You'll have to get up at the crack of dawn to take part in Silicon Alley's hottest new party.

Daybreaker is an event created by General Assembly co-founder Matthew Brimer and Super Sprowtz founder and CEO Radha Agrawal — and it gets going early.

Starting at 7 a.m., young professionals gather to dance, network, and have a good time. The dance party takes place at hot New York City night clubs, but there are definitely no illicit substances involved.

Daybreaker guests drink tea and organic juices instead of gin and tonics, and the emphasis is on getting a healthy start to the day. It fits in well with the cofounders' interests — Agrawal's company, Super Sprowtz, is a Michelle Obama-endorsed media venture that promotes nutrition education for kids.

They even had yoga with Lululemon starting at 6:00 for those looking for an even earlier start. 

"It's a great way to start the day off with a bang, and without alcohol," Brimer said to Business Insider. "It's very much a workout."

The hosts' techie friends are taking note, too. Brimer and Agrawal say that New York City-based startups have been well-represented at past Daybreaker events: Soundcloud, Shutterstock, Flavorpill, and Thrillist, to name a few. 400 people were signed up for the most recent event; they pay $25 to get into the party ($35 with yoga).

"What's exciting about Daybreaker is that it fosters this community where entrepreneurs can be creative," Brimer said. "So there's the physical aspect, but also the social energy, open-minded, and artistic side to it." 

Business Insider attended a recent Daybreaker event to see what the hype is all about.

The party went down at Verboten, a hip club on Wythe Street in Williamsburg. At 7 a.m., the street was quiet, and it didn't seem like anyone was around.

This sign was our only clue to what was going on inside the club.

At the front, the bouncers gave us these stamps with the official Daybreaker logo.

Brazil is a country that shows its feelings through art, and the most visible art form of all is graffiti. And as of 2009, it's also fully legal provided you have permission from the building owner. 

In the shadow of the planet's biggest sporting event, the World Cup, street artists across the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo are expressing themselves through spray paint. Some of the art proudly celebrates Brazil and its soccer team.

Much of it, however, is in protest. Despite the massive amount of money the South American country is spending to get the games in order, an enormous chunk of the population still struggles economically. Street artists point out this injustice in a beautiful way.

We spotted this awesome package of photos taken by Reuters photographers from around Brazil that tells the story of a nation's feelings pre-World Cup.

SEE ALSO: We are stunned at New York City's incredible street art mecca

In honor of World Environment Day, held each year on June 5, we are taking another look at the most irreplaceable sites on earth, identified in a study published in Science last year.

In that report, scientists listed more than 100 irreplaceable environments or regions where many animal and plant species cannot be found anywhere else on our planet.

A total of 137 sites were selected from 173,000 protected areas, regions that cover 13% of the earth's landmass. These are some of the most biologically rich ecosystems in the world but face continued threats and are often poorly managed.

The top sites were the result of two combined rankings: irreplaceability for threatened species and irreplaceability for all — threatened and nonthreatened — species.

Each protected area was analyzed individually. But sometimes the regions overlap, effectively protecting the same species. For this reason, researchers combined adjacent or overlapping protected areas into 78 clusters around the world.

Here are some of the most irreplaceable areas from 10 different clusters. Bringing attention to these places is critical to preventing extinctions of the world’s mammals, birds, and amphibians.

The flat-topped mountains of Canaima National Park in southeastern Venezuela are among the world's most ancient rock formations and were the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventure novel "The Lost World." Canaima is also home the world's highest waterfall, Angel Falls, which is 15 times taller than Niagara Falls at 3,212 feet.

The Wet Tropics of Queensland cover roughly 3,500 square miles of Australian forest. Thirteen mammals that live in the Wet Tropics are found nowhere else in the world. This includes the green ringtail possum and kangaroo rats.

The Palawan Game Refuge and Bird Sanctuary in the Philippines is home to the endangered Palawan horned frog, the vulnerable Palawan peacock-pheasant, and the critically endangered Philippine cockatoo. Unfortunately, the natural forest is being destroyed by mining and palm-oil production.

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Imagine that one of New York City's many islands became abandoned, and you came back to see what it looked like 50 years later. It’s hard to visualize. However, the place would likely be overgrown with vegetation, and the buildings would be crumbling.

This is exactly what happened when photographer Christopher Payne visited North Brother Island, a 13-acre island between the Bronx and Riker’s Island that's been abandoned since 1963. After it became inhabited in 1885, North Brother housed a hospital to quarantine victims of contagious disease and later provided housing to World War II veterans. It also held a treatment center for teenage drug addicts.

At its peak, the island had the look of a manicured college campus, full of green spaces, sidewalks, roads, well-kept buildings, street lamps, and fire hydrants. Visit now, Payne says, and you’ll see an island that nature has reclaimed.

“I went there hoping to find the buildings completely intact, full of old artifacts just the way people left them, but what I found was ruins,” Payne told Business Insider. “It looked like it had been abandoned for a century.”

Payne has spent six years documenting the island’s changing nature. He's collected some of the work in a book, "North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City," and Payne has shared some photos from the project with us here.

North Brother Island has been virtually undisturbed by trespassers and left to decay naturally. This is due to the island's natural isolation and its lack of a working dock for boats to land on. In the 1970s, many Bronx kids partied on the island. But after a number of boats capsized in Hell Gate, the surrounding body of water, the city stepped up patrols. People left the island alone after that.

You can only get to North Brother by taking a small boat that lands directly on the shore.  Payne got permission to visit the island by promising to ferry New York City Parks Department employees — who manage the island — to North Brother so that they could carry out various maintenance tasks.

Since it was abandoned in the 1960s, the island has become a nature reserve. New York City is located directly on bird migration routes both north and south and, as one of the few remaining green spots near the city, it has become a natural stopping place for the birds. Nobody can visit from March to September, and only a few guests are allowed on the rest of the year.

The island's longest-running function was as a quarantine facility, so most of the buildings are of a medical nature. This is the Nurses' building, where the island's resident nurses lived. The island famously housed "Typhoid Mary" Mallon, the first carrier in the United States of Typhoid fever.

When Payne visited, he expected to find the interior of the buildings mostly intact and filled with artifacts. However, he found that almost everything had been cleared out of the buildings. This classroom in the male dormitory was one of the few rooms that had anything still in it. The books are mostly cast-offs from the Queens Public Library.

This is what the male dormitory looks like on the outside. Aside from the birds, there is no wildlife on the island. Not even rats can survive because there is no food.

The largest structure is the Tuberculosis Pavilion, the lobby of which is shown here. Payne says the pavilion is the only building that could be saved structurally if the city wanted to restore the island. While in operation, the pavilion housed a fully functional medical facility, complete with x-ray machines.

This is the balcony of the Tuberculosis Pavilion. Payne usually visited the island in either September or late November because it lags seasonally behind the rest of the Northeast. In September, the island is still overflowing with greenery and, in November and December, the leaves are still changing colors.

One of the most striking aspects of the island is how it changes throughout the year, Payne says. In summer, nature consumes the buildings. In winter, it all recedes and the island becomes barren. Payne took this photo of the coal house from the roof of the morgue in September.

This is a view of the boiler plant, also taken from the morgue roof. While it's hard to imagine, Payne says that all of the nature sits over a thin layer of dirt. Below it, one can still find the sidewalks, street lamps, fire hydrants, and streets that used to define the island.

North Brother Island was more or less self-sufficient when it was in operation. It had an industrial plant and a coal house to provide utilities to the buildings and an internal telephone system. This is the collapsing roof of the boiler plant, which provided heat to the island.

Nature has demolished most of the island's buildings, like this church. "At the rate they are going, the buildings are going to disappear," says Payne, who is also trained as an architect. "Most of the buildings are so far gone it would be difficult to salvage them."

Here is another view of the church. As you can see, only the facade still stands.

Payne says he learned this lesson from his many trips to the island: "When people leave, man-made structures break down and get replaced quickly by the natural order. No matter how hard we try, nature will always reassert itself."

SEE ALSO: Incredible Photos Show What Post-Apocalyptic America Might Look Like

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American malls are dying a slow, sad death, as evidenced by those gloomy photos of abandoned and decaying shopping malls.

But it's also nice to reminisce about the golden days when teens would loiter away their Saturdays shopping and families would eat together at the resident The Cheesecake Factory. 

Sravani Vadlamani, a doctoral student in transportation engineering at Arizona State, has created an animated map (first found via The Washington Post) that shows the boom of retail hubs throughout the 20th century.

Her MapStory includes every kind of mall, including strip, outlet, indoor, and outdoors. All the information is obtained from ASU GIS Spatial Data Repository, which includes data from the Directory of Major Malls. 

Check out the map below (move it to the left or zoom out to see the East Coast):

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Forbes does great sports business analysis, but they've been too conservative. The Milwaukee Bucks, valued by the business site at $410 million, sold for $550 million in April. The Los Angeles Clippers, valued at $575 million, sold for $2 billion in May. Franchise values are rising for many reasons, with new TV deals in particular set to drive them to record highs. Even if billionaire Steve Ballmer overpaid for the Clippers (Stern School of Business valuation expert Aswath Damodaran puts their value at $1.6 billion), it is clear we have entered the new value paradigm faster than expected.

With every team worth more than expected, every owner is, too, and the bump should be more than enough to make Charlotte Hornets majority owner Michael Jordan a billionaire.

Jordan's net worth was estimated at $750 million in February in a thorough analysis by Forbes's Kurt Badenhausen. The NBA legend earned an estimated $90 million in 2013, more than any current athlete including current NBA leader LeBron James, who earned an estimated $60 million. His wealth came primarily from an unprecedented deal with Nike, with his line of shoes alone selling $2.25 billion in the U.S. last year, along with other endorsement deals, business holdings, and very high pay during his playing career.

But he also owns 80% of the Hornets, and that asset is suddenly looking a lot more valuable.

Although the Hornets (then Bobcats) franchise was valued at $175 million when Jordan bought a 80% share in 2010, its projected value increased quickly. By 2013, the team was already worth $410 million and expected to rise significantly in the near future, according to Forbes. Badenhausen concluded in a February article that Jordan's "earnings prowess shows no sign of letting up and should land him a spot on Forbes billionaire list in the coming years." Within months, however, apparent NBA team values would skyrocket.

The Bucks sold for 34% more than Forbes's projection. The Clippers sold for 248% more. Let's split the difference and say Jordan's Hornets are worth 159% more than projected, putting their current value at $1,062 million. That would put Jordan's share at $850 million, rather than the $328 million figure Badenhausen used, raising his new estimated net worth to $1,272 million.

Yes, this recalculation is fairly arbitrary, but all indicators point to it being on the right track.

We can fairly assume that Jordan is a billionaire — and as great as his legacy was in the NBA, his net worth may be even harder for other basketball players to match.

SEE ALSO: How Jordan spends his riches

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Real estate mogul and art collector Aby Rosen has sparked a feud with his wealthy Old Westbury, N.Y., neighbors after debuting this graphic Damien Hirst statue on his front lawn.

The statue is titled “The Virgin Mother” and stands 33 feet tall. It depicts a naked pregnant woman in stride, with the right half of her skin peeled away to expose her skull, muscles, and the fetus in her womb.

Somewhat understandably, Rosen’s neighbors were not pleased when he began displaying the statue on his lawn back in May after renovating his Old Westbury Village property, according to Newsday. The complaints from neighbors reached village officials, forcing Rosen to argue to the village’s planning board this week why the statue should stay.

Rosen is also up against the village's Mayor Fred Carillo, who has introduced new legislation in response to the controversy that would limit the height of “accessory structures” — like statues — to 25 feet in height. Carillo has previously said to 1010 WINS’ Mona Rivera that the statue would be more appropriate in a medical building, “especially OBGYN.”

On Monday night, representatives for Rosen testified to the planning board that the statue not only fit with Rosen’s avant-garde estate, but also that with the proper landscaping, the statue could be screened from neighbors as much as possible. Rosen’s land-use attorney Peter MacKinnon previously stated to Newsday that the statue could be moved to a lower elevation or “pocketed into a hill” to accomplish this.

Village officials decided to reserve judgement until touring the estate, according to Newsday. The statue currently remains on Rosen’s property but is covered in a long black sheet.

"The Virgin Mother" is one of three similar statues created by Hirst, including one called "Verity" that is 67 feet tall and holds a sword above its head in Ilfracombe, Devon. Rosen purchased his statue in 2005, and it has previously been displayed at Manhattan’s Lever House.

This is not the only art-related battle Rosen is currently fighting. The real estate mogul is also being sued by the New York Landmarks Conservancy for wanting to take down the fragile Picasso curtain “Le Tricorne” (1919) from New York City’s Four Seasons Restaurant.

SEE ALSO: 19 New Works Of Art That Have The World Buzzing

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Researchers at the University of Wollongong are working on a next-generation condom that feels like skin.

The project was funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which gave $100,000 to about a dozen such projects, challenging them to build a condom people actually wouldn't mind using.

Bill Gates talked about the condom project during an ask-me-anything session on Reddit last February. While the work is serious, helping to end the spread of AIDS, like everyone else, he couldn't resist cracking a joke about it, saying:

"This is a sensitive topic. The idea was that men don't like the current design so perhaps something they would be more open to would allow for less HIV transmission. We still haven't gotten the results."

So here's a closer look at one project, shown off in a progress-report video published this week.

The researchers call this new material a "tough hydro-gel" which they say can "act, feel and look more like real skin."

A hydrogen-based material feels soft but can also be strong, keeping it from breaking, as latex condoms are prone to do.

If Bill Gates and his foundation likes it, it could receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million.

Here's the full video. 

SEE ALSO: Steve Jobs taught this man how to win arguments with really stubborn people

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The world's largest cupcake company is crumbling. 

Crumbs Bake Shop's stock price has plunged to around 27 cents per share from a high of $14 per share in July of 2011. 

The once-hot bakery catapulted to fame thanks to a cupcake craze that swept across the U.S. in the early 2000s. Shortly after going public in 2011, however, Crumbs began losing money.

The company is now closing stores and its auditors are expressing doubt over whether Crumbs can stay in business.

Three years after Sex and the City inspired a cupcake craze, Crumbs was born.

It all started in 2000 when character Carrie Bradshaw ate a cupcake from Magnolia Bakery's West Village location. Tourists began flocking there and a "Sex and the City" tour bus made the location a destination. The cupcake craze had officially begun.

Mia and Jason Bauer, respectively a legislative counsel and a consumer product entrepreneur, were quick to jump on the trend, opening the first Crumbs on the Upper West Side in 2003.

"My expectations were very simple, and they came to fruition immediately," Mia Bauer told New York Family in 2012. "The goal was to have a neighborhood bakery where I knew everybody and their kids, and I made all their birthday cakes."

Crumbs was a huge hit.

People went crazy for Crumbs' cupcakes, and the company was able to sell its gourmet product for as much as $4.50 a pop.

In an interview with Newsweek, Jason Bauer explained why the cupcakes were such a hit.

"If you rewind to 2002, cupcakes were vanilla, chocolate, lemon, or strawberry, maybe with sprinkles," he said. "When we opened our stores, Mia created three types of cupcakes with cool fillings, frostings, and decorations. Every day they sold out, so we decided to expand that line and continued to grow it. We started making gourmet cupcakes and [that’s] what has now become the industry standard."

Crumbs' cupcakes now come in more than 75 flavors and range from the 1-inch-tall "Taste" cupcake to the 6.5-inch-tall "Colossal," which can feed up to six people.

Next came a nationwide expansion.

Crumbs started opening more shops in New York and expanded to Philadelphia, D.C., and Beverly Hills, among other cities.

But at the same time, hundreds of other cupcake bakeries opened across the U.S. Among them were Sprinkles Cupcakes, which launched in 2005; Cupcake Nouveau in 2007; and Georgetown Cupcake in 2008.

As the cupcake craze ballooned, television networks began taking notice. The Food Network started airing "Cupcake Wars" and TLC launched "DC Cupcakes," a show about Georgetown Cupcake and its owners.

What you eat all day doesn't just impact your health and weight; it affects your productivity, too.

"If you eat high fat, high sugar meals and snacks you will be sleepy and have low energy overall," says Lisa De Fazio, a healthy lifestyle expert and registered dietitian. "High fat foods take more work to digest. Candy causes sugar to spike in your blood stream then crash, and you also may have an upset stomach. Who can be productive with all of this going on?"

But, unfortunately, she says, many people tend to make bad eating decisions during the workday.

"Boredom and stress often lead to mindless snacking on things like sweets and chips," De Fazio explains. "Also, there may be limited healthy food choices or too many temptations around the office, like candy dishes on your colleagues' desks, cupcakes for birthdays, or greasy pizza during lunch meetings." 

Time — or lack thereof — also plays a part. "One of the reasons people don't stick to their healthy eating resolutions of bringing their own homemade prepared food, rather than ordering or eating out, is because of a lack of time," explains Nicole Maftoum, a Lebanese clinical dietitian. "In a fast-paced world, fast food comes as the optimum solution."

Maftoum says sleep deprivation also affects appetite and pushes one to eat twice the amount of calories that they'd typically consume in a day.

The experts say all of these factors make it easy for us to develop bad eating habits at work — but they're terrible excuses.

Luckily, there are plenty of quick, easy, and inexpensive healthy snack options.

Almonds

Almonds are a great source of protein and healthy fat that is satisfying. "They contain nine essential nutrients; have the highest rate of proteins when compared to other nuts; have the highest rate of fiber (3.5g per 23 pieces) when compared to other nuts; are rich in Vitamin E (23 pieces provide 35% of the daily value of Vitamin E); and contain monounsaturated fats that help increase HDL levels," Maftoum says.

Low-fat popcorn

This low-calorie snack will satisfy your craving for something salty and crunchy, and it’s also a good source of fiber, De Fazio says. 

Fresh fruit

Fruits are packed with vitamins and minerals, and are full of great natural sweetness, Maftoum says. "They are also a great source of antioxidants needed for a stronger immune system and a better performance at work."

Exclamation points used to be a rare signal of extreme intensity. 

Now they're everywhere, from news headlines to business emails and text messages.

Thanks to our smartphone-obsessed culture, the exclamatory has been normalized.

"Exclamation points are becoming the standard after salutations and happy or eager statements such as 'I'm looking forward to seeing you,'" grammarian Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, tells New York Mag. 

"Although my training tells me not to overuse exclamation points because they are shouty and juvenile," the author of "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing" continues, "I find myself using them because I fear being seen as unfriendly or insincere if I only use a period." 

Yet it feels so necessary when we text with our friends, colleagues, or partners. 

Here's why.

As far as social scientists understand it, the exclamation point has become such a necessity because many of the conversations we used to have vocally now happen textually. 

And the medium, as they say, is the message.

Think about the difference in information you get in a call versus an email. When you're talking on the phone with someone, you're not only hearing the words they're speaking, but their voice, with its movement of pitch. It's a powerful signal: Women's voices go up when they're attracted to someone, while men's drop.

But with a text or an email, that richness is gone.

Text is a spare medium. All you've got are letters and a handful of punctuation marks (and, recently, a seemingly unlimited supply of emoticons). Yet we're still looking for the same degree of social signaling as on the phone or in person. In turn, punctuation gets magnified in meaning: Periods start to look angry; exclamation points look like friendliness. 

But all this exclaiming can be too much in certain contexts. Job-search experts maintain that the exclamation is disastrous in resumes or cover letters. It's "overly informal," they say, so keep it out of your formal correspondence.

But when you're emailing with your friend, it doesn't hurt to load it with exclamations. You don't want to end up like the recent Onion headline: "Stone-Hearted Ice Witch Forgoes Exclamation Point." 

SEE ALSO: 7 Email Etiquette Rules Every Professional Should Know

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The median price for an existing home in the United States is $211,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. However, these twelve homes blow this average away with price tags in the high millions. 

With the help of Zillow, we've put together a list of the most expensive homes currently on the market in the U.S. They range from penthouse apartments to sprawling estates, and each has amenities that most people can only dream about.

All of the homes are located in either New York or California, which is unsurprising as both are in the top 10 most expensive states in America.

Paige Cooperstein contributed to this story.

#12 A real estate tycoon is selling this ornate California mansion.

Address: Bradbury, Calif.

Price: $68.8 million

The majestic Bradbury Estate is made of mostly French Limestone and took more than eight years of careful construction to build. The home has a two-story library, a 3D theater, a 2,000-bottle wine cellar, a 10-car garage, and a pool.

Owner Don G. Abbey of the real estate firm Abbey Company chopped the price on the home from $78.8 million to $68.8 million when it failed to sell after a year on the market.

Click here to see more photos >

#11 This giant Hamptons mansion was recently renovated.

Address: Water Mill, N.Y.

Price: $69 million

This waterfront estate features a 22,000-square-foot mansion as well as a carriage house and a gatehouse. The property was completely restored by well-known designers and architects, giving it up-to-date touches while retaining its 20th century charm.

#10 Here's a swanky duplex with hotel amenities.

Address:New York, N.Y.

Price: $70 million

This 16-room duplex apartment is located in the swanky hotel The Pierre and features a beautiful dining room and a spacious corner living room. Amenities also include concierge service, housekeeping, and gym access.

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book "Generation Rx: A Story of Dope, Death, And America's Opiate Crisis" by Erin Marie Daly, a former legal journalist.

Daly's 20-year-old brother died of a heroin overdose after getting hooked on painkillers. To research her book, she talked to others whose loved ones died after moving from prescription pills to heroin.

George, a funeral home director in Brockton, Massachusetts, watched as the formaldehyde pulsed its way into the body lying before him on the porcelain embalming table. It was a task that was normally just part of a day’s work, but today, George was overwhelmed by emotion. He slid down to the floor, sobbing, and gripped the hand of the body on the table, willing it to come back to life.

The hand belonged to his 22-year-old son, Lance.

The night before, just after the Boston Red Sox lost to the New York Yankees, George had climbed the stairs to Lance’s bedroom in the home that also houses George’s funeral business. Lance was kneeling on the floor against a chair, with his head slumped forward onto his chest. It looked like he was praying. But he was stiff and unnaturally still. A needle lay by his feet. Heroin had stopped his heart.

It was a twisted ending for the son of a funeral director, but unfortunately, it was hardly surprising. Like many young adults in the working- class Boston suburb, Lance’s heroin addiction began when he became hooked on the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin. An opioid medication originally developed to treat patients suffering from debilitating pain, the drug has become popular among local kids who crush the pills and snort, smoke, or even inject them for a heroin-like high. When the pills become too expensive, they are increasingly turning to heroin itself.

George, for his part, had seen dozens of such cases come across his embalming table in recent years—the sons and daughters of good parents who thought heroin was something only “junkies” did. And even though he was well aware of Lance’s years-long struggle with opiate addiction—at one especially exasperated moment, telling his son that he was saving a casket for him—a junkie’s death wasn’t what he had in mind for Lance.

Despite years of addiction and lies and close calls, he never thought it would be his son.

I met George in the summer of 2010 after reading about his story in a newspaper. I had traveled across the country from California with a story of my own: my youngest brother, Pat, was also addicted to OxyContin and died of a heroin overdose in February 2009, six months shy of his twenty-first birthday. I was seeking answers as a sister and as a journalist. Shortly after Pat’s death, I had started researching prescription painkiller addiction, and had started blogging about my findings. Privately, I also began researching my brother’s life, trying to piece together his downfall in an effort to understand where he went wrong.

Pat was my baby. I was ten years old when he was born, and he was the perfect addition to the pretend scenarios for which I had already bossily recruited my other younger brother and sister. And as babies are, he was incontrovertibly lovable.

Yet as much as I loved my brother, I could not understand his obsession with OxyContin. Nor did I know that it had put him straight on the path to heroin. I learned of the extent of his struggle too late. Also too late, I learned about the disease of addiction, and about the particular insidiousness of narcotic painkillers, all of which provide a heroin-like high when abused: not just OxyContin, but Vicodin, Opana, Darvocet, Fentanyl, Percocet, Dilaudid, Lortab, and Roxicodone, to name just a few (central nervous system depressants like Xanax, Ativan, Valium and Klonopin are also often abused due to their tranquilizing properties).

I learned that Pat wasn’t a special case; that kids just like him, all over the country, were falling victim to these pills: in 2010, 3,000 young adults ages 18 to 25 died of prescription drug overdoses—eight deaths per day. 

Like Pat, many ended up turning to heroin after their pills became too expensive or scarce; in 2011, 4.2 million Americans aged 12 or older reported using heroin at least once in their lives, and nearly half of young IV heroin users reported that they abused prescription opioids first. Like these kids, my brother was the last person you’d picture with a needle in his arm, and yet they were all dying as junkies. I wanted to understand why this was happening, so I quit my job as a legal journalist and began traveling around the country in the hopes that chronicling the experiences of other families affected by the trend would offer some answers.

George was one of the first people I encountered. He told me the story about embalming his son as we sat in the receiving room of his funeral home, surrounded by the proverbial mementos of death: prayer cards, dried floral arrangements, a casket stuffed with billowy waves of satin. He choked up as he talked about Lance, and I choked up too, unable to maintain my reporter’s distance. It was my brother’s story all over again.

Credit: Copyright © 2014 by Erin Marie Daly from Generation Rx: A Story of Dope, Death, and America's Opiate Crisis. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

SEE ALSO: Why I Needed To Start Talking About My Little Brother's Heroin Overdose

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Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen lives a pretty fabulous life. With a net worth of more than $16 billion, he's the 57th wealthiest man in the world, and he has the fancy yachts, planes, and lifestyle to prove it.

Allen also collects a ridiculous amount of properties across the globe. 

From a hilltop mansion on the French Riviera to an entire island off the coast of Washington, Allen has made his fair share of blockbuster purchases over the years.

Allen's primary residence is a 10,000-square-foot waterfront home on Mercer Island, a ritzy enclave of Seattle. He owns a total of nine mansions on the island, including one that's just for his mother and another that houses a full-size basketball court, swimming pool, and fitness center.

Source: Curbed Seattle, The Real Estalker

He bought Allan Island, off the coast of Washington, in 1992. Though he initially had plans to build a dream home on the island, its secluded nature and lack of electricity made construction difficult. He sold the island last year for a discounted $8 million.

Source: Curbed Seattle

In 1993, Allen purchased a former sheep ranch in Tetonia, Idaho. For years, the property operated as the Teton Ridge Ranch, a five-suite luxury mountain lodge. It closed for business in 2009.

Source: The Real Estalker

It's one of the great psychological mysteries: How do you get people to do what you want them to do? Scientists have been studying this topic for a long time, and they've found some tried-and-true tactics for getting people to do your bidding.

References below:

Compliments, repeating speech, asking for more,use names, listening, flattery, tiredness.

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In 2007, photographer Adrain Chesser went to a traditional Native American ceremony called the Naraya when he was having a tough time in the wake of his mother's death.

While there, Chesser became acquainted with Finisia Medrano and J.P. Hartsong, who both lived as hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin, a part of the United States encompassing parts of Nevada, Utah, Oregon, and California.

“When I heard they were living this wild and free existence, my head exploded,” Chesser told me.

Chesser moved to Seattle so he could regularly visit the duo, who had begun to gather a group of people who were also committed to living a free existence in the wild. Before long, Chesser had spent six years following and documenting them and similar groups. Chesser says the experience changed his life.

With the help of Native American ritualist Timothy White Eagle, Chesser collected the work into a new book called “The Return.” Chesser shared a number of the photos with us here, and you can see the rest in the book or at his website.

J.P. Hartsong, Finisia Madrano, and their group live nomadically and travel according to the seasons.

The group, which calls itself Coyote Camp, travels along a centuries-old Native American route known as “The Hoop” (for its circular nature) that passes through Idaho, Nevada, California, and Oregon.

Coyote Camp travels in accordance with the harvest times for edible plants indigenous to the areas. They harvest roots such as breadroot, camas root, and bitterroot in the spring and summer; berries in the late summer; and acorns in autumn.

The geniuses at national real estate brokerage Redfin recently conducted an analysis of some of the wealthiest people in the U.S. to see just how many homes they could afford to buy. 

In many cases, these billionaires could buy all of the homes in an entire city. Bill Gates, for example, has a net worth of more than $77.5 billion and could theoretically afford to buy all 114,212 homes in Boston. The city's homes are valued at a total of $76.6 billion. 

Redfin's economists determined the total value by looking at all home sales between April 1, 2013 and April 1, 2014. Those sales were used as a representative sample of all homes in a city. 

Several other tech billionaires could afford to buy entire cities, including Google CEO Larry Page, who could buy all 99,964 homes in Boca Raton, Florida, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who could buy all 139,124 homes in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Redfin created this map of the cities that these billionaires could theoretically buy with their wealth. For super-rich families like the Waltons and the Koch brothers, the study assumed they would pool their wealth together to purchase a city. The values depicted represent the total value of all homes in a particular city. 

The study was conducted on a total of 30 billionaires drawn from Forbes' 400 Wealthiest list.

"In this fictional real estate investment, the 30 billionaires on our list, with a combined fortune of $582 billion, could afford to own a staggering 6 percent of the total U.S. home equity," Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson said in a blog post.

You can see all 30 in the table below, along with the U.S. cities they could afford to buy if they so desired. 

SEE ALSO: The Incredible Real Estate Portfolio Of Microsoft Billionaire Paul Allen

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