Preliminary government data suggests that Japan’s fertility crisis is worsening, as the data from the first seven months of this year shows the sharpest drop in births in 30 years.

Data from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare show that births fell 5.9% percent from January to July year on year, and the number of women in their childbearing age are shrinking, not to mention the increasing number of women who decide to delay having children, or decide not to have any children at all.

During this period, the total number of births was 518,590. For the whole of 2018, the official tally of births was 918,397, a figure which however excludes babies born to foreigners in Japan and Japanese babies born abroad.

The decline in births is "happening faster than official projections had envisioned," said Yasushi Mineshima, a spokesman for the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Japan's birth rate has been falling since the late 1970s. In 2005, it reached a record low of 1.26, but then seemed to be on a path of recovery until it started to fall again in 2016, according to government figures. By 2018, it was at 1.42.

To maintain a stable population, countries need a fertility rate of 2.1. Last year, it was 1.72 in the United States but only 0.98 -- or less than one baby per woman -- in South Korea, where fertility rates have fallen to their lowest level since records began.

More details of this news over at CNN.

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Twitter states that it has mistakenly used phone numbers and email addresses, that users have provided for security purposes, to show advertisements to them. The social network company has stated on Tuesday that they “inadvertently” used the aforementioned numbers and emails to let advertisers match people to their own marketing lists. Twitter, however, does not say how many users were affected by their mistake.

The company also says that it did not share personal data with advertisers or other third parties. Twitter says it fixed the problem as of September 17.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Monday which makes HIV-prevention drugs available with no prescription required. Thanks to this bill, pharmacists can now dispense both PrEP, or preexposure prophylaxis, and PEP, post-exposure prophylaxis.

The measure follows a 2015 California law that made it possible for women to walk into a pharmacy and get a prescription for birth control.

PrEP can reduce the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99% when taken daily, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. PEP, meanwhile, is for emergency situations and must be started within 72 hours of possible exposure to HIV, the CDC says.

The bill also prohibits insurance companies from requiring patients to get prior authorization before they can use their benefits of obtaining the medications.

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Magda Boulet, 47, and Cat Bradley, 27, are both professional ultrarunners who compete with each other race after race. They chase each other down and exchange top podium spots in some of the biggest 100-mile events in the world. One of them has a problem, however: she has to make sure her workouts don’t interfere with her 14-year-old son’s schedule.

“It hit me just the other day that I’m racing women who are 20 years younger than me,” Boulet says from her home in San Francisco. “I didn’t even know what ultrarunning was when I was 27.”

Boulet grew up in Jastrzebie-Zdroj, Poland, and immigrated with her parents to the U.S. when she was in high school, becoming a citizen in 2001. She ran track at the University of California at Berkley, focusing on the 1,500-to-5,000-meter events, but switched to marathons after college. Working with legendary distance coach Jack Daniels, she came to dominate the distance, racing for the U.S. in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. After almost a decade running the marathon, Boulet started to become restless. “I felt I was getting the most out of my mind and body that I could in the marathon distance,” Boulet says. “I got invited to a local half marathon trail race, and it was captivating. I ended up walking for the first time in a race—I could not run up a certain hill. Instead of being discouraged by it, I suddenly realized there was so much I still had to learn. Recognizing that there’s room for improvement is a beautiful thing.” In 2013, Boulet transitioned again, this time to ultramarathons. 

Know more about her story over at Outside.

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A team of scientists led by MIT professor Michael Strano has concluded that unexpected findings from biologging (the practice of implanting sensors in animals) should “cause a seismic shift in how wearable sensors are used to promote health in humans.”

The team states that while the animals are fitted with sensors in order to measure one or two behaviors, scientists were able to gain dramatic and unforeseen insights into a wealth of other habits.

Take for example the jaw sensor, which is implanted in penguins, sea lions, and dolphins. To the uninitiated the tiny device may look like it’s only able to know if the jaw is moving up or down. For scientists, however, it’s much more than that. By drilling down on the size and frequency of signals, scientists are able to know when the animal is chewing, swallowing, or capturing prey. They are also able to know what type of food the animal eats and how long it feeds.

Which is fine and dandy if you’re interested in the gustatory habits of, say, the Northern rockhopper penguin.

But the scientists argue it is also of critical importance for the emerging science of wearable health monitoring, not least because most of us are already sensor-enabled.

“[R]oughly three billion people owned smartphones in 2018, effectively already being tagged with a subset of sensors,” they write.

Researchers have used smartphone tapping behaviour to predict Parkinson’s disease, analysed text and email data to detect depressed speech and even used the camera to measure heart rate by look at skin colour changes in the finger.

More details over at Cosmos.

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Huawei has always amazed us with its hardware capabilities. First was the Spring 2018’s P20 Pro, where Huawei was the first to offer the triple-lens system, as well as the “night mode” which were later adopted by Google, Samsung, and Apple.

Then came the Mate 20 Pro, known for its phenomenal battery capabilities thanks to its 4,200 cell, as well as its ability to use the wide-angle lens, which Oppo and OnePlus have adopted this year.

Six months after the release of the Mate 20, Huawei’s P30 Pro arrived, which beat Oppo to the punch as it introduced the “periscope” zoom lens that could zoom up to 50 times, as well as an image sensor that “took in drastically more light” compared to other phones in pitch dark conditions.

And now we have the Mate 30 Pro, and once again, there is a clear jawdropping hardware trick: the ability to shoot slow motion videos at 7,680 frames-per-second (fps).

In slow motion videos, the higher the fps, the better, as more frames means footage can be slowed down without animations appearing choppy. For many years, slow motion videos shot on smartphones maxed out at 240fps. Samsung grabbed headlines last year when it offered 960fps slow motion video, and that number has been the standard set for smartphones through 2019–until now, with Huawei’s 7,680.

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The most recent rendition of the famous Batman villain Joker, in the film of the same name directed by Todd Phillips, has earned $93.5 million domestically over the weekend, making it the film with the biggest October opening in history, according to Variety. The record was previously held by Venom’s $80 million opening from last year.

But behind the film’s success lies scorn and derision, especially from the critics. But who’s laughing now?

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If you’re a man struggling to find a female partner, here’s some advice for you, at least from companies that sell this service: for a night, hire a professional wing woman that could help you ease the conversations with prospective dates. There’s a hidden advantage to having a female companion, however, and it’s something deeply rooted in our minds.

Women seeking romantic partners seem to prefer men already chosen by another lady. It’s a notion ingrained in pop psychology, but actually based on the scientific hypothesis that heterosexual women practice “mate choice copying.” That is, females save time and energy finding a worthy mate by selecting one previously picked by others.

Researchers have documented mate choice copying in animals from rodents to birds to fish. But whether humans do it is more ambiguous.

Check out more about mate choice copying over at Discover.

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The night of October 29, 1969, marked one of the most historic events in Internet history: it’s when the first data was transmitted over Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet, blipped from a computer at the University of California, which is in Los Angeles, to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, in Palo Alto.

That evening, the team at UCLA got on the phone with the SRI team and began typing “LOGIN.” “We typed the L and we asked, ‘Did you get the L?’” the UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock recently recalled. “‘Yep’ came the reply from SRI. We typed the O and asked, ‘Did you get the O?’ ‘Yep.’ We typed the G and asked, ‘Did you get the G?’ Crash! The SRI host had crashed. Thus was the first message that launched the revolution we now call the internet.”

Stephanie Wehner has always been fascinated by the ability of networks to transmit data to each other, as well as their ability to behave unpredictably and crash.

“On a single computer, things will happen nice and sequentially,” said Wehner, a physicist and computer scientist at Delft University of Technology. “On a network, many unexpected things can happen.” This is true in two senses: Programs on connected computers interfere with one another, with surprising effects. And users of networks get creative. With the internet, Wehner noted, initially “people thought we would use it to send around some files.”

Wehner was a computer programmer back in the 90s, and then she grew bored. Now, she is “one of the intellectual leaders of the effort to create a new kind of internet from scratch”. This internet is the quantum internet.

Find out more about this over at Quanta Magazine.

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Lista lived in Montreal after college and there he lived a rather simple life. He was in love with a girl, and he would write poetry and didn’t know what would happen to him.

Back home, however, his parents were “breaking up in slow motion”, with the “first ominous sign” being his dad liquidating his closet.

A melancholy windfall came my way. Sometimes it was he who offered them to me, with the cheery derring-do of a man going off to war—here’s that old silver suit you used to love when you were a boy, that houndstooth blazer I wore to your graduation. Other times it was my mom who gave the clothes over, offloading them in a grief she could palliate by giving me a sad, sweet gift.

Nevertheless, Lista would be wearing his dad’s old clothes for almost a decade. Find out why on The Walrus.

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Paul Kay was an anthropology graduate student at Harvard University. When he arrived in Tahiti in 1959, he expected that he would have a difficult time learning the local words for colors.

Kay was surprised, however, to find it easy to understand colors in Tahitian, which had fewer color terms than English.

For example, only one word, ninamu, translated to both green and blue (now known as grue). But most Tahitian colors mapped astonishingly well to categories that Kay already knew intuitively, including white, black, red, and yellow.

This struck Kay as odd, as the groupings were not more random. This would lead into a more detailed research along with his fellow anthropologist, Brent Berlin.

Head over at Nautilus for more details.

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Virtue, for the ancient Greeks, is not a goal in and of itself; it is a route to a well-lived life. According to them, a person would flourish and would come to a life filled with meaning and find enduring happiness by being honest and generous, embodying diligence and fortitude, and showing restraint and kindness. This view hasn’t changed much until today.

If it’s true that virtue leads to a life well lived – a view that receives more empirical backing with each passing year – the question “How do I become virtuous?” takes on a bit of urgency. For the majority of ethicists, both ancient and modern, the answer is clear: virtue comes from living an examined life, one where deep deliberation leads to the embrace of noble qualities such as honesty and generosity, no matter how difficult it can be to enact them.

In considering moral character, the Roman orator Cicero said: ‘Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.’ And while I think it’s an overstatement, Cicero’s view does offer up the tantalising prospect that, simply by cultivating gratitude, other virtues will grow. If correct, it suggests that there’s an entirely different way to improve moral character – one that is rapid, easy and efficient.

Check out Aeon for more details on this topic.

What are your thoughts on this one? Do you agree with Cicero?

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The concept of nation states in Africa only arose after the Berlin Conference in 1884 and the following scramble for Africa by European superpowers of the time, which makes the concept a little over a century old. It therefore should not be a surprise that the names of most African countries are remnants of a colonial legacy.

Nearly every country on earth is named after after one of four things—a directional description of the country, a feature of the land, a tribe name or an important person, most likely a man. For the most part, Africa mirrors this trend with a few exceptions. The stories of how African countries got their names ranges from the more mundane, to the fantastical and sometimes even the mind-boggling.

Take Kenya for example.

… when the British came upon an imposing snow-capped mountain that the Kikuyu people called Kirinyaga (Where God dwells.) As they struggled to pronounce, Kirinyaga, they called it Mt. Kenya – the country would be named after this mountain.

Check out the others over at Quartz.

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In 1752, in the ruins of Herculaneum, one of the towns that was buried in ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D, particular scrolls were unearthed. The scrolls were discovered in the library of a grand villa, which is believed to have been owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The site became known as the Village of the Papyri, and the documents were considered as a major find. However, these scrolls were charred up into rolled up logs, making the texts more or less useless.

“Although you can see on every flake of papyrus that there is writing, to open it up would require that papyrus to be really limber and flexible – and it is not anymore,” Brent Seales, director of the Digital Restoration Initiative at the University of Kentucky, tells Davis.

That hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to access the writings, most of which, it’s believed, were lost to history. Attempts have been made to unroll about half the scrolls using various methods, leading to their destruction or causing the ink to fade.

Seales and his team are now seeking to read the text using the Diamond Light Source facility, a synchrotron based in Oxfordshire in the U.K. that produces light that can be billions of times brighter than the sun. They will test out the method on two intact scrolls and four smaller fragments from L'institut de France.

More details at Smithsonian.com.

I hope that the researchers will be able to finally shed light (literally and figuratively) on the scroll, as I also wonder what the text contains.

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LOLcats is an internet meme of funny pictures of cats alongside amusing captions, which are often grammatically incorrect, but hilarious nonetheless. Thus the term “LOLcats” which is a combination of LOL (“laughing out loud”) and cats. This term is believed to have originated in 2006. The concept, however, is from a time much earlier.

Enter Harry Whittier Frees (1879-1953), an American photographer “who dressed his cats, Rags and Fluff, as well as the pets of his friends and neighbors, and posed them in human situations with props, often with captions.”

Frees utilized specially designed outfits, sewn by his mother, to hold the animals in standing poses waiting patiently for the shot he wanted. In Mr. Frees' own words, "These unusual photographs of real animals were made possible only by patient, unfailing kindness on the part of the photographer at all times."

Check out the pictures over at the Amusing Planet.

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