Important Takeaways:
- Out-of-control wildfires scorch Texas Panhandle and briefly shut down nuclear weapons facility
- A series of wildfires swept across the Texas Panhandle early Wednesday, prompting evacuations, cutting off power to thousands, and forcing the brief shutdown of a nuclear weapons facility as strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blazes.
- Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties as the main blaze, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, swelled into the second-largest wildfire in the state’s history. The main facility that disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal paused operations Tuesday night but said it was open for normal work on Wednesday.
- Authorities have not said what might have caused the blaze, which tore through sparsely populated counties set amid vast, high plains punctuated by cattle ranches and oil rigs.
- The National Weather Service issued red flag warnings and fire danger alerts for several other states through the midsection of the country, as high winds of over 40 mph (64 kph) combined with warm temperatures, low humidity and dry winter vegetation to make conditions ripe for wildfires.
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Important Takeaways:
- A powerful blizzard is set to strike California on Thursday as residents are being warned to brace for 12 feet of snow and 120 mile-per-hour winds.
- The storm heading toward the West Coast will shower low-elevation areas with rain and coat the Northwest and northern Rockies with blankets of snow.
- More severe impacts will be seen in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains – which are set to face blizzard conditions.
- The looming snowstorm will be the strongest of its kind since this time last year, when a siege of storms hit the Sierra’s in late February and early March.
- ‘Multiple FEET of snow are forecast with whiteout conditions and road closures likely. Heaviest snow above 3000 ft. Take advantage of the dry conditions today and tomorrow to prepare!’
- ‘If these snow totals hold, this will easily be the biggest storm of the season.’
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Important Takeaways:
- Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not
- There’s a lot of pressure on the new Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s long-awaited entry into the world of computers you wear on your face. Apple claims that the Vision Pro, which starts at $3,499, is the beginning of something called “spatial computing,” which basically boils down to running apps all around you. And the company’s ads for it do not hedge that pressure even a little: they show people wearing the Vision Pro all the time. At work! Doing laundry! Playing with their kids! The ambition is enormous: to layer apps and information over the real world — to augment reality.
- As I’ve been using it for the past few days, I kept coming up with a series of questions — questions about whether the tradeoffs were worth it.
- Is using the Vision Pro so good that I’m willing to mess up my hair every time I put it on
- Is it so good that I want to lug it around in its giant carrying case instead of my laptop bag?
- Is it so good that I want to look at the world around me through screens instead of with my own eyes?
- Basically, I keep asking if I prefer using a computer in there rather than out here. And as interesting as the Vision Pro is, there’s a long way to go before it can beat out here.
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Important Takeaways:
- During the meeting, which took place on February 21 and 22, attendees were made to pass a biometric validation process by scanning their faces using Serpro’s stand devices, according to a post on the G20 website. Brazil currently holds the G20 presidency, which runs till the end of this year.
- “This technology streamlines procedures by expediting personal validation, thus ensuring security through efficient monitoring,” says Alexandre Ávila, superintendent of Government Digital Customer Relations.
- In the course of the recent meeting in Rio de Janeiro, national and international delegates, including journalists from local and foreign media outlets, performed facial scans to access restricted areas of the meeting venue.
- Apart from the recent ministerial meeting, Serpro has the contract to deploy its facial recognition and other connectivity infrastructure in all of the about 130 scheduled G20 meetings under Brazil’s presidency, the government notes. The agency will also ensure safe management of the data of about 25,000 persons expected to attend these meetings from 30 countries in different venues.
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Important Takeaways:
- I tried paying with my palm at Whole Foods using Amazon’s futuristic scanners. It was scarily convenient.
- Over the summer, Amazon announced that it would be rolling out its palm-scanning payment technology to every one of its 500+ Whole Foods locations in the US by the end of the year.
- As someone who writes about tech, I figured it was my duty to try it out in the name of journalism.
- The palm-recognition system works by linking a user’s payment information with their unique palm print.
- At Whole Foods, you just hover your palm over the reader once you’re ready to pay and the system will find your Prime account, apply any discounts, and charge the credit card you enrolled with.
- Amazon One also gives the option to link your government ID to your account so you can use your palm to pay for age-restricted purchases without being carded.
- I was initially skeptical of the tech — and I definitely still am. After all, there’s something about giving up a scan of one of your body parts that feels inherently vulnerable.
- The more I keep using the tech, the more I have mixed feelings by how convenient it feels. Does anyone really need to have a biometric payment option at the grocery store? Definitely not. After all, we can already pay pretty easily with the tap of a card or phone.
- But does it make breezing through self-checkout just a little bit more streamlined? Yes. And while I hate to admit it, I think it might be winning me over.
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Important Takeaways:
- MIT student creates device that is able to search the entire internet using just his mind
- Arnav Kapur created a device called AlterEgo, which is a wearable type of headset that allows users to communicate with technology without even speaking a word.
- The device records signals when the user hears or thinks of a particular word. This information is then sent to machines which use the internet to find the answer.
- It’s kind of like having Google in your head, which is pretty damn incredible.
- Without speaking, typing or doing anything at all, the device is able to search the internet for the correct answer before feeding back the information via skull vibrations into the inner ear.
- Apparently, the answer presents itself in a similar way to a person’s internal voice, but without interfering with their ‘usual auditory perception’.
- It can search for info, solve math equations and provide answers to all kinds of different questions.
- “This enables a human-computer interaction that is subjectively experienced as completely internal to the human user—like speaking to one’s self,” MIT Media Lab explains.
- “… This enables a user to transmit and receive streams of information to and from a computing device or any other person without any observable action, in discretion, without unplugging the user from her environment, without invading the user’s privacy.”
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Important Takeaways:
- An underwater communication cable between India and Europe in the Red Sea managed by Seacom has been cut, the company confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg today.
- The cable runs in an area where the rebel group in Yemen called the Houthis have been targeting ships with drones and missiles. Other underwater cables, namely, Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1), Europe India Gateway (EIG), and Tata Global Network (TGN) systems connecting Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to Djibouti have also cut off in the Red Sea, as per a report by the Israeli publication Globes.
- Of these, the AAE-1, provides internet to a wide range of countries including Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and India; EIG provides internet to 12 countries including the United Kingdom, Portugal, Egypt, and India; and TGN systems links linking Mumbai in India with Marseille in France.
- The repairs of these cables are expected to take about eight weeks and exposes those making said repairs to potential attacks by the Houthis.
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Important Takeaways:
- After Two Years, Neocons Desperate For More War in Ukraine
- In a recent CNN interview, the normally very confident US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland sounded a little desperate. She was trying to make the case for Congress to pass another $61 billion dollars for the neocons’ proxy war project in Ukraine and she was throwing out the old slogans that the neocons use when they want funding for their latest war.
- Asked by CNN whether she believes that Congress will eventually pass the bill, Nuland responded that she has confidence that, “we will do what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world…”
- What Nuland is attempting here is what the neocons always do. They try to wrap their terrible policies up in the American flag and sell it to the American people as something reflective of “our” values. If you oppose another neocon war, well then you are unpatriotic according to their trickery.
- But Americans are waking up to the lies of the neocons and more and more are realizing that there is no “we” when the neocons are trying to sell another war. It is “them.” The “we” in the equation are the people who are being robbed to pay for what will inevitably be another neocon failure.
- Does any American still believe that Washington was “defending democracy and freedom” when it used a pack of lies to get us into Iraq, where a country was destroyed and perhaps a million people were killed? How about when, after 20 years in Afghanistan, we managed to replace the Taliban…with the Taliban? And Syria and Libya and all the other interventions?
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Important Takeaways:
- Hobbyist balloon detected over Western U.S. has left American airspace, officials say
- CBS News first reported that the military was tracking the balloon as it traversed the Western U.S. on Friday. NORAD, the military command responsible for air defense over the U.S. and Canada, later confirmed it had detected the object and said it was floating between 43,000 and 45,000 feet. Its presence prompted enough concern that the command sent aircraft to investigate.
- One U.S. official told CBS News the balloon was expected to be over Georgia by Friday night. The official said the balloon appeared to be made of Mylar and had a small cube-shaped box, about two feet long on each side, hanging below it.
- “The balloon was intercepted by NORAD fighters over Utah, who determined it was not maneuverable and did not present a threat to national security. NORAD will continue to track and monitor the balloon,” NORAD said in a statement. “The FAA also determined the balloon posed no hazard to flight safety.”
- On Saturday, an official with the Department of Defense told CBS News that the object was actually a hobbyist balloon.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monitors’ mental health and substance abuse through the Youth Mental Health Survey, a poll of high school students collected as questionnaires every two years since 2011. The most recent data, from 2021, was stunning: 42% “experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 28% in 2011. And 22% “seriously considered attempting suicide,” up from 16% in 2011. While the 2021 data might reflect some of the most difficult months of the pandemic, the trends were apparent before 2021.
- Historically, youth have had low rates of suicide mortality, but that began changing about a decade ago. Today, youth and young adults (ages 10-24) account for 15% of all suicides, an increase of 52.2% since 2000. Suicide has become the second-leading cause of death for this age group, accounting for 7,126 deaths. The highest rates are found among non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native youth, with a suicide rate three times greater than the general population. Youth who identified as sexual minorities (LGBTQ+) had a fivefold higher rate of attempting suicide.
- Substance use disorder
- Addiction is not a new problem in America, but it has become a crisis largely because of its new lethality. The advent of powerful opiates, especially fentanyl, has driven mortality rates to unprecedented levels. The CDC reported 105,452 drug overdose deaths for 2022, more than a fivefold increase from 2002 and double the number from 2015. The highest death rates are in males ages 35-44. For context, there were roughly 43,000 auto fatalities in 2022. Lung and bronchial cancers, which cause the most deaths of any form of cancer, accounted for 127,070 deaths in 2022, mostly people over age 50.
- The crisis is indeed personal, not political. There are, in fact, only two kinds of families in America: families struggling with a mental illness and those not struggling with a mental illness yet. The prevalence is that high—50% of us will be affected at some point.
- Anxiety and depression have become a new public health threat for Americans of all ages, but we have the tools to resolve this crisis through better engagement, quality care, and a focus on people and recovery
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