Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 88
August 31, 2017
Bitcoin Price Comes Close to $4,700 As Latest Jump Takes Altcoins Higher
Bitcoin has hit yet another all-time high as virtually all the top 50 cryptocurrency markets rally.
Data from Coinmarketcap and Bitcointicker shows Thursday post Bitcoin highs of $4,687 on Bitstamp, beating the previous record of $4,576 Aug. 29.
The latest move upwards resulted in a consolidated effort from the biggest altcoins tracked by Coinmarketcap, with 95 percent of the top 50 posting overall gains in the 24 hours to press time.
Bitcoin is continuing to gain as commentators increasingly put faith in a test of the highly significant $5,000 barrier in the short term.
Various figures have been extremely bullish on Bitcoin reaching $5,000 sooner rather than later, ignoring criticism that the virtual currency remains in a bubble and will ultimately correct downwards in a manner similar to previous price spikes.
Commenting on the current price action, Civic CEO Vinny Lingham suggested the mid-$4,000s was a “nice consolidation,” but for a crucial upwards of downwards move, some external influence was needed.
Bitcoin is consolidating nicely at these levels but seems to need a catalyst for a breakout or a retrace…
— Vinny Lingham (@VinnyLingham) August 31, 2017
Meanwhile, Ethereum (ETH) has also posted near-record highs as news comes of developers signing a deal with a Russian state-owned bank.
The partnership aims to increase Ethereum expertise in the country, as well as study suitable state-sanctioned use cases for Ethereum Blockchain technology.
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‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Recruits Black Panther’s Sister
The already-massive cast of Avengers: Infinity War keeps growing by the minute, and another superhero supporting character has been recruited for the cause.
Black Panther actress Letitia Wright confirmed that she will appear in the third Avengers film as Shuri, the younger sister to Chadwick Boseman‘s T’Challa.
Wright confirmed that she will appear in the superhero super-sequel on Twitter, writing “Blessings … super excited to be a part of this,” in a quote-tweet of IMDB’s casting announcement.
Blessings ???????????? super excited to be apart of this. https://t.co/YXhApFndWV
— Letitia Wright (@letitiawright) August 25, 2017
Shuri is a genius inventor and member of the Royal Family of Wakanda who will be introduced in Black Panther. She joins Winston Duke‘s M’Baku and Martin Freeman‘s Everett Ross in making the leap from Black Panther to Infinity War.
Avengers: Infinity War promises to be the superhero showdown of the century. With the members of the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy teaming up to combat the threat of Thanos and his minions, it seems like there wouldn’t be room for much else.
Indeed, the movie’s promise of featuring more than 30 superheroes in one single shot sounds almost like too much as it is. Back in June, when Black Widow actress Scarlett Johansson described this scene, she confirmed there were about 60 Marvel characters in Infinity War alone, and that number just keeps on getting bigger.
The timing of this news is somewhat confusing, as Avengers: Infinity War was reported to have wrapped filming in July, as the cast moved on immediately film Avengers 4. This may just be a late piece of casting news, with Wright having already filmed her part in Infinity War with little fanfare. Though, it may indicate that Wright is actually playing a part in Avengers 4, the production news for which is often confused with Infinity War since it was initally meant to be the second in a two-parter.
The growing ensemble cast includes Robert Downey Jr., Josh Brolin, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Hiddleston, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Olsen, Sebastian Stan, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Bettany, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, Benedict Wong, Zoe Saldana, Karen Gillan, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Holland and Anthony Mackie. Many more of these heroes’ supporting characters are set to appear in the film as well.
One character we can confirm won’t appear is Samuel L. Jackson‘s Nick Fury, who is currently only set to star in Captain Marvel when it come to the upcoming slate of Marvel films.
Source:
http://www.slashfilm.com/black-panther-sister-joins-avengers-infinity-war-cast/
Instagram says hackers swiped contact info for verified users
Instagram just suffered a potentially serious (and this time, very real) data breach. The social photo service is sending out alerts that intruders got access to the phone numbers and email addresses for a number of “high-profile” users by exploiting a bug in Instagram’s programming interface. The attackers didn’t obtain passwords, and Instagram says it has already fixed the bug, but it’s warning all verified users out of an “abundance of caution.”
We’ve asked Instagram for more details and will let you know if it can shed more light on the situation, such as when the breach happened and how many people were targeted. It’s also unclear if this is related to the recent hack that compromised Selena Gomez’s Instagram account.
The breach isn’t as severe as it could have been, but it’s definitely not what Instagram needs in the wake of the Gomez incident. The social network is growing very rapidly, but it might run into trouble if big-name users are hesitant to stick around over security fears. The apparently prompt fix suggests that Instagram is at least on top of these issues when they do come up.
Source:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/30/instagram-verified-user-contact-data-breach/
Residents warned to ‘get out or die’ as Harvey unleashes new waves
The storm once known as Hurricane Harvey made its second landfall Wednesday, dumping record rains and spurring additional flooding in small Texas cities that lie east of now-devastated Houston.
Harvey, which had swung out into the Gulf of Mexico again, came ashore at dawn near the Texas-Louisiana border. Its rain bands preceded it, pounding Texas towns including Orange, Port Arthur and Beaumont with more than two feet of rain.
City officials said much of Port Arthur — a city of 55,000 — was under water. A shelter for flood victims flooded. One official estimated that water had entered one-third of the city’s buildings.
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“We need boats. We need large trucks, and we need generators,” said Tiffany Hamilton, a former city councilwoman in Port Arthur who was helping coordinate relief efforts in a city that is also without electricity. “The entire city has been flooded.”
About 80 miles to the west, the Houston area was just beginning to recover from the biggest rainstorm in the recorded history of the continental United States.
Nearly 35,000 people were in shelters. Thousands of homes were still submerged.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said Wednesday that 20 people remained missing in the city. At one point, that figure had gone as high as 47, but Acevedo said 27 people have been found alive and removed from the list.
At least 37 people were dead, and that number was climbing as water receded, revealing the storm’s awful toll.
Harris County authorities finally located a van, containing six members of the same family, that had been washed off the road days earlier. All six were dead.
A few miles away, authorities discovered the bodies of two friends who had gone out in a boat Monday, trying to rescue neighbors. They lost control in the current, drifted toward the sparks of a downed power line. They jumped in.
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Three other men, including two journalists from a British newspaper, suffered electrical burns but survived by clinging to a tree above the water.
By Wednesday afternoon, the remnants of Harvey had moved into Louisiana, and by the evening had weaken to a tropical depression.
Louisiana officials, who had worried that Harvey might devastate their state as well, said the threat of flooding seemed to be lessening.
“Somewhere between being complacent and being panicked is the right place” to be, said Gov. John Bel Edwards (D). “That’s where we’re going to ask the people of Louisiana to settle.”
More than 50 inches of rain fell onto Houston over four days, turning the country’s fourth-largest city into a sea of muddy brown water, boats skimming along what had been neighborhood streets in search of survivors.
At the height of the flooding, between 25 and 30 percent of Harris County — home to 4.5 million people in Houston and its near suburbs — was flooded as of Tuesday afternoon, according to Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the county flood control district. That is an area as large as New York City and Chicago combined.
On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said more than 210,000 people in his state had applied for assistance from FEMA.
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The number of people who have registered for federal assistance is expected to go up, William “Brock” Long, the FEMA administrator, said during a news briefing. It will take “many, many years” before the full scope of Harvey’s impact is clear, Long said.
“We expect a many-year recovery in Texas, and the federal government is in this for the long haul,” Elaine Duke, the acting Homeland Security secretary, said at the same briefing Wednesday.
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A New Cancer Treatment Could Be More Effective Than Chemotherapy
Scientists have discovered a new process to kill cancer cells, called Caspase Independent Cell Death (CICD), that can get rid of tumors, and decrease the risk of both side effects and recurrence. In experimental models, CICD removed tumors completely — killing all cancer cells.
Current treatments such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiation all carry risks of side effects, and they frequently fail to kill all cancer cells, which leads to recurrence. These treatments all work through apoptosis, the process of activating proteins called caspases to cause cell death.
Dr. Stephen Tait, the researcher who led the University of Glasgow team in the work on the CICD technique, told Sky News the new method “often led to complete tumor regression” and “may be a more effective way to treat cancer” than apoptosis. He added: “In essence, this mechanism has the potential to dramatically improve the effectiveness of anti-cancer therapy and reduce unwanted toxicity. Taking into consideration our findings, we propose that engaging CICD as a means of anti-cancer therapy warrants further investigation.”
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death globally. Worldwide, there were 14 million new cases of cancer and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths in 2012. Within the next 20 years, the number of new cancer cases will rise to 22 million worldwide.
In the United States alone, an estimated 1,685,210 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in 2016, and 595,690 people died. Every year in the U.S .there are about 454.8 new cases of cancer for every 100,000 adults — and 171.2 cancer deaths per 100,000 adults. About 39.6 percent of people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer at some time in their lives. As a country, the U.S.’s annual national expenditures on cancer care have been estimated to reach up to $156 billion by 2020.
Cancer is a disease that science is eager to better understand so that it can be better prevented, treated, and perhaps even one day cured. Current treatment methods are only partially effective (and are typically specific to the type of cancer, of which there are many). They also make even healthy cells sick, which further wreaks havoc on the rest of the body, not just the cancerous tumors. In contrast, when the CICD technique kills cancer cells, those cells release inflammatory proteins which alert the immune system to ramp up the body’s own natural defenses, which then attack any remaining tumor cells missed during the initial treatment.
Work remains for the researchers, as they have not yet successfully triggered the CICD response in humans. They hope that achievement will be possible as their research continues and they experiment with a wider range of cancer cells (the current work focused solely on colorectal cancer cells). Still, these initial results are very promising.
“Although many cancer treatments work by triggering apoptosis, that method sometimes fails to finish the job and instead may lead to the tumor becoming harder to treat,” spokesperson Dr. Justine Alford told Sky News. “This new research suggests there could be a better way to kill cancer cells which, as an added bonus, also activates the immune system.”
Source:
https://futurism.com/a-new-cancer-treatment-could-be-more-effective-than-chemotherapy/
Vin Diesel to Star in ‘Fast and Furious’ Live Arena Tour
Vin Diesel will continue to live his “life a quarter mile at a time.”
Diesel announced Wednesday on Facebook that he will be starring in the upcoming “Fast and Furious” live show.
Universal Studios is teamed up with Brand Events for the international arena tour, based on the hit franchise, which kicks off in January.
“As you know, my work with ‘Fast and Furious’ never ends, which I’m grateful for because of you all,” Diesel, who plays Dominic Toretto, said in the Facebook video. “I am in New York, believe it or not, and we are filming something that is going to be pretty state of the art, something no one’s ever seen before, which is a live show.”
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The actor also told fans that the show will launch in the United Kingdom.
“I think it’s first going to be showed at the O2 Arena in London, but it’s going to go all over the world and we’re really excited about it,” Diesel added. “It’ll be a way for you to see the action first-hand, first time it’s ever been done.”
The show will include re-creations of some of the stunts and cars in the eight-film franchise, which is still expanding. The executive producers are Chris Hughes and James Cooke-Priest, along with writer/director Rowland French.
Source:
Vin Diesel to Star in ‘Fast and Furious’ Live Arena Tour
