they didn’t lose.

Asked to gauge his level of concern with the Lakers’ slow starts, Vogel said he’s “not there yet.”

“We don’t want to lose any of these games,” Vogel said. “The big picture is to build habits that are going to win for us in the playoffs.”

The ability to perceive touch sensations gives our brains a wealth of information about the environment, including the shape, texture and temperature of objects. Working in mice, neuroscientists at EPFL have identified a type of neuron that helps trigger activity in the brain region involved in functions such as sensory perception and motor control.

The findings could help to understand not only how the brain perceives tactile stimuli, but also how it links information together—a key process in learning.

Previous studies have suggested that a type of inhibitory neuron called a vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) interneuron could play a role in processes including the formation of new connections between nerve cells and the integration of sensory and motor signals. The new study is the first to measure the membrane potential—the most fundamental electrical feature—of these brain cells in a living brain, says Professor Carl Petersen at the EPFL School of Life Sciences.

Whisked away

Mice use whiskers—long bristles growing from their snout—to explore their environment, much as people might feel around with their hands to navigate in the dark. In one set of experiments, Petersen and his team monitored the activity of neurons in the somatosensory barrel cortex, a brain region that responds to whisker sensation, as mice moved their whiskers back and forth in a process called ‘whisking.’ In another set of experiments, the researchers monitored the activity of neurons in the barrel cortex as mice received light touches to their whiskers.

In the absence of the main excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate, both whisking and whisker stimulation triggered the activity of VIP neurons, but not of other types of neurons in the barrel cortex, the researchers found. The activation of VIP neurons appeared to depend on an increase in the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

To test the idea that acetylcholine activates VIP neurons, Petersen and his colleagues used mice engineered to carry light-sensitive proteins in brain cells that mainly use acetylcholine to send their messages. Then, the researchers used light to stimulate these neurons to release acetylcholine as they monitored the activity of other nerve cells in the barrel cortex.

The release of acetylcholine triggered a ‘go’ signal for initiating action in VIP neurons and a ‘stop’ signal in a type of neuron called somatostatin-expressing (SST) neurons. SST neurons typically inhibit the portions of excitatory nerve cells located in the outer layer of the somatosensory cortex.

Further experiments suggested that the acetylcholine released during whisking excites VIP neurons, which in turn dampen the activity of SST neurons. Turning off inhibitory signals from SST neurons helps drive the activity of excitatory cortical nerve cells, stimulating sensory processing through a process of disinhibition. The study was published in Neuron.

Learning curve

Many of the long-range connections between different brain regions seem to occur in the outermost layer of the cortex. The activation of excitatory neurons through disinhibition of this outer layer likely favours the integration of different sensory signals, helping the animal to make sense of them, Petersen says. That could also drive the formation of new connections between neurons, a process that underlies learning, he adds.

Although the study was done in mice, Petersen notes that a similar process could happen in people’s brains. “When scientists have looked in the human brain, the same cell types and the same mechanisms have come up,” he says.

For example, the findings might help to explain some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, a disorder characterized by delusions and hallucinations—among other things. Some people with schizophrenia have mutations in receptors that respond to acetylcholine, which might hint at why individuals with the disorder have trouble selecting and integrating sensory information, Petersen says.

Next, the team plans to study whether signals mediated by acetylcholine could improve learning in mice. “We can increase acetylcholine and see if we can enhance learning, or turn the signals off and see if that prevents learning,” Petersen says.

The researchers are also trying to work out how acetylcholine reaches its receptors on the surface of VIP neurons, and what makes acetylcholine-producing neurons become active and release the neurotransmitter. “Right now, that’s a complete mystery,” Petersen says.

Younger investors in Britain and other countries are fast joining online trading platforms and spending more on shares at traditional brokerages, hoping to copy Americans who bet on stocks such as GameStop and AMC Entertainment during the frenzy this year.

British-based online trading platform Freetrade signed up over 160,000 customers in January, pushing it past 500,000 in total, thanks to the hype around the so-called Reddit rally stocks, Freetrade told Reuters.

“When investors become so excited about the potential for a particular stock or asset class, the story can sometimes move from the world of financial news to the mainstream,” said Adam Dodds, chief executive of Freetrade.

The Reddit stock mania has galvanised a retail trading boom that was already underway in Europe in 2020, as bored housebound punters saving extra money tried to cash in on market volatility, and new user-friendly apps gave them the means.

The surging interest in stock investing is also due to macroeconomic factors in continental Europe, including rock-bottom interest rates, high house prices and inadequate pension systems, said Nick Bortot, co-CEO of Amsterdam-based digital broker BUX.

The U.S. Reddit-fuelled stock craze has lit the touchpaper, he said.

“During the last couple of weeks since GameStop and others hit the headlines, we have onboarded a few thousand customers a day, two or three times our average,” he said.

Traditional brokers have also benefited.

Spending on credit and debit cards by Barclays customers at brokerages grew by over 300% year-on-year in January, the British bank said, continuing a growth boom that started last year mainly among the 18-29 age group.

LATE TO THE PARTY
Regulators and some of the brokers themselves have cautioned that with the new craze comes risks, especially for latecomers chasing easy gains.

Some investors in the U.S. made a lot of money in the early days of the social media-fuelled frenzy, which pitted amateur traders against Wall Street hedge funds that had built up big bets against the fortunes of unloved stocks like GameStop.

Many of those late to the party have lost heavily as GameStop’s stock crashed to as low as $51 last week after hitting $483 the week before, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said regulators must keep a close watch.

Many investors in Europe caught up in the hype are more focused on U.S. stocks rather than companies closer to home, bank and brokerage sources said.

“We are seeing an increase of retail investors outside the U.S. opening stock accounts. Most of these are household names and with a virtual halt on other forms of betting due to the pandemic, some retail punters are increasingly betting on US stocks,” said the head of trading at a U.S. bank in London.

Younger overseas investors are ignoring domestic shares in favour of the U.S. because it offers both the Reddit rally stocks and many of the world’s household name tech companies such as Apple Inc, Amazon and Tesla.

Freetrade says its UK retail customer orders are split around 55% for US-listed securities and 45% for UK-listed ones.

Lewis Harding, a 22-year-old Freetrade user from Leeds, said he holds a mix of US and UK shares in his portfolio, including Facebook Inc, Bank of America Corp, British American Tobacco Plc and Unilever Plc .

He made his first investment in 2017, buying shares of Aphria Inc one of the world’s largest cannabis companies.

The trade was successful and he managed to buy his first car with the gains. Since then, he’s been focused on bigger, more stable companies and says he educates himself by reading investment books, watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts. He expressed enthusiasm about what has happened in markets over the past few weeks.

“It’s been quite amazing what’s been happening,” Harding said. “I haven’t bought GameStop myself but I watched from the sidelines and it was crazy.”

Mike Rockwell, who runs Apple’s AR / VR group, is still responsible for day-to-day development of these upcoming products, according to Bloomberg. But Riccio reportedly has “ultimate oversight” of Apple’s first hardware to enter the space.

There have been reports for years indicating that Apple is working on AR and VR hardware. That’s been buoyed by Apple’s continued investments in AR on its iPhones and iPads, plus some coy remarks from CEO Tim Cook.

The latest reports suggest that Apple plans to first debut an expensive virtual reality headset as a stepping stone on the path toward a more impressive augmented reality device. The Information reported last week that the VR device could sell for $3,000 and launch in 2022.