How to Get OG Black Widow in Fortnite
To get OG Black Widow in Fortnite, players must purchase the skin from the Item Shop for 1,500 V-Bucks before it leaves Fortnite on Nov. 29 at 7 p.m. ET.
2023-11-30 02:18
Retail traders reignite rally in GameStop shares
By Medha Singh and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed (Reuters) -Retail traders powered a nearly 20% jump in GameStop shares to a
2023-11-30 01:52
Here's What's Coming With Lethal Company Update Plans
Lethal Company's update plans reveal the next update arriving during the week of Nov. 27, set to include new creatures, items, and decorations.
2023-11-30 00:54
Bitcoin consumes as much water as all the baths in Britain, study claims
Bitcoin mining requires as much water annually as all of the baths in Britain, according to a new analysis of the cryptocurrency’s environmental impact. Financial economist Alex de Vries, who runs the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, estimated that roughly 1.6 trillion litres of water each year is required to cool the computers used to support the cryptocurrency’s network. Separate research from 2018 found that 1.6 trillion litres is how much bath water the British public sends down the plughole every year – enough to fill roughly 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The latest analysis, which was published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability on Wednesday, suggested that a single bitcoin transaction could use as much water as a backyard swimming pool. “Many parts of the world are experiencing droughts, and fresh water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource,” said Mr de Vries. “If we continue to use this valuable resource for making useless computations, I think that reality is really painful.” The “useless computations” refer to the complex calculations required to mint new units of the cryptocurrency and verify transactions on the network. The use of water to cool the necessary hardware could be significantly reduced if miners shifted their operations underwater, with companies like Microsoft already placing some of their data centres in the ocean in order to cool them. Earlier this month, China announced that it had begun building the world’s largest underwater data centre in order to reduce electricity and water costs. Bitcoin has previously been criticised for its electricity consumption, with Mr de Vries’s Energy Consumption Index estimating that the cryptocurrency’s network uses roughly as much electricity as the country of Poland. Bitcoin advocates have refuted accusations relating to bitcoin’s electricity consumption, claiming that miners are increasingly turning to renewable energy sources as the costs of wind and solar drop. A recently published study suggests bitcoin mining could actually help speed up the transition to renewable energy, as solar and wind energy installations could earn hundreds of millions of dollars mining bitcoin during periods of excess electricity generation. ”These rewards can act as an incentive for miners to adopt clean energy sources, which can lead to combined positive effects on climate change mitigation, improved renewable power capacity, and additional profits during pre-commercial operation of wind and solar farms,” said Apoorv Lal, a doctoral student at Cornell University who was involved in the research. Read More Bitcoin mining could supercharge transition to renewables, study claims Bitcoin mining rate hits all-time high amid record-breaking prediction for 2024 Elon Musk scam ads appear on X as key advertisers depart Scientists find planets moving around in strange ‘rhythm’ Astronomers find unprecedented ‘disc’ around distant planet Scientists have cooked ‘alien haze’ that could help find life
2023-11-30 00:22
Can You Beat Lethal Company?
Players cannot beat Lethal Company and must instead continue working for the Company as they scavenge loot and defeat monsters with no ending in sight.
2023-11-30 00:22
One trillion tonne iceberg escapes from Antartica and is gaining speed
The world’s biggest iceberg is drifting away from the Antarctic after having been grounded there for more than 30 years. The iceberg, which has the catchy name A23a, split from the Antarctic’s giant Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, but has been stuck to the ocean floor since shortly after that time. Now, according to the British Antarctic Survey, it is on the move. Satellite images show the iceberg drifting past the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. A23a is truly massive. It weighs nearly a trillion metric tonnes and is about three times the size of New York City. It is more than twice the size of Greater London. Scientists say the massive chunk of ice is drifting at a rate of three miles each day. “Over time, it’s probably just thinned slightly and got that little bit of extra buoyancy that’s allowed it to lift off the ocean floor and get pushed by ocean currents,” said Oliver Marsh, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey. Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing expert from the British Antarctic Survey, told the BBC the iceberg had been drifting for the last year, but now appeared to be picking up speed. “I asked a couple of colleagues about this, wondering if there was any possible change in shelf water temperatures that might have provoked it, but the consensus is the time had just come,” he said. Still, some scientists are concerned about how the movement could affect wildlife. The iceberg could end up at the island of South Georgia, which is about 1,000 miles east of the southern tip of South America, which is home to seals, penguins and other seabirds. Chad Greene, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the New Scientist large icebergs tend to break off from Antarctica around once per decade. They then get stuck in the Antarctic’s nearly freezing waters, which staves off the melting process, but only for a while. “Icebergs this big can hang around for decades in one place, then one day decide to go for a jolly,” Greene said. “That’s when things get interesting.” How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.
2023-11-29 22:23
How to see your Spotify Wrapped for 2023?
It's almost that time of year again, when we see how many hours we've shamelessly spent listening to mortifying music and just playing Taylor Swift on loop. Yes, Spotify Wrapped is here again and soon your social media feeds will be full of people either showing you how cool by how much Senegalese lounge Jazz they listen to or embarrassed that they still haven't moved on from The Libertines or The Strokes. Each and every year, even for the most dedicated of music lovers, Spotify Wrapped throws up countless surprises in your top artists and songs leading many to question just how it tallies what you listen to. The past few years Wrapped has arrived earlier and earlier, as reported by the Radio Times, so it's not surprise that its arrived on November 29th. Here are the dates it arrived on the previous years. 2017: 6th December 2018: 6th December 2019: 5th December 2020: 2nd December 2021: 1st December 2022: 30th November Finding your Wrapped couldn't be easier you just need to go to your Spotify app on the day it drops and it'll be there waiting for you at the top of the app alongside your saved songs and albums. Alternatively, if you just use Spotify on a laptop or desktop you can visit spotify.com/wrapped and use it from there. Spotify have never officially said how they compile their data for Wrapped but a Reddit user in 2021 revealed how they believed it works. In the post Hudsonlovestech pointed out six key takeaways that they discovered after downloading their data from the music platform. They were: This year the data was logged from January 1st 00:00 to November 15th 23:59. You have to listen to a song for more than 30 seconds for it to count in your song rankings. Your top songs are calculated by play count rather than total time listened. In your top 100 playlist only the first 10 songs are sorted by play count, the rest are close but sorted by artist. Your total time listening includes podcasts. Your top artists are calculated by total play counts rather than total time listening. If you apply this date to your own listening history then there is a chance you might discover what your Wrapped will look like this year although there is no guarantee. Meanwhile, many users on X/Twitter are posting memes, imagining what their Wrapped will look like this year. To be honest, we're just dreading seeing how much we listened to Ryan Gosling sing 'I'm Just Ken' from the Barbie soundtrack. Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.
2023-11-29 21:58
Elon Musk scam ads appear on X as key advertisers depart
Adverts promoting crypto scams are appearing on X, formerly Twitter, amid an exodus of major brands from the platform. Many of the scam ads use the likeness of Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, to promote fake cryptocurrency giveaways. The scam ads work by promoting a fake pre-sale of “X Token”, which fraudulently offers early investors large profits if they buy the cryptocurrency before it officially launches on exchanges. Some of the adverts seen by The Independent have even appeared on the profile page of Elon Musk, who has 165 million followers on X – more than any other user. The scammers have paid for the sponsored posts, providing much-needed revenue for X as the company struggles with retaining traditional advertisers. Over 100 brands and other advertisers have pulled their ads from X in recent weeks, according to internal documents seen by The New York Times, which could lead to losses of around $75 million in earnings this year. The exodus reportedly began after Mr Musk engaged with a controversial tweet about an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The X owner responded to claims that he is antisemitic by saying “nothing could be further from the truth”. Companies to have withdrawn ads include Airbnb, Apple, Coca-Cola, Disney, IBM, Netflix and Uber. X disputed the figure reported, claiming it “represented an internal exercise to evaluate total risk” and that the true figure was closer to $11 million. The emergence of scam crypto ads has already resulted in significant financial losses for X users, according to the MalwareTips forum, with some victims reporting they lost their entire crypto savings. “The anonymity of cryptocurrency enables the scammers to quickly withdraw funds without being tracked down,” a post to MalwareTips notes. A twitter-hackers-cryptocurrency-a8620436.html">2018 investigation by The Independent found that crypto scams shared on Twitter had tricked people into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to cyber criminals posing as Mr Musk. Hackers were able to take over Twitter accounts belonging to verified brands like Matalan and Pantheon Books, before switching the name and profile picture in order to impersonate the tech entrepreneur. They then posted messages offering fake giveaways that required people to send cryptocurrency in order to verify their bitcoin address. Analysis of the addresses found that more than 400 people sent bitcoin to one address, with transactions totalling 28.2 bitcoins ($1.1m at current exchange rates). Mr Musk cited the cryptocurrency scam epidemic as one of the motivating reasons for his purchase of Twitter, pledging to fix the issue upon his takeover. “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” he tweeted in April 2022. In June 2022, Mr Musk also criticised YouTube for fake cryptocurrency promotions that featured on the platform. “YouTube seems to be nonstop scam ads,” he tweeted. Efforts to defeat the bot endemic have included subscriptions and a $1 charge to new users, which was introduced in New Zealand and the Philippines last month. The “Not a Bot” subscription method is designed to “reduce spam, manipulation or our platform and bot activity,” the company said at the time. It is not clear how this approach will prevent accounts from promoting crypto scams, with all of the ads seen in October and November coming from verified X accounts. X did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent about the issue of crypto scam ads. Read More Elon Musk mocked for trying to resurrect QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy Elon Musk set to meet Netanyahu and hostage families in Israel Elon Musk weighs in on Dublin riots claiming country’s PM ‘hates the Irish people’ X introduces limits to prevent non-paying users from replying to posts
2023-11-29 21:54
HSBC, SocGen Drop Bids to Get CO2 Goals Approved by UN Body
HSBC Holdings Plc and Societe Generale SA are among banks that have withdrawn applications to get their climate
2023-11-29 21:16
Electric-Car Makers Can Stop Worrying So Much About Lithium
Lithium’s price slump over the past year has been as dramatic as its climb — and it’s probably
2023-11-29 20:59
Tesla Color Wraps May Save the Cybertruck From Its Weird Self
Tesla Inc. designed its stainless-steel Cybertuck to be something special: the first vehicle for the masses that doesn’t
2023-11-29 20:56
Taskmaster VR in development as Channel 4 show gets video game twist
'Taskmaster' is expanding beyond Channel 4 with a new virtual reality game turning fans into contestants.
2023-11-29 20:26