Antihistamine-infused Contact Lenses Could Help With Allergies

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=33233

With the warm weather upon us and the once-frozen plants coming back to life, springtime feels like a long-awaited oasis for most people. But for some, the resurgence of trees and grass can trigger seasonal allergies, and turn springtime into a sneezy, snotty mess. Instead of just popping your allergy meds and hoping for the best, a group of researchers think they may have just enabled a new approach to allergy relief.
Research published on March 19 in the journal Cornea shows how contact

via Discover Main Feed https://ift.tt/1dqgCKa

March 29, 2019 at 12:58PM

Making a Sekiro Wrist Mounted Fold Out Shield

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2019/03/29/making-a-sekiro-wrist-mounted-fold-out-shield/

Making a Sekiro Wrist Mounted Fold Out Shield

Amazing inventor and youtuber Colin Furze created an amazing replica of the Sekiro Shadows Die Twice PlayStation 4 game’s fold out umbrella shield.

Thanks to videos sent in by the game producers, Colin Furze tries to figure out how to create this stainless steel wonder. We just love how he shows his thought process through out the whole project!

You will be amazed by the end result!

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via [Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News https://ift.tt/23BIq6h

March 29, 2019 at 01:50PM

Lightning Strike motorcycle is an electric sportbike with up to 200 miles of range

https://www.autoblog.com/2019/03/29/lightning-strike-motorcycle-electric/

There’s a new

electric motorcycle

on the block, and it’s called the Lightning Strike. Made by California-based startup Lightning, this bike offers a lot of performance for the price. Its most potent form available will take you up to 200 miles on a full charge and reach a top speed of 150 mph. This bike is called the Carbon Edition, and Lightning prices it at $19,998. It uses a CCS charge port and is capable of getting to a full charge on a Level 3 charger in only 35 minutes. This rapid charging is possible because the bike uses a small 20 kWh battery pack.

Lightning breaks the range out by the kind of driving you’re doing. It says the bike is able to go 150 miles in highway driving and 200 miles in exclusively city driving. Power is also impressive from the electric motor at 120 horsepower and 180 pound-feet of torque for the Carbon Edition. This is the only version that will be available at the

motorcycle’s

launch in July this year, but standard and midrange versions will follow. The standard motorcycle starts at only $12,998, but you take a big range cut. Lightning says this one will go 70-100 miles on a full charge from its 10 kWh battery pack, half the size of the Carbon Edition. It’s also less powerful at just 90 horsepower and 180 pound-feet of torque. The 15 kWh midrange costs $16,998 and will go 105-150 miles with a full charge. It has the same power as the standard-range bike.

Level 3 charging isn’t supported out of the box with the standard and midrange, but can be added as a $1,500 option. The standard 6.6 kW AC charger on the Carbon Edition is also a $1,500 option for the two lesser trims. Acceleration numbers aren’t provided for any of the bikes, but the standard and midrange top out at 135 mph. Lightning claims these bikes will perform well no matter if you’re on the racetrack or commuting through a busy city.

The more expensive Carbon Edition comes with a bunch of other goodies that the standard and midrange don’t get. For one, it uses a plethora of carbon fiber bodywork that Lightning makes itself. It also adds Ohlins suspension, Brembo brakes and an AIM Strada racing dash that includes a lap timer and

GPS

data logging. There’s no word on when the cheaper bikes will be available for purchase, but folks can reserve any of them right now. The Carbon Edition requires a $10,000 refundable deposit, while the standard range only requires a $500 refundable deposit. Lightning plans to produce the bikes at its production facility in San Jose, CA.

In a specs-and-price war, this bike handles the

Harley-Davidson Livewire

easily, since that bike is only rated for 140 miles of city range and 88 miles of highway range —

and costs $29,799

.

via Autoblog https://ift.tt/1afPJWx

March 29, 2019 at 10:17AM

NASA proves its space helicopter can fly on Mars

https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/29/nasa-proves-its-space-helicopter-can-fly-on-mars/

The scientists working on NASA’s Mars helicopter project are done building the actual 4-pound vehicle that’s blasting off to the red planet with the Mars 2020 rover. But they can’t just strap the helicopter to its bigger companion’s belly and call it a day — they first have to prove that it can actually fly in Martian conditions. That’s why in late January, the team replicated our neighboring planet’s much thinner atmosphere in JPL’s Space Simulator in order to make sure the helicopter will be able to take off. Spoiler alert: they were able to successfully conduct two test flights in Martian conditions on separate days.

Since the Martian atmosphere only has about one percent the density of Earth’s, the researchers would’ve had to conduct their flight tests at an altitude of 100,000 feet if they did’t rely on the simulator. The 25-foot-wide vacuum cylinder was the much better choice, especially since the agency has been using it to test machines meant for the red planet anyway. In fact, it’s where the Curiosity team tested the rover here on Earth.

To be able to replicate the Martian atmosphere, the team injected carbon dioxide into the chamber after sucking out all nitrogen, oxygen and other gases. They also had to use a gravity offload system in the form of a motorized lanyard that tugged at the helicopter as it hovered above the ground, since Mars only two-thirds of our planet’s gravity.

While the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) only logged a total of one minute of flight time at an altitude of 2 inches above the ground, the scientists were able to get the data they need to be able to say that it will work on Mars. "The next time we fly, we fly on Mars," project manager MiMi Aung said. "Watching our helicopter go through its paces in the chamber, I couldn’t help but think about the historic vehicles that have been in there in the past. The chamber hosted missions from the Ranger Moon probes to the Voyagers to Cassini, and every Mars rover ever flown. To see our helicopter in there reminded me we are on our way to making a little chunk of space history as well."

Both the Mars 2020 rover and the helicopter are expected to arrive on the red planet in February 2021. The helicopter will serve as a demo for future space UAVs, while the rover will study the planet’s geology, assess the possibility of life in the past and collect samples by drilling into its surface.

Source: NASA

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

March 29, 2019 at 01:42AM

FCC “fined” robocallers $208 million since 2015 but collected only $6,790

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1482785

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai talking while standing in front of an FCC seal.
Enlarge /

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on December 14, 2017, in Washington DC, the day of the FCC’s vote to repeal net neutrality rules.

The Federal Communications Commission has issued $208.4 million in fines against robocallers since 2015, but the commission has collected only $6,790 of that amount. That’s because the FCC lacks authority to enforce the penalties, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal learned of the $6,790 figure by making a Freedom of Information Act request. “An FCC spokesman said his agency lacks the authority to enforce the forfeiture orders it issues and has passed all unpaid penalties to the Justice Department, which has the power to collect the fines,” the Journal report said. “Many of the spoofers and robocallers the agency tries to punish are individuals and small operations, [the spokesman] added, which means they are at times unable to pay the full penalties.”

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Since Ajit Pai became FCC chairman in January 2017, the FCC has issued $202 million in forfeiture orders against robocallers but has collected none of it, the Journal wrote. That includes a $120 million penalty issued in May 2018 against a robocaller that was accused of making 96 million robocalls during a three-month period in order to trick people into buying vacation packages.

Separately, the Federal Trade Commission has collected $121 million out of $1.5 billion worth of penalties issued against robocallers since 2004, the Journal report said. An FTC spokesperson told the Journal that it is proud of its 8 percent collection rate.

“The dearth of financial penalties collected by the US government for violations of telemarketing and auto-dialing rules shows the limits the sister regulators [FCC and FTC] face in putting a stop to illegal robocalls,” the Journal wrote. “It also shows why the threat of large fines can fail to deter bad actors.” Fines can be “a deterrent on legitimate companies that have real assets in the US,” but they aren’t as effective against scammers and overseas operators, an attorney quoted by the Journal said.

Paid FCC fines are deposited into the US Treasury. In some cases, the FCC settles with offenders, and such settlements can include refunds for consumers or compliance requirements.

The FCC’s enforcement process begins with the issuance of a proposed fine. This first formal step “informs the company of the alleged unlawful activity, establishes the maximum penalty that could be assessed for that violation, and provides the company with an opportunity to contest the allegations,” the FCC says.

The FCC’s best bet for collecting is often settling with the violator for some amount lower than the proposed fine. If there is no settlement, the FCC can issue the aforementioned forfeiture orders and hope that the violators pay up. The $208.4 million figure in the Journal story consists of “forfeiture orders in cases involving robocalling, Do Not Call Registry, and telephone solicitation violations,” the Journal wrote.

FTC shuts down robocallers

The FTC has more authority than the FCC to require refunds for consumers and shut down robocalling operations. On Tuesday this week, the FTC announced court settlements with “four separate operations responsible for bombarding consumers nationwide with billions of unwanted and illegal robocalls pitching auto warranties, debt-relief services, home security systems, fake charities, and Google search results services.”

Under these new settlements, “the defendants are banned from robocalling and most telemarketing activities, including those using an automatic dialer, and will pay significant financial judgments,” the FTC said.

But the FTC will just collect parts of those judgments. For example, one of the settlements imposed fines totaling $5.5 million against a defendant and his companies. But the fines will be suspended once the defendant pays $18,000.

Americans receive tens of billions of robocalls each year, according to estimates cited by the FCC. Pai has repeatedly talked tough on robocallers, for example by urging carriers to adopt stronger anti-robocall technologies.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats on the Republican-controlled commission, wants stronger action.

“I’ve called for carriers to make free tools to block robocalls available to every consumer,” she wrote on Twitter today. She also criticizing the FCC’s poor record in collecting fines: “It’s time for my colleagues [to] join me in this effort.”

The lack of follow-through on big fines isn’t new to Pai’s FCC. The FCC in 2015 proposed a fine of $100 million against AT&T for throttling the wireless Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans without adequately notifying the customers about the reduced speeds. But AT&T fought the proposed penalty, and the FCC apparently never issued a forfeiture order in that case.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

March 28, 2019 at 04:21PM

This Site That Randomly Loads YouTube’s Most Unsearchable Videos Is Addictive as Hell

https://gizmodo.com/this-site-that-randomly-loads-youtubes-most-unsearchabl-1833636611

Do you miss the old days of YouTube? When the platform was dominated by random videos of people’s everyday lives; instead of movie trailers, commercials, clickbait, and lots of awfulness all vying for a place in your queue? A website called defaultfile.name manages to strip that all away by randomly playing videos that were uploaded to YouTube with the camera’s default filename—and I can’t click away.

There have been previous attempts to mine YouTube for undiscovered treasure like this (be it genuinely entertaining or cringe-worthy) but those have always sought out videos with zero views; randomly grabbing clips that no one has ever watched. With this new approach, you’ll occasionally find a video with a few thousand views, but for the most part, it guarantees a steady stream of clips from amateurs who are uploading their content using automated tools, or directly from their devices. It’s safe to assume they don’t know the first thing about SEO, optimizing their videos to maximize views, or, in some cases, that their clips have even been uploaded to YouTube in the first place.

The site provides a preview of the next video to be loaded, which is useful if you find yourself falling down the rabbit’s hole at work as there’s the genuine risk you’re going to stumble across something you don’t want your co-workers seeing. YouTube has a hard enough time policing NSFW videos with millions of views being reported by hundreds of users; so it’s unlikely anyone’s keeping a close eye on the content down at this level.

Social media thrives on humanity’s voyeuristic tendencies, but few share snippets of their daily lives now without at least a thin layer of shellac to make their photos, videos, and posts more likable. Defaultfile.name is like entering YouTube through its less-flashy back door, and somehow watching a high-schooler practice a speech in front of his grandparents while the camera struggles to keep focus feels far more compelling than the umpteenth teaser for the next Avengers movie.

[defaultfile.name]

via Kotaku https://kotaku.com

March 28, 2019 at 12:58PM

‘Why Don’t You Want Kids?’ ‘Because Apocalypse!’

https://www.wired.com/story/how-we-reproduce-childfree

Are you pregnant yet? Don’t you like kids? Well, it’s different when it’s your own child. Being a parent is the most important job in the world. You’re being a bit selfish. What if your parents had decided not to have you? Speaking of your parents, isn’t it cruel to deny them the joy of grandchildren? Besides, who will take care of you when you get old? You’re just saying that because you’re young. You’ll change your mind. Your biological clock is ticking! What if your kid cured cancer?

If you don’t have kids and don’t want them, apologies: You’ve heard this all before from well-meaning relatives, friends, coworkers, cashiers, taxi drivers, crossing guards. If you do have kids and you’ve said anything like the above, the childfree community would like to let you know that you’re not being as thoughtful and caring as you (maybe) mean to be.

See, all of those questions and statements are forbidden by the bylaws of popular subreddit r/childfree, where they’re known as “bingos”: “cliché phrases parents say in an effort to convince the childfree that their decision is wrong, and that they are shirking their societal duty by not reproducing.” The subreddit is a forum to vent about being antagonized by “mombies” and “daddicts.” More importantly, it’s a place for users to speak openly about choice, offer stories and support to others, and share advice about how to respond to bingos or convince doctors to sterilize them.

By now, some of you might be forming a hard nugget of disapproval for the snarky childfree redditors. You’re far from alone: Multiple sociological studies have found that voluntary childlessness often sparks immediate disdain and “moral outrage,” even from total strangers. The stigma knows no race, religion, gender, or border. Researchers have found similar negative judgements of childfree adults everywhere from India to Italy to Israel. (If you’re having trouble imagining the hostility, try typing “childless”—or even better, “childless millennial”—into Google.)

Emma Grey Ellis covers memes, trolls, and other elements of internet culture for WIRED.

Still, fertility rates in the United States (and everywhere else) continue to drop. And contrary to certain hypotheses, voluntarily childfree people seem to rarely regret their choice. r/childfree has nearly half a million subscribers, and similar communities exist on just about every social media platform.

For the childfree, the reasons to consider childfreedom extend beyond baby hatred, questions of bodily autonomy, or suboptimal finances. Concerns go broader, ranging from the economy to politics to climate. “We basically have 12 years until the planet is an apocalyptic hellscape,” says Justine, a longtime r/childfree member in her early thirties. “We aren’t as lucky as our parents, and they seem to have no idea how much more difficult it is to ‘get by’ for us than it was for them.”

When responding to crusading parents who might try to convince them out of their stance, many childfree people use prepared “scripts,” formed by years of entertaining the same inquiries. They know they’re working against ingrained biases: The childfree are keenly aware that they are prefigured in the eyes of most as a band of entitled, disrespectful millennials, trading tradition for self-interest.

Being childfree—they first want you to know—is hardly a millennial idea. “There have always been people who have made the choice not to have children, but we’ve never noticed them in that way,” says Amy Blackstone, a (childfree) sociologist at the University of Maine and author of the forthcoming book Childfree by Choice. Priests and nuns and other celibate ascetics spring to mind, but plenty of lay people throughout history have made the same call. Referring to somebody as a spinster or “confirmed bachelor” was a coy implication of queerness, but it’s also a signpost for the childfree of yesteryear. “What’s different is that we’re talking about it openly now,” Blackstone says.

Activists have been challenging the taboo of childfreedom since the early 1970s, when second-wave feminism (which focused on family-centric issues such as reproductive rights, workplace equality, and marital rape) collided with the overpopulation and overconsumption worries of the environmental movement. In 1972, journalist Ellen Peck founded the National Organization for Non-Parents with a simple goal: making more people aware that parenthood was a choice, not an obligatory life chapter.

According to Blackstone, the economic boom-time of the 1980s, along with its focus on women “having it all,” re-hushed the childfree—though it didn’t extinguish them. “I wish there was something like [r/childfree] 30 years ago,” writes one redditor. “I am a 60 year old woman who has been happily married for 35 years. We are childless by choice and have never regretted it. I was always pretty sure I did not want children.” Other posters share their own experiences in the comments beneath. With over 300 upvotes: “I’m 55 myself and I can still remember being told by the gyno—at age 40!— that she wouldn’t sterilize me because ‘you still might change your mind.’ Yeah, that’s a negatory, ghost rider, damn satisfied with my decision, too.” (Many childfree people, but especially women, struggle for decades to get permanent birth control. Doctors’ concerns are seldom medical, so r/childfree’s moderators maintain an international list of childfree-friendly doctors and a guide to getting sterilized.)

The millennial-aged redditors seem to have a broader focus—as a generation, they’ve been shaped by third-wave feminism, acceptance of wider notions of family, climate change, and the Great Recession. “Since the recession, everyone is freaking out about lower fertility rates caused by women delaying pregnancy,” says Alison Gemmill, a demographer at Stony Brook University. But the childfree aren’t just delaying, and that’s started to show in the data too. “We’ve also seen a decline in fertility intention. More women are intending to have no children,” Gemmill says. She doesn’t foresee an imminent demographic apocalypse, but that hasn’t stopped political pundits and other commentators from preaching about society’s impending doom.

“People worry we won’t have enough taxpayers to pay for our aging population,” Blackstone says. “It also becomes a nationalist concern: ‘We need more people to defend our borders.’” In the mouths of some conservative commentators, worrying about low birth rates in the US and Western Europe takes on a tone not just of nationalism but also of ethnic anxiety—You Will Not Replace Us (as long as these inconvenient millennial women start churning out babies). One strategy for softening the appearance of racism is recruiting far-right mommy bloggers, like Wife With a Purpose. These women spread motherly messages about their laundry and their role in preserving white “heritage.” Online spaces controlled by the so-called alt-right teem with them—advocating for “radical traditionalism” and sharing Norman Rockwell-esque photos with captions reminding you that men are meant to protect and women to nurture.

Living as they do in a stridently pro-reproduction climate, it’s difficult for childfree people to publicly express the sentiments behind the downward-trending data. “Participants from a range of places told us how they felt ‘like a freak’ until they went online,” says Tracy Morison, a lecturer at Massey University of New Zealand who has studied online childfree communities. “Then they discovered others who felt the same as they did and discovered a vocabulary to articulate what they had been thinking and feeling.” For many, even the term “childfree” (as opposed to “childless,” a word that implies loss and incompleteness) was an affirming revelation.

The feelings the childfree have learned to articulate within their own spaces are often grounded in deep reflection. Sure, people pop off about hating obnoxious kids—codenamed Bratleys in the US, “sprogs” or “anklebiters” in Morison’s part of the world—so much so that a splinter subreddit, r/truechildfree, broke away to become a more “respectful” alternative. (Another, more hardline subreddit, r/antinatalism, is for people who “assign negative value to birth.” It can get pretty nihilistic.) For most, more sober discussions take precedence: economic woes, environmental concerns, political unrest. US users fret about reproductive rights under attack. Lots of them probably still wouldn’t be interested in having kids even in a stable economy with no environmental threats, but a sense of grim calculation—why would I bring a child into a world I can’t guarantee will be able to nurture them?—also pervades the space.

The harsher realities of millennial life certainly weigh heavily on Justine. “I got my bachelor’s degree and licensure in a field where I ended up not being able to find work. I was unemployed for years. After completing a year or so of occupational training, I finally obtained a job in medical transcription, a field that is slowly dying due to automation, with a paycheck based on production,” she says. “Adding a kid to my life would be insane even if I wanted to.”

For Justine and many other childfree people, having their struggles sneered at as selfishness is especially isolating. Morison’s research has found mounting hostility between parents and the childfree—especially mothers and childfree women. For childfree people, the animus comes from a lifetime of judgement, invasive questions, and, at times, real disadvantage. Morison found that childfree individuals were often expected to work overtime because they had no children. In some states, like Iowa, the government will take a larger percentage of your estate if you leave your possession to someone other than a biological heir—something some childfree Iowans feel unduly penalized by.

The centrality of parenthood can hurt parents too. “Having kids—lots of them—is glorified, so people are pressured to have kids when they aren’t ready to, to have more kids than they want to or can afford, or to spend heaps of resources on becoming biological parents,” Morison says. “Then talking about the challenges or even regrets of parenthood is culturally taboo.” Discussions about postpartum depression have only recently made it to the mainstream, in no small part because of supportive online communities, but struggling new mothers still face stigmas of their own.

The childfree movement rejects one of life’s basic drives with reason and thoughtfulness, asking fundamental questions about the worlds childfree people live in. “The reality is that in the US, we have some of the worst supports for parents in the workplace in the world,” Blackstone says. If a plummeting fertility rate is truly a concern, some policy changes—say, paid family leave, or the environmental reforms teenagers around the world have been asking for—might help. Still, asking non-parents what would convince them to procreate is, the childfree people’s view, the wrong question. “I wish we could shift conversations away from ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and toward why some people are hesitant to become parents,” Blackstone says. “If there are cultural problems, let’s solve them. But then leave the rest of us alone.” Parenthood may no longer be the default. Most childfree people are deeply concerned about the state of future—and procreating isn’t the only way to contribute.

How We Reproduce

via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

March 28, 2019 at 06:09AM