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Drink water and eat the water bottle too: edible water bottles are here!
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- Drink water and eat the water bottle too: edible water bottles are here!
London, Apr 29: Finished drinking your bottle of water? Now eat it! A design student in the UK has developed an edible bottle that could rid the world of excess plastic waste. Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, along with fellow students from Imperial College London, has been working on the Ooho water bottle for the past few years.
The bottle is made from edible material, looks like a jellyfish, and has the potential to put an end to the bottled water industry, Smithsonian.com reported.
The Ooho bottle is inspired by the juice-filled pearls added to bubble tea and the creations of legendary Spanish chef Ferran Adria, who uses a technique for encasing liquids in edible membranes known as sheperification.Gonzalez and his team first took a frozen ball of water and dipped it into a calcium chloride solution, which formed a gelatinous layer.
The frozen ball was then soaked in another solution made from brown algae extract, which encapsulated the ice in a second squishy membrane that further reinforced the structure. Keeping the frozen water in the algae solution for long periods of time allowed the mould to become thicker and stronger.
"The main point in manipulating the water as solid ice during the encapsulation is to make it possible to get bigger spheres and allow the calcium and algae to stay exclusively in the membrane," Gonzalez said.
The Ooho has been tested in some European cities, but the researchers need to perfect it, as their edible bottles still don't hold large amounts of water and also can't be resealed. Even with the Ooho's fortified layers, Gonzalez describes the container's strength as comparable to the skin of a fruit. "We're trying to address this with a double container," he said.
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Users shun WhatsApp to join Telegram, Signal amid data concerns
New Delhi, Jan 9: As WhatsApp teases users to either give their consent to sharing data with Facebook or lose their accounts after February 8, rival Telegram's Founder and CEO Pavel Durov on Saturday slammed the social media giant, saying it is no surprise that the flight of users from WhatsApp to Telegram, already ongoing for a few years, has accelerated.
According to Durov, Facebook has an entire department devoted to figuring out why Telegram is so popular.
"Imagine dozens of employees working on just that full-time. I am happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give away our secret for free: respect your users," he said in a statement.
At about 500 million users and growing, Telegram has become a major problem for the Facebook corporation.
"Unable to compete with Telegram in quality and privacy, Facebook's WhatsApp seems to have switched to covert marketing: Wikipedia editors have recently exposed multiple paid bots adding biased information into the WhatsApp Wikipedia article," Durov claimed.
"We have also detected bots which spread inaccurate information about Telegram on social media".
Millions of people are outraged by the latest change in WhatsApp Terms, which now say users must feed all their private data to Facebook's ad engine.
In 2019 alone, Facebook spent almost $10 billion on marketing.
Durov said that unlike Facebook, Telegram doesn't spend any money, let alone billions of dollars, on marketing.
"We believe that people are smart enough to choose what is best for them. And, judging by the half a billion people using Telegram, this belief is justified," he said.
Not just Telegram but another encrypted messaging app Signal has seen a surge in new sign ins after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk vouched for it.
"Verification codes are currently delayed across several providers because so many new people are trying to join Signal right now (we can barely register our excitement). We are working with carriers to resolve this as quickly as possible. Hang in there," Signal tweeted.
"Everyone should be able to register without delay again. Thanks to all of the carriers who flipped the right switches so that people can keep switching," the company further said.
Over 400 million Indian WhatsApp users this week received an in-app notification from WhatsApp as part of an upcoming global roll-out for over 2 billion users, asking them to either accept the changes in its Terms of Service and privacy policy by February 8 or their accounts will be deleted.
The in-app notification did not elicit much details but clicking on the links clearly mentioned the key changes in how WhatsApp will collect and process users' information going forward, and the partnership with Facebook, its parent company, as part of a larger unification drive between the family of apps.
To recall, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in October said that the company is working hard to merge Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp so that they can start to function a little bit more like one connected interoperable system.
In a bid to allow cross-messaging among its family of apps, Facebook has reportedly started merging Instagram and Messenger chats. The social network has already integrated Messenger rooms with WhatsApp on the Web.
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People are now becoming interested in their privacy and it is a good signal for what comes into other sectors especially the world of finance. The surge in the use of Bitcoin and crypto of late could be also attributed to the taste people are developing for privacy. Even in Bitcoin, tools like Bitcoinmix and others are also recording spiking usage, all for privacy. Many people are now becoming woke.
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Bitcoin set to dominate cryptocurrency in 2021 as it continues to hit new highs
Well-known cryptocurrency Bitcoin has witnessed sharp fluctuations over a couple of days and on Monday, it fell sharply, losing ground from a record high of $34,800 to almost $30,000, with traders citing volatility in the highly leveraged futures markets. Earlier, the world's most well-known cryptocurrency smashed through $34,000 for the first time ever in its entire history of 12 years on Sunday.
The latest gains come two days after Bitcoin closed out a year in which the cryptocurrency rose more than 300%, with an almost 50% gain in December alone. Despite ups and downs, this year is already shaping up to be the Year of Bitcoin (BTC).
Last year already witnessed a ground-breaking evolution in BTC adaptation. According to JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bitcoin has the potential to reach $146,000 in the long term.
"Global GDP is about $80 to $82 trillion and if 2.5 % of world GDP is involved in currency hedging, for sake of argument, then Bitcoin could easily take a share of that space because it is proving itself to be a store of value that investors can hold over a one to two year period," reports Forbes.
Bitcoin has seen an unprecedented rise this year, with its value witnessing a 240% jump in 2020.
According to Vladimir Signorelli, founder of Bretton Woods Research in Long Valley, New Jersey, these valuations are being driven by the pandemic.
"But every major central bank in the world is signalling they're going to print as much money as necessary so as a finite store of value, Bitcoin can rise against every major currency because there is a finite amount of Bitcoin in the world," the report quoted Signorelli as saying.
Buyers are aggressively accumulating more and more Bitcoin. This is the driving factor that has propelled the price growth of BTC towards this new all-time high value.
The market capitalisation of Bitcoin has also skyrocketed above the $600 billion mark.
A major jump in Bitcoin price -- from $5,000 to $25,000 -- was seen after PayPal - the online payment major - announced in March that it will enable its account holders to use Bitcoin.
A debate on whether Bitcoin should be seen as a form of money, an asset, or a commodity has been raging since the cryptocurrency was launched in 2009.
After the unit crossed $1,000 for the first time in 2013, it has been increasingly attracting the attention of financial institutions.
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Google, Facebook, Microsoft halt political contributions after Capitol riot
Washington, Jan 12: Facebook, Google and Microsoft have announced that they were freezing political contributions from their political action committees (PAC) in the wake of the January 6 riot in the US Capitol by President Donald Trump's supporters.
"Following last week's awful violence in D.C., we are pausing all of our PAC contributions for at least the current quarter, while we review our policies," Xinhua news agency quoted Facebook spokesman Andy Stone as saying in a statement on Monday.
Alphabet Inc's Google said it would pause contributions from its PAC.
"We have frozen all NetPAC political contributions while we review and reassess its policies following last week's deeply troubling events," a Google spokesperson said.
Microsoft said the company is halting its political spending until after it assesses the implications of last week's events.
"The PAC regularly pauses its donations in the first quarter of a new Congress, but it will take additional steps this year to consider these recent events and consult with employees," the company said in a statement.
Also on Monday night, Amazon announced that it will pause donations from its PAC to lawmakers who voted against the certification of the presidential election results.
"We intend to discuss our concerns directly with those Members we have previously supported and will evaluate their responses as we consider future PAC contributions," an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement.
The attack on the Capitol building took place on January 6 while Congress was in session considering the ratification of the electoral college votes electing Joe Biden as President and Kamala Harris as Vice President.
Before the violence, Trump, who has claimed that their election was invalid because there was massive fraud, told a rally of his supporters before the Congress session began to go there.
A section of his supporters stormed the Capital and invaded the Senate chamber and the offices of the Speaker and others, bring the session to a halt and evacuating the legislators to safe places.
Five people, including a police officer, were killed during the riots.
Congress met later and put its seal on the election of Biden and Harris, who will be sworn-in on January 20.
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