World renowned sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik commemorates World Tiger Day – Times of India

NEW DELHI: World renowned sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik on Friday carved a larger-than-life tiger at Puri beach in Odisha to commemorate World Tiger Day. The award-winning artist took to Twitter to inspire his followers, saying India’s national animal was a symbol of its natural wealth.
“Tigers are symbols of India’s wildlife wealth. Let’s protect the national animal,” tweeted Pattnaik, who was photographed sitting next to his creation: a massive tiger reclining beside a simple slogan: ‘Save Us’

Bio-Concrete Heals Itself [video]

All concrete cracks over time. The cracks themselves are not so bad in most cases. But water seaps in and can freeze and melt, causing further damage.

Bio-concrete injects spores that can live for centuries… coming alive only when in contact with water. The bacteria grows until the water is gone and the crack filled.

How Much Are You Worth?

I love this. Not only does it show that the same material can be used to create different levels of value, it talks about what motivates the individual and what you think of yourself. Many times people are not self aware. They just don’t step back and take a real look at themselves. Gary Vaynerchuk pushes the concept of self awareness as the core to business success and “life” success. We all need to take a moment out of our busy days and contemplate the concept above. Are we a horseshoe or are we a watch spring? Life can be radically different if we simply set our minds to becoming something of greater value by being mindful.

Jenna Marbles delivered the supreme 100 layers of makeup video

Jenna Marbles delivered the supreme 100 layers of makeup video

“I’m not sure if [my face] could ever feel clean again.”

Videos of millennial makeup aficionados putting on 100 layers of things like foundation and Kylie lip kits have been catching the viral wave lately, so we should have been prepared for YouTuber Jenna Marbles‘ horrifying and hilarious makeup venture.

Marbles spent a long, disgusting 7.5 hours applying 100 layers of liquid lipstick, foundation, glitter nail polish, spray tan (on her arm), hairspray and fake eyelashes -all at once. 

The beauty products’ chemicals evidently seemed to have seeped through to her brain, because as the layers get thicker, her stream of consciousness gets wackier.

This article originally appeared at: http://mashable.com/2016/07/22/jenna-marbles-100-layers-all-makeup/#OJKCXhu5osqZ

What Amazon’s homepage looked like when it launched 21 years ago this month

Long before it became the world’s go-to, online source for virtually anything, Amazon.com was strictly a bookseller. And before the arrival of its slick, obsessively considered menus, navigation bars, and search algorithms, the $250 billion operation’s homepage was much more basic. A screen capture from a month after its July 1995 launch is a relic from the early days of web design and branding history.

Notable on the upper lefthand corner is Amazon’s first logo, featuring a snaky, river-like path over a stylized letter “A” on a faux marbled background. (The company’s current logo, with its clever “A to Z” visual pun, was introduced in January 2000)

(Amazon.com)

CEO Jeff Bezos, who left his job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and drove west with an idea to capitalize on the growing internet, sold his first book from the garage of a rented home in Seattle. The book was titled Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, and it was purchased for $27.95 by John Wainwright, an Australian computer scientist in Los Gatos, California. To honor its first customer, Amazon named an office building on its campus after Wainwright.

This Baby Imitating Rocky Balboa – The Next American Ninja Warrior?

Talk about being the next American Ninja Warrior in the making!! This kid’s timing is even perfectly synced to the the movie! There is something going on in that brain of his. Some kinetic understanding of his future talent I think! So cool to see this at such a young age. He must really like watching the movie instead of cartoons. Bravo little one, bravo. #eyeofthetiger

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCt89VSRe4w

Your Phone Is Poised to Get 10 Times Faster as FCC Approves 5G

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler took a seat, grasped a set of controls, and guided an excavator — that happened to be 1,400 miles away.

By moving dirt in Dallas through a remote hook-up from the FCC’s Washington offices earlier this year, Wheeler showed the promise of what could be the largest and most lucrative expansion of the internet yet.

The agency on Thursday took a major step toward boosting wireless speeds 10-fold by voting unanimously to open little-used airwaves to purposes as varied as remote surgery, lightning-fast video downloads and factory robotics. The network that will flow over the frequencies in the next few years will be known as 5G, or fifth generation, to succeed the 4G networks that carry music and movies to smartphones today.

“We’re turning loose the incredible innovators of this country,” Wheeler said just before the commissioners voted in Washington.

New Antennae

The airwaves involved were of little use until recently, because even though they carry a lot of data they don’t travel far and can be stopped by walls or even by rain drops. Engineers have begun to figure out how to aim and focus the transmissions to overcome these frailties, sending signals to new types of antennae that resemble compact smoke alarms rather than roadside towers.

The promise is an abundance of speedy information shot across short distances and linking up without the tiny delays known as latency that can plague even 4G connections, such as the barely perceptible delay that can make voice conversations awkward.

“These are huge blocks of spectrum that will deliver amazing applications to Americans,” said Meredith Attwell Baker, president of CTIA, a trade group for wireless companies including the top four U.S. carriers, AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. “This is a critical first step to ensure the U.S. is in a position to lead the world in 5G.”

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All four top U.S. mobile carriers have announced plans to test 5G technology, with partners including Cisco Systems Inc., Ericsson AB, Nokia OYJ, Qualcomm Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Connections are projected to double by 2020 and reach 500 billion 10 years later as more mobile devices, robots, light sensors and drones all become part of the so-called internet of things.

5G will feed massive machine-to-machine communications that will encompass “everything from smart homes to real-time cargo tracking to enhanced environmental monitoring and myriad applications yet to be conceived,” Reed Hundt, a former FCC chairman, said in a filing. Hundt is on the board of Ligado Networks, the wireless company formerly known as LightSquared.

Super Fast

“We’re talking about super-fast data rates, super-low latency: the kind of wireless any one would want that’s only a dream today,” said Dean Brenner, senior vice president for government affairs at Qualcomm Inc. The chipmaker based in San Diego, California, joined with Intel Corp., Verizon, Samsung, Nokia and Ericsson to ask the FCC to allow higher power for base stations than the agency initially proposed.

It’s not entirely clear what uses may emerge, said Brenner.

“When we were devising 4G no one was thinking of Uber, no one in Washington was thinking of Snapchat or Instagram,” Brenner said. “No one was thinking of Pokemon Go. The truth is, we don’t know.”

Qualcomm and competitors will work to deploy the technology as soon as possible, Brenner said. “This is going to be hyper-competitive, working with tremendous urgency,” he said.

2020 Deployment

People in the field often talk of deployment by 2020, said Baker, the trade group leader. “We’ll see what our companies can do,” she said.

The FCC slated airwaves in four different swathes for use by 5G. Some airwaves are to be auctioned for exclusive use by winning bidders, and others — mainly in frequencies that travel less far than the auctioned airwaves — are to be shared.

Interests including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and the New America public policy group asked that more airwaves be offered for shared use.

Carriers that win at auction may have incentive to deploy 5G only in crowded urban spaces, leaving other areas without coverage, said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at the Washington-based New America.

“Nobody really knows yet what 5G will be,” Calabrese said. “But the carriers have decided they want to control access to this spectrum for whatever it is that develops.”

This article originally appeared at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-14/promise-of-5g-wireless-seen-in-long-distance-dig-before-fcc-vote

What’s In A Beard: Study Combs Through The Bacteria On Your Face

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Whether you’re a hipster or a Hasid, a lumberjack or a Luigi, you’ve probably wondered whether facial hair—be it your own, or someone else’s—is clean. And while the answer depends largely on whether the owner of said beard or”stache sticks to the basic rules of hygiene, two recent studies suggest that beards tend to harbor fewer dangerous bacteria than clean-shaven faces.

“Not only were the bearded men less likely to harbor bacteria than their clean-shaven counterparts, but the clean-shaven men actually had higher rates of certain bacterial species,” said Carrie L. Kovarik, a dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in either study, in a press statement. “In general, we have no need to fear the beard.”

Full disclosure—I have a beard. And I’d like to believe that it isn’t full of more fecal matter than a toilet. And yet, until recently, the science was not on my side. Perhaps the biggest boon to facial hair PR came to light in 2014 after researchers were shocked to find that some beards swabbed harbored, “a degree of uncleanliness that would be somewhat disturbing.” I didn’t trim after reviewing the data—but I sure did scrub and shampoo a bit extra for the next few weeks.

But lately study after study has been coming up whiskers. The first of these studies appeared in the Journal Of Hospital Infection, and swabbed the beards of 408 male hospital workers and found that their beards were so sterile that clean-shaven men were a full three times more likely to carry dangerous bacteria on their faces than the cohort of hirsute healthcare workers. The study also found that hospital workers without facial hair were 10 percent more likely to carry MRSA colonies on their faces—MRSA being that really bad antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Then, a separate study upped the ante and examined surgeons’ faces. After having a group of bearded and clean shaven surgeons alternate between shaking their faces over a petri dish (partially to simulate surgical contamination and partially, we assume, to make fun of surgeons) they found that beards are at least as sterile as clean-shaven faces. “Bearded surgeons did not appear to have an increased likelihood of bacterial shedding compared with their nonbearded counterparts,” the authors conclude.

While neither study examined possible reasons for this disparity, Kovarik suggests that it may be due to the aggressive process of shaving. During shaving, tiny cuts mar the skin, possibly opening the door to bacteria infection and colonization. The results were likely due to, “micro-trauma to the skin that occurs during shaving, which could support bacterial growth,” Kovarik says.

Admittedly, both of these studies surveyed healthcare workers—a population that spends more time around infectious disease, but also tends to be more careful about hygiene for that very reason. So it’s not unthinkable that the cleanliness of my own beard may pale in comparison to the immaculate whorls of a surgeon’s tress or nurse’s sterile chops. But, at the very least, these studies suggest that all facial hair deserves to be judged on a case by case basis.

Excuse me, while I shampoo my beard.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.vocativ.com/339371/bacteria-in-beards/

Airbnb isn’t fair

Over the past few weeks Airbnb has sued the city of San Francisco, faced potentially devastating regulations in New York, and been called racist.

So, there’s a good chance you missed the company’s latest, more trivial update. But hotel owners sure didn’t.

What happened?

Yesterday Airbnb announced a partnership with three travel management companies -American Express Global Business Travel, BCD Travel, and Carlson Wagonlit Travel.

Those companies will now funnel their clients (which include IBM, McKinsey, and Microsoft) to Airbnb’s new corporate-focused platform, Airbnb for Business.

Uh-oh, hotels…

Last year Carlson Wagonlit Travel handled $24.2 billion in sales, with 92% coming from corporate bookings. AmEx GBT did $30 billion. BCD did $23.8 billion.

That’s Airbnb’s money now.

Growing up

On top of that, this signals that the “typical” Airbnb customer has changed. Just a few years ago Airbnb was for casual vacationers, college students abroad, and honeymooners.

Now, it’s for men and women on business trips, leaving the hotel industry with, well, I’m not sure…Division III soccer teams playing away games?

This article originally appeared at: http://thehustle.co/daily?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=hero

Lift Life: One Athlete’s Selfless Gift To His School

When a teen lifter was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, he had the opportunity to make a wish come true. He used it to give back to his school and community and build his own legacy of iron!