Online disinformation is a rampant problem on the Internet, and the best solution against it is an informed society which thinks critically. In other words, society must be educated. However, the problem here is that “there are no shortcuts to universal education.” Thankfully, there are institutions who try to help in making the process faster.

Enter Finnish Public Broadcasting Company, Yle, which is hoping to harness the engagement power of gamification to accelerate awareness and understanding of troll tactics and help more people spot malicious Internet fakes. It’s put together an online game, called Troll Factory, that lets you play at being, well, a hateful troll. Literally.

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Yle, which is a not-for-profit public service broadcaster with a remit to educate and inform, released a Finnish version of the troll factory game back in May but decided to follow up with this international version (in English) after the game got such a strong local reception, including being picked up by people in natsec and education to use as an educational resource, according to Jarno Koponen, head of AI & personalization, at Yle Uutiset News Lab.

Check out TechCrunch for more details about the game.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: TechCrunch)

Life on Earth is, indeed, something wonderful. It is diverse and it displays striking geographical global patterns in biodiversity. But what determines these global patterns? This has been the question of scientists ever since the days of von Humboldt, Darwin, and Wallace, and despite over 200 years worth of study, this has remained unanswered.

Published this week on September 13, a pair of companion papers found out that mountain regions, especially the mountains in the tropics, “are hotspots of extraordinary and baffling richness.” However, this also begs the question why mountains become hotspots of biodiversity, and scientists looked deeper into the matter.

Find out more over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Jesper Sonne/CMEC)

On Wednesday, burglars tripped an alarm at the Dallas County Courthouse in Iowa. Police found two men in the courthouse, who offered a completely reasonable excuse for their presence. They said they had been hired by the state court administration to test courthouse security, and they were just doing their job. A likely story., They were hauled off to jail. However, Justin Wynn and Gary Demercurio had told the truth.

“The company was asked to attempt unauthorized access to court records through various means to learn of any potential vulnerabilities,” the statement read. “SCA did not intend, or anticipate, those efforts to include the forced entry into a building. SCA apologizes to the Dallas County Board of Supervisors and law enforcement and will fully cooperate with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and Dallas County Attorney as they pursue this investigation.”

The state court administration had contracted cybersecurity firm Coalfire, for which Wynn and Demercurio worked. They apparently thought any tests would be in the realm of digital security, and never considered alerting the police. Oops. The two men were released under a $50,000 bond. Read more on the story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Jimmy Emerson, DVM)

Most of the materials needed to sustain our modern daily living such as fuels, pharmaceuticals, and other commodity materials, come from non-renewable resources. Since they are non-renewable, these materials would be more costly and more difficult to acquire over time as their supplies diminish. A good example of these non-renewable resources is petroleum, from which we get fuels that meet our demand for energy.

To help create a truly renewable alternative to petroleum, Michelle O’Malley, a professor of chemical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, has turned to one of the most abundant materials on Earth: the non-food parts of plants — stems, roots, inedible leaves — that would generally be regarded as waste. And with a $2.25 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy, O’Malley’s research group, along with collaborators at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), are poised to advance the knowledge of and technology for advanced biofuels.

“We are extremely grateful to the Department of Energy for making this award, which will fund an ambitious, high-risk/high-reward research collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and PNNL to image microbial processes that are critical for waste-to-fuel production,” O’Malley said. “There is a critical need to develop new methods to manufacture chemicals, fuels and commodity chemicals from renewable resources.”

Check out The Current for more details.

(Image Credit: PublicDomainPictures/ Pixabay)

Japanese artist Haruhiko Kawaguchi, also known as Photographer Hal, is famous for his vacuum-sealed couples in intimate spaces as a form of art. His art presents pairs of people tightly wrapped in a thin layer of plastic, and photographed in an extreme, controlled, and ephemeral moment.

But Photographer Hal is stepping up his game! He is now extending the couples into families plus the things they value such as their cars and houses. This means that the whole landscape is vacuum-packed, which signifies that “everything in the world is one existence.”

Is it safe? Yes, with reservations. Photographer Hal’s carefully-controlled portraits allow him a strict shooting time of 10 seconds before the situation could become harmful. In fact, the couples volunteer themselves for the project because they want to convey the artist’s vision and photographic philosophy which is love.

 ‘the shooting location is the most important place for them,’ the artist continues. ‘the things you love will be one, and the world will be one. I think that is an ideal form of love…we should spread the sense of love outward, and spread the link of love more and more across various communities.’

Photo of Yamada Family by Nina Azzarello in Design Boom

Neonicotinoid is the most widely used pesticide in the world. It has been implicated to have caused the dropping of bee populations, and now new research suggests another harmful effect of the pesticide, this time on birds.

… [The pesticide] could also have a hand in the decline of songbird populations across North America. From 1966 to 2013, the populations of nearly three-quarters of farmland bird species across the continent have precipitously dropped.

When the researchers fed some of the birds seeds coated with neonicotinoids, this is what happened.

Within hours, the dosed birds began to lose weight and ate less food, researchers report in the Sept. 13 Science. Birds given the higher amount of imidacloprid (3.9 milligrams per kilogram of body mass) lost 6 percent of their body mass within six hours. That’s about 1.6 grams for an average bird weighing 27 grams. Tracking the birds (Zonotrichia leucophrys) revealed that the pesticide-treated sparrows also lagged behind the others when continuing their migration to their summer mating grounds.

Find out more about the study over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: M. Eng/ ScienceNews)

If you're an architecture geek, you'll love this!

In its 150^th anniversary, University of Melbourne hosted a competition in baking. The theme “Batter, Bake & Build” challenged the bakers to faithfully replicate the iconic structures from Melbourne’s City Centre. This is to celebrate the similarities between baking and architecture.

Here are the cakes that won the Top 5 slots:

First Prize: Flinders Street Station by Zarah Noriel—$1,500 Australian Dollars (AUD)

Second Prize: Southbank Theatre by Monica Nam—$700 AUD

Third Prize: Storey Hall Annex by Sharyn Frantz—$300 AUD

Student Prize: Arts Centre by Caroline Lee—$1,000 AUD

People’s Choice Award: Manchester Unity by Xin Ying Choo—$1,000 AUD

Go to this website to see more photos.

Image Credit: University of Melbourne

A Pennsylvania urban legend about a green man, or "Charlie No Face," has been circulating in western Pennsylvania since the 1950s. It seems like just a campfire story, but there's a kernel of truth behind it. Simon Whistler has the real story. He also explains goosebumps.  

The Annals of Improbable Research awarded their 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes on Thursday evening in a ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. These are bestowed every year for research that makes one laugh, and then makes one think. The most attention-grabbing winner was a study called "Thermal Asymmetry of the Human Scrotum," in which the temperature of the male subjects' left testicle was compared to the temperature of the right testicle. The Anatomy prize went to Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa for their efforts. Continue reading for more winners.

Taking a photo of a lightning takes extreme patience and high-tech camera equipment. However, successfully capturing lightning is well worth it.

Now, researchers also capture lightning, but using a method way different than photography. It turns out that lightning can be used to shed light on storm cell behavior, which gives forecasters new tools for predicting lightning hazards, as this new study showed.

The new technique is "essentially lightning-based tomography, similar to a medical X-ray," said Michael Peterson, an atmospheric physicist at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico and author of the new study, published in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

"Using lightning flashes as the light source, we can identify contrasts in cloud layers that are indicative of dense regions, such as ones that might be laden with hail," he said.

Peterson drew upon data gathered by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) on NOAA's GOES satellites. The GLM was designed to measure total lightning activity and provide that data to forecasters in real-time, but the products used in operations are only a small portion of GLM's capabilities.

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This deeper dive into the GLM data can also help identify storm systems that may produce especially dangerous lightning, like horizontal flashes that can seem to strike out of the blue, Peterson said.

More details of this one over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: WKIDESIGN/ Pixabay)

NASA is giving its best in getting its new, moon-bound rocket and spacecraft ready for its next space mission, Artemis 1, which aims to eventually land people on the lunar surface. The new video from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center goes in detail through the new Space Launch System (SLS), piece by piece, from top to bottom. The SLS is the rocket expected to bring astronauts to the Moon, and spacecraft faraway places in our Solar System, like Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Watch the video over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: Tyler Martin/NASA)

I just realized Scooby-Doo is only 10 months older than me. Most of my life I've had the impression that the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon was younger than me. Fifty years ago today, on Sept. 13, 1969, Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Machine Gang hit the airwaves. Scooby, Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy certainly have been pop culture icons for decades.

Voice actor Frank Welker recounts how he got the job of voicing Fred:

By Welker’s own account, his Scooby-Doo career was a happy accident. In 1969, the Colorado-born performer was making appearances at stand-up comedy clubs around L.A., and part of his 20-minute set included a three-minute gag where he simulated the sounds of cats and dogs fighting. A commercial casting agent heard that routine and instantly called him in to provide those same growls and hisses for a Friskies dog food ad. But the job offers didn’t stop there. “It just so happened that his fiancé was casting a show at CBS called Scooby-Doo,” Welker remembers. “So I went over to Hanna-Barbera, and Joe Barbera was doing the session. He told me not to worry about Scooby, but wanted me to read for Shaggy and Fred.” A quick glance at the early character sketches for both characters left Welker with a clear preference. “Shaggy looked like a funny character — Fred was just a guy in an ascot.”

Five decades later, Welker actually has two jobs aboard the Mystery Machine: Since 2002, Welker has provided the voices of both Fred and Scooby-Doo, the latter being a role originated by one of Welker’s earliest mentors in the business, Don Messick.

Read about the history of Scooby-Doo and its various incarnations at Yahoo Entertainment.

Image Credit: Hanna Barbera, Warner Bros. Animation/Wikimedia Commons

Image Credit: Photo: Everett Collection

Cilla Carden, a vegan from Perth, was frustrated with her two neighbors cooking meat barbeque in their own backyards. This moved her to bring them to court!

According to Carden, she couldn’t enjoy her backyard walk anymore because she can smell the smoke coming from her neighbors’ barbeque. She even claimed that they deliberately allow their barbeque smoke to waft into her yard.

After her claims were rejected by a tribunal earlier this year on lack of evidence, she applied to the Supreme Court of Western Australia for right of appeal. It was also turned down in July.

Lawyer John Hammond said going to the Supreme Court was an “extreme option” — but it hadn’t stopped Ms Carden from further appealing the case.

She told Nine News she believed her neighbors were “absolutely deliberate” in allowing their smells to cross into her yard.

It’s absolutely okay to demand for your right to live your life in peace. But where do you draw the line so as not to deprive others their right to enjoy their own lives as well?

Find out more of this story here.

Image Credit: Nine News

Remember the creepy clown scare of 2016? Even before that, there was a viral clown that you may have missed. In 2014, a surveillance video of a clown hiding under a child's bed caused a stir. As strange as that was, the truth is even stranger: the parents hired Wrinkles the Clown to pull off the stunt and scare their daughter into behaving. Wrinkles is a retired Florida man who will appear as a creepy clown for any reason you want to pay for, and became national news after the bedroom video went viral.

Now Wrinkles is the subject of a horror film, set to hit theaters on October fourth. This one should give Pennywise a run for his money in the creep competition, because this movie is a documentary. -via Mental Floss

There are days where we have the strong urge to laze around and do nothing. Doing nothing might consist of you lying around until the late afternoon, or just browsing on the Internet. But is that really doing nothing? By browsing or lying on your bed, that is actually doing something. How can one really do nothing? In a keynote talk at EYEO 2017 in Minneapolis, Jenny Odell shares her thoughts on doing nothing: 

1. making nothing

I want to backtrack a little here just to say that I’ve long had an appreciation of doing nothing — or more properly, making nothing. I’m not lazy, but the most I have ever made or constructed is a new context for, or perspective on, something that already existed.

2. the architecture of nothing

The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. 

3. the precarity of nothing

There’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege. It’s possible to understand the practice of doing nothing solely as a self-indulgent luxury, the equivalent of taking a mental health day if you’re lucky enough to work at a place that has those.

4. nothing for something

That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you simply could file my talk simply under the heading of self care. But if you do, make it “self care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s — self preservation as an act of political warfare – and not what it means when it’s been appropriated for commercial ends. As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop (a Goop parody book) put it, self care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

image credit: Rembrandt via wikimedia commons