According to the statistics gathered by the World Health Organization, around 1.35 million people die each year because of road traffic crashes, while 20-50 million more people suffer from non-fatal injuries, which often result in disabilities. Traffic crashes are also the leading cause of death of people aged 5-29 years old.

The usual causes of car crashes are speeding, driving under alcohol influence, non-use of seatbelts, distracted driving (such as texting while driving), and unsafe road infrastructure.

Of course, avoiding alcohol and distractions and using seatbelts can reduce your risk of going to the afterlife well before your time, but we know better. We want to drive safer than safe, and ZF, a German supplier, can help us with that.

We already know that airbags inside the car can be an equipment crucial for our survival once accidents happen, but ZF offers us something better — airbags on the outside of the car:

A new airbag that deploys from the side of a vehicle before a collision can reduce the severity of occupant injuries 40%, according to ZF, which is bidding to become a major force in safety engineering in addition to its longstanding expertise in steering and transmissions.

The system uses cameras, radar and lidar to determine when a collision is unavoidable, igniting the air bag milliseconds before the oncoming vehicle strikes. The sensors will also communicate with safety systems inside the vehicle, for instance adjusting the seat belts for side impact.

What are your thoughts?

(Image Credit: ZF)

Last June 6, Vivian Gomez posted a video that would immediately spread all over the internet. It was a 9-second security camera footage of her front yard. As seen on the footage, a creepy shadow appears from what seems to be Vivian’s front door. A second later, a strange figure can be seen walking in an upbeat manner with its toes facing outward. It even does the chicken dance for a moment and then proceeds to walk weirdly again. The video then abruptly ends.

What could it be? Is it an alien? A hyperactive child? A drunk guy? Even Vivian does not know.

Of course, this being the internet, the first assumption is that it's somehow fake. But perhaps the most logical explanation comes from a commenter on Gomez's original Facebook post who said, "It is probably some kid wearing flip flops with shorts on his head." 

But for Harry Potter fans, this is not a child and definitely not an alien. There is only one creature they can think of that has the same physique as the figure caught on camera: Dobby the House Elf.

What do you guys think?

See the full video here.

(Image Credit: Vivian Gomez/ Facebook)

Kamchatka, the most Russian part of Russia, is serviced by the Yelizovo Airport outside of the largest city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Recently, security cameras noticed a bear casually strolling through a security checkpoint. The Siberian Times reports:

‘Look who we have here at 5.30am. And without ID, too!’ - says a security guard as he watches the animal confidently walking past his booth. 

Residents and visitors in regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky were informed about the wanderlust animal, and asked to take extra care when traveling to and from the airport.

Officials warned travelers to be careful if the spot the bear while they are in the airport.

-via Dave Barry

“Plants underpin all life on Earth,” states Dr. Eimear Nic Lughadha. “They provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, as well as making up the backbone of the world’s ecosystems – so plant extinction is bad news for all species.”

Dr. Ludhadha is part of the team of researchers studying plant extinction, and according to them, the numbers of plants driven to extinction are “frightening”, and we humans are to blame for that. What’s more, they believe that these numbers are a gross underestimate. In other words, we most likely have made more plants extinct than we have ever known.

They found 571 species had definitely been wiped out since 1750 but with knowledge of many plant species still very limited the true number is likely to be much higher. The researchers said the plant extinction rate was 500 times greater now than before the industrial revolution, and this was also likely to be an underestimate.

The number of plants that have disappeared from the wild is more than twice the number of extinct birds, mammals and amphibians combined. The new figure is also four times the number of extinct plants recorded in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list.

She said the true extinction rate for plants could easily be orders of magnitude higher than that reported in the study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. There are thousands of “living dead” plant species, where the last survivors have no chance of reproducing because, for example, only one sex remains or the big animals needed to spread their seeds are extinct.

It takes many years to be sure a plant has been wiped out, meaning there are many species awaiting formal confirmation. “How are you going to check the entirety of the Amazon for your lost plant?” Vorontsova said. And some plant species may have gone extinct before ever being discovered. Botanists find about 2,000 new species a year.

A sixth mass extinction of life on Earth is under way, according to some scientists. A landmark report in May said human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, with 1 million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction.

Is the end of life on Earth nearer than we thought?

(Image Credit: Kew Gardens)

The future of medicine may not be as far we thought it would be. Already, 3D printed body parts are created and tested on laboratory animals such as the 3D-printed heart and this one — the 3D-printed air sac. Scientists are hopeful that synthetic organs would be available for transplant in around two decades.

This 3D-printed lung-mimicking air sac is a collaborative work of researchers from Rice University, the University of Washington, Duke University, Rowan University, and Massachusetts-based design firm Nervous System. The work was led by Rice University’s Jordan Miller.

From Science Focus:

In tests, the resulting air sac was sturdy enough to avoid bursting as blood flowed through it and took in and expelled air that simulated the pressures and frequencies of human breathing. It was also found that red blood cells could take up oxygen as they flowed through a network of blood vessels surrounding the “breathing” air sac – a process similar to the gas exchange that occurs in the lung’s alveolar air sacs.

(Video Credit: Rice University/ YouTube)

Fredrik Tjærandsen, a BFA at Central Saint Martins in London, has been taking the internet by storm.

These past few days, my Facebook timeline and Instagram feed has been invaded by videos of a fashion collection where the models enter the runway wearing huge balloons. Halfway through their walk, they deflate the balloon and it transforms to skirts and dresses!

Tjærandsen’s inspiration for this collection was his childhood as well as his interest in sculpture, his first love during his BFA.

“I was inspired by my own early childhood memories. I wanted to recreate the fogginess and the ‘mist’ of the memories themselves. The inflated bubbles are about being able to wear an unclear memory. When the bubble emerges onto the catwalk, it’s the dream. The deflation of the bubble visualizes the moment when we realize we have a consciousness,” said Tjærandsen in his interview with Vogue.

Photo Credit: Niall McInerney

Meet GROVER, a new AI (Artificial Intelligence) created to detect fake news spreading wide in the digital age. Besides detecting fake news, GROVER can actually also make them.

Dan Robitzski describes the capabilities of this algorithm:

The system, GROVER, can create fake and misleading news articles that are more believable than those written by humans, according to research shared to the preprint server ArXiv on Wednesday — and also detect them.

   “We find that best current discriminators can classify neural fake news from real, human-written, news with 73% accuracy, assuming access to a moderate level of training data,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “Counterintuitively, the best defense against Grover turns out to be Grover itself, with 92% accuracy.”

To show how good GROVER is, Robitzki explains how it churns out a news article falsely asserting that vaccines are linked to autism:

   Writing in the style of The NYT‘s science section, GROVER generated not only a headline, but also an author’s name and the opening of a news article that attributes a link between vaccines and autism to scientists from UC San Diego and the federal government:

    Those who have been vaccinated against measles have a more than 5-fold higher chance of developing autism, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Even with GROVER's own set of risks, scientists who built it concede that it is so far the best line of defense against fake news - even those generated by itself.

image credit:@gwern on twitter

Before you travel, you might want to read this article over at the South China Morning Post by Jamie Carter.

A survey by 1st Move International ranks the world’s most dangerous countries by mode of travels - trains, planes, and automobiles - based on the number of accidents and deaths since 1968:

   1. USA - 10 accidents, 4 200 deaths

   2. SPAIN  - 7 accidents, 1367 deaths

   3. JAPAN - 3 accidents, 946 deaths

   4. INDONESIA - 5  accidents, 873 deaths

   5. NIGERIA - 5 accidents, 787 deaths  

Here is a list of the five most- accident-prone airlines, for your consideration:

 1. American Airlines - 5 accidents, 2578 deaths

   2. Aeroflot - 4 accidents, 718 deaths

   3. China Airlines - 3 accidents, 692 deaths

   4. Pan Am - 3 accidents, 758 deaths

   5. Malaysia Airlines - 2 accidents, 537 deaths

In addition to air travel, the article further ranks the five eadliest national rail systems in 2018:

1. India - 2 accidents, 59 deaths

2. Turkey - 2 accidents, 33 deaths

3. South Africa - 3 accidents, 20 deaths

4. Taiwan - 1 accident, 18 deaths

5. Egypt - 1 accident, 15 deaths

Lastly, should you decide to go driving around for your next getaway trip, here are the five deadliest driving destinations in 2018:

1. India - 150,785 deaths

2. China - 58,022 deaths

3. Brazil - 8,651 deaths

4. USA - 35,092 deaths

5. Indonesia - 31,282 deaths

Do remember that these statistics are here not to scare you, but to make you aware of the situations and precautions one must take on traveling. Travel safe, kids!

image credit: wikimedia.org

A Swedish start-up company named Cangoroo announced plans to deploy pogo sticks in select cities to directly compete with e-scooters as a transportation option. San Francisco CBS provides details on the launch of the pogo sticks rental in San Francisco:

On Friday, Cangoroo CEO and co-founder Adam Mikkelsen said his company chose San Francisco as one of its launch cities because of its reputation as place of innovation.

 He added that Cangoroo could start deploying anywhere between 100 and 200 pogo sticks in San Francisco as early as late summer or possibly in the fall.

Mikkelsen said Cangoroo would be ready to work with city officials, including the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, on regulations and safety before launching the product.

Would you use pogo sticks as a mode of transportation, should it be made available in your city?

image credit: Cangoroo.tech

The photo above shows an abundance of boulders on the surface of asteroid Bennu (101955 Bennu), as taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

The aforementioned spacecraft  will maneuver towards the surface of Bennu, which at a span of 500 meters  is the height of the Empire State, to sample its rugged surface and return the samples to Earth in September 2023.

To read more on these boulders and Bennu itself, click here.

image credit: apod.nasa.gov

When Marc Chaussidon, director of the Institute of Geophysics in Paris, looked at the map of the newly scanned seafloor in the Indian Ocean, he discovered something very unusual:

   Rising from the Indian Ocean floor between Africa and Madagascar was a giant edifice 800 meters high and 5 kilometers across. In previous maps, there had been nothing. “This thing was built from zero in 6 months!” Chaussidon says.

What Chaussidon saw was the birth of a new volcano - the largest of such underwater event ever seen in human history.

image credit: MAYOBS team (CNRS/IPGP-Université de Paris/Ifremer/BRGM) 

Argentina’s National Agricultural Technology Insitute crafted sixty-three wooden, artificial nests for wild bees in the years 2017 and 2018. When checked again, three were found lined with plastic.

This discovery that Argentina’s solitary bees are now making use of plastic in building their homes may be revolutionary. However, the reason behind this, and if this is a good thing or not, scientists are yet to find out.

“It would take a lot more research to know what this means for the bees themselves. Sure it’s possible it might afford some benefits, but that hasn’t been shown yet. I think it’s equally likely to have things that are harmful,” says Hollis Woodard, an entomologist focusing on bees at the University of California Riversides Woodard Lab.

“This new research, published in the journal Apidologie, documents the first time bees have been seen making nests only out of plastic, but for years scientists have known bees were incorporating plastic into their building materials.”

“It would demonstrate the adaptive flexibility that certain species of bees would have in the face of changes in environmental conditions,” the study’s lead author Mariana Allasino wrote in a press release translated from Spanish.

Via National Geographic

Image by PublicDomainPictures on Pixabay

No matter where you are, trains have the right of way. A train might take a mile or so to come to a stop, which means they cannot stop just because they see a car on the track. So imagine the trepidation a driver would feel having to drive across a bridge that's also a railroad track. One without warning lights. That's the case for a couple of bridges in rural New Zealand, as Tom Scott explains.  

The East West Market, an independent grocery store in Vancouver, British Columbia, wants its shoppers to bring their own reusable bags instead of relying on disposable plastic bags given at the store. So it produced bags that no one would want to be seen casually carrying.

Well, perhaps I should better say that some people would never want to be seen casually carrying these bags. I can easily imagine myself reusing these bags just to get weird looks from people.

They're funny, but I'm skeptical that intentionally humiliating customers is a good business practice.

-via Design Boom

I bet everybody has reservations about the internet. Of course, it has greatly improved productivity and communication. It has facilitated innovation and the building of communities with shared interests. But it has also caused issues with privacy and security. However, is data regulation and limiting internet access the solution to these problems?

This won’t just be bad news for free speech and thought, the Splinternet is already a formidable threat to businesses operating in multiple countries. The fact is, not all countries are playing by the same rules. Different nations have different rules governing the use and movement of all kinds of data.

Before, the most prominent governments to impose restrictions on internet use were probably North Korea and China. However, the EU has also released its own policies regarding internet and data usage. India and Brazil have also set up theirs. Even now, the US is debating on net neutrality.

We are only going to see more countries implement similar data laws so will we be able to cope with this new future of the internet?

(Image credit: Geralt/Pixabay)