Florida Airport Shut Down Over ‘Suspicious Package’ That Ended Up Being Provisional Ballots?
November 12th, 2018Via: TownHall:
Late Sunday evening the Ft. Lauderdale Airport was shut down due to a suspicious package left outside of one of the terminals. Reports are coming in that an Avis rental car employee discovered provisional ballot boxes left in the back of a rental car that had just been returned by a Broward County employee.
Alarm Over Talks to Implant UK Employees with Microchips
November 11th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Britain’s biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security.
UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK.
The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.
Another company, Biohax of Sweden, also provides human chip implants the size of a grain of rice. It told the Sunday Telegraph that it is in discussions with several British legal and financial firms about fitting their employees with microchips, including one major company with hundreds of thousands of employees.
The CBI, which represents 190,000 UK businesses, voiced concerns about the prospect.
A CBI spokesperson said: “While technology is changing the way we work, this makes for distinctly uncomfortable reading. Firms should be concentrating on rather more immediate priorities and focusing on engaging their employees.”
The TUC is worried that staff could be coerced into being microchipped. Its general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “We know workers are already concerned that some employers are using tech to control and micromanage, whittling away their staff’s right to privacy.
“Microchipping would give bosses even more power and control over their workers. There are obvious risks involved, and employers must not brush them aside, or pressure staff into being chipped.”
Related: Cyborgs at Work: Employees Getting Implanted with Microchips
U.S. Crude Oil Posts Longest Losing Streak in Over 34 Years, Falling for 10th Day
November 9th, 2018Via: CNBC:
U.S. crude prices fell Friday for a 10th consecutive session, sinking deeper into bear market territory and wiping out the benchmark’s gains for the year.
The 10-day decline is the longest losing streak for U.S. crude since mid-1984, according to Refinitiv data.
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U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude settled 48 cents lower at $60.19 on Friday. The contract is now down nearly half a percent this year. It fell as low $59.26 on Friday, its weakest level in about nine months.
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Oil prices spiked in early October on fears that U.S. sanctions on Iran, OPEC’s third biggest oil producer, would thin out global petroleum supplies. However, the Trump administration granted temporary sanctions exemptions to eight countries, allowing Iranian crude exports to continue and easing concern about undersupply.
Analysts now expect the loss of exports from Iran to be less severe than anticipated.
Meanwhile, the world’s top three producers, the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia are pumping at or near records. Other OPEC members and exporting nations are also turning on the taps.
Preliminary data this week suggests U.S. production has hit an all-time high at 11.6 million barrels per day.
Memory of Mankind Project
November 9th, 2018Via: GQ:
So it began in his shop six years ago, in 2012, this time capsule of his, what he calls the Memory of Mankind project (or MOM), with Martin making his first ceramic tablet, etching a greeting to future finders. The first tablet addresses creatures a million years from now—whoever they may be—explaining that here lies “a preservation project” meant to protect knowledge about “our present civilization from oblivion and collective amnesia.” It is dated by the signification of astronomical events, as it’s unclear whether those who come many millennia in the future will know how to read numbers. There’s also a pictionary, so they can understand our letters and words.
The act of creating that first tablet alone felt absolutely freeing. The ensuing tablets—roughly the size of bathroom tiles—were laser-engraved with personal recollections and global news, texts of books and scientific studies. By starting to build the collection himself first, he hoped to entice others—citizens, scholars, experts, enthusiasts—to add to it. Already he’s up to over 500 tablets, with participants from an array of countries, most of them sending files or e-mails through the website he’s created, with material they want printed on a tablet. They send their diary entries and love letters, newspaper articles and obscure dissertations, blogs and texts, the most important parts of us. “MOM is the first ‘bottom-up’ history of the world,” said Martin.
Underperforming Chinese Workers Made to Drink Urine, Eat Bugs
November 8th, 2018Via: Reuters:
Workers at a Chinese home renovation company who failed to complete their tasks had to drink urine, eat cockroaches or get whipped by a belt.
Others had to shave their heads or drink water from a toilet bowl and had their salaries withheld by a month, according to images and videos on Chinese social media cited by state media.
The punishments were all publicly meted out in the presence of other staff, state media said, citing workers who had quit the company in the southwestern province of Guizhou.
Forgetful staff who did not wear leather shoes to work or failed to turn up in formal attire were given 50 yuan ($7.20) fines.
Windows 10: BitLocker on Self-Encrypted SSDs Blown
November 7th, 2018haha Un-Effing-Believable.
Via: ComputerWorld:
Reacting to a recently discovered security hole in hardware-based encryption in solid state drives, Microsoft recommends that if you’re using BitLocker to protect a solid-state drive, you switch from hardware to software encryption.
Related: Compromised from the Operating System Down to the Silicon
Cancer-Linked Chemicals Manufactured by 3M Are Turning Up in Drinking Water
November 5th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
Water tests show that 110 million Americans have levels of PFAS in their water that the most cautious scientists call unsafe, according to the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit organization that advocates for public health issues. At the same time, new studies show how the chemicals can cause harm even at tiny doses. As awareness spreads, 3M has been named in dozens of lawsuits, several this year alone.
Chicken Meat ‘Cultured’ from Chicken Cells
November 4th, 2018Via: Engadget:
You may know Just (formerly Hampton Creek) for its vegan cookie dough and mayo, but the company has also been working on cultured meat — real meat that’s made from animal cells rather than taken from an animal itself. While it’s not the only company doing so — there are actually quite a few — it could be the first to get a product on the market. Just CEO Josh Tetrick told Engadget earlier this year that his company would have either a chicken nugget, foie gras or sausage available by the end of 2018, and now it looks like Just is gearing up to release a chicken nugget. A cultured chicken nugget, that is.
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To make cultured chicken, you have to first collect some cells, and that can be done through a small, harmless biopsy from a live chicken, through a cell bank or even from a feather, among other means, Noyes told Munchies. In a video Just posted last year, the company said that when it used the feather method, it chose “the single best chicken that we could find,” — a chicken with clean feathers, a healthy comb and a nice wattle. However, Just’s first product won’t be produced from cells collected from a feather, said Noyes.
Russia Holding Record Amount of Physical Gold
November 4th, 2018Via: Russia Today:
The Central Bank of Russia bought over 92 tons of gold in the three months to the end of September breaking the Soviet peak of 2000 tons in gold reserves seen in 1941, according to a new report by the World Gold Council (WGC).
Russia reportedly purchased more gold than any other country in the world, followed by Turkey, Kazakhstan, and India, which bought 18.5 tons, 13.4 tons and 13.7 tons respectively.
That marks the highest quarterly net purchase since 1993, when the WGC started tracking the country’s data. Russia’s gold stockpile now accounts for 17 percent of the country’s overall foreign exchange reserves.
There’s Something Different About The Gut Microbes of Babies Born at Home
November 4th, 2018Via: ScienceAlert:
Compared to the babies born at home, the findings reveal that hospital-born infants had a lower diversity of gut flora, and this change persisted for the entire month.
“The reasons for the differences between infants born at home versus in hospitals are not known, but we speculate that common hospital interventions like early infant bathing and antibiotic eye prophylaxis or environmental factors – like the aseptic environment of the hospital – may be involved,” says senior author Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a researcher in microbiota function at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
These results suggest that babies born in hospitals are immediately exposed to less microbes and, therefore, have less diverse microbiomes in the first month of life.
