“Lover” is the title track from Taylor’s forthcoming album, and the song has finally dropped. If you haven’t heard of the song, go check it out now!

While the album’s first two pop singles, namely, “Me!” and “You Need To Calm Down”, were met with lukewarm critical reception, fans were appreciative of her song “The Archer”, which was released last month, because of it being dreamier, slower, and more intimate. Her new song, “Lover”, continues that positive trend.

And part of why “Lover” feels like such a throwback might be that it’s the first Taylor Swift song on which Swift is the sole credited writer since 1989’s “This Love,” released back in 2014.

Working with other songwriters doesn’t mean that Swift is a bad or inauthentic musician; most musicians work with collaborators all the time. But because Swift’s best songs tend to be both highly personal and highly specific, there is something unmistakeable about a song she crafted on her own: It feels emotionally honest and fresh in a way nothing else quite does.

(Video Credit: TaylorSwiftVEVO/ YouTube)

Goose the cat from the film Captain Marvel has made quite a stir way back then, but now that its hype has died down a little, it’s about time we shifted our attention to over to dogs from TV shows, comics, movies, and video games.

Check out Gizmodo’s list of very good sci-fi doggos. But for now, here are some of the dogs that made it to their list.

Boomer, Independence Day

K-10, South Park

Rick Deckard’s dog, Blade Runner 2049

Snuffles/Snowball, Rick and Morty

Lockjaw, Marvel Comics

Do you agree with their list?

(Image Credit: skeeze/ Pixabay)

Summer is drawing to a close, and families, teachers, and even people who don’t have kids and do not teach, are starting to prepare for another school year, and this preparation comes in the form of back-to-school shopping.

Because of the priorities of the state and federal governments, school teachers have to spend their small salaries in order to buy school supplies and basic amenities. Aside from the dedicated teachers that struggle to make ends meet, there are also the families struggling to pay their bills and buy new school supplies for their children.

There are a lot of big, unwieldy, anxiety-inducing problems facing the world right now, but sending a kid to school with a new backpack and sharp pencils to start the year off right is a lot easier to manage than solving global warming on your lunch break. 

You can also help kids and teachers in need. Fast Company tells us 9 ways to help this back to school season. Why don’t you check them out?

(Image Credit: Pixabay/ Pexels)

Oftentimes, people tend to eat breakfast in a hurry, on the go. Sometimes, they skip breakfast entirely. In her book entitled Breakfast: The Cookbook, Emily Elyse Miller states that “breakfast is often hastily thrown together or eaten on the go, yet it is a meal steeped in tradition and rituals.”

Documenting those global traditions resulted in the tome that is Breakfast, which includes 380 recipes. During her three years of research, Miller accumulated nearly 1,000 recipes before selecting the range of breakfast specialties that she tested for the book. Arranged in chapters such as “Toasts” and “Soups and Stews,” some recipes are simple and global, such as fried eggs and instant coffee. Others are much more regional, such as the recipe for American hand pies (“commonly known by the brand name Pop-Tarts”) or bread topped with Norway’s brunost, a beloved, caramel-like brown cheese that requires a special slicer to cut.

Miller wants these recipes to “encourage everyone to explore and travel the world through breakfast.” Whether you’re an early bird or someone who sleeps through lunch, the following foods may offer more motivation for waking up in the morning.

Check out some of these morning meals over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Phaidon)

My boyfriend literally has no problem making friends with anybody... pic.twitter.com/iaz2JqoNxn

— bri (@bricheeseyy) August 11, 2019

Twitter user Robert Meadows waited for the plane to take off from Atlantic City. As he waited, he decided to kill some time in the most creative way possible — by challenging a tarmac worker to a quick game of rock-paper-scissors. The whole match was captured by his girlfriend, Brianna Kolbe.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: @bricheeseyy/ Twitter)

Five days ago, Shelby Wardell drove along a freeway in Michigan. Along the way, however, things came to a stop. As she sat there while waiting for the vehicles in front of her to move, something caught her eye. Several cars ahead of her, there was a man going out of his vehicle.

“I saw this guy walking over to [a] truck,” Wardell told The Dodo. “I obviously didn't know what was going on.” But soon it all became clear.

Apparently, the guy saw someone that needed petting.

"The dog was so happy," Wardell said. "It was so cute!"

(Image Credit: VT/ Facebook)

Photographer Walter Chandoha found a kitten outside in the winter snow around 1950. This kitten would then be adopted by the photographer and it would be named Loco. This event would also start Chandoha’s affinity for documenting cats, and this affinity would last up until the end of his life. Now, there’s a new book that chronicles seventy-five years of his images of cats.

The New York-based photographer, who passed away earlier this year, was quite prolific. His archive contains over 225,000 photos, including about 90,000 of his feline friends. Hundreds of these charming, often candid photographs are compiled in a new 296-page book published by Taschen, with writing and editing by Susan Michals and Reuel Golden, respectively. The book was released on August 12, 2019, and is available online.

Check out some of the photos over at Colossal.

(Image Credit:Walter Chandoha/ Taschen)

The Tokyo subway is almost always under construction that one would think that it would always be like that forever. While it is a good thing that the city is investing in what is already an excellent public transportation infrastructure system, for frequent users the subway can be frustrating when they find the usual path temporarily blocked and so they have to look for a detour.

Several years ago, however, straphangers began noticing stylish signages made out of duct tape. These signages direct passengers to station exits and platforms.

Who made these signages in the subway? Find out on Spoon & Tamago.

(Image Credit: Kenji Yoshida)

Ever wished that you had a glorious space for your fancy ride? Luxury sports car manufacturer Aston Martin has unveiled a new service called Automotive Galleries and Lairs which will let you collaborate with the Aston Martin Design Team and renowned architects in designing the perfect space for your luxurious ride.

More details over at Geek.com.

(Image Credit: Aston Martin)

Eating or drinking flavonoid-rich items such as apples and tea protects us from cancer and deadly heart disease, according to new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU). From their research, they found out that those who consumed moderate to high amounts of foods rich in flavonoids were less likely to die from cancer or heart disease. The research, however, still promotes a change of lifestyle, especially to those who have vices.

Lead researcher Dr Nicola Bondonno said while the study found a lower risk of death in those who ate flavonoid-rich foods, the protective effect appeared to be strongest for those at high risk of chronic diseases due to cigarette smoking and those who drank more than two standard alcoholic drinks a day.

"These findings are important as they highlight the potential to prevent cancer and heart disease by encouraging the consumption of flavonoid-rich foods, particularly in people at high risk of these chronic diseases," she said.

"But it's also important to note that flavonoid consumption does not counteract all of the increased risk of death caused by smoking and high alcohol consumption. By far the best thing to do for your health is to quit smoking and cut down on alcohol.

"We know these kind of lifestyle changes can be very challenging, so encouraging flavonoid consumption might be a novel way to alleviate the increased risk, while also encouraging people to quit smoking and reduce their alcohol intake."

(Image Credit: 955169/ Pixabay)

All demonstrations of quantum teleportation so far have transferred the state of a qubit — a simple two-level system. This type of transfer is a far cry from teleporting particles in their complete quantum state, which involves multiple degrees of freedom, each with many possible values. Now, scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, and at the University of Vienna demonstrated the transfer of a 3D quantum state, or qutrit.

The scheme may be useful in high-speed quantum communications, since a qutrit can carry more information than a qubit. The approach could be generalized to teleport quantum states involving any degree of freedom with more than two levels (photon orbital angular momentum, for example). The authors also suggest that they could extend their scheme to an arbitrarily high number of dimensions by adding more paths for the photons. These features could eventually allow the complete state of a complex quantum particle to be transferred.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

The world constantly bombards our senses with information, so how does our brain makes sense of these information? For example, what processes are there in our brain that enables us to identify the object in front of us? Neuroscientists now know the answer.

In work published in Nature Neuroscience, MIT neuroscientists have identified a brain circuit in mice that distills “high-dimensional” complex information about the environment into a simple abstract object in the brain.

“There are no degree markings in the external world; our current head direction has to be extracted, computed, and estimated by the brain,” explains Ila Fiete, an associate member of the McGovern Institute and senior author of the paper. “The approaches we used allowed us to demonstrate the emergence of a low-dimensional concept, essentially an abstract compass in the brain.”

This abstract compass, according to the researchers, is a one-dimensional ring that represents the current direction of the head relative to the external world.

What is this abstract brain compass? Find out on Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: ColiN00B/ Pixabay)

The U.S Navy wants ten Large Unmanned Surface Vehicle (LUSV) ships in five years, and so they are calling on the industry to present ideas for its ships. The ships will be scouts for the main battle fleet, carrying advanced radar and sonars or floating magazines and extra anti-air and cruise missiles.

Above all, the ships will do what proponents call the “3D work”: dull, dirty, and dangerous work.

The Draft Request for Proposal, posted on the FedBizOpps web site, states, “The LUSV will be a high-endurance, reconfigurable ship able to accommodate various payloads for unmanned missions to augment the Navy’s manned surface force. With a large payload capacity, the LUSV will be designed to conduct a variety of warfare operations independently or in conjunction with manned surface combatants. The LUSV will be capable of semi-autonomous or fully autonomous operation, with operators in-the-loop (controlling remotely) or on-the-loop (enabled through autonomy).

Head over at Popular Mechanics to know more about this news.

(Image Credit: U.S Navy)

Tardigrades are micro-animals that live on every continent on Earth. Following the crash of a lunar lander carrying thousands of these water bears, some of them now are probably living on the Moon. The question is, to those who have survived the crash, what happens to them now?

When the tardigrades were placed on the Israeli moon mission Beresheet, they were in a tun state — dehydrated, with their chubby limbs and heads retracted and all metabolic activity temporarily suspended. Their arrival on the moon was unexpectedly explosive; Beresheet's crash landing on April 11 may have scattered the microorganisms onto the lunar surface. 

Tubby tardigrades are notoriously tough, but were the Beresheet tardigrades hardy enough to survive that impact? It's certainly possible that some of them made it to the moon intact. But what would that mean for the moon to have what might be thousands of Earth microbes as new inhabitants? And what might it mean for the tardigrades?

See more details on Live Science.

(Image Credit: Schokraie E, Warnken U, Hotz-Wagenblatt A, Grohme MA, Hengherr S, et al./ Wikimedia Commons)

The police can know if you’re driving under the influence of liquor by using a breathalyzer to estimate your blood alcohol level on the spot. However, when you’re driving while stoned, cops don’t have evidence-based way to confirm their suspicions on the spot. When this is the case, “they typically have to rely on subjective roadside sobriety tests.”

Now, though, Canadian startup SannTek Labs says it’s developed a marijuana breathalyzer — and it’s caught the eye of top startup accelerator Y Combinator.

SannTek just secured funding as one of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 startups for its SannTek 315, a device that analyzes the molecules on a person’s breath to determine the amount of marijuana they’ve smoked within the past 3 to 4 hours (it’s not clear whether it can detect the consumption of vaping or edibles).

“We are specifically detecting Delta-9 THC, which is the predominant psychoactive component of cannabis,” SannTek CEO Noah Debrincat told TechCrunch, later adding, “We know that if people are driving with high concentrations of that in their system, their psycho-motor skills are seriously decreased.”

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: SannTek/ Victor Tangermann)