Child film and TV stars are no longer new to us. Like their predecessors, child stars on social media platforms also attract and fascinate audiences far and wide. Instagram and YouTube are expected to grow to a $6.5 billion to $8 billion by the end of this year. The huge growth on influencer marketing on these platforms, however, raises a lot of questions and concerns about the lack of oversight and the possible long-term impact on children’s lives.

One of the examples of these kid influencers is the three-year-old twins Taytum and Oakley Fisher, who recently branched out from their family’s YouTube channel. Now, they have a channel of their own.

It's run by parents Madison and Kyler Fisher, whose "FishFam" home-video style vlogs have amassed more than 3.6 million subscribers on YouTube. The family also has 5 million Instagram followers, of which 3 million belong to Taytum and Oakley's unique account. At just 4 months old, the newest Fisher family member, baby Halston Blake, has more than half a million Instagram followers on her account.

"(Our) new channel for Taytum and Oakley, called Taytum and Oakley Play, it's going to be more geared towards just them," dad Kyler Fisher told CBSN Originals on a recent morning at the family's Los Angeles home. "Them playing with toys or just doing whatever they do, using their imaginations and stuff like that." 

Becoming a social media star is one of the most popular career aspirations named by kids in a recent survey. The influencer marketing industry is projected to grow to $15 billion by 2022. But experts warn that regulations need to be put in place as younger and younger influencers are sharing their lives on camera. Since 1939, Coogan's Law — named for child star Jackie Coogan, whose parents squandered his fortune — has protected the earnings of professional child performers. The law, however, doesn't apply to kid influencers online.

Asked about whether he's concerned about the lack of labor laws governing kids in this new social media entertainment space, Kyler Fisher said: "Who gets to say who does the work? My kids are in a picture, and that's work? I'm not so sure." 

The Fishers were among the forerunners of family vlogging and can earn upwards of $200,000 per month, with money coming in from brand deals and advertising revenue from Facebook and YouTube. 

There are also other parents of kid influencers who also have a different take on the subject. Check them out on CBS.

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Building houses for the homeless takes a lot of time and money. It is a slow and expensive process, and it gets slower and more expensive as the years pass by. Six developers, however, through their response to a challenge from L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti, say that they can do it faster and cheaper.

Pre-fab construction, simplified financing, shared housing and small-scale projects were the strategies spread through the proposals recommended Friday to share a $120-million grant funded through the city’s $1.2-billion homeless housing bond.

The proposals promise to produce 975 new units of supportive housing at an average cost of $352,000 per unit, according to a report the mayor and housing officials presented to the citizen committee tasked with oversight of the bond, Proposition HHH. The committee, which had called on the mayor last fall to conduct the innovation challenge, voted with little comment to send Garcetti’s recommended proposals on for City Council consideration.

The proposals, however, fell short of the committee’s goal of building 1,000 units in two years or less (but hey, it’s just 25 units short).

More details about the proposals over at the Los Angeles Times.

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Miriam Pawel was not expecting to return to their tiny farm in Del Rey, California — at least, not every summer. Yet she found herself there once again, amidst the triple-degree heat in July for the ninth straight year of pilgrimage with her friends to an orchard just south of Fresno, near the geographic center of California.

We come to harvest peaches from a tree we “adopted” on the farm of 65-year-old David Mas Masumoto, a third-generation Japanese-American farmer who began his adoption program to connect people to their food and to find homes for old-fashioned fruit too delicate for commercial sale. He has succeeded in ways he could not have foreseen. We are drawn back each summer by the intense flavor of the heirloom fruit, but even more by the unexpected attachments that have deepened over the harvests: bonds among members of our multigenerational team, ties with the Masumoto family, and a connection to our decades-old Elberta peach tree.

This year, however, would perhaps be one of the moments Pawel would certainly remember.

Climate change has brought extremes in heat and precipitation that play havoc with the harvest season, now elongated and unpredictable. And farm labor, long one of the few factors growers could control, has become equally unpredictable, as immigration crackdowns cause shortages and fear suffuses the largely undocumented Mexican farmworker community in the state.

When we return next year, we will see one of the more tangible consequences: Our peach tree will be two-thirds its former height. All trees on the 80-acre farm will be pruned to make them easier to be cared for by women, who have become by necessity the preferred workers for this small farm during a labor shortage that shows no sign of abating. The Masumotos hope to turn the challenge into an opportunity by shaping the trees to produce fewer, larger peaches, which command a higher price.

More details of the story over at The New York Times.

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Cheryl Rogowski’s parcel of land in Pine Island, New York is down a steep slope that opens up into a wide view of the valley. The crops of this season are lettuce, epazote, cabbage, squash, cucumber, tomato, peppers, sunflowers and gladiolas — all of them reflecting Rogowski’s love for color.

Rogowski is no stranger to Pine Island, a land known as the “Black Dirt Region” or “The Drowned Lands” because of its dark and damp soil, which locals call “muck”.

She’s always experimented with the land. In the 1980s, soon after her father gifted her five acres to farm for herself, she started planting jalapenos. “You can’t grow jalapenos in the north-east,” some were quick to warn. This was when it was rare to see a jalapeno in the local supermarkets. But it worked, and at one time her farm had more than 1,000 varieties of chillies. 

But her thousand varieties of chillies were not the ones that transformed the landscape. It was the onions. But what’s the difference between a regular onion and this one?

The high sulphur content of the soil from thousands of years of composted vegetation ups the pyruvic acid levels in the onions, which, in turn, increases the sugar content, resulting in a bold, pungent taste. This makes the Pine Island onion exceptional for cooking. When caramelised, they become uniquely sweet.

“The flavours are brighter, sharper, cleaner,” Rogowski said. She makes a smoked onion jam that she claims won’t taste the same with any other onions.

Know more about the land and its onions over at BBC.

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A report today published in the medical journal BMJ suggested that higher levels of physical activity at any intensity is linked to a lower risk of early death in middle-age and older people.

Previous studies have repeatedly suggested that any type of sedentary behavior, such as sitting still, is not good for your health. Being sedentary for 9.5 hours or more a day, excluding sleeping time, is associated with an increased risk of death.

[...]

According to the researchers, the public health message may simply be: "Sit less and move more and more often."

“We humans did not evolve to be sitting creatures. We evolved to be naturally moving all day long,” says Dr. Sanjay Gupta, an American-Indian neurosurgeon. “In fact, some people have called sitting the new smoking,” he continues. He then concludes the video that our best bet to live to 100 is to “get up and walk around.”

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Known for creating Monopoly and GI Joe, toy and board game company Hasbro, for $4 billion, will buy Entertainment One Ltd., a British entertainment company that produced animated shows for preschoolers such as “Peppa Pig” and “PJ Masks.”

“Peppa Pig,” which stars a pink cartoon pig with a British accent, airs worldwide and is translated into over 40 languages.

Shares in Entertainment One jumped 30% in London on Friday.

Hasbro Inc., based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, says the deal will help it turn more of its toy brands into shows or movies. Many of its brands, including My Little Pony and Transformers, already appear in TV shows and movies.

The deal is expected to close before the end of the year.

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The average American goes through over 250 pounds of plastic waste yearly. Much of this waste comes from packaging.

We know that plastic is harmful to the environment. Some would take hundreds of years before decomposing, while others don’t decompose at all. This is why we do our best in recycling plastic, so that we can minimize the plastic waste. However, not all plastic is recyclable. This begs the question: which plastic is recyclable and which is not?

Fortunately, NPR looks into the matter to help us identify which is which. Why don’t you check it out?

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Fish is an essential ingredient when it comes to traditional nigiri, sashimi, and maki. However, if we keep on consuming fish without caring for their dwindling numbers, there will come a point in time where there would be no fish in the sea.

The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nation’s 2018 State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture report leads with this jarring quote: “Since 1961 the annual global growth in fish consumption has been twice as high as population growth.” As of 2018, 33 percent of our fish populations were at “biologically unsustainable levels”—meaning they were critically overfished. We are basically at risk of eating our oceans bare.

Seafood watch senior program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Ryan Bigelow states that tracking sustainability can be a hard task since restaurants carry so many species of fish, and many of the popular ones, such as the bluefin and eel, have significant environmental issues. Shifting the focus towards sustainability would be a slow process.

Add the fact that your fish was likely flown in on ice and you’ve got a hefty carbon footprint, too.

Plant-based sushi eliminates these woes, especially when made with local ingredients. And there’s more to vegetarian rolls than the singular obligatory cucumber offering. In fact, Planta, a restaurant in Miami’s South Beach, serves an entire menu of vegan sushi. Think mushroom and celeriac nigiri and spicy rolls made with dehydrated watermelon in place of tuna.

Of course, it’s a bit more work to make vegan rolls than your more traditional options. “You can buy the right piece of tuna and do nothing to it and put it on sushi rice and away you go. Plant-based sushi is more difficult, but it’s also definitely more sustainable,” says David Lee, Planta’s executive chef. He’s found success in dehydrating vegetables, which creates a texture similar to that of raw fish and concentrates its flavor.

Check out these plant-based sushi recipes over at Outside.

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U.S scientists say that they can turn living cells into computers or recording devices through a new technology that they developed. The artificial program shall be encoded in the cells’ DNA.

The technology is called DOMINO (DNA-based Ordered Memory and Iteration Network Operator), which works similar to the CRISPR gene editing method. DOMINO can trigger simultaneous DNA writing events — where one DNA mutation event triggers another – in response to biological signals. Thus, the acronym DOMINO.

Writing in the journal Molecular Cell, the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the technology enables the deep interrogation of biology and the use of engineered cells as devices that can process, monitor, and store information occurring within cells and/or their environment.

Potentially it could be used to create sensors that sit in the body collecting and storing information for health monitoring, or in systems to measure and record contamination in rivers and waterways.

"We need better strategies to unravel how complex biology works, especially in diseases like cancer where multiple biological events can occur to transform normal cell into diseased ones," says senior author Timothy Lu.

"With this method we are using DNA as a memory tape to permanently record biological events that are occur in disease. This technology can give us deeper insights into what signals go up and down over time to drive disease development."

Instead of cutting the DNA at a specific location, as CRISPR does, DOMINO uses a base editing approach to overwrite DNA at particular locations.

See more details of this news over at Cosmos Magazine.

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Disruption can be a positive thing. It is a part of life after all. However, for those who began coming of age during the global economic recession a decade ago, disruption took a toll on them — it forever changed their view of the world where they live in.

The latest Deloitte Global Millennial Survey shines a light on the human toll taken by years of societal discord, technological transformation and economic insecurity.

Deloitte Global has been looking inside the minds of millennials for the past eight years in order to better understand what makes them tick. They’ve also begun to Generation Z members to examine how different are the youngest employees and consumers from their predecessors.

We look for trends, sure, but are equally interested in discovering morsels of data that Deloitte clients might find surprising. There were plenty of those morsels in this year’s survey results. Even some of the trends were unexpected.

For instance, the percentage of millennials who believe the economic situations in their countries will improve during the coming year was 45 percent each of the past two surveys. This year, it plummeted to 26 percent. Hope that the social/political climate will get better is even more scarce—just 22 percent believe it will, down from a third last year.

[...]

These results speak to a group that’s troubled, disillusioned and dissatisfied. That’s especially concerning when you consider millennials and Gen Zs make up more than half the world’s population and, together, account for most of the global workforce. They can make or break entire enterprises, and right now, they’re not thrilled with much at all.

More details of the survey over at Forbes.

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4. You might think these Nazis impersonating Jews are comical. After all, how such bad must their real lives be that they spend their time online pretending to be Jewish? But Jews are just 2% of the US population & most folks have never met one, so can be easily fooled by trolls. pic.twitter.com/tIRu5XPy21

— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) August 19, 2019

“Fellow Jews, we must do a better job to address our Jewish privilege,” writes a Twitter user under the name of Rabbi David Goldberg on Saturday. Along with his statement was an image that read, “When 1.4% of the US dominates political funding, media, Hollywood, government, finance, law, academia, and foreign policy and somehow nobody puts the words ‘Jewish’ and ‘privilege’ together.”

This was only one of many stridently left-wing Jewish Twitter accounts that called for three things, namely, an acknowledgement of “Jewish privilege,” an end to what they called “Jewish racism”, and ultimately an end to the state of Israel.

They tweeted things like “I am Jewish and see…hatred towards European people from Jews every day” and “I can’t tell you how saddening it is to hear my fellow Jews talking down to people of color – referring to them as mere goyem trash.” They had names like Simon Edelson and Chaim Adelberg.

None of them were real people. As discovered by Tablet Magazine senior writer Yair Rosenberg, all of these accounts were fake profiles created with stolen photos of real people like Israeli writer Hen Mazzig and the husband of an editor at Forward magazine. The network of accounts all seem to have been created after a now-archived thread on the white supremacist breeding ground that is 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board /pol called for “a massive movement of fake Jewish profiles” on Facebook and Twitter.

Why would they do this? What is their purpose?

See more of the story at Slate.

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A book which has 98% of its text written in gibberish surely wouldn’t sell, and I think we all could agree that we won’t purchase a copy of that book.

Biology does not care about the business industry. However, it still writes a charming guidebook that everyone needs to live: DNA. 

DNA is the genetic manual that instructs the proteins that make up and power our bodies. However, only a part of the whole DNA — namely, less than 2% of it (specifically, 1.5%) — codes for the proteins.

The rest — 98.5 percent of DNA sequences — is so-called “junk DNA” that scientists long thought useless. The non-protein-coding stretches looked like gibberish sentences in a book draft — useless, perhaps forgotten, writing. But new research is revealing that the “junky” parts of our genome might play important roles nonetheless.

In other words, what scientists call “junk DNA” is not just junk, but useful junk. (So is it still junk if it is useful?)

Other research advances in the last decade also suggest “junk DNA” might just be misunderstood genetic material. Scientists have now linked various non-coding sequences to various biological processes and even human diseases. For instance, researchers believe these sequences are behind the development of the uterus and also of our opposable thumbs. A study published in Annals of Oncology last year showed that a non-coding DNA segment acts like a volume knob for gene expression, ultimately influencing the development of breast and prostate cancer. And a study in Nature Genetics this year found mutations outside of gene-coding regions can cause autism.

Exploring the role of non-coding sequences is now an area of intense research. Increasing evidence suggests these noncoding sequences might help cancer defeat treatment, and experts now see them as promising tools for cancer diagnosis.

Head over at Discover to know more about this topic.

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Shingle Springs, California. On a hot April morning at Ponderosa High School, volunteers paint teenagers with fake blood. Others mess up their hair by holding battery-powered fans a few inches from their face, and a Grim Reaper examines a folding table filled with peanut butter pretzels, gummy bears, and doughnuts.

Evan Chavez, an 18-year-old senior, and Ella Beezley, a 17-year-old junior, are waiting their turn at the makeup station. “I’m in the car with Alex—as the passenger—who’s the drunk driver,” explains Chavez, who has red hair and a matching beard. “And I get critically injured and helicoptered to the hospital.” Chavez is slated to lose an arm during the event. Soon, he says, it will be “bloody and black and blue and crushed, like it’s losing blood and starting to die.” 

“I’m the passenger in the other car, and I get hit and die,” says Beezley, who will have a large head wound applied above her wide hazel eyes. “I’m dead on the scene.”

Shingle Springs, located in rural El Dorado County, is a community of less than 5,000 people, about 40 miles from Sacramento. Beezley and Chavez, along with 34 others, have been selected from around 1,800 at Ponderosa High—or “Pondo,” as everyone calls it—to play a role in their school’s version of Every 15 Minutes, a grisly pageant involving a mock car crash and funeral intended to curtail teen drunk driving through elaborate role playing. Ponderosa High stages the program every two years for its junior and senior classes.

Is this method effective in deterring teens from drunk driving? Does it work? Find out more on Topic.

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The brain receives very little information from the world, yet highly detailed images of the world appear before the mind’s eye. Why is that? This is the big mystery of the human vision. Much of what we “see” are only conjured in our heads.

“A lot of the things you think you see you’re actually making up,” said Lai-Sang Young, a mathematician at New York University. “You don’t actually see them.”

Despite this being the case, the brain does an excellent job in inventing the visual world, as we don’t bump into doors routinely. Studying anatomy alone, however, would not reveal how the brain does this in the same way as a person staring at a car engine would allow him to learn the laws of thermodynamics.

New research suggests mathematics is the key. For the past few years, Young has been engaged in an unlikely collaboration with her NYU colleagues Robert Shapley, a neuroscientist, and Logan Chariker, a mathematician. They’re creating a single mathematical model that unites years of biological experiments and explains how the brain produces elaborate visual reproductions of the world based on scant visual information.

“The job of the theorist, as I see it, is we take these facts and put them together in a coherent picture,” Young said. “Experimentalists can’t tell you what makes something work.”

Young and her collaborators have been building their model by incorporating one basic element of vision at a time. They’ve explained how neurons in the visual cortex interact to detect the edges of objects and changes in contrast, and now they’re working on explaining how the brain perceives the direction in which objects are moving.

The study is the first of its kind. Previous attempts to model human vision “made wishful assumptions about the architecture of the visual cortex, while the work of Young, Shapley, and Chariker tries to explain how the phenomenon is still possible despite the “demanding, unintuitive biology of the visual cortex as is”.

Alessandra Alegucci, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah, thinks that their model “is an improvement in that it’s really founded on the real brain anatomy. They want a model that’s biologically correct or plausible.”

Head over to Quanta Magazine to know more about this.

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December 1972. It was the first physics conference of then 17-year-old Lee Smolin. His teacher at Hampshire College suggested that he drop in to the conference, listen attentively to the talks, and take the opportunity to meet people.

“Don’t be shy,” he said. “If you need an icebreaker, just ask them what they are working on.”

Having practised my line on the subway, I strode into the grand hotel. The first person I met was a young Texan named Lane P. Hughston, who took me to lunch and taught me twistor theory—a radically original description of the geometry of space and time as it would be experienced by a ray of light. I’d been reading Albert Einstein’s original papers on general relativity, but I’d never seen a theory so elegant. In the following days, I met and listened to lectures by many of the leading physicists of the time—including Roger Penrose, the inventor of twistor theory, himself.

At the time, several researchers were working on black holes, which I had recently started to learn about. A black hole is created after a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses. Inside, gravity is so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape.

At the last afternoon of the symposium, Smolin noticed a man who didn’t look like a typical physicist. He had what Smolin called an “Old Testament” beard and he wore black jeans and a turtleneck.

I tried my line on him, and his reply was so unusual that I remember it exactly. “My approach to research is to ask myself how I would create the universe, were I God. I’ve come to the conclusion that God could never understand calculus or, indeed, the real numbers. But I am pretty sure that God can count.” He showed me a game with an electron and a chessboard. The probability of the electron jumping between any two squares was related to the total number of ways of travelling between them. Through this game, he hoped to reduce quantum physics, concerned with the movement of particles, to a simple matter of counting. I had no idea what to think of this, so I quickly said goodbye, and in my haste, I neglected to ask his name.

Seven years later, as a new PhD visiting Stanford University, I was formally introduced to David Finkelstein, the first person to describe the inner structure of a black hole. In 1958, he had used simple mathematics to describe how something such as light travels near the hole’s surface, showing that the boundary can be crossed only one way—by photons falling in. Because of this, a black hole would appear perfectly black. Today, we call this edge of darkness the event horizon.

Check out this intriguing story over at The Walrus.

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