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The hornet has landed: Scientists combat new honeybee killer in US
Sun, 26 May 2024 10:55:00 +0000
Researchers are working to limit the threat while developing better eradication methods.
Match ID: 0 Score: 120.00 source: arstechnica.com age: 3 days
qualifiers: 34.29 japan, 34.29 china, 25.71 south korea, 25.71 indonesia
North Korea spy satellite explodes in flight as latest launch fails
Mon, 27 May 2024 23:57:30 GMT
Cause of accident was ‘operational reliability of engine’, says Pyongyang, after two failed attempts last year
North Korea’s latest attempt to put a spy satellite into orbit ended in a mid-air explosion, Pyongyang said late Monday, hours after its announcement of a planned launch was criticised by Seoul and Tokyo.
Japanese broadcaster NHK ran footage of what appeared to be a flaming projectile in the night sky, which then exploded into a fireball. NHK said the footage was taken from northeast China at the same time as the attempted launch.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated while red alerts issued for unrelenting heat across north-western India and Pakistan
During the early hours of Saturday morning, an area of low pressure over the east-central Bay of Bengal intensified, and has been named Cyclone Remal.
Cyclone Remal made landfall between Sagar Island in West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh’s Khepupara region late on Sunday as the India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued warnings for heavy rain, strong winds, storm surges, and rough seas. Cumulative rainfall totals through the first half of this week could reach 200-300mm across the majority of Bangladesh, north-eastern states of India, and West Bengal. More than 150mm is also possible across southern parts of Bhutan and western Myanmar.
Continue reading...Suspected North Korean balloons carrying faeces are latest example of dung or human waste being used in conflict
South Koreans faced a different type of retaliation this week when more than 150 white balloons were allegedly floated across the border by North Korea attached to bags of rubbish and faeces.
It came after the North Korean defence vice-minister, Kim Kang-il, warned that Pyongyang would retaliate in response to anti-North Korean leaflets flown across the border in the opposite direction.
Continue reading...Reforms will expand parliamentarians’ powers to question officials and citizens
Taiwan’s opposition-controlled parliament has passed a controversial reform bill after days of hostile debate and physical fights between MPs inside, and mass protests by citizens outside.
The bills passed 58 votes to 45, Bloomberg reported, after a third reading on Tuesday evening in Taipei during which there were further scuffles and members of the ruling party throwing paper planes and hurling garbage bags at the opposition.
Continue reading...Much has been made of the struggles musicians face when they become mothers – but what about the inspiration? Bat for Lashes, Logic1000 and others discuss the radical energy unleashed by the ultimate collaboration
The year my son was born, I spent a lot of time walking laps of my small ground-floor flat in a milky, slightly hysterical state of sleep deprivation, listening to a set of instrumental albums by Raymond Scott from 1962 called Soothing Sounds for Baby. YouTube helpfully let me put them on repeat, between scratchy loops of synthetically produced white noise.
“Yes! I listened to Soothing Sounds for Baby too!” says Natasha Khan, AKA Bat for Lashes, whose daughter, Delphi, is now three. “Delphi grew up on instrumental and ambient music – a lot of synthy 80s stuff and Japanese composers.” Khan’s new album, The Dream of Delphi, is her own sonic celebration of those sleepless days in early motherhood, with tracks such as The Midwives Have Left, Her First Morning and Letter to My Daughter. “It’s such a hallucinatory, liminal experience that documenting seems to be the only thing you can do,” she says as we video-call on our sofas, talking about the psychedelic transformation that is motherhood.
Continue reading...We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2021: During the second world war, Chinese merchant seamen helped keep Britain fed, fuelled and safe – and many gave their lives doing so. But from late 1945, hundreds of them who had settled in Liverpool suddenly disappeared. Now their children are piecing together the truth. By Dan Hancox
Continue reading... submitted by /u/lurker_bee [link] [comments] |
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Chow Hang-tung, a prominent barrister, among those held over social media posts before Tiananmen Square anniversary
Hong Kong police have arrested six people, marking the first time that the city’s new national security law, known as Article 23, has been used against suspects since it was implemented in March.
The six people, aged between 37 and 65, are accused of publishing messages with seditious intent ahead of an “upcoming sensitive date”, according to a police statement.
Continue reading...From badly behaved travellers to horrendous carbon emissions, summer holidays aren’t always an unmitigated good. Here is how to travel responsibly and still have a great time
Tourism is almost back to pre-pandemic levels – which is good news and bad news. However much holiday destinations rely on them, no one wants badly behaved tourists blocking views, partying wildly in the streets or pricing local people out of their own cities. Overtourism, carbon emissions, nature depletion and plastic pollution are all huge concerns. But that doesn’t mean you have to cancel your holiday. Here are 28 ways to be a better tourist this summer.
Continue reading...The Mexican capital’s Unesco-listed wetlands are being brought back to life by the Indigenous chinamperos, who are striving to overcome the effects of urbanisation and the climate crisis
Authorities warn of water shortages as temperatures reach nine degrees higher than expected
Temperatures in Delhi have hit a record high of 50.5C (122.9F), as authorities warned of water shortages in India’s capital.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD), which reported “severe heat-wave conditions”, recorded the temperature in the suburb of Mungeshpur on Wednesday afternoon, breaking the landmark 50C measurement for the first time in the city.
Continue reading...Temperatures in Delhi have soared to record highs of 49.9C (121.8F) as authorities warn of water shortages. The India Meteorological Department (IMD), which reported “severe heatwave conditions”, recorded the temperatures on Tuesday, saying they were nine degrees higher than expected
Continue reading...Indian leader tells interviewer God ‘just keeps making me do things’ but that he ‘cannot dial him directly’
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has said he believes he has been chosen by God, as the multi-stage Indian election nears its completion.
“I am convinced that ‘Parmatma’ (God) sent me for a purpose. Once the purpose is achieved, my work will be one done. This is why I have completely dedicated myself to God,” he told NDTV news channel on Sunday.
Continue reading...He tells the world he intends to be an authoritarian. So why won’t journalists repeat it?
The post The Media Still Doesn’t Grasp the Danger of Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
South Korea has warned residents to be alert after the military released photos showing inflated balloons with plastic bags tethered to them
South Korea has warned residents living near the border with North Korea to be on alert, after accusing the regime of sending balloons containing what appeared to be rubbish and faeces into its neighbour’s territory.
Photographs released by the South Korean military on Wednesday showed inflated balloons with plastic bags tethered to them. Other images appeared to show trash strewn around collapsed balloons, with the word “excrement” written on a bag in one photograph.
Continue reading...Bystanders ran in to rescue 12 newborns from fire at children’s hospital as PM Narendra Modi says deaths are ‘heart-rending’
Six newborn babies have died after a fire tore through a children’s hospital in the Indian capital, Delhi, with people charging into the flames to rescue the infants, police have said.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, called the fire and deaths “heart-rending” in a post on social media.
Continue reading...Investigation report says aircraft ‘experienced a rapid change in gravitational force’ during turbulence
The Singapore Airlines flight hit by severe turbulence last week dropped 54 metres in altitude in less than five seconds, preliminary findings from an investigation show.
A 73-year-old British passenger died of a suspected heart attack and dozens of people were injured after flight SQ321 from London to Singapore encountered what the airline described as sudden, extreme turbulence while flying over Myanmar. The flight carrying 211 passengers and 18 crew diverted to Bangkok for an emergency landing.
Continue reading...We know turbulence is a common part of flying – but are some routes more prone? And where is it the worst? Turbulence is the leading cause of in-flight injuries to crew and passengers and after the fatal Singapore Airlines incident and injuries to passengers above Turkey on a Qatar Airways flight, you might be wondering if flights are about to get bumpier. Incidents of severe turbulence are on the rise – increasing by 55% between 1979 and 2020 – and the climate crisis is thought to be a responsible factor
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Continue reading...Khaled Al Serr, a young surgeon, vanished from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis two months ago. He hasn’t been heard from since.
The post Hundreds of Palestinian Doctors Disappeared Into Israeli Detention appeared first on The Intercept.
This south-east Asian favourite is fun to make, easy to adapt and healthy, so get rolling …
Though I enjoy a spring roll as much as the next fried-food fan, the freshness of the Vietnamese summer version has my heart, especially if I’m the one preparing it. Fun to make and easy to adapt to suit different tastes and diets, it’s fortunate they’re so healthy, because once I start rolling, I find it very hard to stop.
Prep 20 min, plus cooling time
Cook 25 min
Makes 8
Appeal allowed Sudharsan Ithayachandran to return to UK to be with his family, but he died in Sri Lanka while awaiting visa
The family of a man who died abroad after being wrongly deported by the UK Home Office have blamed the department for causing delays that stopped him being reunited with his children.
Sudharsan Ithayachandran, 41, was deported from the UK to Sri Lanka on 24 December 2019 – his wedding anniversary – after admitting to working illegally at Tesco and using false documents.
Continue reading...As brutal police repression sweeps campus encampments, schools have been cutting ties with pro-Palestine faculty members without tenure.
The post University Professors Are Losing Their Jobs Over “New McCarthyism” on Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
Study confirms huge concentrations of potentially dangerous PFAS in rivers, lakes and taps in Dhaka
Rivers, lakes and tap water in areas of Bangladesh that host garment factories are swarming with dangerous levels of toxic “forever chemicals”, some with links to serious health issues, according to new research.
In the first study of its kind conducted in Bangladesh, a global fashion hub supplying international brands, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as forever chemicals, were found in 27 water samples collected close to textile factories in the capital, Dhaka.
Continue reading...Kuo Chiu, known as KC to his friends, teaches urban design at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He’s also one of many of the country's citizens who practises rifle skills in his spare time, in case of a Chinese invasion.
The population of Taiwan has long grown familiar with Beijing’s pledge to one day ‘unify’ what it claims is a breakaway province. But recently, there has been a significant increase in aggressive and intimidatory acts.
Taiwan’s 160,000 active military personnel are vastly outnumbered by China’s 2 million-member armed forces, leading many civilians to turn to voluntary medical and combat training to protect themselves.
The Guardian's video team spent time with KC to see how he is preparing
Continue reading...From targeting humanitarian vehicles to standing by as mobs attack trucks, Israel is blocking aid from reaching Gaza.
The post The State Department Says Israel Isn’t Blocking Aid. Videos Show the Opposite. appeared first on The Intercept.
Since Dobbs, state-level Republicans have sought to strip power from DAs elected in Democratic cities who won’t prosecute abortion care.
The post Republicans Can’t Decide: Do They Hate Prosecutors Because of Bail Reform or Abortion? appeared first on The Intercept.
Ban Khun Samut Chin, a coastal village in Samut Prakan province, Thailand, has been slowly swallowed by the sea over the past few decades. This has led to the relocation of the school and many homes, resulting in a dwindling population. Currently, there are only four students attending the school, often leaving just one in each classroom. The village has experienced severe coastal erosion, causing 1.1-2km (0.5-1.2 miles) of shoreline to disappear since the mid-1950s
Continue reading...A fun-filled terror yarn featuring a flesh-eating alien secretly reared by a 12-year-old that delights in cutting its teeth on the apartment block’s pets
This killer-spider-from-outer-space movie feels like a cross between Alien and TV’s Only Murders in the Building. It’s a mostly fun throwback horror comedy set in a Brooklyn apartment block where 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne) finds a spider, puts it in a jar and calls it Sting. “Awesome,” she marvels when Sting doubles in size in two hours, hungrily tapping the glass for more cockroaches to chomp on. What Charlotte doesn’t know is that her new pet is a flesh-eater recently hatched out of an asteroid that crash landed on Earth.
At the screening I attended, someone a few rows behind couldn’t hack it and walked out after a few minutes. Which is a credit to first-time feature director Kiah Roache-Turner, who pulls off a couple of moments that will make you jump out of your skin using simple shadow tricks and oh-there-it-is! shocks. But really, the film’s mood is larky, with some big laughs as Sting cuts its teeth on the building’s pets. There’s a majestic fluffy white Persian cat, and a parakeet that steals the show acting-wise with its worried face as Sting scuttles out of an air vent.
Continue reading...Is it a religious organisation? A management company for dancers? A brainwashing sect? This fascinating, unusually sensitive Netflix documentary looks at a dark, sad tale
Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult has plenty of components that are lurid, brash and sensational. It’s about a loosely affiliated group of TikTok dancers in Los Angeles, who sign up to 7M, a management company that is also a private, invite-only church led by a pastor named Robert Shinn. Many of the dancers’ friends and family members now believe that they have joined a cult, and certainly the testimonies of ex-members suggest that they have strong reason to suspect that. But this takes its many stranger-than-fiction components and turns them into a story that is unusually sensitive, for Netflix at least, and also desperately sad.
The director Derek Doneen uses the Wilking sisters as his point of entry into what begins as a tale about the spectacle of social media and ambitious young people. Miranda and Melanie Wilking grew up in a working-class home in Detroit, and dreamed of becoming professional dancers. There are home movies of them as small children, dancing in front of the TV; later, as they pursue careers in the dance world, they realise that social media could help them to gain exposure. Eventually, together, they built up over 3.3m followers on TikTok.
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak is so palpably convinced he can’t win he’s promising any old mad thing. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are falling off kayaks
People say manufacturing has declined under the Conservatives, but the sheer volume of outrage manufactured by Rishi Sunak’s national service wingnuttery at the weekend was last night compounded by his decision to unveil a quadruple lock to the state pension. Truly the seven-blade razor of advanced pensions technology. It’s so innovative it might even spin off and manufacture another deranged Loose Women segment. I am still howling at the moment on the show a couple of weeks ago when Janet Street-Porter demanded of Sunak: “Why do you hate pensioners? WHY DO YOU HATE PENSIONERS? That is the only conclusion I can come to.” State of the art lunacy, made end-to-end in the UK. Let’s face it: this is what you call a joined-up manufacturing industry.
But look, for whatever reason, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves preferred to spend their afternoon at a facility where they manufacture something other than abstract nouns: Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage. A lot of election campaign visits are to places connected with jobs the politician probably wanted to do when they were little. Digger driver. Train driver. Biscuit factory worker. Today’s broadly fell into the category “spaceman”. Airbus are serious manufacturers in aerospace and defence, and recently won a new contract to maintain the Skynet military satellite system (although, I obviously massively misunderstood the movies because I hadn’t realised we were supposed to think calling things Skynet was cool?).
Continue reading...
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most popular digital assets today, capturing the attention of cryptocurrency investors, whales and people from around the world. People find it amazing that some users spend thousands or millions of dollars on a single NFT-based image of a monkey or other token, but you can simply take a screenshot for free. So here we share some freuently asked question about NFTs.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is a cryptographic token on a blockchain with unique identification codes that distinguish it from other tokens. NFTs are unique and not interchangeable, which means no two NFTs are the same. NFTs can be a unique artwork, GIF, Images, videos, Audio album. in-game items, collectibles etc.
A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that allows for the secure storage of data. By recording any kind of information—such as bank account transactions, the ownership of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts—in one place, and distributing it to many different computers, blockchains ensure that data can’t be manipulated without everyone in the system being aware.
The value of an NFT comes from its ability to be traded freely and securely on the blockchain, which is not possible with other current digital ownership solutionsThe NFT points to its location on the blockchain, but doesn’t necessarily contain the digital property. For example, if you replace one bitcoin with another, you will still have the same thing. If you buy a non-fungible item, such as a movie ticket, it is impossible to replace it with any other movie ticket because each ticket is unique to a specific time and place.
One of the unique characteristics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they can be tokenised to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought, sold and traded on the blockchain.
As with crypto-currency, records of who owns what are stored on a ledger that is maintained by thousands of computers around the world. These records can’t be forged because the whole system operates on an open-source network.
NFTs also contain smart contracts—small computer programs that run on the blockchain—that give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren't cryptocurrencies, but they do use blockchain technology. Many NFTs are based on Ethereum, where the blockchain serves as a ledger for all the transactions related to said NFT and the properties it represents.5) How to make an NFT?
Anyone can create an NFT. All you need is a digital wallet, some ethereum tokens and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you’ll be able to upload and sell your creations
When you purchase a stock in NFT, that purchase is recorded on the blockchain—the bitcoin ledger of transactions—and that entry acts as your proof of ownership.
The value of an NFT varies a lot based on the digital asset up for grabs. People use NFTs to trade and sell digital art, so when creating an NFT, you should consider the popularity of your digital artwork along with historical statistics.
In the year 2021, a digital artist called Pak created an artwork called The Merge. It was sold on the Nifty Gateway NFT market for $91.8 million.
Non-fungible tokens can be used in investment opportunities. One can purchase an NFT and resell it at a profit. Certain NFT marketplaces let sellers of NFTs keep a percentage of the profits from sales of the assets they create.
Many people want to buy NFTs because it lets them support the arts and own something cool from their favorite musicians, brands, and celebrities. NFTs also give artists an opportunity to program in continual royalties if someone buys their work. Galleries see this as a way to reach new buyers interested in art.
There are many places to buy digital assets, like opensea and their policies vary. On top shot, for instance, you sign up for a waitlist that can be thousands of people long. When a digital asset goes on sale, you are occasionally chosen to purchase it.
To mint an NFT token, you must pay some amount of gas fee to process the transaction on the Etherum blockchain, but you can mint your NFT on a different blockchain called Polygon to avoid paying gas fees. This option is available on OpenSea and this simply denotes that your NFT will only be able to trade using Polygon's blockchain and not Etherum's blockchain. Mintable allows you to mint NFTs for free without paying any gas fees.
The answer is no. Non-Fungible Tokens are minted on the blockchain using cryptocurrencies such as Etherum, Solana, Polygon, and so on. Once a Non-Fungible Token is minted, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain and the contract or license is awarded to whoever has that Non-Fungible Token in their wallet.
You can sell your work and creations by attaching a license to it on the blockchain, where its ownership can be transferred. This lets you get exposure without losing full ownership of your work. Some of the most successful projects include Cryptopunks, Bored Ape Yatch Club NFTs, SandBox, World of Women and so on. These NFT projects have gained popularity globally and are owned by celebrities and other successful entrepreneurs. Owning one of these NFTs gives you an automatic ticket to exclusive business meetings and life-changing connections.
That’s a wrap. Hope you guys found this article enlightening. I just answer some question with my limited knowledge about NFTs. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below. Also I have a question for you, Is bitcoin an NFTs? let me know in The comment section below
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