Fighting Drug addiction

 Here's the story: We sat down with a man who had a harrowing journey with addiction. He began by telling us about his early days in tertiary education, where he would occasionally smoke dagga with friends. However, his focus remained on his studies, and he worked hard to graduate and secure a qualification. After landing a job, he started building a life for himself. He got married, bought a property, and even splurged on a car. Life was good, and he felt like he was on top of the world. But one fateful night, while out with friends, he was introduced to heavier narcotics. At first, the experience was exhilarating. He described it as an elevation from the mild high of dagga to a level 5 high, where he felt invincible and euphoric. The effects would last for days, allowing him to party from Friday to Sunday without sleep. The problem, however, began to manifest on Mondays and Tuesdays every week, when the withdrawal symptoms would kick in, and he'd struggle to function at work....

A diamond bigger than Earth

This handout illustration obtained by Reuters October 11, 2012, shows the interior of the planet 55 Cancri e - an extremely hot planet with a surface of mostly graphite surrounding a thick layer of diamond, below which is a layer of silicon-based minerals and a molten iron core at the center. REUTERS/Haven Giguere/Yale University/Handout
This handout illustration obtained by Reuters October 11, 2012, shows the interior of the planet 55 Cancri …

LONDON (Reuters) - Forget the diamond as big as the Ritz. This one's bigger than planet Earth.
Orbiting a star that is visible to the naked eye, astronomers have discovered a planet twice the size of our own made largely out of diamond.
The rocky planet, called '55 Cancri e', orbits a sun-like star in the constellation of Cancer and is moving so fast that a year there lasts a mere 18 hours.
Discovered by a U.S.-Franco research team, its radius is twice that of Earth's with a mass eight times greater. That would give it the same density as Earth, although previously observed diamond planets are reckoned to be a lot more dense. It is also incredibly hot, with temperatures on its surface reaching 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit (1,648 Celsius).
"The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite," said Nikku Madhusudhan, the Yale researcher whose findings are due to be published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The study - with Olivier Mousis at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, France - estimates that at least a third of the planet's mass, the equivalent of about three Earth masses, could be diamond.
Diamond planets have been spotted before but this is the first time one has been seen orbiting a sun-like star and studied in such detail.
"This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth," Madhusudhan said, adding that the discovery of the carbon-rich planet meant distant rocky planets could no longer be assumed to have chemical constituents, interiors, atmospheres, or biologies similar to Earth.
David Spergel, an astronomer at Princeton University, said it was relatively simple to work out the basic structure and history of a star once you know its mass and age.
"Planets are much more complex. This 'diamond-rich super-Earth' is likely just one example of the rich sets of discoveries that await us as we begin to explore planets around nearby stars."
"Nearby" is a relative concept in astronomy. Any fortune-hunter not dissuaded by "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", F.Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age morality tale of thwarted greed, will find Cancri e about 40 light years, or 230 trillion miles, from Park Avenue.
(Editing by Andrew Osborn, Alistair Macdonald and Sandra Maler)
(This story was refiled to clarify density in the fourth paragraph

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