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Month: February 2020

Headlines 

A Star’s Auroras Light the Way to a New Exoplanet

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Jupiter’s moon Io—the solar system’s most volcanic world—has inspired a new way to find distant exoplanets. As the moon orbits Jupiter, it tugs on the planet’s magnetic field, generating bright auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Even if we couldn’t see Io itself, the enormous auroras, pulsing to the beat of a hidden orbiting body, would tell us that something was out there. Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and…

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A Cruise Ship Quarantine, a Hunt for Cheaters, and More Car News This Week

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Turns out transportation angles lurk in every story. This week, the global reach of the coronavirus was top of mind, so we investigated how cruise ships—and one cruise in particular—helped spread the virus worldwide. Then, for a change of pace (pun intended), we looked into how digital footprints helped one data obsessive track down (we did it again) marathon cheats. Meanwhile, in California, a labor law is changing the way Uber and its drivers do business, which may end up affecting the price of a ride. Plus, check out this…

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Odds and Ends 

You Can Fill This Heart-Shaped Box With Your Fave Beer For A Boozy Valentine’s Day

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Courtesy of Bud Light Bud Light’s Heart-Shaped Valentine’s Day 2020 Box Is Too Cute By Cianna Garrison Feb 7, 2020 Last-minute shoppers can find a perfect gift this Valentine’s Day for the beer-lover in their life. Bud Light’s heart-shaped Valentine’s Day box even comes complete with a poem. That’s right, while everyone else will be getting chocolates, you can surprise someone special (or yourself) with a box of beer that looks just like a classic box of chocolates. Available on Anheuser-Busch’s gift shop page, the Bud Light heart-shaped box is…

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9 Types of Dreams You Have And What They Actually Mean

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Kim Quindlen Updated February 23, 2020 By SplitShire 1. Dreams About Your Teeth A dream like this may involve your teeth falling out, breaking apart, coming out from a slight tap, or crumbling into pieces after eating a particularly challenging mouthful of Jujubes. (No? Just me on that last one?) However it happens, this is an incredibly common and disturbing dream for many people. Many of you are probably clutching your mouth or skipping over this section as we speak. Experts say this dream could have both positive or negative meanings.…

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These New Cat Face Filters On Snapchat Look Super Realistic

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Denise Grabowski / EyeEm/EyeEm/Getty Images The 7 Best Cat Face Filters On Snapchat To Channel Your Inner Feline By Cianna Garrison Feb 16, 2020 At the end of 2019, cat face videos started flooding social media. The videos of people scaring their cat with a feline face filter caught fire because of the real kitties’ hilarious reactions to their pet parents. Sine the trend first caught on, there are now even more cat filters to choose from, so here are the 7 best cat face filters on Snapchat to channel…

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For the second time this week in New Orleans, a person was fatally hit by a float during Carnival parade

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(CNN)A person was killed Saturday night at the Krewe of Endymion parade in New Orleans when they were hit by a float, authorities said. Cantrell said police responded to the fatality “in record time.” The final part of the parade was canceled, NOLA Ready tweeted. It is the second death during the Carnival season that precedes Mardi Gras. A woman was killed Wednesday night during the Krewe of Nyx parade. She was hit by a tandem float, authorities said. In 2017 a pickup truck went into the crowd and dozens…

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Odds and Ends 

U.S. Readied Sanctions on Russian Oligarchs AssociatesThen Mysteriously Backed Off

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Something strange happened in mid-December involving Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch. Late last year, the U.S. government signaled that it was about to level a new round of sanctions targeting people and entities linked to to convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as part of a decades-long relationship between the two men. Over the following months, Deripaskas allies estimated net worth of $4.5 billion, entered the Treasury Departments crosshairs in the wake of the Kremlins campaign to shape American opinion about the 2016 election. Manafort and Deripaska have known each…

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While You Were Offline: Oh Hey, Julian Assange Is Back in the News!

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These days it's hard to tell for sure, but its seems as though, if anything, the biggest news of the last week was the most dying from Covid-19, and Ben Affleck is opening up about will officially step down as royals at the end of March, and both E*Trade are being sold, but sadly not as a bundle. (If only.) What can we say? It’s been that kind of a week. What else happened over the last seven days? Well, all of this. Presidential Pardons What Happened: President Trump announced…

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Odds and Ends 

YC-backed Goodcover launches into the fast-moving insurtech space

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As the insuretech space fills up, a new entrant is joining the fight. Y Combinator -backed Goodcover is launching today to take on the likes of big insurance, as well as insurance startups like Lemonade, Jetty, Hippo and Zebra. The company offers renters insurance in California. The twist? Goodcover returns unclaimed premiums to policy holders at the end of the year. Here’s how it works. Goodcover operates as a managing general agent, which means they write the policy, set the pricing and build their own risk assessment model, but partner…

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This Technique Uses AI to Fool Other AIs

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Artificial intelligence has made big strides recently in understanding language, but it can still suffer from an alarming, and potentially dangerous, kind of algorithmic myopia. Research shows how AI programs that parse and analyze text can be confused and deceived by carefully crafted phrases. A sentence that seems straightforward to you or me may have a strange ability to deceive an AI algorithm. That’s a problem as text-mining AI programs increasingly are used to judge job applicants, assess medical claims, or process legal documents. Strategic changes to a handful of…

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Rare Black Panther Rediscovered In Sri Lanka

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A few years ago, a black panther was found in Sri Lanka, but it was dead in a trap. The animal was thought to be the last of its kind to exist in the Teardrop of India. However, Sri Lanka’s Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) has just announced that it has spotted black panthers in the forests of Adam’s Peak, making them no longer considered extinct in the country. After receiving information of sightings from local villagers, the DWC set up a number of camera traps to try to capture…

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Headlines 

These states recently enacted bail-reform laws

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Aerial view of Rikers Island, New York’s City main jail complex. “Bail reform, it’s lit!” Charles Barry said as he was being transferred by police to Manhattan Central Booking. “It’s the Democrats! The Democrats know me and the Republicans fear me. You can’t touch me! I can’t be stopped!” Gov. Andrew Cuomo has defended the law, calling it an “ongoing process.” “We need to respond to the facts but not the politics, we need to act on information and not hyperbole,” he said in January. New Jersey The New Jersey Criminal Justice…

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