G Suite has been recently rebranded by Google. The app collection, which is now known as Google Workspace, now has new icon designs as well. According to Google, these new icon designs reflect a “more connected, helpful, and flexible experience” on the Workspace. But it seems that the new designs create unnecessary confusion, and they don’t seem to help the average user. Tarvin Gill from Mashable has this to say about the new icon designs:

I’m on the fence about this new design. On one hand, I do like the consistency of the new icons. They all share the same colors and stand out from the other app icons on my phone.

But on the other hand, I find myself taking longer to open up any Google app because I have to make sure I’m launching the right app.

How about you? What do you think about this?

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A study of dog DNA has found out that dogs were domesticated some 11,000 years ago, confirming that they were the first animals to be domesticated before any other known species. This would mean that the friendship of humans and dogs is time-tested, and dogs are worthy of the title “man’s best friend”.

Dr Pontus Skoglund, co-author of the study and group leader of the Ancient Genomics laboratory at London's Crick Institute, told BBC News: "Dogs are really unique in being this quite strange thing if you think about it, when all people were still hunter gatherers, they domesticate what is really a wild carnivore - wolves are pretty frightening in many parts of the world.

"The question of why did people do that? How did that come about? That's what we're ultimately interested in."

Learn more about the study over at BBC.

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It was a new word that neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields encountered one night as he read his copy of Science. The word refers to the ability of the neurotransmitter dopamine to enter a cell’s nucleus and control genes. That’s right. Dopamine apparently can control the genes in one’s body.

As I read the paper, I realized that it completely upends our understanding of genetics and drug addiction. The intense craving for addictive drugs like alcohol and cocaine may be caused by dopamine controlling genes that alter the brain circuitry underlying addiction. Intriguingly, the results also suggest an answer to why drugs that treat major depression must typically be taken for weeks before they’re effective. I was shocked by the dramatic discovery…

Learn more about dopaminylation, and how this could be used in future studies, over at Quanta Magazine.

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Even a ghost can be traumatized by a scary experience and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This is from Boston band Hallelujah the Hills.

Case-in-point: over the course of 4 months in quarantine, lead singer Ryan Walsh decided to make a stop-motion music video for their song "The Memory Tree," from the band's recent album I'm You. He handcrafted little ghost puppets and tiny ghost houses and put together a whole elaborate world to tell a whimsical story of spirits and transdimensional discovery, in the style of a classic silent film.

-via Boing Boing

Dakota is a rescue coyote living at Save a Fox Rescue. He is so excited about his gift of a pumpkin! It's a ball to play with AND food! If only he had opposable thumbs! -via reddit

Rise above those stormy, dreary days. Sit above them on the Rain Cloud Chair by Shota Urasaki, a designer on Okinawa. Stainless steel rods simulating the rain support the polyester foam seat. It would be an ideal chair for creative writing moments.

-via Toxel

The most common types of stained glass works that you might see include windows, decorative panes, and lamps. But Nicole Bex moves imaginatively beyond those norms. Her Etsy shop includes realistic bats with glass wings! Each one has a wingspan of about a foot.

-via So Super Awesome

Trying to imagine the online form that lets students choose how they'd like to get updates on food deliveries pic.twitter.com/spOl3HWKlC

— Nich🎃las Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) October 30, 2020

The University of Cambridge dates back to 1209 and has thus experienced the travails of pandemics of the past 800 years, including the Black Death. One of the hygienic practices dating back to that time includes ringing a bell to clear space between the infected and the uninfected. This type of hand bell is called a plague bell.

Cambridge students who are self-isolating can select to have their food deliveries announced by plague bell. One difference between now and centuries ago: they make this selection by filling out an online form.

-via Marginal Revolution

Counting and keeping an eye on a certain group is a daunting task. It requires steady focus and attention. I can’t seem to imagine how difficult it would be if I was tasked to monitor 300,000 penguins. Thankfully, we have machines that could make our jobs easier and faster.

How do you keep a close and regular eye on 300,000 nesting pairs of Adélie penguins spread over two square kilometres of ice? Send in the drones, of course.

But not without a plan. It helps to have an algorithm that can partition the space, assign destination points to each drone and figure out how to move them through those points in the most efficient way, limiting backtracking and redundant travel.

Get that right, and you can do detailed visual surveys in a couple of hours rather than a couple of days. Researchers at Stanford University, US, developed just such a system and put it through its paces at Cape Crozier, near McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

Know more about this story over at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: Kunal Shah/ Cosmos)

It’s not a surprise that there are now more people who regularly use video conferencing apps to meet virtually with their friends and co-workers. But how much was the increase, really? Well, it is big enough to make people who invest in companies, which provide video conferencing services, happy.

Microsoft saw some big growth in Microsoft Teams at the beginning of the pandemic, and it has kept accelerating over the past six months. During an earnings call with investors today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reveled Microsoft Teams now has 115 million daily active users. That’s a more than 50 percent rise from the 75 million that Microsoft reported almost six months ago.

It’s difficult to compare Microsoft’s numbers to its rivals, though. Both Zoom and Google report daily active participants, which means a single user could be counted multiple times through different meetings during a day. Google revealed it has 100 million daily active participants earlier this year, and Zoom said it had 300 million daily active participants. Slack also saw some growth earlier this year.

Now that’s big money.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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Bad habits can be hard to break. Just like good habits, you do them unconsciously, and that’s the reason why it would be difficult to break and change them. But it doesn’t mean that it would be impossible. But of course, you have to do it the right way.

Diane Dreher provides us five tips based on neuroscience research that will help us break bad habits successfully. Here is the first one:

Build Awareness and Take Control. Habits are unconscious. The first step in breaking a bad habit is bringing it into conscious awareness. We can do this by consciously keeping score. My friend Bob had smoked cigarettes for 20 years. When he wanted to break this habit, he took out an index card, wrote down the date, and made a checkmark for each cigarette he smoked that day. Just by becoming aware, he decreased the number of cigarettes he smoked per day. In one month, he went down from two packs a day to one. Then he took charge, cutting down from smoking 20 cigarettes a day one week, to 19 a day the next, progressively smoking less and less until he finally quit completely.

Check out the other tips over at Psychology Today.

What bad habits were you able to break in the past?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Using his left hand as accompaniment, and the AK-47 that he’s holding with his right hand, Vinheteiro plays the Soviet Anthem, because why not? And since he’s holding a gun, and with his finger on the trigger, I’m pretty sure that no one will be stopping him from doing so.

The music still sounds good, though.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Vinheteiro/ YouTube)

You don't have to worry about your pharmaceutical reaction so as long as inanimate objects are waiting to affirm your life choices, as seen in Ryan Hudson's Channelate. And let us be glad that Kyle chose to have a normal throw pillow instead of an anime hug pillow as his companion (I'll let you Google that on your own).

Inverness Caledonian Thistle don’t employ a cameraman as their camera is programmed to follow the ball throughout the match. The commentator had to apologise today as the camera kept on mistaking the ball for the linesman’s head... pic.twitter.com/LeKsc2bEj7

— Tom Cox (@seagull81) October 24, 2020

The Scottish football team Inverness Caledonian Thistle decided to forego paying a cameraman and employed a robotic artificial intelligence algorithm to operate the camera for games. This is an important job, as spectators are banned from attending games due to the pandemic.  

The club announced a few weeks ago it was moving from using human camera operators to cameras controlled by AI. The club proudly announced at the time the new "Pixellot system uses cameras with in-built, AI, ball-tracking technology" and would be used to capture HD footage of all home matches at Caledonian Stadium, which would be broadcast directly to season-ticket holders' homes.

Cut to last Saturday, when the robot cameras were given a new challenge that hadn't been foreseen: A linesman with a bald head.

The robotic camera operator couldn't help but focus on the referee's head, which is stunningly round and white, instead of the ball in play. While this kept the action on the sidelines for viewers, there were plenty of jokes about how this improved the broadcast, "given the usual quality of performance." You can see a highlight video of the game at IFLScience. -via Metafilter

Back in the day, Halloween was taken seriously. Back then, this was believed to be the day when the world of the gods became visible to us, and this resulted in “supernatural mischief.” Some people would offer treats and foods to these gods, while others wore animal skins and heads to disguise themselves as wandering spirits. In doing so, they won’t be disturbed by these spirits. And that is why Halloween back then was really scary.

Know more about the history of Halloween over at CNN.

(Image Credit: Toby Ord/ Wikimedia Commons)