Current Events – Page 19

Culture, Current Events, Hot Issues, Latest News, Latest Trend

The Pirate Bay removes all of its Torrent links

February 28, 2012

The Pirate Bay, the largest torrent site on the Internet, is no more. Or well, it’s not like it once was. As of this moment, they’ve taken down all torrent links on the website and will now only use ‘magnet links’.

Though it sounds really bad, it’s more of an act to “future proof” The Pirate Bay website than anything else. So don’t worry! The Pirate Bay will still be able to work. It’s not dying, it’s just changing. In their words, “just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine”…

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Analysis, Award Winner, Crazy Stuff, Current Events, Entertainment, Historical Perspectives, New Discoveries

New world’s shortest man

February 27, 2012

Chandra Bahadur Dangi with his certificates.

Chandra Bahadur Dangi of Nepal is now officially the world’s shortest living man. He’s 21.5″ (54.6 cm) tall. If you have a hard time estimating that, notice the, er, iPad included in the photo above for comparison. Dangi beat out the Philippine’s Junrey Balawing by two full inches. From Guinness World Records…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Current Events, DIY, Education, Entertainment, Globalism, Historical Perspectives, Hot Issues

How to turn off Google’s search-history logging and erase your stored history

February 22, 2012

Google forges forward with new privacy policies.

With Google’s privacy policy change looming, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a guide to turning off Google’s search-history logging, thus preventing your search-history from all of Google’s services, including YouTube, from being merged and tracked together. You can also erase your stored search-history while you’re there…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Current Events, Education, Green Friendly, Historical Perspectives, Plant Life

Scientists resurrected a plant that died 32,000 years ago

February 21, 2012

A plant has been generated from the fruit of the narrow-leafed campion.

Russian scientists have resurrected an arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, that died 32,000 years ago, which would make it the oldest plant ever grown from ancient tissue…

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Analysis, Art, Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Current Events, DIY, Education, Entertainment, Green Friendly, Human Behavior

Neglected New York City phone booths converted into communal libraries

February 21, 2012

A phone booth with a new purpose.

The days of the phone booth may be numbered in New York City: with the flood of smartphones, vandalism and lack of maintenance, it may be time to re-think how else they might be used. Local architect John Locke’s proposition is to convert them into communal libraries or book drops, complete with brightly coloured shelving, much like your bricks-and-mortar institutions…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Current Events, Health & Fitness, Historical Perspectives, Medical Breakthrough, New Discoveries

The scientist who discovered Hepatitis C says he’s now discovered the vaccine

February 21, 2012

Michael Houghton

In a poetic turn of virology, the scientist who discovered hepatitis C in 1989 has now also discovered a vaccine that will hopefully cure the now-incurable disease.

Not only is it poetic, it’s an accomplishment that many thought was impossible. Because hepatitis C is more virulent than HIV, no one was confident a vaccine against all the various strains around the world could be developed. But Michael Houghton, the University of Alberta researcher who announced his work today at the Canada Excellence Research Chairs Summit in Vancouver, says his vaccine works against every known strain of the virus…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Current Events, Globalism, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

How Google’s algorithms are solving chemistry’s trickiest calculations

February 16, 2012

Google knows a thing or two about complex calculations performed across very big data sets. Which is why chemists are borrowing ideas from the search company to help them predict how substances react with each other.

PageRank is the algorithm that Google uses to determine the relevancy of links. Now, scientists from Washington State University have borrowed ideas from the code to understand how molecules interact with each other…

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Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Current Events, Economy, Historical Perspectives, Money Talk

Crowdtilt Launches To Become The “Kickstarter For Any Group”

February 10, 2012

Kickstarter has spawned a whole new generation of funding potential.

Inherently, we like doing things in groups, as it makes our experiences more social. It’s not about what we’re doing so much as who we’re doing it with that makes our experiences enjoyable. Group messaging took off two years ago, overrunning SXSW, as a better way to keep groups of people engaged; Kickstarter has grown like a week thanks to the power of the crowd lending legs to fledgling projects that need quick capital to get off the ground.

A new startup launching today called Crowdtilt is taking a page out of Kickstarter’s book, riffing on “crowdfunding,” but instead choosing to call itself “groupfunding” or a “Kickstarter for groups of friends.”

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Analysis, Current Events, Education, Global Warming, Globalism

Over past four years, new vehicles became 14% more fuel-efficient in U.S.A.

February 10, 2012

Another step ahead.

After what seemed like an eternity of mostly stagnation, average fuel economy for new vehicles has been going up in the United States. Researchers at the University of Michigan have conducted a study showing that for current model year vehicles, fuel economy is 14% higher than just four years ago, which might not sound like much, but it’s much better than what we’ve got in the recent past.

The study concludes that average fuel economy…

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Current Events, Entertainment, Historical Perspectives, Latest News

New Kickstarter record set as double fine game hits $400K in 8 hours, $1M in a day

February 9, 2012

Breakthrough project.

If you played PC games in the 90s, chances are you played some of Tim Schafer’s work. He worked on the Monkey Island Series and Day of the Tentacle, later going on to create such classics as Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. He recently took to Kickstarter to try and score some funding for a new point-and-click adventure game, as most publishers would consider the genre more or less untouchable these days.

He figured there were enough people out there who wanted a new adventure game that they could scrape together $400,000. That was last night. They hit their goal in 8 hours, and are likely to break a million dollars before the end of the day. In fact, just since I started this post, I’ve had to adjust the headline to reflect an additional $50,000 $70,000 $100,000 that has been pledged…

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Analysis, Current Events, Historical Perspectives, New Viewpoints

America’s most miserable cities

February 5, 2012

Feeling miserable today? Maybe you live in Miami, Florida. The city – famous for mega-million mansions and South Beach clubs – has just gotten the unenviable title of America’s Most Miserable City.

Forbes Magazine took a look at 10 factors (including violent crimes, unemployment rates, and foreclosures) for the 200 largest metro areas in the United States to find the 10 most miserable cities in America. See if yours make the list..

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Analysis, Big Problems, Crazy Stuff, Current Events, Health & Fitness, Historical Perspectives, Human Behavior, New Discoveries

Flesh-eating bug spreads by sneezing

February 3, 2012

It is now more important than ever to cover your mouth when sneezing.

A flesh-eating bug, which has been known about for years, has gotten so virulent it can now be spread by sneezing and coughing. Doctors suspect new victims caught the virus on buses or trains and enclosed spaces like elevators.

Although the flesh-eating bug has been documented for several decades, most patients suffering from its effects caught the strain in hospitals where treatment contained the spread and was relatively confined and hard to catch.

But the bacteria strain, an MRSA known as USA300, has become so powerful it can now be spread by sneezing. Even worse, the virus is spreading just by shaking hands…

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