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Category Archives: Futurism

Marineland Under Investigation Amid 17 Beluga Deaths – Futurism

Two more beluga whales have died at Niagara Falls tourist attraction Marineland this month, raising the total number of whale deaths there to 17 since just 2019.

According to the Canadian Press, the park has been under investigation by Ontario's Animal Welfare Services since 2020.

Officials didn't reveal the exact cause of death of the latest two whales, but Marineland has since said the belugas "both died from torsion after valiant medical efforts to assist them," in a statement, referring to the twisting of bodily organs.

The latest news was met with outrage by critics, who are now calling for the government to shut the park down once and for all.

While the company maintains that the whales at its parks are well taken care of by experts, the deaths shed light on the ongoing and unnecessarily cruel act of holding large marine mammals in captivity for the entertainment of human visitors.

Marineland's park in Niagara Falls isn't even the only facility where its beluga whales are dying. According to the Canadian Press, three belugas have died at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, which bought the animals from Marineland in 2021.

The deaths have triggered an investigation by the US government as well.

According to a January report by the International Marine Mammal Project, there are at least 54 orcas in captivity in marine parks worldwide. The US accounts for 18 of them, spread out over three SeaWorld parks.

In comparison, there are more than an estimated 300 beluga whales currently being kept in captivity globally.

According to the Canadian Press, there were 37 beluga whales at Marineland alone as of last summer.

The mammals' habitats are being degraded by climate change, forcing tens of thousands of belugas to change their migration patterns and feeding grounds. Despite those considerable threats, they're easily stressed by being confined. They also often suffer from boredom and are more susceptible to health issues.

Ontario's Animal Welfare Services have already found that belugas have been in distress due to poor water quality, per the report.

In short, it's astonishing Marineland's Canadian attraction is still in operation, and it's still unclear what will come of the ongoing investigation.

Animal protection advocates are now calling for the park to be shut down, accusing the government of turning a blind eye to the deaths.

"Sixteen beluga whales, and one orca have died at Marineland since 2019," said Melissa Matlow, campaign director of the Canadian nonprofit World Animal Protection, in a statement. "Marineland has lost the trust of the public and has no business caring for animals."

"Enough is enough Marineland is the prime example of Ontario's broken system of regulations of animal attractions," she added. "This is a law and order issue, and the provincial government needs to address this issue immediately for the safety and security of the animals that remain at the facility."

"Marineland continues to try to hide the severity of the situation their animals are enduring, but dead whales are difficult to hide," former Marineland trainer turned critic Phil Demers told the Canadian Press. "When will there be accountability? Where is the government?"

More on whales: The Suspected Russian Spy Whale Isn't Looking So Good

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Rich People Hiking Mount Everest Now Forced to Bring Their Poop Back With Them – Futurism

Mount Everest is basically a mountain of human dung. Hiker's Duty

Back in the good old days of summiting Mount Everest, you could just shimmy down your pants, drop a deuce, and leave it right there on the snowy ground.

The problem with just leaving poop on the highest peak in the world is that the environ's extremely cold temperatures are not at all conducive to degrading biological matter. In addition, poop runoff is a problem at lower elevations to the degree that they've contaminated the local watershed.

Basically, Mount Everest is covered in human feces. It's a problem that hikers, sherpas and local officials have been complaining about for years.

But now, according to CNN, new poop rules are in place. If you want to climb Mount Everest from Nepal, the most common entryway, you gotta take your crap back with you instead of leaving it on the mountain.

Hikers, who are already paying tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest, are required to bring with them two bags for their poop, each of which can be used for six bowel movements. When you put poop in the bag, officials say, chemicals inside cancel out the smell and make the poop solid.

The issue with leaving excrement on the mountain, besides it being unsightly, is that it can contaminate the supposedly pristine snow and glacier ice of the landscape. Melted runoff can pollute drinking water, making climbers and non-climbers alike sick.

"Every year, it is getting worse with poop," Everest veteran climber Lakpa Rita told Outside magazine back in 2015. "People just dig holes at Camps I and II, and it melts out and smells terrible. When it melts out, it gets into the water, and people are getting sick at every camp."

"The only good part about the human waste situation above Base Camp is that shit freezes fast at 8,000 meters," Everest guide Adrian Ballinger told the magazine. "Beyond that, its an inexcusable embarrassment. If you walk from one tent to another in Camp II or IV, you will step in shit. If you melt snow from the camp areas, you are drinking shit."

The other problem that officials have had to contend with is trash on the mountain, from ruined tents to oxygen canisters. The peak has been called the "worlds highest garbage dump."

In other words, it's high time for these wealthy tourists to bring their crap back with them.

More on Mount Everest: Climate Change is Thawing Out the Corpses on Mt. Everest

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Zuckerberg Brags About Feeding Cows Macadamia Nuts and Beer at His Alleged Doomsday Bunker – Futurism

"They'll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here." Poster's Brain

Move over, Sam Altman it looks like there's a new doomsday-prepping tech titan in town.

As recent social media posts and news stories indicate, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is living someone's dream. Over the past few days, the BBQ-loving elder millennial shared on Instagram which, of course, he owns a video of him playing with a giant catapult and announced that he has been raising high-end cattle on his ranch in Hawaii.

"The cattle are wagyu and angus, and they'll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch," Zuckerberg wrote in the caption of one of the posts. "We want the whole process to be local and vertically integrated. Each cow eats 5,000-10,000 pounds of food each year, so that's a lot of acres of macadamia trees."

He went on to add that his daughters both help plant the "mac trees" and assist in the care of the Zuckerberg-Chan family's animals, which hopefully is their idea.

If viewed in a vacuum, these dadposts about Zuckerberg's goings-on would be less exciting, even, than his admission that he'd made bracelets and decorated his face with adhesive rhinestones when taking his daughters and their friends to see Taylor Swift last fall.

But when you add into the equationWired's recent reporting about the secret doomsday bunker on the family's palatial Hawaiian compound, which is said to cost an estimated $100 million to build, that IG activity starts to look more like not-so-humblebrags about having a private food source and weaponry in the event of global catastrophe.

So secretive is the estate, which is still under construction, that any security or grounds personnel working there would be fired immediately if caught speaking to the press.

"Its fight club," a former contractor told Wired. "We dont talk about fight club."

To be clear, there's absolutely nothing unusual about the uber-rich and techy crowd getting into hoarding remote properties, food stockades and weapons caches for the end of the world. Just ask OpenAI's embattled CEO, who once reportedly bragged years ago to people at a party that he "prep[s] for survival" from such catastrophes as lab-made virus leaks and "AI that attacks us"(yes, the irony is palpable.)

"I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to," Altman told folks gathered around a firepit at a long-ago Y Combinator party, per The New Yorker.

Whatever Zuckerberg's got at that giant Kauai estate is anyone's guess, but given his penchant for Sweet Baby Ray's barbeque sauce, he may have a room dedicated to the delicious sauce.

More on Zuckerberg: Elon Musk Started Screaming About Zuckerberg Immediately After Signing Twitter Deal

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Rejoice! Device That Sprays Your Butthole Now Connects to Alexa for Voice Control – Futurism

Alexa, clean my butt. Smart Throne

Kohler, a name that's practically synonymous with chic, premium plumbing, has long been on top of the smart toilet game.

Now, it's bringing its tech toilet offerings to the masses, announcing a new voice-controlled bidet seat called the PureWash E930 that you can install on your peasant porcelain throne to wash your ass on uttered or grunted royal command.

At $2,149, the PureWash E930 is far cheaper than getting a full blown toilet from Kohler's smart offerings. At that still exorbitant price point and here's the kicker your bidet comes with Amazon Alexa and Google Home compatibility built-in, according to The Verge. So, yes: you'll have to connect your fancy toilet hardware to devices known to be privacy nightmares to get the most out its lavatorial luxury.

But if you're willing to pay that price, Kohler lets you use the bidet's many featuresto get your business out of the way without so much as lifting a finger.

And let it be said that the bidet's spray is ridiculously fine-tuneable. It comes with oscillating and pulsating spray modes. The water pressure is adjustable, and so is the temperature. A gentler child mode is included, too. And for "consistent comfort," Kohler says the water is continuously heated, per The Verge. Rest assured that when nature calls, your E930 won't leave you cold.

The luxuries don't end there. The bidet thoughtfully pre-mists the toilet bowl for more effective flushing. It automatically opens and closes. It also has a self-cleaning mode using UV light, and a warm air dryer to keep your buns toasty as they're dried off. Built in LEDs can be used as a nightlight. All of these little features can be linked to Kohler's app to let you save and toggle your preferences at a click.

If getting your smartphone involved is too much tech for you and having to utter the steps of your sacred toilet routine aloud is a no-no Kohler's product also comes with a remote control.

And hey, if this is the kind of stuff you want to blow your hard-earned dough on, go for it. But be apprised that smart gadgetsencroaching on theprivacy of the bathroom has resulted in shocking violations of trust in the past.

More on tech: Amazon Caught Selling Bathroom Spy Cam Disguised as Clothes Hook

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Gaping Hole in Boeing 737 Linked to Stuffing More Passengers Into Flights – Futurism

Last week, passengers on board an Alaska Airlines flight were rattled by a terrifying incident involving a "door plug" being ripped out of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet that was taking them from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California.

The following "violent explosive decompression event," as National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy later described it, forced pilots to return back to the ground though luckily, nobody got seriously injured.

As regulators pore over the data the offending door plug has since been recovered alongside a fully intact iPhone from one of the passengers new questions have arisen over the events that led to the incident.

As The American Prospect reports, the plug door, which was designed to seal a hole in the fuselage that's used in some other configurations as a door opening, was possibly the result of "cost-cutting production techniques to facilitate cramming more passengers into the cabin."

The plug door was a fix to still meet Federal Aviation Administration requirements in the case of high-capacity passenger seat layouts without having to make major changes to the fuselage design.

"There are a lot of different ways to configure an aircraft to pack in air travelers like cattle, but it changed the calculus for manufacturers to meet standards," airline industry expert Bill McGee told the Prospect.

Worse yet, court documents obtained by The Lever suggest that former employees at Boeing spinoff Spirit AeroSystems, the company Boeing subcontracted to manufacture these plug doors, told Boeing officials about an "excessive amount of defects."

Instead of heeding these warnings, internal correspondence reviewed by The Lever suggest that officials told these former employees to falsify records.

One employee told a coworker that "he believed it was just a matter of time until a major defect escaped to a customer," per the report.

As more data comes to light, the situation is starting to look grim for Boeing and the timing couldn't be worse. The company has already been through several crises over the last couple of years, following two fateful crashes in 2018 and 2019 involving 737 MAX 8 aircraft that left 346 people dead.

As for the later model, according to theNew York Times, Alaska Airlines instructed MAX 9 planes not to fly over water due to warning lights indicating a loss of cabin pressure, though it's unclear if the latest incident was related to this issue.

In August, Boeing said it had identified quality problems related to parts supplied by Spirit. However, the issue was related to the planes' aft pressure bulkheads, not plug doors.

After Boeing and Spirit jointly announced an expanded investigation, the FAA said that there was "no immediate safety concern" as a result of the defective bulkheads.

So who's at fault following the latest incident? Was it Boeing, which subcontracted out the plug door, or did regulators fail to enforce rules that could've stopped the latest incident from happening in the first place? Or perhaps a mix of both?

The investigation has only begun, and we're only starting to get a clearer picture of the outrageous accident.

More on the incident: Schoolteacher Finds Door Plug That Fell Off Boeing 737 in His Backyard

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Wizards of the Coast Denies "Magic: The Gathering" Art Was AI-Generated, Then Admits It Was – Futurism

In a change of heart, "Magic: The Gathering" and "Dungeons & Dragons" publisher Wizards of the Coast has admitted to using generative AI in a recent promo image after initially claiming AI wasn't used.

Last week, users on social media noticed some strange incongruities in the image, a steampunk scene showcasing some of the company's new "Magic" cards.

After users pointed out wonky dials, wires that didn't line up, and lightbulbs that appeared to have far too many filaments, the company initially denied that it or its contractor had used any AI tools.

"This art was created by humans and not AI," Wizards of the Coast wrote in a since-deleted tweet.

The claim didn't sit well with keen onlookers, who kept pressing the company on the telltale details.

"Either you are lying to us or your artist is lying to you," tabletop game creator Tom Cartos tweeted. "This is blatantly AI, it took me less than a minute to find multiple examples of clear AI generation."

Now, in an apparent attempt to save face in light of a massive wave of users flooding the company's social media accounts, the official "Magic" X account issued a new statement.

"Well, we made a mistake earlier when we said that a marketing image we posted was not created using AI," it reads. "As you, our diligent community pointed out, it looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative, even if a human did the work to create the overall image."

The controversy highlights a raging debate surrounding the use of generative AI tools in creative fields, a practice that many artists now worry may undermine their livelihoods.

It's an especially egregious example, given Wizards of the Coast's close relationship with illustrators and animators. Their well-loved products make use of extensive illustrations and other creative works.

Worse yet, the company had promised last year to introduce strict rules regarding the use of such tools after a veteran D&Dartist admitted to using AI to enhance images for a book.

The company had already landed in hot water early last year for severely restricting how D&D-inspired game creators could adapt the game's base rules in an apparent attempt to cash in.

At the time, Wizards of the Coast reneged on its new rules following a massive outcry from fans and left its old rules in place instead.

Now, the latest offense seems unlikely to sit well with the company's community.

"We already made clear that we require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to theMagicTCG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create finalMagic products," the company wrote in its latest statement.

Wizards isn't the only company to get caught using generative AI. Digital pen tablet maker Wacom was also recently accused of using AI to generate an image of an illustrated dragon whose body parts didn't line up.

In short, creatives' jobs are on the line, and the public is on the lookout.

"Jobs are going in real time, makes me nauseous," film concept artist and illustrator Reid Southen tweeted in response to the news.

"It's insane that they'll damage their brands to save a few bucks," he added in a follow-up.

More on generative AI: Image Database Powering Google's AI Contains Explicit Images of Children

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