The heat wave has been roasting much of the U.S in the past days. However, this may only be the start as the temperatures are still expected to rise up to dangerous levels on the weekend. Because of this, people (and animals) try their best to stay cool.
Here are some of the photos. The rest are on Dothan Eagle.
What do you plan on doing to stay cool?
(Image Credit: Byron Hetzler/The Southern Illinoisan via AP)
(Image Credit: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
(Image Credit: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
ジュースに含まれている糖分を角砂糖に変換してくれるアプリ🥤 pic.twitter.com/aQ0aazkL46
— Daiki Shimizu (@432daiki) July 15, 2019
Most, if not all, of us love sweet food and beverages. However, it is worth noting that too much sugar can cause weight gain, increase risks of various diseases such as cancer and diabetes, speed up the aging process, and can contribute to tooth decay.
If there was one thing that people can agree upon, it would be trying to decrease sugar consumption. Sodas, juices, sports drinks, and pre-bottled coffees are some of the drinks out there in the market that are known to have high levels of sugar. However, it would be difficult to visualize how much sugar is in a drink, even for a careful consumer. Fortunately, there’s an app that just shows that.
Twitter user Daiki Shimizu (@432daiki) developed an app that scans the bar code of a soft drink and gives you a visual representation of how much sugar is in it. In the video above, which he posted on Twitter, he scans the bar code of a popular Japanese soda called Mitsuya Cider. Then after a brief moment, an image of a bottle pops up, and the gauge that shows how much of the drink is sugar climbs higher and higher.
The final product also says how many cubes of sugar is in one bottle of Mitsuya Cider: 13.8, which is quite a hefty amount. When he taps “kakutei/確定 (confirm), 13 cubes of sugar drop from the top of the screen, and, with every movement of his phone, tumble around like they’re inside of a jar. The app then displays “13.8 cubes” in larger numbers, and further specifies that 13.8 cubes of sugar is 229.2 percent of the recommend[ed] daily value. Sort of makes you want to put back the soda bottle, doesn’t it?
Many netizens clamored for the name of the app and where they can get it, but Shimizu says that it was actually an app that he made a year ago and shelved for various reasons, so it’s not currently available for download. But due to popular demand, he decided to upload it to the iPhone App store, where it is currently waiting for approval, and he will likely Tweet when it’s ready to be downloaded.
The app seems to only have Japanese language accessibility, and may not work on beverages that weren’t purchased in Japan. However, since the app itself can read Japanese, it can still tell you how much sugar is in a Japanese drink even if you can’t read the language, and can help you watch your sugar intake while traveling or living in Japan.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Video Credit: Daiki Shimizu/ Twitter)
Dopamine is a chemical messenger in the brain associated with happiness. It affects reward-based behaviors and motivation, as well as movement. Treatments for Parkinson’s disease have been mostly focused on this chemical. Researchers from Yale University, through their new study, challenge the long-held assumptions about the sole role of dopamine in this degenerative disorder.
In people with Parkinson’s disease, nerve cells that produce dopamine slowly die. The loss of dopamine leads to slower movements, resting tremors, and other symptoms that worsen over time. To reverse parkinsonism — the collection of symptoms seen in Parkinson’s disease — doctors provide a treatment that increases dopamine levels in the striatum, a portion of the brain that is responsible for motor learning. However, medical treatments do not consider the effects of parkinsonism on another neurotransmitter, acetylcholine.
Scientists had previously believed that when dopamine levels dropped, acetylcholine levels increased. However, this relationship had never been thoroughly investigated, despite acetylcholine’s likely role in creating a movement disorder called dyskinesia, which develops in most patients after several years of dopamine treatment for parkinsonism.
Neurology professor Nigel S. Bamford, together with his fellow researchers, explored the relationship between dopamine and acetylcholine through the use of mice. This is what they found out.
...Bamford and his co-authors learned, motor function in parkinsonism becomes dependent on both dopamine and acetylcholine.
These findings suggest that treating parkinsonism may require targeted therapies that restore the balance between these two chemicals, instead of focusing solely on dopamine, said the researchers.
See the full study here.
(Image Credit: sabinevanerp/ Pixabay)
Sad news for Japan.
Thirty three people have been confirmed dead after a suspected arson attack razed the Kyoto Animation Studio.
Witnesses stated that a man was screaming “Die!” before he set the studio on fire.
The unnamed 41-year-old suspect was also injured during the incident and he was taken to a hospital. Knives were discovered by the police at the scene of the fire.
Apparently the man had set fire on the studio because the company had allegedly "stole a novel". Police is still investigating the motive of the crime.
Some 70 people were believed to have been in the studio when the building was set on fire at 10.35 in the morning. 11 bodies were found on the second floor, four more on the stairs.
Meanwhile, president of the anime company, Hideaki Hatta said the news of fire was heart breaking.
“This has just broken our hearts. What’s the use of resorting to violence?” he said when present at the damaged building.
[...]
Even Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has offered a message of condolence on Twitter.
“So many people were killed or injured. It’s so appalling I can’t find the right words. I pray for … their souls.”
Popularly called KyoAni, the animation studio is known for producing K-On!, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, A Silent Voice, and Clanaad.
(Image Credit: ABS-CBN News)
本日、京都で発生した放火殺人事件では、多数の死傷者が出ており、あまりの凄惨さに言葉を失います。お亡くなりになられた方のご冥福をお祈りいたします。負傷された皆様にお見舞いを申し上げるとともに、一日も早い回復をお祈りしています。
— 安倍晋三 (@AbeShinzo) July 18, 2019
Social media has certainly made constant exposure a widespread experience. As Elaine Replogle puts it in “Fame, Social Media Use, and Ethics”, “[s]ocial media allow anyone to disclose life trivia for all to see, making it possible for people to be perceived as begging for attention, of transgressing traditional boundaries of public and private, of acting somehow ‘inappropriately.’”
Citing Jodi Dean in “Twitter and the New Publicity,” Joseph Faina writes that “publicity has become the defining ideology for Internet users, leading to a constant preoccupation with visibility.” This preoccupation in turn creates new kinds of psychological issues, as Melissa Gronlund describes in “From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art after the Internet”...
[...]
It’s only in the past decade or so that this problem of playing to the crowd has become widespread: Before the advent of YouTube, reality television stars were the only “ordinary” people to appear on screen with any regularity, and before blogs and social networks, we only paid attention to the eating or beauty routines of movie stars or rock stars. While we can therefore blame social media for making the problem of celebrity into a mass phenomenon, anxieties about the hazards of public exposure long predate the internet. Look back at the history of celebrity, and all the hand-wringing over social media scrutiny sounds like an all-too-familiar tune.
We might be able to learn a thing or two from the nineteenth century celebrities like Dickens and Thackeray.
See the full story at JSTOR Daily.
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
The Russia-based photo-filtering app has been drawing attention for this week due to its new filter that makes its users older or younger. The app first became viral in 2017 because of its facial modification features (such as adding a smile or a “hotness” filter). However, during that same year, users were surprised to learn that the developers of the said app were gathering metadata from their photos. And that is why the privacy concerns have resurfaced again.
Close research suggests FaceApp isn’t doing anything particularly unusual in either its code or its network traffic, so if you’re worried about FaceApp, there are probably a bunch of other apps on your phone doing the same thing. Still, the conversation does bring attention to standard tech practices that might be more invasive than users realize.
To use the app, iOS users select specific photos they want to put filters on, and there’s no evidence of the app downloading a user’s entire photo roll. The company then uploads the specific images to its servers to apply the filter. FaceApp never spells out that it’s downloading the filtered photo, but it’s not unusual, as iOS researcher and CEO of Guardian Firewall Will Strafach noted on Twitter.
Theoretically, FaceApp could process these photos on the device itself, but Yaroslav Goncharov, an ex-Yandex exec and CEO of the Russian company that created the app, previously told The Verge that photos uploaded to the app are stored on the company’s servers to save bandwidth if several filters are applied, and that they get deleted not long after. In a statement to TechCrunch, FaceApp said it accepts requests from users to remove their data from its servers. The team is currently “overloaded,” but users can send the request through Setting>Support>Report a bug with the word “privacy” in the subject line.
(Image Credit: FaceApp)
using a network traffic analyzer, I tried to replicate the thing people are talking about with FaceApp allegedly uploading your full camera roll to remote servers, but I did not see the reported activity occur.
— Will Strafach (@chronic) July 17, 2019
here is marlo stanfiekd with a beard though pic.twitter.com/6wy8cHLNuA
We’ve come to a point where we think of outlandish ideas like this to try to save our planet from the deadly effects of climate change. I wonder what kind of ideas we will come up soon.
What sounds like a discussion climate scientists would have after eating a bunch of pot brownies is actually the premise of a new paper out in Science Advances on Wednesday. Researchers crunched the numbers on a massive geoengineering modeling experiment to learn what it would take to shore up the most imperiled glaciers on Earth. The results focus on pumping massive amounts of artificial snow onto the surface to stabilize West Antarctica’s glaciers, an idea that would staunch sea level rise but could also have a host of unintended consequences. These types of thought experiments, while interesting to gauge all options humanity has to deal with climate change, also show how desperation could lead to some dangerous decisions by policymakers if carbon emissions aren’t cut soon.
West Antarctic is ground zero for the sea level rise crisis. The coastal glaciers hold back an ice sheet that would raise sea levels more than 10 feet if it melted entirely, but they’re being undercut by warm water . The bedrock beneath them slopes downward as you travel inland, creating an unstable situation that could lead to runaway collapse. Their eventual collapse is possible even if the world meets the Paris Agreement goals, and if that happens it would completely reshape the shorelines of the world.
Do you think this would be made into reality?
See the full story on Gizmodo.
(Image Credit: girlart39/ Pixabay)
In order to stop the ill effects brought about by climate change, the world is realizing that it must do something to pull off the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Scientists have engineers have proposed many ways to do this, but most of them would cost a lot of money and resources, and “no one wants to foot the bill”.
However, there is one method explored in the past decade that humanity may be able to use.
… [It] might now be a step closer to becoming practical, as a result of a new computer simulation study. The process would involve pumping airborne CO2 down into methane hydrates—large deposits of icy water and methane right under the seafloor, beneath water 500 to 1,000 meters deep—where the gas would be permanently stored, or sequestered. The incoming CO2 would push out the methane, which would be piped to the surface and burned to generate electricity, to power the sequestration operation or to bring in revenue to pay for it.
There are still some issues with regards to this method. However, as time passes by, this becomes more and more viable.
Know more about this on the Scientific American.
(Image Credit: U.S Department of Energy)
We use the Internet for many things, like buying stuff, setting up appointments, submitting our documents, and accessing different networks. Every time we go to a page, we trust that that page will remain private, and that our information will be safe. But is our information really safe?
DataSpii, a newly documented privacy issue in which millions of people’s browsing histories have been collected and exposed, shows just how much about us is revealed when that assumption is turned on its head.
DataSpii begins with browser extensions—available mostly for Chrome but in more limited cases for Firefox as well—that, by Google's account, had as many as 4.1 million users. These extensions collected the URLs, webpage titles, and in some cases the embedded hyperlinks of every page that the browser user visited. Most of these collected Web histories were then published by a fee-based service called Nacho Analytics, which markets itself as “God mode for the Internet” and uses the tag line “See Anyone’s Analytics Account.”
How did these guys obtain the information? Find out over at Ars Technica.
(Image Credit: Tobias_ET/ Pixabay)
A person would be able to survive for weeks without food. However, a person would not be able to survive a week without water. This just goes to show how important it is to always stay hydrated.
We all know “the 8 x 8 rule” when it comes to drinking water. Eight glasses of water, eight ounces each glass. But, unknown to many, this rule is an unfounded one, and is not supported by science. Nobody even knows where this rule came from.
“It has no basis in fact,” says Michael Farrell, a professor at Monash University in Australia, who studies how the brain responds to thirst and other sensations. Likewise, the old advice to “drink before you’re thirsty” is countered by the latest research, as scientists finally figure out how the brain knows when you’re thirsty, and when you’ve had enough.
So how much water do we really need? And how do we know if we are well hydrated?
There is no official U.S. government recommendation for how much water to drink. But there are guidelines for total fluid intake from independent groups. The average adult woman should consume about 11.4 cups of fluid per day (a cup equals 8 ounces) and men should consume 15.6 — be it straight from the tap, in other beverages, or in food, according to a widely cited 2004 report from the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies. People get about 20% of their water from food, the report states. Fruits and vegetables are particularly water-laden — both tomatoes and watermelon are 90% or more water.
[...]
… Clear urine is a sign you’re well hydrated. When urine turns yellow, and especially if it becomes dark, dehydration has begun. Other symptoms include infrequent urination and dry or blue lips, along with blotchy skin, rapid breathing, fatigue, fever, and dizziness.
Know more about this topic over at Medium.com.
(Image Credit: ronymichaud/ Pixabay)
In 1997, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez sent out three unknown actors in the woods to improvise a horror movie and film it on their own. It was, indeed, a practically new concept at that time, and pulling that kind of stunt off is surely not going to be easy.
But two years later, Sanchez and Myrick had a bonafide hit on their hands with The Blair Witch Project, which inspired a new horror subgenre and became one of the most iconic horror flicks of all time.
Made with a budget of only $60,000, the film premiered at Sundance in 1999. Just hours after the midnight screening, the two young directors sold the film to Artisan Entertainment for $1.1 million. The movie was the most-talked about horror movie of the season, but it took years to become a reality.
On its 20th anniversary, Vice interviewed the filmmakers and actors behind this cult classic. See the full interview over at the website.
(Image via Vice)
If you happen to pass by a sculpture of a napping cat when you walk to the beach this summer, chances are this was made using a Neko Cup, the latest product from h-concept, a Japanese design brand.
Made from biomass plastic (bamboo and scallop shells) the hollowed out object creates a silhouette of a napping cat.
It can be used on the beach, in your park’s sandbox and, in the winter, with snow. And when it’s not in use, it also functions as ab adorable little sculpture. Designer Yuka Morii says she loves seeing cats sleeping on the sidewalk and she wanted to preserve that warm feeling she gets when she spots one out of the corner of her eye.
If you’re in Japan, you can buy one of these through the h-concept online shop for only ¥2,916 (around $27).
(Image Credit: h-concept/ Spoon & Tamago)
A mod is a modification (thus the term, “mod”) made by players to a video game. A mod usually changes how the video game behaves or looks like. A user named Nxus64 just made a mod for Devil May Cry 5, the newest entry to Capcom’s Devil May Cry series. Upon the reveal of the character V, fans and non-fans of the game realized that this character bears a resemblance to the Star Wars character Kylo Ren.
As with other wacky character mods on PC, the Kylo Ren mod by user Nxus64 replaces V’s model with a pretty detailed rendition of the moody Force user from the Battlefront games. They honestly didn’t have to change that much, just cover up V’s sleeves with a space robe. The mod also swaps out V’s cane with Kylo Ren’s distinct red crossguard lightsaber. However, in the game V does much of his fighting indirectly by summoning monsters from his book. And now you’ll get to see Kylo Ren do that too which is pretty funny…
[...]
This is far from the only example though of fans adding beloved characters to great games through mods like this. This Sekiro mod turns all of the ogres into Shrek. Adding Keanu Reeves to Metal Gear Solid V makes that game even more breathtaking. And just when Capcom’s own Resident Evil 2 remake couldn’t get any better, this mod makes zombie stalker Mr. X wear a horrifying thong.
What do you guys think?
(Image Credit: Geek.com)
According to a study published in Games for Health Journal, when used as part of an emotional intelligence training program, videogames can help teenagers in evaluating, expressing, and managing their own emotions after the training.
The article entitled “Can Videogames Be Used to Promote Emotional Intelligence in Teenagers? Results from EmotivaMente, a School Program” was co-authored by Claudia Carissoli and Daniela Villani, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy). The researchers developed an emotional intelligence training program that integrated videogames as experience-based learning tools. The experimental group of teenagers participated in eight sessions and their emotional competency was evaluated before beginning the program, at the end of the training, and three months later. The researchers provide recommendations for future research based on the results of this study.
“Games for health have been designed to address an increasing variety of issues. A relatively new health issue is emotional intelligence, which has implications for various health problems, including coping with stress,” says Tom Baranowski, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief of Games for Health Journal, from USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center, and Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX. “Carissoli and Villani created a videogame, EmotivaMente, to enhance emotional intelligence among adolescents, perhaps the group that could benefit most…
Here is what Carissoli and Villani concluded on their research:
EmotivaMente helped adolescents to improve emotional skills. Results confirmed that videogames can be useful to promote EI in adolescents at school, if integrated with a guided and assisted framework…
(Image Credit: Olichel/ Pixabay)
In 2017, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and founder of the Boring Company, revealed that he was about to launch yet another company named Neuralink. This company focused on finding a way to directly link the human brain to computers.
Fast forward to April 2019. After two years of silence with regards to Neuralink, Musk tweeted that an update from the startup was “coming soon”, and now we know the exact date of the update.
On Thursday, Neuralink tweeted that it will host an event in San Francisco on July 18 to “share a bit about what [it’s] been working on the last two years.”
The tweet included a link to a page where anyone could apply to attend the gathering — but those who don’t score an invite will still have the option of watching a livestream of the event, which Neuralink plans to upload online after it’s all over.
I wonder what Neuralink has in store for us. What are your thoughts?
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
We're having an event next Tuesday in San Francisco to share a bit about what we've been working on the last two years, and we’ve reserved a few seats for the internet. Apply here: https://t.co/1VQsv4gAA4
— Neuralink (@neuralink) July 11, 2019
