An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report about Japan’s virtual YouTubers or VTubers that act as live performers, corporate PR officials and even surrogate children. From The Wall Street Journal: Ryosei Takehisa, 24 years old, doesn’t have any children — unless you count an animated character with elfin ears called Mikuriya Kuon. In live appearances on YouTube, the kimono-clad Kuon character,…
Tag: Ears
Woman Develops Horrifying Skull Infection After Cleaning Her Ears with Cotton Swabs
A woman’s daily habit of cleaning her ears with cotton swabs led to a life-threatening infection in her skull. Source: https://www.livescience.com/cotton-swab-ear-skull-infection.html
Why do birds sing?
Birds spend a lot of time and energy singing, but they don’t do it the same way in every season of the year. And some can’t sing at all. What’s the purpose of birdsong? Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/why-do-birds-sing…
Meet a family of NASA space robots
NASA engineers are working on a new family of space robots that can roll, climb, and use artificial intelligence to navigate around obstacles in rough terrains on other worlds. Meet the family, here. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/nasa-space-robots-lemur-ice-worm-robosimian…
China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People
Tencent and Alibaba are among the firms that assist authorities in hunting down criminal suspects, silencing dissent and creating surveillance cities. From a report: Alibaba Group’s sprawling campus has collegial workspaces, laid-back coffee bars and, on the landscaped grounds, a police outpost. Employees use the office to report suspected crimes to the police, according to people familiar with the operation. Police…
The Pineal Gland, Seat of Spiritual Connection
You may think of the spiritual world as being completely beyond and outside of the body, but in fact spirituality is a built-in feature of the human brain. Just as we have ears to help us hear sound waves and eyes to help us see shapes and colors, we have a bodily organ to help […] Source: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ilchilee/2019/06/24/the-pineal-gland-seat-of-spiritual-connection/…
Remembering The Retiree Who Became America’s Worst Counterfeiter
The Hustle tells the story of a mysterious legend who “produced thousands of the ugliest counterfeit $1 bills ever made…so poorly done that the Secret Service thought the perpetrator was intentionally mocking them” — using a small hand-driven printing press in his kitchen:
It was printed on cheap bond paper that could be found at any stationary store. The serial numbers were…
Quantum music to my ears
It sounds like an old-school vinyl record, but the distinctive crackle in the music streamed into Chris Holloway’s laboratory is atomic in origin. The group at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado, spent a long six years finding a way to directly measure electric fields using atoms, so who can blame them for then having a little fun…