Fighting pollution and global warming is a top priority for governments and various organizations around the world. One of them is the Paris-based Plume Labs, which has enlisted pigeons in a bold new air-monitoring project. By equipping thesebirds with sensor-laden backpacks that can monitor air pollution, Plume was able to offer more details about the air quality in London.
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After a rocky start characterized by a clunky and inconsistent UI, Apple Music has seemingly hit its stride. Not even a year old, Apple’s streaming music service already boasts more than 13 million paying subscribers. And while one might reasonably assume that Apple Music’s tremendous gains in just a few months is bad news for Spotify, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
As it stands today, Spotify currently has more than 30 million subscribers. What’s more, Spotify VP Jonathan Forster recently explained in an interview with Reuters that Spotify has experienced an even faster rate of growth since Apple Music hopped on the scene last June.
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HBO owns Game of Thrones, the most pirated TV show in existence. So it’s no surprise that it’s going to liberally use DMCA copyright law to protect its content from illegal sharing on YouTube. What is more surprising, and frankly disappointing, is that HBO appears to have abused copyright law to take down fan content that wasn’t illegal, just inconvenient.
YouTuber Frikidoctor uses inside information and guesswork to make prediction videos for upcoming Game of Thrones episodes. They’re not remotely infringing on copyright, in the same way that talking about Game of Thrones at a bar isn’t infringing. But nonetheless, HBO used YouTube’s copyright system to take down Frikidoctor’s videos, and YouTube did nothing to help.
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More than any year before it, 2016 might be the year of the Netflix original series. The second season of Daredevil cemented it as the best superhero show on any network, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was even stronger the second time around, and now what many consider to be the flagship of the service — Orange is the New Black — is returning in just a few short weeks.
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It’s a device that brings to mind the bodyless hand, Thing, from The Addams Family: a human-like robotic hand, engineered by scientists at the University of Washington, that can learn on its own as it handles a specific task.
The hand has five fingers, tendons, joints, over a hundred sensors, and is capable of moving faster than its human counterpart. In a video the university released, the hand can be seen delicately rotating a tube full of coffee beans– an activity that the robot can improve iteratively, the university said.
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Some day the climate change argument will be over and one side will emerge victorious, but that day almost certainly won’t come in our lifetimes. People on both sides of the fence believe strongly in their stances, and neither side seems swayed by convincing arguments made by the other. Of course, the data often seems to favor one side of the argument a bit more than the other, and a new visualization we came across serves as a strong reminder of which side that is.
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WhatsApp has been a smartphone-only messaging program for ever, but that changes today. There’s now desktop clients for both Windows and OS X, in addition to the months-old web client.
This doesn’t reflect some giant change for WhatsApp — the desktop clients just mirror what’s on your phone. In other words, you need your phone powered on and running the WhatsApp app to send and receive messages. You scan a QR code on the desktop app with your smartphone, and what you see on your laptop is a reflection of the WhatsApp app on your phone, complete with sent messages and chats.
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The only thing better than the Deadpool movie itself might be Ryan Reynold’s years-long dedication to bringing the character to the big screen. Now that the movie has finally released (and broken countless box office records), Reynolds appears to be enjoying the spotlight immensely, most recently evidenced by the latest Honest Trailer from the people at Screen Junkies.
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Virtual reality is all the rage these days, and if you have a VP headset then you’ll definitely want to check out a new video posted by AccuWeather that gives puts you right in the middle of a tornado chase. The action was shot with a 360fly camera near Wray, Colorado earlier this week and the storm chasers drive very close to it so we can see the base of the tornado tearing up its surroundings.
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It’s 2016. We’re accustomed to movies being filled with green screens and CGI. Batman v Superman, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Captain America: Civil War and virtually every other blockbuster film of the past few decades have relied on special effects that simply can’t be replicated in the real world.
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