Cats are lovable animals who love to be cute, curl up to small spaces, or just get into all kinds of funny positions. Oftentimes, when cats sleep, we see them sitting down with their head down. But there are some cats (like this one), who like to sleep by lying down, just like us humans. This tiny munchkin does this in the cutest way possible.
What do you think?
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Thirty-two million dollars were stolen from the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Bitpoint. The said cryptocurrency exchange has stated on their website that they have "identified an unauthorized outflow of virtual currency.” Because of this, they have stopped trading and opening new accounts “in order to find the cause and minimize damage.”
A more detailed document from Bitpoint's parent company Remixpoint says $23 million of the stolen funds belonged to the exchange's customers. According to Nikkei Asian Review, Remixpoint plans to compensate those customers.
There's no word on which coins were stolen, but CoinDesk says that Bitpoint offered trading in five cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and XRP.
Cryptocurrency exchanges getting hacked isn't new, but the last couple of months have been particularly bad. Days ago, Singaporean crypto exchange Bitrue was hacked to the tune of $4.2 million. In May, Binance lost approximately $40 million due to a hack.
Perhaps the best lesson we can learn from this is to think twice before investing in cryptocurrency.
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Jarret Stopforth likes to drink coffee. However, he doesn’t want it bitter, and so he adds cream and sugar before drinking it.
But then something came into his mind. “Why settle for a regular cup of joe?” he thought. And so he set out to re-engineer coffee to a coffee without the bitterness, and without the bean.
"I started thinking, we have to be able to break coffee down to its core components and look at how to optimize it," he explains.
Stopforth, who has worked with other food brands such as Chobani, Kettle & Fire and Soylent, partnered with entrepreneur Andy Kleitsch to launch Atomo. The pair turned a Seattle garage into a brewing lab and spent four months running green beans, roasted beans and brewed coffee through gas and liquid chromatography to separate and catalog more than 1,000 compounds in coffee to create a product that had the same color, aroma, flavor and mouthfeel as coffee.
"As we got deeper into the process, we learned more about the threats to the coffee world as a whole — threats to the environment from deforestation, global warming and [a devastating fungus called] rust, and we were even more committed to making a consistently great coffee that was also better for the environment," Stopforth says.
Unfortunately, Stopforth’s company Atomo doesn’t reveal what their beanless coffee is made of.
What are your thoughts on this one? Is a bitterless, beanless coffee still considered coffee?
(Image Credit: Atomo)
Google contractors apparently listen to and review some recordings on what people say to Google Assistant through their phones or through smart speakers such as the Google Home.
The company acknowledged that humans can access those recordings after some of its Dutch language audio snippets were leaked. Google product manager David Monsees acknowledged the leak in a blog post Thursday, and said the company is investigating the breach.
“We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again,” he wrote.
Belgian broadcaster VRT NWS obtained over a thousand recordings with some of them containing sensitive personal conversations and information that identified the person speaking.
...VRT reporters could hear spoken home addresses in some of the recordings, and were able to track down the speakers. Some of these conversations were not directed at Assistant and happened either as background noise or as a mistaken recording when Assistant thought it was being spoken to, but wasn’t.
Google says contractors listen to recordings to better understand language patterns and accents. Its user terms confirm recordings may be used by the company, stating Assistant “records your voice and audio on Google services to improve speech recognition.”
The recording feature of Google Assistant can be turned off. However, this would mean that the Assistant would lose the ability to recognize individual voice patterns and learn your voice pattern.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Image Credit: AP Photo/ Mark Lennihan)
About 150 million children under 5 years old around the world are malnourished, according to the World Health Organization.
Malnourished children end up having an “immature” and incomplete communities of gut bacteria. Because of this, a malnourished child’s growth is stunted.
A new research suggests that a diet rich in bananas, chickpeas and peanuts improves gut bacteria in malnourished children. This gut bacteria would help in kick-starting their growth.
This is what scientists from Washington University, in St Louis, believed could be the cause of poor growth - but not all foods are equally good at fixing the problem.
Researchers had studied the main types of bacteria present in the healthy guts of Bangladeshi children.
[...]
After closely monitoring the children's recovery, one diet stood out - which contained bananas, soy, peanut flour and chickpeas in a paste.
This diet was found to boost gut microbes linked to bone growth, brain development and immune function.
It also used ingredients that were affordable and acceptable to people in Bangladesh.
See more at BBC.
(Image Credit: International Centre for Disease Research)
A new study suggests that cutting just 300 calories from your daily diet can have a significant effect on your cardiovascular health, even if you’re already at a healthy weight. Cutting your calorie intake can be easily attained by intermittent fasting or by not eating that slice of cheesecake for dessert.
A reduction of 300 calories daily refers to the average cutback in calories obtained by the study participants, said Dr. William Kraus, distinguished professor at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, who was senior author of the study.
"Exercise and diet are the two most profound and easily implemented interventions we have in our environment that can reduce our cardiovascular risks," he said. "There aren't five drugs on the market when combined that could approach what we saw in this study from moderate calorie restriction."
Find out more about this study on CNN.
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We go to the restaurant and order our food. We trust the waiter that he heard our order and jotted it down correctly. We trust the chefs that they cook our food properly (after all, we can’t enter the kitchen because it’s “authorized personnel only”). Likewise, the crew and the owner of the restaurant trust us that we will pay them in exchange for the good service and good food. The thing is: we don’t know them, and they don’t know us. So why do we trust them even if they are strangers?
According to the rational actor model developed by economists, you should assume other people will take advantage of you if they can possibly get away with it. Furthermore, the model states that it’s in your best interest to take advantage of another’s trust anytime you can get away with it. That means you should only trust someone to the extent that you can compel them to follow through with their promise.
This model forms the motivation for contract law and the role of government in enforcing agreements. You and your roofer sign a contract before he replaces the shingles on your roof. If you refuse to pay when the work is done, he can take you to court. And if the roof leaks, you can sue for damages.
While we may sign contracts for major business transactions, in most everyday situations we rely on unsecured trust instead. We trust our barbers, plumbers, and dry cleaners to render the services we request, and they trust we’ll pay them when the job is done. Only in certain cases do we act according to the rational actor model. For example, in fast food restaurants we’re expected to pay first before we get our meal.
There are two explanations for this type of behavior. Check them out over at Psychology Today.
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Due to an unspecified vulnerability that had the potential to allow a person to listen to another person’s iPhone without consent, tech company Apple has disabled the Apple Watch Walkie Talkie app. The tech company has already apologized for both the bug and the inconvenience of being unable to use the feature while it is being fixed.
The Walkie Talkie app on Apple Watch allows two users who have accepted an invite from each other to receive audio chats via a “push to talk” interface reminiscent of the PTT buttons on older cell phones.
[...]
Apple was alerted to the bug via its report a vulnerability portal directly and says there is no current evidence that it was exploited in the wild.
The company is temporarily disabling the feature entirely until a fix can be made and rolled out to devices. The Walkie Talkie App will remain installed on devices, but will not function until it has been updated with the fix.
Via The Verge
(Image Credit: Sam Byford/ The Verge)
BREAKING: A fifth of cities worldwide 🌏 will face dramatic and unprecedented urban climate conditions by 2050. @CrowtherLab's new global data map visualizes #ClimateChange impact on cities 🗼🗽 🌉 to drive urgent action → https://t.co/IZ5HGUh0qn #2050Cities pic.twitter.com/dXaTXsocKp
— Crowther Lab (@CrowtherLab) July 10, 2019
A new research states that the world is on the verge of having drastic transformation “that will see cities around the globe inherit the disparate climates of places hundreds of miles away”. Scientists say that by 2050, as part of the rapid metamorphosis, three-fourths of the world’s cities will have had their climates rearranged.
Most concerning of all, over 20 percent of cities will experience conditions that have no precedent in any city in the world today.
In truth, it's not the first time scientists have told us such an unthinkable overhaul of our weather patterns is imminent.
A study published just a few months ago suggested that by the year 2080, cities in North America will feel like they're about 500 miles (800 km) away from where they are today – for the most part, they'll be hotter and wetter, as if the whole country existed in the US south (if not Mexico).
But the new research takes the same approach a big step further.
Scientists from the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich have for the first time visualised how these climate shifts will play out on a global scale, looking at how conditions in 520 major cities around the world are predicted to change in just three decades.
Check out more details of this news over at Science Alert.
(Image Credit: Crowther Lab/ Twitter)
Slowly drawing closer together in a death spiral, the supermassive pair will start sending gravitational waves that will rip through space-time. The mass of each black hole is stated to be over 800 million times that of our sun.
Even before the destined collision, the gravitational waves emanating from the supermassive black hole pair will dwarf those previously detected from the mergers of much smaller black holes and neutron stars.
"Supermassive black hole binaries produce the loudest gravitational waves in the universe," says co-discoverer Chiara Mingarelli, an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. Gravitational waves from supermassive black hole pairs "are a million times louder than those detected by LIGO."
The pair of black holes is found to be 2.5 billion light years away from Earth.
Find out more about this on EurekAlert.
(Image Credit: A.D. Goulding et al./Astrophysical Journal Letters 2019)
Alyssa Carson, 18, is a NASA astronaut-in-training, on track to be the first person to land on Mars. She has teamed up with smart travel brand Horizn studios to co-design this space-travel inspired NASA cabin luggage. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20, the limited edition cabin luggage “features the NASA logo and commemorative luggage tag inspired by the ground-breaking spaceflight.”
The M5 cabin luggage is finished in apollo white with orange and blue trims, and includes a built-in smart charger, 360° spinner wheels and an aerospace-grade polycarbonate hard shell.
For an 18-year-old, Carson has achieved a lot.
(Image Credit: Horizn Studios/ DesignBoom)
Ladies and gentlemen, we now have an air conditioner… for ants. Costing only 300 yen (US $2.75) is Stasto’s Capsule de Kaden The Cooler (In-Capsule Appliances-The Air Conditioner). This tiny A.C. requires no installation or maintenance fees, which, I guess, is pretty cool.
Some assembly was required, but… Everything snaps together, so there’s no need for glue, tape, or any other sort of adhesives.
… while quirky aesthetics are definitely a big part of the appeal, In-Capsule Appliances-The Air Conditioner is, ostensibly, functional too. In putting it together, you’ll notice that the components include trays, which you can fill with water…
..and stick in the freezer, turning them into little blocks of ice!
…and clip it to the face of a fan to produce, according to Stasto, a cool, soothing breeze.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Image Credit: SoraNews24)
Do you need to set an alarm to wake up in the morning? According to the results of a national survey of sleep habits, if your answer is yes, then chances are you are under 35.
LiveLighter (a joint initative between Cancer Council Victoria and Cancer Council WA) released today data from their research showing the generational divide in how Australians sleep, “with experts warning poor practices are having a detrimental impact on wide-ranging areas of health.”
The survey gathered information about the health, nutrition and physical activity behaviours of more than 2000 Australians adults, finding sleep habits were overwhelmingly poor.
Almost one third of respondents reported having a good night of sleep "rarely" or once each week.
Forty-four percent of people said they had a good night's sleep most of the time (at least four nights a week). However, this was most commonly reported by those over 55: in that demographic, thirty percent of respondents said they had enough sleep every single night, nearly double the number of people aged 18-34 who felt the same.
[...]
Other age differences were seen in how people wake up. Setting a morning alarm was most common for those aged 18-34, with 48 percent of respondents saying they used one. Meanwhile, 82 percent of over-55s woke up naturally, without assistance from an alarm or another person.
"In general terms, they say it's a healthy sign to be waking without an alarm," said Dr Junge. An alarm may wake a person during deep sleep, rather than the lighter REM sleep, leaving them feeling less well rested.
See more details of the study on The Sydney Morning Herald.
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Sylvia Plath’s poem entitled “Mushrooms” is often seen by scholars and readers to be a feminist allegory, rather than a poem dedicated to literal mushrooms.
Many argue that the poem—from Plath’s 1960 collection The Colossus and Other Poems—uses mushrooms as a metaphor for women in mid-century America, stuck in a world of domesticity and discontent, hungry for more as they “Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow, / Bland-mannered, asking // Little or nothing.”
But is the poem only about women? Or can we say that the poem is also about mushrooms?
Find out the answers on the Nautilus.
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One of the most common human experiences is boredom. Despite being a common experience, boredom continually defies complete understanding.
What exactly is boredom? Who or what is to blame when you feel bored? Those are just some of the questions we feel that we have to answer.
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips begins one of his best essays, “Every adult remembers, among many things, the great ennui of childhood, and every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” The wish for a desire is a nod to Tolstoy’s similarly doubled definition of boredom (“the desire for desires”). This twisted condition is not restricted to children, and though it may be judged absurd and paradoxical, it is nevertheless common and urgent. The stall of desire working against itself is the beginning, but not the end, of boredom. And thus boredom understood in terms of desire is a first clue to boredom’s special ability to initiate philosophical reflection. But there are further clues to decipher and a more complicated solution to confront concerning the mystery of consciousness.
The ultimate question one should answer is: is boredom a good thing? Well, it is not necessarily evil.
Know more about this on The Walrus.
(Image Credit: Free-Photos/ Pixabay)
