Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Aristotle used to say: Fight the power! Bitcoin price We closed the day, June 23 2020, at a price of $9,629. That’s a minor 0.14 percent decline in 24 hours, or -$14.42. It was the lowest closing price in one day. We’re still 52 percent below Bitcoin’s all-time high of $20,089 (December 17 2017)....

According to security firm Armor’s 2019 Black Market report, released this month, savvy criminals are selling cash on the dark web to avoid the risks associated with having to deal with the funds themselves. The report says this alarming trend gives buyers the chance to buy cash in various amounts – $10,000, $5,000, $2,500 – and all they have to do is prepay the criminal their 10-to-12 percent fee in Bitcoin and provide them with a bank or Paypal account they would like the money transferred into....

Exactly how the climate will respond to all this extra CO₂ is one of the central questions in climate science. Just how much will the climate actually change? A major new international assessment of the Earth’s climate sensitivity, now published in the journal Reviews of Geophysics, addresses this question. This research has improved our understanding of how much the world will eventually warm if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is maintained at double the level of pre-industrial times....

A pair of researchers recently published an analysis of 3.5 billion-years-old soil samples from Mars containing chemical compounds called “thiophenes” that could, potentially, be organic. If they are, it would be highly likely that bacteria once lived on the planet. Terrestrial thiophenes are considered tell-tale signs of life by Earthbound biologists. The presence of these possibly-organic compounds in martian soil represents the strongest evidence yet that life may have once existed anywhere other than Earth....

Up front: Nope. Machines can’t tell if a person is a racist. They also can’t tell if something someone has said or done is racist. And they certainly can’t determine if you’re thinking racist thoughts just by taking your pulse or measuring your O2 saturation levels with an Apple Watch-style device. That being said, this is fascinating research that could pave the way to a greater understanding of how unconscious bias and systemic racism fit together....

Roughly twice as large as Earth, with 8.6 times the mass of our homeworld, this exoplanet orbits within the habitable zone around its star, K2–18. This region of a solar system, sometimes called the Goldilocks zone, is the distance from a star that is neither too hot nor too cold, for liquid water to exist on the surface of a planet. “To establish the prospects for habitability, it is important to obtain a unified understanding of the interior and atmospheric conditions on the planet — in particular, whether liquid water can exist beneath the atmosphere,” Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the new research, stated....

A new AI study led by Western University could provide them with some pointers. The researchers say it’s the first systematic attempt at using machine learning to predict relationship satisfaction. “Satisfaction with romantic relationships has important implications for health, wellbeing, and work productivity,” said Western Psychology professor Samantha Joel in a statement. “But research on predictors of relationship quality is often limited in scope and scale, and carried out separately in individual laboratories....

Here, see for yourself. Would you want to chat with this face multiple times a week, every week? Okay, don’t answer that. But you get the picture. Luckily for me, I just found a way to improve the image quality using my Canon M50 mirrorless camera as a webcam instead of the one built into my laptop. Yeah, I know I said DSLR in the title, but it’s in the same space....

The group, called “I’m 10-15,” a reference to the Border Patrol code for “officer in custody of alien,” has over 9,500 members and began in 2016. According to its introduction page it exists to serve as a Facebook “family” for Border Patrol agents: Credit: ProPublica Per the ProPublica report, agents on numerous occasions engaged in commentary or shared memes illustrating a community-wide hatred for undocumented immigrants, liberals, and Democrats. One agent mocked the drowning deaths of an immigrant father and his two-year-old child, questioning whether an AP photo of the tragedy was faked as part of a liberal conspiracy....

MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) is a well-known term in the transportation space today and one of the elements which this commonly relates to is access and not ownership of mobility modes. It could be defined as a packaged service available to the user integrating new/existing shared mobility modes such as bikeshare, scootershare, carshare together with public transit. At movmi, we strongly believe that public transit forms the backbone of MaaS or as we also like to call it “integrated shared mobility....

It’s not unheard-of for esports professionals to be banned from competition for cheating – and it’s certainly not unusual to read “cyclist” and “doping” in the same headline. But in this case we’re presented with the unique question of whether competitors should be banned in real life for something they did in a virtual tournament. Wait, what’s e-racing? There’s a lot to unpack here, so let me catch you up....

Email is like an avalanche. What starts with just a few disruptions at the beginning can quickly turn into a rumbling landslide that can ultimately leave you buried underneath. Each time you buy from an online store or join a new digital group usually comes with new email ads, newsletters, or other pieces of digital filler flooding into your email box. And once you’re getting literally dozens of those each day, it’s easy for something truly important like a security alert or a client email or something personal to get lost in all that email white noise....

While this encounter felt like an invasion of my privacy, it also got me thinking about other biometric recognition devices which, for better or worse, are already integrated into our everyday lives. There are obvious examples: fingerprint scanners that unlock doors and facial recognition that allows payment through a phone. But there are other devices that do more than read an image — they can literally read people’s minds....

Despite Snapchat’s waning popularity after Facebook’s properties copied all its best features, the company isn’t totally giving up on Spectacles. Today it announced the Spectacles 3, introducing a second camera for better AR and pivoting to appeal a more luxury crowd. Accordingly, the price has shot up from $150 to $380. At first glance, that price jump is alarming; you’d think Snapchat would want to keep the price low to sell more glasses....

Masayoshi hopes such drastic measures will reassure shareholders of his firm’s resilience under threat of global recession. “This will allow us to strengthen our balance sheet while significantly reducing debt.” he said in a statement. [Read: Google’s coronavirus information site is now live] SoftBank now intends to purchase 45% of all shares that exist on the market, after it revealed a $4.5 billion buy-back scheme earlier this month. This is now the largest cash injection in the tech conglomerate’s 38-year history....

Back in February, Spotify announced that its 6,550 employees can choose where they want to work in the future. Whether that’s in an office, a coworking space, or a beach in Bali. It doesn’t matter! In 2020, Dropbox also announced they were going to have a ‘virtual first’ workplace. While employees will primarily work from home (or wherever they choose), they can also visit Dropbox’s previous offices which have now been rebranded as Dropbox Studios....

Yes, you could just read the information from a standard spreadsheet, but where’s the fun in that? The joy? The sense of being a smartass? Exactly. So, what I’ve done is put together a series of graphs that compare some key stats between the two models. Of course, facts and figures aren’t everything — making a phone is far more complex that just bashing components together — but they are entertaining....

The Swedish billionaire wants to acquire English Premier League side Arsenal, and is reportedly working with three of the club’s most celebrated former players on a takeover bid. — Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) April 23, 2021 Ek declared his interest on the same night thousands of Arsenal fans staged a protest against the club’s current regime. In typically tasteful and moderate style, they hung up an effigy of owner Stan Kroenke and a banner that read: “Kroenke-19: the American virus....

This personal experience has also inspired my research. As a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, I have engineered tiny nano-materials – objects about 10,000 times smaller than a grain of rice – to better deliver DNA into white blood cells called T-cells that defend us against cancer. My method – which I think of as the equivalent of FedEx and UPS – delivers DNA efficiently to T-cells that then transforms them into super-soldiers for tracking and attacking cancer cells....

It’s relatively affordable, starting at $550 and maxing out at $900. It’s a gorgeous laptop, with a mostly metal design, slim bezels, and solid construction that feels good to use. Even the plastic underside feels reassuringly firm. It’s small and light, with a 12.4-inch screen and a weight of 1.11 kg (2.45 lb). The keyboard and trackpad are fantastic for something so small. It performs well, with a full-fledged 10th Gen Core i5 processor....