The booming business of luxury chicken diapers

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It’s Instagram’s fault.

Julie Baker never intended to become a figurehead of the luxury chicken-diaper industry. Before she launched her brand Pampered Poultry in 2010, she had never even heard of chicken diapers.

Around 10 years ago, Baker was raising chickens with her daughter on their small farm in Claremont, New Hampshire when she first saw a YouTube video of a chicken wearing what looked to be an upside-down apron that stretched across its backside. The diaper, so to speak, was used to catch chicken poop so the birds wouldn’t leave droppings everywhere (chickens do not urinate separately from defecation. Their urine is technically in their excrement). “I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, I so need to do that,’” Baker said. Baker’s daughter liked to bring her favorite chicken, an Old English hen named Abigail, inside their house, and because chickens poop close to a dozen times per day, Baker needed a better system for managing Abigail’s excrement.

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People will take 1.2 trillion digital photos this year — thanks to smartphones

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Thanks to smartphones, millions of people around the globe are turning into prolific photographers. According to estimates from InfoTrends, people will take a hundred billion more photos in 2017 than they did in 2016. As highlighted by this chart from Statista — which is based on the InfoTrends’ data — the vast majority of those photos will be taken on smartphones.

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AI is going to make it easier to fake images and video

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Smile Vector is a Twitter bot that can make any celebrity smile. It scrapes the web for pictures of faces, and then it morphs their expressions using a deep-learning-powered neural network. Its results aren’t perfect, but they’re created completely automatically, and it’s just a small hint of what’s to come as artificial intelligence opens a new world of image, audio, and video fakery. Imagine a version of Photoshop that can edit an image as easily as you can edit a Word document — will we ever trust our own eyes again?

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Turn Your Skin into a Touch Screen

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A paris-based design company is looking to take the wearable devices trend to the next level with the visualization of ‘cicret‘, a bracelet that projects the screen of your smartphone directly onto your wrist. currently in the prototype phase, the wristband remotely hooks up to a mobile device and emits the interface onto the wearer’s arm, allowing them to read emails, play games, answer calls and check the weather on the surface of the skin.

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Sneak Peek: George Lucas’ Future Museum

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Isolated, the words all sound so cliché. Organic. Flowing. Curvy. But set to the backdrop of Chicago’s blocky skyline, they assemble a brash thesis on the city’s future: The new George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a low-slung knoll inside a landscape of towering Lego, an Egyptian pyramid reimagined for the year 2020.

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