As part of Barcelona’s efforts to reclaim its car-congested streets for pedestrians, the city has tapped architects to create "superblocks” — groups of streets transformed into car-free public plazas. One such project was completed in 2019 by Leku Studio in the trendy neighborhood of Sant Antoni. Redesigned with attractive way-finding elements and street furniture, the Superblock of Sant Antoni is the second of six superblocks completed to date.[...]

In an effort to find a balance between protecting the significant investment in our cellular devices and protecting the planet, LifeProof has developed a phone case that sources materials diverted from the ocean and simultaneously supports organizations directly involved in providing safe water, protecting ocean life and maintaining river habitat. [...]

With limited traffic on the roads, cruising down abandoned streets on a slick new skateboard can be a dream come true for many skateboarders. Thanks to Rustek's new collection of wooden skateboards, handcrafted out of sustainably sourced wood, we can all dream of popping sweet 180-degree ollies while soaring down the street.[...]

After receiving nearly 500 submissions from around the world, eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of the 2020 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual award recognizes visionary vertical architecture ideas that push the limits of design and technology. First place was awarded to a Chinese team that designed Epidemic Babel, a rapid-deployment healthcare skyscraper concept for mitigating epidemic outbreaks.[...]

Creating furniture is an age-old art form that has incorporated standard materials such as aluminum, wood and rattan. However, one artist has perfected a way to use another prolific material, cardboard, into furniture designs, and he'll show you how to use it too. [...]

The Sucker

Buzzkill

With all of her plans cancelled because of the crisis that’s hit our planet recently, Jacoba Niepoort decided to use her own home to create murals.

“I wanted to use the spaces we were in to create parallel individual works.”

Together with Miami-based artist Alex Void and the Void Projects’ creative team, Niepoort curated Home MuralFest, which inspired many artists around the world to paint on the walls of their living rooms, studios, and garden sheds.

Check out the various murals over at Colossal.

(Image Credit: David de la Mano/ Void Projects/ Colossal)

(Image Credit: Helen Bur and Erin Holly/ Void Projects/ Colossal)

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutes have found the black hole that is currently the closest to Earth. The aforementioned black hole lies just 1000-light years from our planet, and is closer to our Solar System compared to others found to date. What’s more, it is part of a triple system that can be seen with the naked eye.

They say this system could just be the tip of the iceberg, as many more similar black holes could be found in the future.

"We were totally surprised when we realised that this is the first stellar system with a black hole that can be seen with the unaided eye," says Petr Hadrava, Emeritus Scientist at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague and co-author of the research.

More details about this finding over at ScienceDaily.

(Image Credit: JohnsonMartin/ Pixabay)

TAKE THAT!
Spruce up your next teleconference meeting with Ace Attorney backgrounds!
Perfect for adding a touch of legal proceedings to anything your agency does, or for having arguments about what those metal things with steps on them are called. pic.twitter.com/98N89kzymo

— Ace Attorney (@aceattorneygame) April 29, 2020

As even lawyers now work from home, and trials are now held via Zoom, I guess it would only be appropriate if they had a background that’s related to their job. And what background would that be other than the courtroom? But even if you’re not a lawyer, you can still use these Zoom backgrounds released last week by Capcom’s Ace Attorney, via Twitter. You can use the 2D background from the original trilogy, or opt for the 3D one from the more recent games.

Take that! And no objections, please.

(Image Credit: Ace Attorney/ Twitter)

When Sam Goree and his colleagues came across articles and blog posts that claim or ask that websites today look very similar to each other, they were intrigued. Unfortunately, since these articles didn’t have an empirical study to back them up, they ran a test to determine whether this claim had any truth to it, and if so, the reason behind it.

We ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.

And what did they find out? Websites, indeed, were becoming very similar.

More details about this study over at Fast Company.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: 200degrees/ Pixabay)

In his book Secrets of Polar Travel, explorer Robert Peary speaks about a ration that he brought on his expeditions to the Arctic between 1886 and 1909. Among his supplies in his trips, he considers this ration as the “first in importance”. What’s more, he comments that this is one meal that “a man can eat twice a day for three hundred and sixty-five days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first.” What is this that Peary says is food that you won’t get tired of eating everyday?

Peary was talking about pemmican, a blend of rendered fat and powdered, dried meat that fueled exploration and expansion long before his attempts to reach the North Pole. Archaeological evidence suggests that as early as 2800 BC humans hunted the bison that roamed North America’s Great Plains and blended their meat, fat, and marrow into energy-dense patties with a serious shelf-life. A single pound of pemmican lasted for years and might’ve packed as many as 3,500 calories.

More details about pemmican and how to make it over at Atlas Obscura.

Yum!

(Image Credit: Sam O’Brien for Gastro Obscura)

The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) yesterday issued a fresh advisory alerting organizations to change all their Active Directory credentials as a defense against cyberattacks trying to leverage a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Pulse Secure VPN servers—even if they have already patched it. The warning comes three months after another

A newly discovered unpatchable hardware vulnerability in Xilinx programmable logic products could allow an attacker to break bitstream encryption, and clone intellectual property, change the functionality, and even implant hardware Trojans. The details of the attacks against Xilinx 7-Series and Virtex-6 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been covered in a paper titled "The

A Chinese hacking group has been found leveraging a new exploit chain in iOS devices to install a spyware implant targeting the Uyghur Muslim minority in China's autonomous region of Xinjiang. The findings, published by digital forensics firm Volexity, reveal that the exploit — named "Insomnia" — works against iOS versions 12.3, 12.3.1, and 12.3.2 using a flaw in WebKit that was patched by

Watch out Apple users! The default mailing app pre-installed on millions of iPhones and iPads has been found vulnerable to two critical flaws that attackers are exploiting in the wild, at least, from the last two years to spy on high-profile victims. The flaws could eventually let remote hackers secretly take complete control over Apple devices just by sending an email to any targeted

In a recent highly targeted BEC attack, hackers managed to trick three British private equity firms into wire-transferring a total of $1.3 million to the bank accounts fraudsters have access to — while the victimized executives thought they closed an investment deal with some startups. According to the cybersecurity firm Check Point, who shared its latest investigation with The Hacker News,

Microsoft has patched a worm-like vulnerability in its Teams workplace video chat and collaboration platform that could have allowed attackers to take over an organization's entire roster of Teams accounts just by sending participants a malicious link to an innocent-looking image. The flaw, impacting both desktop and web versions of the app, was discovered by cybersecurity researchers at

A new type of mobile banking malware has been discovered abusing Android's accessibility features to exfiltrate sensitive data from financial applications, read user SMS messages, and hijack SMS-based two-factor authentication codes. Called "EventBot" by Cybereason researchers, the malware is capable of targeting over 200 different financial apps, including banking, money transfer services,

In the last few months, multiple groups of attackers successfully compromised corporate email accounts of at least 156 high-ranking officers at various firms based in Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Dubbed 'PerSwaysion,' the newly spotted cyberattack campaign leveraged Microsoft file-sharing services—including Sway, SharePoint, and OneNote—to launch highly targeted

Two severe security flaws have been discovered in the open-source SaltStack Salt configuration framework that could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The vulnerabilities were identified by F-Secure researchers earlier this March and disclosed on Thursday, a day after SaltStack released a patch (version 3000.2)

Days after cybersecurity researchers sounded the alarm over two critical vulnerabilities in the SaltStack configuration framework, a hacking campaign has already begun exploiting the flaws to breach servers of LineageOS, Ghost, and DigiCert. Tracked as CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, the disclosed flaws could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data

Cybersecurity researcher Mordechai Guri from Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev recently demonstrated a new kind of malware that could be used to covertly steal highly sensitive data from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems using a novel acoustic quirk in power supply units that come with modern computing devices. Dubbed 'POWER-SUPPLaY,' the latest research builds on a series of

Since the past few weeks, software giant Citrix has privately been rolling out a critical software update to its enterprise customers that patches multiple security vulnerabilities affecting Citrix ShareFile content collaboration platform. The security advisory—about which The Hacker News learned from Dimitri van de Giessen, an ethical hacker and system engineer—is scheduled to be available

More than six years after Facebook launched its ambitious Free Basics program to bring the Internet to the masses, the social network is back at it again with a new zero-rating initiative called Discover. The service, available as a mobile web and Android app, allows users to browse the Internet using free daily data caps. Facebook Discover is currently being tested in Peru in partnership

DigitalOcean, one of the biggest modern web hosting platforms, recently hit with a concerning data leak incident that exposed some of its customers' data to unknown and unauthorized third parties. Though the hosting company has not yet publicly released a statement, it did has started warning affected customers of the scope of the breach via an email. According to the breach notification

The post When Will a Self-Published Book Win a Major Book Award? appeared first on Fiction Notes.

Dear Librarians who serve on one of the ALA Youth Media Awards committees (Newbery, Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Michael L. Printz, Schneider Family, Alex, Mildred L. Batchelder, Odyssey, Pura Belpré, Robert F. Siebert, Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media, Stonewall, Theodor Seuss Geisel, William C. Morris, YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults, Continue Reading

The post When Will a Self-Published Book Win a Major Book Award? appeared first on Fiction Notes.

A gift from our guest: dried cyclamen, a ballet of expressive flowers! Today's Expression: Prenez soin de vous : take care of yourself (plural: yourselves) Audio file: Click here to listen to today's phrase in French and English A DAY IN A FRENCH LIFE by Kristi Espinasse Someone close to us, someone young and strong, had an accident--une chute while alone at home-- followed by a trip to ER for some points! The emotional and physical scars are there, but our bien-aimé is here with us now and will stay in time to recover from the choc. Today's short entry is a reminder to you and me to continue to check in with those who are living alone. Which of our friends are on their own? Which family members? Which colleagues? Have you seen the post lady lately? Big, strong, young? Grand, fort, jeune? Don't forget to check on these ones! Check on everyone. Self-check. Vérifie! I am off to check on our guest, who somehow managed--between the ER and here--to pack a bunch of goodies for us to share at the table: gingembre, poireaux, citrons, oranges--les agrumes--which have since been added to soup and put into a simple cake....

Dramatic action is needed now to blunt the immediate pain of vulnerable workers.

As the novel coronavirus spreads through the U.S. during presidential primaries, election and government officials are scrambling to figure out how to allow voters to cast their ballots safely ― or postpone primaries altogether. Managing in-person voting during an unprecedented pandemic has forced authorities to overcome new virus-related hurdles: providing sufficient cleaning supplies to polling […]

Republican senators on Wednesday teamed up to kill an amendment introduced by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray that would have expanded paid sick leave to millions of U.S. workers left out of a bipartisan coronavirus relief package. Every Republican present for the vote, 51 in total, voted against the amendment while every Senate Democrat voted in favor. […]

Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. As the head of the intelligence […]

Well, depending when and where you saw him, it might have been…me. When this whole thing started, we were told that people wearing bandannas and even N95 masks in public were fools: “Don’t you idiots know that just cloth won’t … Read more

By Dan Duddy  Published: May 06th, 2020 

By Alex Hanton,E. Reid Ross,Julia Lange,Tee Ngin Rui,W.H. Thomas  Published: May 06th, 2020 

By Luis Prada  Published: May 06th, 2020 

By Amanda Mannen  Published: May 06th, 2020 

By Isaac Cabe  Published: May 06th, 2020 

By Isaac Cabe  Published: May 07th, 2020 

By Dan Duddy  Published: May 07th, 2020 

By Luis Prada  Published: May 07th, 2020 

By JM McNab  Published: May 07th, 2020 

By Dan Duddy  Published: May 07th, 2020 

By Isaac Cabe  Published: May 07th, 2020 

By Cedric Voets  Published: May 08th, 2020 

By Amanda Mannen  Published: May 08th, 2020 

By JM McNab  Published: May 08th, 2020 

By Dan Duddy  Published: May 08th, 2020 

I am currently reading “Alice Isn’t Dead” by Joseph Fink and “Limetown” by Cote Smith, two novels which are based on dramatic fiction podcasts I like. And recently I saw a trailer for “Homecoming” which is a TV show based on a dramatic fiction podcast I like. I listen to a lot of podcasts due... Continue Reading →

Man, this landlord sounds like a particularly unpleasant human being. The guy continued to ignore the completely reasonable series of requests/complaints from the girls that were living in the property. Well, they certainly taught him a lesson. They ultimately engineered his demise by putting together a mold test that showed they were living in a pit of unwanted mold. Mold is no joke, man! 

Check out another landlord revenge story over here, with the time a tyrannical landlord tried to scam tenants and was dealt justice.