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News Image Tim Walz Rally Goes Live on World of Warcraft Twitch Stream

This is the latest chapter of the Kamala Harris campaign’s effort to reach young male voters.

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Rapid analysis finds climate change’s fingerprint on Hurricane Helene

Hurricane Helene crossed the Gulf of Mexico at a time when sea surface temperatures were at record highs and then barreled into a region where heavy rains had left the ground saturated. The result was historic, catastrophic flooding. One key question is how soon we might expect history to repeat itself. Our rapidly warming planet has tilted the odds in favor of some extreme weather events in a way that means we can expect some events that had been extremely rare to start occurring with some regularity. Our first stab at understanding climate change's influence on Helene was released on Wednesday, and it suggests that rainfall of the sort experienced by the Carolinas may now be a once-in-70-year event, which could have implications for how we rebuild some of the communities shattered by the rain. The quick analysis was done by the World Weather Attribution project, which has developed peer-reviewed methods of looking for the fingerprints of climate change in major weather events. In general, this involves identifying the key weather patterns that produced the event and then exploring their frequency using climate models run with and without the carbon dioxide we've added to the atmosphere. Read full article

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News Image Time Doesn’t Wait, This 26% Off Canon Portable Document Scanner Will Last Until Tonight Only for Prime Day

Preserve and save everything from receipts to bank statements and everything in between, thanks to this prime day deal.

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News Image Is China pulling ahead in AI video synthesis? We put Minimax to the test.

If 2022 was the year AI image generators went mainstream, 2024 has arguably been the year that AI video synthesis models exploded in capability. These models, while not yet perfect, can generate new videos from text descriptions called prompts, still images, or existing videos. After OpenAI made waves with Sora in February, two major AI models emerged from China: Kuaishou Technology's Kling and Minimax's video-01. Both Chinese models have already powered numerous viral AI-generated video projects, accelerating meme culture in weird new ways, including a recent shot-for-shot translation of the Princess Mononoke trailer using Kling that inspired death threats and a series of videos created with Minimax's platform. The videos show a synthesized version of TV chef Gordon Ramsay doing ridiculous things. After 22 million views and thousands of death threats, I felt like I needed to take this post down for my own mental health. This trailer was an EXPERIMENT to show my 300 friends on X how far we've coming in 16 months.I'm putting it back up to keep the conversation going. pic.twitter.com/tFpRPm9BMv Kling first emerged in June, and it can generate two minutes of 1080p HD video at 30 frames per second with a level of detail and coherency that some think surpasses Sora. It's currently only available to people with a Chinese telephone number, and we have not yet used it ourselves. Read full article

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News Image SpaceX Reportedly Strong-Arms Spectrum From Rivals Who Want a Ride on a Rocket

SpaceX operates flights to space as well as a satellite internet division with multiple rivals who rely on those flights.

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News Image The Internet Archive is under attack, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts

When visiting The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The Verge was greeted by a pop-up claiming the site had been hacked. Just after 9PM ET, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle confirmed the breach and said the website had been defaced with the notification via a JavaScript library. Here’s what the popup said: “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!” HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a website where people can look up whether or not their information has been published in data leaked from cyber attacks. HIBP operator Troy Hunt confirmed to Bleeping Computer that...

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News Image Few Hours Left To Get the Nearly 50% Off Anker Power Bank That Can Fully Charge an iPhone Nearly 5 Times Over

Get the Anker power bank with a smart digital display for just $80 — down from $150 for Prime Day.

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Crypto-stealing malware campaign infects 28,000 people

Over 28,000 people from Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and other countries in the Eurasian region were impacted by a large-scale cryptocurrency-stealing malware campaign....

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Drug makers can’t make knockoff weight-loss drugs anymore—and they’re mad

Compounding pharmacies are suing the Food and Drug Administration so they can keep making imitation versions of popular—and lucrative—tirzepatide drugs, namely knockoffs of Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss. Generally, compounding pharmacies make customized formulations of drugs for patients with specific needs, like when a patient has an allergy to a filler ingredient or if a child needs a liquid version of a drug that normally comes as a capsule. But larger compounding operations are also legally allowed to make imitations of branded drugs if those drugs are in short supply, acting as a stopgap for patients. Tirzepatide has certainly been in short supply in recent years. Given the high prevalence of diabetes and obesity in America and the drug's effectiveness, demand for tirzepatide and other drugs in the new GLP-1 class have skyrocketed, and many patients have struggled to fill prescriptions. The FDA placed tirzepatide on its drug shortage list in December of 2022—and that's where it remained until last week. Read full article

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News Image 329 Best Prime Day Deals Day 2, Vetted By Our Gear Pros (Oct 2024)

There are still a few hours left to claim the best Prime Day deals. We've been obsessively tracking prices on editor-tested and approved gear starting at $6 to bring you the best bets.

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News Image The shady origins of the climate haven myth

The term “climate haven” never made much sense. After Hurricane Helene dumped two feet of rain on western North Carolina, many major media outlets marveled at how Asheville, which had been celebrated as a climate haven, had been devastated by a climate-related disaster.  Some in the media later reported accurately that climate havens don’t actually exist. But that still raises the question: Where did this climate haven concept even come from? Well before humans began putting billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, entire populations would migrate toward better conditions in search of a place with milder weather or more fertile soil or the absence of drought.  Because of its speed and scale, however, human-caused climate change is especially extreme, and everywhere will be impacted by some degree of risk. There is no completely safe haven. Which is part of how we ended up talking about the idea of climate havens. It’s wishful thinking. At least that’s what several experts told me after Helene laid a path of destruction across the Southeast and as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. As the impacts of climate change became more real and apparent, the media as well as local leaders started looking for a better story to tell. “People are desperate for optimism,” said Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, who described the concept of climate havens as a fiction. “It gives people hope.” Keenan actually blames himself for helping to popularize the term. For a concept that feels so widespread now, it’s surprisingly hard to find much mention of climate havens in the media before 2018. That was when the Guardian quoted Keenan in a piece about where you should move to save yourself from climate change that used the phrase “safe havens.” Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, were Keenan’s suggestions.  The concept gained more traction a few months later, when Mayor Byron W. Brown referred to Buffalo as a “climate refuge” in his 2019 state of the city address, followed by outlets like Bloomberg and Quartz referring to Buffalo as a climate haven. The New York Times did a whole spread on “climate-proof Duluth,” a slogan Keenan wrote as part of an economic development package commissioned by the city. He told me it was just a joke that got pulled out of context. It’s hard to know how responsible one professor with a knack for marketing was for the mainstreaming of the climate haven concept. But it’s easy to see why local governments would latch onto it.  The Census Bureau estimates that as climate change warms the planet over the next several decades, 100 million will migrate into and around the US. Increased flood risk may have already pushed several million people out of coastal and low-lying areas across the US, as wildfires start to raise questions about migration in the West.  Inland cities, namely those along the Rust Belt that have been losing population for years, see an opportunity to pull those people in. “The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy,” said Billy Fleming, director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “To the extent that a climate refuge even exists, it’s not a particularly physical or geophysical phenomenon. It’s social and economic.” Fleming added that, for these would-be climate havens, attracting new residents is a means to pull in more tax revenue and create wealth for the community. “It’s about keeping the real estate machine churning,” he added, “which is the thing that pays for everything else in the city.” The real estate industry has taken notice. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a new feature that displays climate risk scores on listing pages alongside interactive maps and insurance requirements. Now, you can look up an address and see, on a scale of one to 10, the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures, and wildfires for that property, based on data provided by the climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, launched its own climate risk index using First Street data earlier this year. The new climate risk scores on Zillow and Redfin can’t tell you with any certainty whether you’ll be affected by a natural disaster if you move into any given house. But this is a tool that can help guide decisions about how you might want to insure your property and think about its long-term value.  It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to help people find the perfect home, are doing the work to show that climate risk is not binary. There are no homes completely free of risk for the same reasons that there’s no such thing as a perfect climate haven.  Climate risk is a complicated equation that complicates the already difficult and complex calculus of buying a home. Better access to data about risk can help, and a bit more transparency about the insurance aspect of homeownership is especially useful, as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters that come with it. “As we start to see insurance costs increase, all that starts to impact that affordability question,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, told me. “It’ll help the housing market move towards a much healthier place, where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have options to meet them.” That said, knowledge of risk isn’t keeping people from moving to disaster-prone parts of the country right now. People move to new parts of the country for countless different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job prospects, and affordable housing. Those are a few of the reasons why high-risk counties across the country are growing faster than low-risk counties, even in the face of future climate catastrophes, which are both unpredictable and inevitable. It’s almost unfathomable to know how to prepare ourselves properly for the worst-case scenario. “The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen,” said Vivek Shandas, an urban planning professor at Portland State University. “No matter what we think might be a manageable level of preparedness and infrastructure, we’re still going to see cracks, and we’re still going to see breakages.”That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls or find new ways to fight wildfires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate havens by making cities more resilient to the risks they face. We can be optimistic about that future. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Environment Read on Vox
News Image Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s Answer to Arachnophobia Mode Is Just Not Having Spiders at All

For the first time in the fantasy gaming series' history, players will not be menaced by giant, eight-legged beasties. There's plenty of other things trying to eat you, though.

Entertainment Read on Gizmodo
News Image Listen to Green Day’s Best Song on a Big Mouth Billie Bass

Or, try your luck with a wax cylinder copy of 'When I Come Around.'

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“Sticky” steering sparks huge recall for Honda, 1.7M cars affected

Honda is recalling almost 1.7 million vehicles due to a steering defect. An improperly made part can cause certain cars' steering to become "sticky"—never an attribute one wants in a moving vehicle. The problem affects a range of newer Hondas and an Acura; the earliest the defective parts were used on any vehicle was February 2021. But it applies to the following: Honda says that a combination of environmental heat, moisture, and "an insufficient annealing process and high load single unit break-in during production of the worm wheel" means there's too much pressure and not enough grease between the worm wheel and worm gear. On top of that, the worm gear spring isn't quite right, "resulting in higher friction and increased torque fluctuation when steering. Read full article

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News Image Still Time to Get 32% Off This Best-Selling Bluetooth Turntable, Record Low Price for Prime Day

Save over 30% on an Audio-Technica entry-level record player that can connect to speakers over Bluetooth.

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Tesla Robotaxi reveal: What to expect

Tesla is gearing up to reveal its Robotaxi this Thursday, and everyone wants to know what it will look like, whether Tesla will unveil a commercialization strategy, and what outrageous timelines Elon Musk might announce to bump Tesla’s stock.  The “We, Robot” event will take place at 7 p.m. PT at Warner Bros. Discovery’s movie […]

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News Image These $40,000 Wireless Speakers Are Like a Spa for Your Ears

It seems unfair that you need to pay so much money for music to sound this good.

Entertainment Read on Gizmodo