With the flashy red and gold colors that it displays, the Eumaeus atala butterfly, in its caterpillar state, already makes a statement to the potential predators around it: “I’m not a good meal. Don’t eat me.” And it is not lying when it tells this. Why? Because it’s poisonous. But how did it become a poisonous butterfly? The answer lies in the food it wants to munch on:

plants called cycads that have been around since before dinosaurs roamed the Earth and contain a potent liver toxin called cycasin.

The Atala butterfly’s five closest relatives also share the same behavior, and they are poisonous, too.

Learn more about the Atala butterfly and its relatives over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Robert Robbins, Smithsonian/ EurekAlert)

Our search for aliens still continues in 2021. This time, some scientists say that the key to finding them could be the energy coming from a black hole. They theorize that these extraterrestrial beings might be collecting the said energy.

This energy-harvesting technology could leave traces just outside a spinning black hole's event horizon — the boundary beyond which a black hole's gravity becomes too strong for matter and energy to escape. And the process could explain at least some flares of plasma, a white-hot form of charged gas, that scientists have already detected near these massive disruptions in time and space. a new study published Jan. 13 in the journal Physical Review D proposes.

And while it’s only a science-fiction idea at the moment — the nearest black hole to us is thought to be more than 1,000 light-years away, which is too far to be reached in many human lifetimes — if astrophysicists could ever work out a method of tapping these cosmic behemoths, rotating black holes could become a near-limitless source of energy for a technologically advanced civilization.

Learn more about this theory over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Sometimes, hitting electronic devices makes them work again. Blurry television? Give it a nice tap at its side and the image will get clearer. Computer not booting? Give it a kick and it will boot. This has been an age-old practice. You’ve probably done this, and I’m not going to lie, I have, too.

Surprisingly, this method is recognized even by people in the tech industry, and it even has a technical name — “percussive maintenance”, which means to “hit a malfunctioning device to make it work”.

(Image Credit: Viva La Dirt League/ YouTube)

A research led by William Anderegg of the University of Utah School of Biological Sciences, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found out that pollen seasons were now longer than 30 years ago. And, if you have an allergic reaction to pollen, you know what this means. This means that you get to deal with your pollen allergy longer than before.

[The] research shows that pollen seasons start 20 days earlier, are 10 days longer, and feature 21% more pollen than in 1990—meaning more days of itchy, sneezy, drippy misery.

And what is the reason for the longer pollen season? Unsurprisingly, it’s climate change.

"The strong link between warmer weather and pollen seasons provides a crystal-clear example of how climate change is already affecting peoples' health across the U.S.," says Anderegg.

[...]

The results showed that climate change alone could account for around half of the pollen season lengthening and around 8 percent of the pollen amount increasing. By splitting the study years into two periods, 1990-2003 and 2003-2018, the researchers found that the contribution of climate change to increasing pollen amounts is accelerating.

"Climate change isn't something far away and in the future. It's already here in every spring breath we take and increasing human misery," says Anderegg. "The biggest question is—are we up to the challenge of tackling it?"

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Myriams-Fotos/ Pixabay)

All computers can be vulnerable to cyber attacks, and because modern aircraft have computers integrated in them, they could be vulnerable, too. Engineers were aware of this fact way back in 1994, when the 777 airliner was first rolled out. Ever since then, they have been thinking of how to defend against these cyber attacks.

So far, the protections devised by those engineers—and the ones who came after them—have worked. No hacker has ever penetrated the computers of an airliner’s flight control system or any part of its avionics. The not-so-shocking news is that hackers have tried.

One of the men tasked to fight against hacks is Mike Vanguardia.

Vanguardia is a cybersecurity engineer with Boeing, the company that gave the world its first “e-Enabled” commercial airplane, the 787 Dreamliner. In 2006, as the Dreamliner was being born, the idea of an e-Enabled airplane—one that lets passengers connect to the Internet with commercial off-the-shelf electronics and Internet protocols, used for in-flight entertainment and some communications systems—wasn’t as scary as it is today. Back then, cybercrime was rare. Today, it is anything but. “The cyberthreat is always moving,” says Vanguardia, who is part of a team that studies the electronic connections on Boeing airliners, as they’re being designed, and tries to make sure that protections are built into them and into the airplanes’ software. His team, he says, is constantly asking, “What things have happened in the news that we haven’t thought about as we design?”

More about this story over at Air & Space Magazine.

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

If you think that your vacation photos are already the best, then you clearly haven’t seen these photos of dogs on vacation yet. Even without trying, they already look fabulous!

See more of these photos over at Dogs Addict.

(Image Credit: Dogs Addict)

You know that the music that you’re listening to is great music when even a two-year-old kid can be moved to tears upon hearing it. This Swedish kid was overcome with emotion when he heard Giacomo Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” (O my dear papa) from the opera Gianni Schicchi.

The aria is sung by the young Lauretta, who begs her father to help her get hitched to Rinuccio, the love of her life.

And it seems this tiny tot really sympathises with poor Lauretta – because he literally cannot stop bawling when his dad plays it to him at the kitchen table.

[...]

His dad said: “It shows what kind of emotions beautiful music can create.”

(Image Credit: Newsflare/ Classic FM)

One day four years ago, at the Goffin Lab in Vienna, Figaro the cockatoo saw pebble sitting outside his cage. Figaro wanted the pebble, but how could he get it from where he was? Figaro had the most amazing idea. He tried to get the pebble using a shard of bamboo.

Impressed, the researchers replaced the pebble with a cashew, triggering Figaro to stick his beak through the bars of his cage and gnaw off a splinter of wood from the very beam the cashew was resting on, before using the splinter to reel the cashew into his tensile beak.

But that’s not the end of Figaro’s story. Figaro also managed to pass down his knowledge to his fellow cockatoos.

Learn more about Figaro’s story over at Good News Network.

(Image Credit: Alice Auersperg, University of Vienna’s Goffin Lab)

Aside from their biological role, which is to prevent stuff such as sweat and water from falling down to the eye socket, eyebrows also can make your face more attractive. This is why people spend money in shaping their eyebrows. And then there are those who overdo it, like these people in these mugshots, which Sad and Useless collected.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

Who doesn’t want a relaxing hot coffee or tea while chilling on a plane and waiting for it to land? Well, after reading this, you might want to avoid any type of hot beverage while on the plane.

“Flight attendants will not drink hot water on the plane," a flight attendant told Business Insider. "They will not drink plain coffee, and they will not drink plain tea.” So why not? The answer, which comes from the EPA, is pretty disgusting.

The water used for hot drinks on flights comes straight from the tap rather than from bottles. The EPA did a study on the water back in 2004 and found that 12.6 percent of the samples contained coliform. Not grossed out yet? Coliform count is an indicator of how much fecal matter there is, thus determining the sanitary quality of foods and water.

"Both total coliform and E.coli are indicators that other disease-causing organisms (pathogens) may be present in the water and could potentially affect public health," the study noted.

To make things worse, the EPA also found that of the 158 planes they looked at, two of the planes tested positive for E.coli, which can cause diarrhea and stomach cramps.

Maybe I’ll just stick with the canned beverages next time.

(Image Credit: LeeRosario/ Pixabay)

On August 3, 2020, a beefalo was able to escape from a trailer outside the Plymouth Meats processing facility. It was then next seen in Terryville two weeks after its escape. Ever since its escape, the Plymouth Police Department had been trying to capture it, but in all of their attempts, the beefalo was able to elude them. Now, over six months later, the police department encountered the beefalo again, and it seems that, despite the winter storms, it was able to take care of itself pretty well.

The Plymouth Police Department shared a photo on Facebook showing the beefalo, dubbed Buddy by locals, wandering in the snow in the Terryville area of Plymouth.

"As you can see, he is doing fine," the post said. "Ready for dinner."

[...]

A fundraiser to save Buddy from slaughter raised enough money to secure the bovine a new home at the Critter Farm Sanctuary in Florida, but attempts to capture the beefalo have thus far been unsuccessful.

Well, I hope that the cops are not giving up on capturing him. The sanctuary in Florida seems like the better place for him.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Plymouth Police Department/ Facebook)

Computer systems and cyber-infrastructures will almost always be imperfect. This is why updates and patches are essential to these systems. But while the devs are busy creating the patches needed to fix the flaws of a computer system, malicious entities can sometimes take this time to launch a cyber attack to exploit the flaws. This type of cyber attack is called zero-day attacks, and this is the worst that could happen to vulnerable computer systems. Zero-day attacks…

can quickly overwhelm traditional defenses, resulting in billions of dollars of damage and requiring weeks of manual patching work to shore up the systems after the intrusion.

Computer scientists recognize the limitations of traditional defenses in computer systems, and so they try to make new types of computer security.

Now, a Penn State-led team of researchers used a machine learning approach, based on a technique known as reinforcement learning, to create an adaptive cyber defense against these attacks.

According to Minghui Zhu, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Institute for Computational and Data Sciences co-hire, the team developed this adaptive machine learning-driven method to address current limitations in a method to detect and respond to cyber-attacks, called moving target defense, or MTD.

Learn more about this method over at TechXplore.

(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)

Toys are normally supposed to make your mood better and not to make it worse. Comedian Jeff Wysaski of Obvious Plant went the opposite way from the norm and decided to make these toys which are insulting at the very least, and morbid at the most. While the toys are considered “fake”, these are “actually available for purchase through the Obvious Plant store.”

Dibs on the leg! How about you? What will you take?

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: obviousplant/ Instagram)

It hasn’t been long since Google lost Dr. Timnit Gebru, the tech company’s top AI ethics researcher, last December 2020, after apparently mistreating her. Now, just a little over 2 months after Gebru’s termination from the company, engineers and other staff have also left Google.

According to Reuters, engineering director David Baker left the tech giant last month after 16 years with the company. In a letter seen by the news organization, Baker said Gebru’s exit “extinguished [his] desire to continue as a Googler.” He added: “We cannot say we believe in diversity, and then ignore the conspicuous absence of many voices from within our walls.”

[...]

Timnit Gebru used to co—lead Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team until her controversial exit. Gebru said she was fired after sending an email to the company’s internal “Brain Women and Allies” list. In a report trying to get to the bottom of what happened, MIT’s Technology Review said Gebru’s departure was a result of a conflict over a paper she co-authored. The paper discussed issues with training language AI, including its environmental impact and its potential to cause a disadvantage to marginalized groups.

[...]

Gebru’s exit caused an uproar, prompting thousands of Googlers, as well as academic, industry and civil society supporters to sign a letter calling on Google Research “to strengthen its commitment to research integrity and to unequivocally commit to supporting research that honors the commitments made in Google’s AI Principles.”

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: The Pancake of Heaven!/ Wikimedia Commons)

One of the most common dishes that is served in Japan, especially in summer, is curry. With the many curry roux available in the Japanese supermarkets, Ahiruneko, SoraNews 24’s Japanese-language reporter, had a “brilliant thought.”

“What would happen if I mixed every kind of supermarket curry roux out there into one giant pot?” And so the plan to create the King of Curries was hatched.

He journeyed to several supermarkets in the area and, while he didn’t find every single kind of curry roux out there, he did find a whopping 43 boxes and packets to try.

How did his little experiment turn out?

It was delicious! Scrumptious! Succulent! But, when Ahiruneko thought about it in a calmer state of mind, it did taste just like normal homemade curry. It’s just homemade curry on another dimension.

Read more about Ahiruneko’s story over at SoraNews 24.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: SoraNews24)