This week at IFA 2019, Asus has revealed the ProArt Studio Book One, which boasts a ridiculous 24 GB graphics processing unit (GPU), making it the most graphically-powerful laptop ever.

That power come from a mobile version of Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 6000, the desktop versions of which were unveiled at SIGGRAPH last year. Built on the Turing architecture, the main gimmick of this GPU is real-time ray tracing, which is claimed to trace the path of light through virtual scenes and produce realistic reflection, refraction and scattering.

With 24 GB of this graphical grunt, that makes the ProArt StudioBook One the most powerful laptop around by quite a wide margin. The runner-up title also belongs to Nvidia, with laptops packing the 16 GB Quadro RTX 5000 which came out earlier this year.

If a 24 GB GPU seems like overkill for even the most hardcore of gamers, that’s because it is. The 8 GB RTX 2080 is plenty for consumer needs – instead, the Quadro RTX lineup, and the laptops it’s built into, are designed for business, engineering and scientific use. That includes crunching huge datasets, editing 8K video, and creating detailed 3D animations and environments.

Aside from the powerful GPU, the laptop also boasts other high-end specs. It would surely be expensive, however. But if you’re just someone who uses a laptop for writing documents, then a laptop with basic specs will do.

(Image Credit: Asus)

Google has been around with us now for 21 years, carrying out over 5.4 billion searches a day. It has influenced us in our search habits that we no longer just search for something — we Google it.

Over the 21 years of the search engine, Google has been the focus of several lawsuits, controversies, and accusations of misconduct, which range from tracking our movements, to mishandling advertisements, to spreading fake news.

Many of Google’s issues ultimately stem from its search engine, from the role it plays controlling our attention. Google, along with other tech companies and platforms, has helped to create the attention economy, in which we all have endless options and everyone involved is trying to profit from what we choose to spend our precious time on.

Know more about this over at JSTOR Daily.

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Forest pathologist Bob Marra traveled to the back of a barn in Hamden, Connecticut, which belongs to the state’s Agricultural Experiment Station. There, stacks of wooden sticks, all that remains of 39 trees that were taken down in 2014 from the state’s Great Mountain Forest, can be found.

These cross-sections of tree trunks, known as stem disks — or more informally as cookies — are telling a potentially worrisome tale about the ability of forests to be critical hedges against accelerating climate change. As anyone following the fires burning in the Amazon rainforest knows by now, trees play an important role in helping to offset global warming by storing carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide — a major contributor to rising temperatures — in their wood, leaves, and roots. The worldwide level of CO2 is currently averaging more than 400 parts per million — the highest amount by far in the last 800,000 years.

But it seems that we have been overestimating the trees and their ability to store carbon, as Marrra’s study suggested that internal decay significantly reduces the amount of carbon stored within a tree.

Find out more about this on Undark. 

(Image Credit: Jan Ellen Spiegel)

He’s filthy but he’s mine (again)!

🏆 pic.twitter.com/RXGuzTBGke

— Ashley Mayer (@ashleymayer) July 11, 2019

Because many New Yorkers have accidentally dropped their beloved AirPods onto subway tracks this summer, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority is considering the issuance of a PSA asking commuters to not take their AirPods on or off while entering or exiting the trains, according to the Wall Street Journal.

MTA maintenance supervisor Steven Dluginski says the number of lost AirPods first spiked in March after Apple released the AirPods 2, but there’s been a considerable uptick this past summer, presumably due to the heat and humidity on subway platforms that makes “the ears and hands of New Yorkers pretty sweaty.” It’s true that during the summer months, stepping onto a subway platform is a disgusting, sauna-like experience. In an investigation, Gothamist found that some platforms can get as hot as 102.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s definitely steamy enough for those tiny earbuds to slip out of sweaty ears.

Up to 25 MTA workers search the tracks thoroughly for lost items every weekend. Before, workers retrieved baby pacifiers and dentures. Now, they recover AirPods. The Wall Street Journal also states that “on one particular Thursday”, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority got 18 requests to retrieve lost items, and six of these requests are for AirPods (that’s one-third!)

“It’s job security, as far as we’re concerned,” Dluginski says.

MTA workers use an eight-foot pole with two rubber claws at the end to grab items, but retrieval can take a while. In July, one of commuter Ashley Mayer’s AirPods fell onto the tracks. She was told that it would take two hours to retrieve, and she had to be present for it. So she went on a DIY rescue mission and managed to retrieve her AirPod with some duct tape attached to the end of a broom. It may not have been the safest or most sanitary option, but it was certainly cheaper than paying $69 for a replacement AirPod.

Have you dropped your AirPods in a similar situation?

(Image Credit: Ashley Mayer/ Twitter)

Have you ever wondered why Siri is called “Siri”? If you did, then you’re not the only one, and there’s already an answer for you, coming from none other than the co-founder of Siri Inc., Adam Cheyer.

As a startup company, Cheyer and his team wanted a name that was “easy to remember, short to type, comfortable to pronounce, and a not-too-common human name.” They also wanted to get the domain for a not-so-expensive cost.

Once Siri became the leading candidate, everyone on the team had their own favorite explanation of the meaning. Dag Kittlaus, our Norwegian-American CEO, once considered using Siri as the name of his child, and liked the Norse meaning: "beautiful woman who leads you to victory."

For me, Siri, which means "secret" in Swahili, was a tip of the hat to our pre-named days when we began as stealth-company.com. I also liked the fact that it was the reverse of Iris, a software system I helped build as part of the CALO project, which Siri spun out of. Some liked the resemblance to SRI, which was the research institute that ran the CALO project.

We knew that Siri [meant] "beauty" in Sinhalese, but missed that SHIRI [meant] "butt" in Japanese (they're not the same word, but the pronunciations are close).

And it was all a big surprise that Apple decided to keep the original Siri name for its launch as part of iOS. There were other candidates that were leading up until the final weeks.

Via Mental Floss

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In 1964, then 49-year-old Norman Cousins collapsed in the middle of his living room floor. Cousins was rushed to the hospital, and he was diagnosed with sudden-onset degenerative collagen disease — a connective tissue condition which gave him severe back pain and almost left him quadriplegic. He was given by his doctor a one-in-500 chance to recover (that’s only 0.2%).

Cousins, however, decided that he will recover and beat the odds.

“He knew that there was research and evidence showing that negative emotion — fear, anger, anxiety — was bad for you,” said Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, as quoted in the book Fingerprints of God. “But he felt that there had been little study of whether positive emotions might have the opposite effect on your health, that it might be good for you. He felt he had nothing to lose, because he wasn’t going to get better through conventional means, and perhaps he had a lot to gain.”

Cousins checked himself into a hotel room and developed his own treatment. He hired a doctor to pump doses of vitamin C through his IV and prescribed himself a “laughter routine” in which he read funny excerpts by E.B. White and watched episodes of “Candid Camera” and Marx Brothers films.

According to Cousins, it worked.

He, however, is unsure of what happened to him, and he says that it is quite possible that what happened to him is an example of the placebo effect.

Cousins is not the first one to explore the idea of using laughter as medicine. It has its roots way back in the Middle Ages, in the early 14th century.

Know more about the history of laughter therapy over at Medium.com.

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Despite many insurance companies accepting chiropractic as a treatment, a number of studies do not confirm whether it’s effective.

Over the years, chiropractic has been widely accepted in the U.S, and today there are over 70,000 chiropractors in the country. However, a number of scientific studies do not show that chiropractic is more effective than placebo of pharmaceuticals.

The history of chiropractic treatment goes way back in 1896 in an office building in Iowa.

D.D. Palmer, a fan of magnetic healing and anti-vaxxer, ran into the building's janitor, who was suffering from back pain; he was also deaf. It's not quite clear exactly how Palmer adjusted the janitor's vertebral subluxation—a term unique to chiropractic that implies an undetectable spinal misalignment—as, with all origin stories, details are murky. Supposedly, Palmer claims the adjustment cured him of deafness; the second patient he treated apparently left with no more heart disease.

Palmer was a metaphysics fan and correlated physical symptoms with spiritual phenomena; chiropractic is based on the idea that energy flows block the "innate," which manifests in things like back pain. Not only did he believe chiropractic had a religious and moral purpose, he also claimed he "received" it from a deceased physician. He called chiropractic a religion; he even tried to use the freedom of religion clause to circumvent the fact that he wasn't a licensed medical professional, a move that got him jailed and fined. He ended up selling his school to his son, who apparently killed him in 1913.

While Palmer's emphasis on the nervous system was an early contribution to an important physiological discourse that doctors are still uncovering today, chiropractic is still considered pseudoscience. Regardless, this is America, where suspect folk remedies and metaphysical interventions are commonplace. Within three decades there would be over 80 chiropractic schools established in the United States.

Despite scientific studies not showing the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment, it can alleviate pain, but only temporarily. As Derek Beres puts it, “chiropractors provided temporary relief without ever pointing to the cause of the pain.”

Know more about Derek’s experience on chiropractic over at Big Think.

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Looking forward to a vacation or holiday so that you can put down your phone? If your answer is yes, then you might be suffering from social media “technostress” — a type of stress that a person experiences due to his or her use of information systems.

The constant stream of messages, updates and content that social media apps deliver right to our pockets can sometimes feel like a social overload, invading your personal space and obliging you to reply in order to maintain friendships.

You might think that the correct (and obvious) response should be to put down or switch off your phone. But that might not be that easy.

...we have recently published research showing that, when faced with this pressure, many of us end up digging deeper and using our phones more frequently, often compulsively or even addictively.

Conventional wisdom implies that when people are faced with a stressful social situation, for example, an argument with someone – they cope with the stress by distancing themselves. They take a walk, go for a run, play with their kids. But when the stressful situations stem from the use of social media, we find people tend to adopt one of two very different coping strategies.

How do we avoid technostress, then?

More details of this topic over at The Conversation.

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Engagement photo shoots usually emit an intimate, peaceful and romantic vibe. This engagement photoshoot of couple Madison Moxley and Mason Whitis is different. Despite this being different, it is still intimate and romantic, but not peaceful — rather, it is highly spirited.

It should be noted, however, that the couple does not dress or look like this usually. They really just wanted their photoshoot to be fun.

See their photos and their story over at Bored Panda.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Madison Moxley/ Facebook / Bored Panda)

An attempt to trap a mouse goes horribly wrong.

If California has In-n-Out, and New York has Shake Shack, then the Lone Star State, Texas, has Whataburger. Thanks to a video that appeared on Facebook this weekend, however, you might want to think twice before going to the burger chain to eat their midnight bacon and cheese Whataburger with fries.

In the video, a person behind the counter begins turning over the containers in an attempt to trap the mouse. But mice, as you might know if you've ever had one, are sneaky, and instead of being caught, the mouse takes a big, brave leap… straight into the deep fryer. Screams of "oh my god" and "deep-fried rat!" follow. The people behind the counter talk about trying to scoop out the mouse, but a Whataburger employee doesn't seem to know how to turn the fryer off.

Lewis's video has gone fully viral, having earned over 2 million views on Facebook, plus reposts on Twitter and various news publications. "The entire restaurant has since been cleaned and sanitized. We addressed this situation as quickly as possible, reinforcing procedures with our Family Members," Whataburger wrote in a statement, per KVUE. "While we’ll continue to be very diligent, it’s important to know there was no history of this type incident at this unit and there is no ongoing issue."

The Bastrop branch was pest control notified and temporarily closed, but it has since been re-opened.

(Image Credit: Brushawn Lewis/ Facebook)

Over 200 people across the U.S have come down with a mysterious illness that seems to be linked with vaping. Perhaps it is our body’s way of telling us the potential serious health risks of using e-cigarettes.

As of August 27, there were 215 cases of severe respiratory disease in 25 states since late June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Friday. All patients reported using e-cigarette products. But while officials believe their illness is associated with vaping, they haven’t been able to single out which ingredient or device may be causing the problem.

So far, the patients have a few things in common. They suffered from respiratory symptoms, including coughing, shortness of breath, chest pain, and difficulty breathing. Some have gotten seriously ill, even winding up in intensive care units on oxygen support through ventilators or intubation. Most are in their late teens and 20s with no underlying health issues. Many cases also involved vaping THC-containing liquids (though it’s not clear whether that was from cannabis e-cigs or nicotine e-cigs), and the CDC singled out black market products as another potential commonality.

More details of this news over at Vox.

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A new case report came out this week with news of a UK teenager having a diet of potato chips and other junk foods, which led to very undesirable health consequences. Doctors have described how the teen’s disordered “fussy” eating “led to chronic nutritional deficiencies that left him with a variety of symptoms, including permanent partial blindness.”

According to the case report, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the boy had visited his family doctor at age 14 with complaints of fatigue. He seemed otherwise healthy and wasn’t taking any medications, but he described himself as a “fussy eater” and tests showed that he was low in vitamin B12 and had anemia. He was prescribed injections of B12 and was given advice on how to eat a proper diet.

A year later, though, he developed hearing loss and was sent to another doctor. Soon after, he started having vision problems as well. But tests at the time, including brain scans and standard eye exams, didn’t reveal any underlying physical causes. Over the next two years, his vision continued to worsen, and by the time he saw an eye specialist, he was diagnosed with damage to his optic nerves.

Again, tests looking for a possible explanation like a hereditary disease came up short—but a more sensitive test found that he was still low in vitamin B12. And when they asked about his diet, he revealed that since he was a kid in grade school, he had flat out avoided foods with “certain textures” and almost exclusively ate chips, white bread, processed ham and sausage; he had also stopped taking vitamin B12 shots. Further tests showed that he was deficient in copper, selenium, and vitamin D too, and his bones were unusually weak with low mineral density.

Check out more details about this saddening news over at Gizmodo.

What are your thoughts on this one?

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Social network company Facebook will no longer scan the faces of new users by default. Facebook will now ask for permission first. Existing users of the site who did not get the site’s face recognition system will be alerted about it.

Facebook notes: “If you do not currently have the face recognition setting and do nothing, we will not use face recognition to recognize you or suggest tags.” In short, it’s not on by default for these users. Good!

Despite the social network company’s efforts to convey its updated policy clearly, however, there are still some users who may be left uninformed.

For those users, Facebook’s face recognition feature may be enabled without them realizing it. And that’s not good, because Facebook’s face recognition practices have bothered some privacy-conscious users…

Facebook’s interest in scanning faces—with and without asking for permission first—goes way back. The technology originally appeared at the end of 2010 as Tag Suggestions. The tag suggestions feature was turned on by default for users in most countries, and if you never turned it off manually, then its broader replacement—the face recognition option—may be (or has already been) enabled for you as well.

So why isn’t Facebook just asking every user explicitly, now, if they want the feature on or off? A spokesperson told Fast Company, “In the US and [other countries] where Tag Suggestions was available, we respected people’s Tag Suggestions settings choice.”

Have you turned your face recognitions off? I believe it’s time we did.

(Image Credit: Simon/ Pixabay)

Five hundred years ago, chocolate first arrived in the European shores in the form of cocoa beans. After pillaging the Mayan and the Aztec empires of Central America, where the cocoa beans have been cultivated and used to create various forms of chocolate for over 3,000 years, Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors brought the spiced treat with them over to the ports of Spain.

In honor of this trans-Atlantic transfer, the Barcelona Confectionery Guild has set up the Chocolate Museum to tell the story of chocolate and its modernization. Although the history section of the museum is in no way perfect, visitors get a general trajectory of chocolate’s evolution, moving from bitter water to the stunningly detailed sculptures that fill the museum. By using the statues to visibly depict modern chocolate innovation, the arc of the history of chocolate feels fairly complete.

Upon entrance to the museum, guests are greeted by a massive white chocolate ape named Snowy, along with their own chocolate bar as part of their admission. As they munch on the confectioner’s chocolate, guests walk past glass-encased sculptures made entirely of chocolate. The sculptures include some famous cultural icons such as Minnie Mouse and Louis Armstrong. However, the bulk of work focuses on Spanish architecture, proudly featuring Sagrada Familia, one of Gaudi’s famous houses, and creatures from Parc Guell.

What a sweet way to tell history!

(Image Credit: SpirosK / Flickr / Atlas Obscura)

J.T Sexkik has compiled a series of misspellings and grammatical blunders taken from Yahoo! Answers into one video, and reads them. The result is an extremely hilarious video that would surely leave you rolling on the floor laughing.

Despite this video of misspellings of the word “pregnant” being over 2 years old, it is still fun to watch.

Via Funny Or Die

(Video Credit: J.T Sexkik/ YouTube)