NPR: Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill Monday that adds the state to the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement among states to award their presidential electoral votes to the nationwide popular vote winner.
Link to article: https://t.co/3x2WZs6Xpq
POKÉMON GO PLAYERS TRAINED 30 BILLION IMAGE AI MAP
Niantic says photos and scans collected through Pokémon Go and its AR apps have produced a massive dataset of more than 30 billion real-world images.
The company is now using that data to power visual navigation for delivery robots, letting them identify exact locations on city streets without relying on GPS.
Source: NewsForce
With Apple Pay, your real card number never really leaves your device. When you add your card, the bank creates a special replacement number called a Device Account Number (DAN). That DAN is stored securely inside the phone’s Secure Enclave chip, not on Apple’s servers. When you pay, your phone sends this DAN plus a one-time cryptographic code to the merchant. The merchant never sees your real card, and Apple doesn’t process the transaction itself. It’s basically: phone → bank → done. Everything sensitive stays on the device.
With Google Pay, the idea is similar but the path is different. Instead of storing everything only on the device chip, Google often uses cloud tokenization. Your card info is linked to Google’s servers, which generate payment tokens during transactions. When you tap to pay, a token is fetched/created and sent to the merchant, then validated by the bank. So it’s more like: phone → Google server → bank. Still secure, but it relies more on the cloud.
So both systems hide your real card number. Apple leans more toward hardware-based security (on-device chip), while Google leans more toward server/cloud-based token management.
In simple terms:
Apple Pay locks your card inside your phone.
Google Pay locks your card behind Google’s servers.
Either way, the shop never gets your real card details; which is why mobile payments are often safer than swiping your physical card.
NYC has an excellent tool to see how recently any street has been plowed. Check out PlowNYC at: https://t.co/5cKnAeF8mH
Thank you to the 1000s of hard working men and women at @NYCSanitation who are out battling this storm.
Physical activity and the reduction of all-cause mortality, from 2 very large prospective cohorts
1. The relationship is non-linear, suggesting a threshold effect for many types of exercise as seen below
*Every single* cure for a disease ultimately flowed from basic exploratory research. Stopping basic research is like stopping the mountain rains and expecting rivers of cures to still flow. Examples:
1) studying saliva of Gila monster -> GLP1's
2) studying funghi -> first statins
3) mRNA biology -> gene therapy for spinal atrophy
4) studying bacterial genetics -> CRISPR gene therapies
5) studies of nuclear magnetic resonance -> MRI scans
this list can go on and on. Not only in biology but all aspects of technology.... e.g.
6) curvature of spacetime -> GPS
7) quantum mechanics -> semiconductors
8) electromagnetism -> fiber optics -> internet
...
Really an incredible statistic: The share of American adults who move in any given year has fallen by about 2/3rds since the 1980s.
Housing costs are a big, big part of this. I think a sneaky part of it is that metros are a bit less specialized by industry than they used to be, and the same general mix of services jobs exists everywhere, so you have fewer ppl, eg, moving toward the sort of manufacturing jobs that mostly exist in the Great Lakes states.
Theory that modern humans tire mentally from the huge amount of decisions we make daily. Taking note to plan out my weeks better, decide simply, and keep my siestas to clean up the glutamate in my brain. Still no coffee for me
Why you’re so tired https://t.co/ef6dIjrZfg
Yesterday, the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD treatment. This came as a surprise to tons of people since the phase 3 trials showed *really* promising results. And a lot of people are pretty angry at the FDA right now.
So why did the FDA reject it? A 🧵