Via Apple iOS 7

The emoji keyboard was first introduced in Japan, but only features two emojis that appear to be Asian: a “man with a turban” and a “man with Gua Pi Mao,” a type of Chinese hat. But the emoji keyboard features more than a dozen faces that look white.

Via Apple iOS7

Emoji characters have been standardized by Unicode Consortium since 2010, so as to appear on all computers and mobile devices the same. Other apps offer emojis, but users risk their friends not being able to see them if they haven’t installed the same software.

Via Apple App Store

In response to the lack of diversity, DoSomething.org started a petition calling on Apple to increase the ethnic diversity of emojis.

But of the more than 800 Emojis, the only two resembling people of color are a guy who looks vaguely Asian and another in a turban. There’s a white boy, girl, man, woman, elderly man, elderly woman, blonde boy, blonde girl and, we’re pretty sure, [video game character] Princess Peach. But when it comes to faces outside of yellow smileys, there’s a staggering lack of minority representation.

DoSomething.Org / Via dosomething.org

This is not the first time people have noted the lack of ethnic emojis, and many have expressed frustration in particular with the fact that there are no black emojis.

Miley Cyrus tweeted in 2012 that emojis needed an ethnic update:

Miley Ray Cyrus@MileyCyrusFollow

RT if you think there needs to be an #emojiethnicityupdate

7:05 PM - 18 Dec 12 

• Reply
 
• Retweet
 
• Favorite

And Baby Daddy star Tahj Mowry tweeted about it too:

Tahj Mowry@Tahj_MowryFollow

It makes me mad that there are no black emojis...

12:01 AM - 16 Mar 14 

• Reply
 
• Retweet
 
• Favorite

In response to continued concern, MTV Act askedApple CEO Tim Cook directly why there is so little diversity in emojis. On Tuesday, Apple representative Katie Cotton responded that Apple has been working to update the character set.

Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.

Despite Apple’s announcement that they are working on an emoji update, there is no release date.

“We’re proud that thousands of our members acted and Apple listened,” said DoSomething.org’s spokeswomen Colleen Wormsley to BuzzFeed. “In August, we urged Apple to include more diversity in the emoji keyboard. Emojis are a huge part of youth culture and everyone should feel valuable and represented.”

Via Apple iOS 7

Apple’s last update in 2012 introduced same-sex couples and families into the emoji keyboard as part of iOS 6.

Via Apple iOS7

Campaigns in the past have tried to add hotdogs, cupcakes, tacos, and other edibles to the keyboard, which does include sushi, fried shrimp, and a bento box, because of its Japanese roots.

Heart becomes more spherical when exposed to long periods of microgravity in space, a change that could lead to cardiac problems, a new research has found.
The findings from a study of 12 astronauts represent an important step toward understanding how a spaceflight of 18 months or more could affect astronauts' heart health, researchers said.
"The heart doesn't work as hard in space, which can cause a loss of muscle mass," said James Thomas, Moore Chair o f Cardiovascular Imaging an d Lead Scientist for Ultrasound at NASA, and senior author of the study.
"That can have serious consequences after the return to Earth, so we're looking into whether there are measures that can be taken to prevent or counteract that loss," Thomas said. The researchers said that knowing the amount and type of exercise astronauts need to perform to keep the heart healthy is going to be very important to guarantee their safety on a long flight like a mission to Mars.
Thomas added that exercise regimens developed for astronauts could also be used to help maintain heart health in people on Earth who have severe physical limitations, such as people on extended bed rest or those with heart failure. The research team trained astronauts to take images of
their hearts using ultrasound machines installed on the International Space Station. Twelve astronauts participated, providing data on heart shape before, during and after spaceflight.
The results show the heart in space becomes more spherical by a factor of 9.4 per cent, a transformation similar to what scientists had predicted with sophisticated
mathematical models developed for the project. By validating those models, the study could also lead to a better understanding of common cardiovascular conditions in
patients on Earth.
"The models predicted the changes we observed in the astronauts almost exactly. It gives us confidence that we can move ahead and start using these models for more clinically
important applications on Earth, such as to predict what happens to the heart under different stresses," Thomas said.
The team is now working to generalise the models to analyse such conditions as ischemic heart disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and valvular heart disease.

The largest earthquakes occur where oceanic plates move beneath continents. Obviously, water trapped in the boundary between both plates has a dominant influence on the earthquake rupture process. Analyzing the great Chile earthquake of February, 27th, 2010, a group of scientists from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and from Liverpool University found that the water pressure in the pores of the rocks making up the plate boundary zone takes the key role. The stress build-up before an earthquake and the magnitude of subsequent seismic energy release are substantially controlled by the mechanical coupling between both plates. Studies of recent great earthquakes have revealed that the lateral extent of the rupture and magnitude of these events are fundamentally controlled by the stress build-up along the subduction plate interface. Stress build-up and its lateral distribution in turn are dependent on the distribution and pressure of fluids along the plate interface.

"We combined observations of several geoscience disciplines -- geodesy, seismology, petrology. In addition, we have a unique opportunity in Chile that our natural observatory there provides us with long time series of data," says Onno Oncken, director of the GFZ-Department "Geodynamics and Geomaterials." Earth observation (Geodesy) using GPS technology and radar interferometry today allows a detailed mapping of mechanical coupling at the plate boundary from the Earth's surface. A complementary image of the rock properties at depth is provided by seismology. Earthquake data yield a high resolution three-dimensional image of seismic wave speeds and their variations in the plate interface region. Data on fluid pressure and rock properties, on the other hand, are available from laboratory measurements. All these data had been acquired shortly before the great Chile earthquake of February 2010 struck with a magnitude of 8.8.

"For the first time, our results allow us to map the spatial distribution of the fluid pressure with unprecedented resolution showing how they control mechanical locking and subsequent seismic energy release," explains Professor Oncken. "Zones of changed seismic wave speeds reflect zones of reduced mechanical coupling between plates." This state supports creep along the plate interface. In turn, high mechanical locking is promoted in lower pore fluid pressure domains. It is these locked domains that subsequently ruptured during the Chile earthquake releasing most seismic energy causing destruction at Earth's surface and tsunami waves. The authors suggest the spatial pore fluid pressure variations to be related to oceanic water accumulated in an altered oceanic fracture zone within the Pacific oceanic plate. Upon subduction of the latter beneath South America the fluid volumes are released and trapped along the overlying plate interface, leading to increasing pore fluid pressures. This study provides a powerful tool to monitor the physical state of a plate interface and to forecast its seismic potential.

Source: Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,300-year-old tomb which had a 7-metre-high pyramid at its entrance in an ancient cemetery in Egypt.

The tomb, found at the site of Abydos, contained disarticulated skeletal remains from three to four men, 10 to 12 women and at least two children.

Within one of its vaulted burial chambers, archaeologists found a finely crafted sandstone sarcophagus which was painted red.

There is no mummy in the sarcophagus, and the tomb was ransacked at least twice in antiquity, researchers said.

The chambers uncovered would have originally resided beneath the surface, leaving only the steep-sided pyramid visible.

“Originally, all you probably would have seen the pyramid and maybe a little wall around the structure just to enclose everything,” said Kevin Cahail, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, who led excavations at the tomb.

The pyramid itself “probably would have had a small mortuary chapel inside of it that may have held a statue or a stela giving the names and titles of the individuals buried underneath,” Mr. Cahail told ‘LiveScience’.

Now, all that remains of the pyramid are the thick walls of the tomb entranceway that would have formed the base of the pyramid. The other parts of the pyramid either have not survived or have not yet been found.

It was not uncommon, at this time, for tombs of elite individuals to contain small pyramids, Mr. Cahail said.

The tomb was excavated in the summer and winter field seasons of 2013 and Mr. Cahail will be presenting the results at a meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt, to be held in Portland next month.

Songs, an app probably used by a few million Indian Android users, was among the two apps recently caught covertly using smartphones for mining bitcoins and dogecoins.

Security researchers at Trend Micro, a company that makes antivirus and other security applications, recently wrote in a blog that 'Songs' and 'Prized - Real Rewards & Prizes' were using smartphones to covertly mine for virtual currency.

Mining virtual currency like bitcoin or dogecoin requires lots of computing power. If an app uses a smartphone to mine virtual currency, the process is likely to keep the processor running at 100%, resulting in poor battery life and heating of the device.

Trend Micro said the apps being used for bitcoin and dogecoin mining were injected with ANDROIDOS_KAGECOIN, a malware.

"(Some) coin mining apps were found outside of the Google Play Store, but we have found the same behaviour in apps (Songs and Prized) inside the Google Play Store. These apps have been downloaded by millions of users, which means that there may be many Android devices out there being used to mine cryptocurrency for cybercriminals," a Veo Zhang, a mobile threat analyst with Trend Micro wrote in the blog.

"Analyzing the code of these apps reveal the cryptocurrency mining code inside. Unlike the other malicious apps, in these cases the mining only occurs when the device is charging, as the increased energy usage won't be noticed as much."

After the Trend Micro blog post, Prized and Songs were removed from the Play Store by Google.

Of the two, Songs was more popular. It was downloaded five to 10 million times and had a rating of 4 stars. Songs claimed to give users free access to Bollywood and songs in regional languages like Punjabi and Tamil.

On the Play Store, clicking on the developer's website specified in the description page of Songs let to an error. While the developer was listed as "Da Xpert" for the app, the email address of the app hinted it was created by one Mukesh Verma. TOI wrote to the specified email address, seeking response on the Trend Micro report, but did not receive any reply.

Trend Micro said that it believed "with thousands of affected devices, cybercriminal accumulated a great deal of dogecoins."

"Reading the app description and terms and conditions on the websites of these apps, users may not know that their devices may potentially be used as mining devices due to the murky language and vague terminology," wrote Zhang.

"Users with phones and tablets that are suddenly charging slowly, running hot, or quickly running out of batteries may want to consider if they have been exposed to this or similar threats," Zhang advised Android users.

Head of Samsung Electronics Co's mobile business, J.K. Shin, received a $5.8 million compensation package last year, beating the paycheck of his counterpart at U.S. rival Apple Inc, the South Korean firm said on Monday in its first such disclosure under new regulations.

The world's biggest technology company by revenue said Shin's pack included a base salary of 1.17 billion won and 1.6 billion won in incentives and performance bonus.

By comparison, Apple chief executive Tim Cook received $4.25 million in 2013, little changed from the previous year when he had been paid $4.17 million.

Shin, who has led Samsung's mobile business since 2009, has since overseen the launch of its flagship Galaxy handsets that helped it unseat Apple in the smartphone market and also sparked patent litigations the world over that claimed Samsung copied the look and feel of the U.S. firm's iconic mobile products.

Samsung's other co-chief executive Kwon Oh-hyun, who leads the component business, earned even more, taking 6.77 billion won home, while third co-CEO Yoon Boo-keun, the head of its consumer electronics business, received 5.09 billion won.

South Korean financial authorities changed regulations late last year, requiring listed companies to include annual compensation details of executives who earn more than 500 million won in their business reports filings.

But the measure also drew some criticism as it does not shed much light on pay details of some high profile owners of business conglomerates or chaebols, as they frequently assume non-executive titles.

Samsung didn't disclose remuneration details of J.Y. Lee, non-executive vice chairman and son of its chairman Lee Kun-hee, who is also non-executive chairman and receives no salary from Samsung. ($1 = 1069.3000 Korean Won)

(Reporting by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

© Thomson Reuters 2014 All rights reserved.

Google was penalised by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for "non cooperation" in the pending investigation.

According to an official statement today, Google has been fined Rs 1 crore for failing to comply with the directions of the Director General (DG) seeking information and documents.

A Google spokesperson said the company was "disappointed by this development."

The DG, the investigation arm of the regulator, is probing a complaint filed by matrimony.com Pvt Ltd and Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) against Google, alleging that it was abusing market power in the online search and advertising markets.

"CCI also directed Google to cooperate with the investigations by furnishing such other information/documents which may be required by the DG during the course of further investigations," the statement issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs said.

The commission is under the administrative control of the ministry.

"While we are confident that our products are compliant with competition law in India, we continue to cooperate fully with the Competition Commission of India's extensive and ongoing investigation.

""We're disappointed by this development. While we are confident that our products are compliant with competition law in India, we continue to cooperate fully with the Competition Commission of India's extensive and ongoing investigation. We've not yet received this procedural order, but will review it fully once we have," the Google spokesperson said in a statement.

The case against Google has been before the CCI for over two years.

Last year, CCI Chairman Ashok Chawla said the complaint was that the Google search engine favours platforms it wants to support.

"That is when you click on Google under a certain category, you will get the platforms where there is a tendency to put them in a certain order which may not be the fair and non-discriminatory manner.

"So, what is the software and what is the algorithmic search?

Since its launch in 2011 Pinterest has been a social network destination for those looking to share shopping, decorating and general quality of life ideas, so imagine the confusion (and distaste) visitors felt when their boards had been hacked with images of rows of women's rear ends and other suggestive pictures.

That's what greeted users yesterday and the suggestive images were all captioned with weight loss spam or various give-away offers.

Initial reports of the hack began appearing on Twitter last night but the Better Business Bureaus posted a warning at the start of the month about how the amount of spam on the photo site has been increasing, so perhaps those following that warning might have been taken by surprise.

While Pinterest has clearly been alerted to the issue and has announced that are currently investigating the security problems, they aren't actively taking the offensive pins down as the problem appears to be on other websites that host 'Pin this' buttons and not Pinterest's servers directly.

All the major social media sites have become magnets for hackers over the years. The reason why they are particularly vulnerable is due to their use of web applications, which are an easy conduit for spreading viruses.

According to a recent PewResearch study 21% of internet users have had an email or social networking account compromised or taken over by someone else without permission and 11% of internet users have had important personal information stolen such as their Social Security Number, credit card, or bank account information.

In an effort to reach out and offer some online security advice, the Council of Better Business Bureaus recently issued a Five Tips to Keep Your Pinterest Account Secure guideline:

Report hacked pin: if you spot a spam pin, report it to Pinterest by clicking the flag icon at the bottom of the image.
Change your password: If you suspect someone has hacked your account, rest your password in Settings.
Only login to official sites: These include Ointerest.com and the official mobile app.
Be careful about linking your account to other social media: once scammers gain access, they can easily share spam pins on your Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Check before you pin: Before you repin, hover on the image and check the destination link corresponds with the info on the pin.

Windows Phone 8.1 brings the new capability to install apps on the microSD card, if developers allow of course, and will allow users to no longer be limited in any way by the built-in storage on their phone.

CoolXap.com reports however that Microsoft has set some special requirements for using memory cards to install apps on Windows Phone 8.1.

According to them a minimum of Class 6 SDHC card is required, with Class 10 recommended.

Class 4 and below will not be supported, with the OS automatically detecting the speed on insertion.

If the card is too slow users will not be offered to move apps from the phone to the card.

The requirement should also help users avoid performance issues when saving video to external cards, which can be stuttery when bitrates are high.

Separately CoolXap also confirm that the 3 column screen option will be confined to screens with a physical size bigger or equal to 4.5 inches, excluding the the Nokia Lumia 520 and 620 for example.

Our Milky Way galaxy is a massive collection of stars and dust, planets and black holes that, altogether, stretches some 100,000 light-years across. For the past ten years, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has been snapping photos of the galactic disk, from the bright dense core to the wispy spiral arms. The Spitzer team took some two million shots, and now they've stitched them all together to produce an absolutely staggering panorama of our home galaxy.

At the highest resolutions, the panorama had to be broken up into eight sections, each 67,500 pixels across and capping out at a whopping 1.38 gigabytes. If you wanted to print out the full image, you'd need a space 150 feet wide.

But there's a curious feature about the Milky Way, and our vantage point of it. We reside in the Orion spiral arm, out on the edge of the galaxy. So, from here, says NASA in a video describing the new Spitzer panorama, most of the galaxy looks like a flat disk. Though the photo would be 150 feet wide, it would only be 4 feet tall. And that photo, says NASA, would contain more than half of all the stars in the Milky Way.
Alongside the full resolution photographs, NASA has also produced a set of interactive viewers that let you scroll and zoom your way around the galaxy.



video link>>

The Spanish government should rescind approval of a veterinary drug that threatens Europe’s largest population of wild vultures, researchers argue in a letter published online yesterday in Conservation Biology. The drug, diclofenac, is commonly used to treat pain in livestock. It has already caused the decline of nearly 99% of India’s vultures, which ingested the drug while feeding on carcasses. It has also triggered an ecological chain reaction there, resulting in, among other impacts, record numbers of rabies cases.

“[I]t is undeniable that European vulture populations could be seriously affected by the ingestion of diclofenac, and its use has become a matter of great concern for ecologists, politicians, and conservationists,” write the five scientists, who represent agriculture, ecology, and biology departments at universities in both Spain and Switzerland. Although European grazing and sanitation practices are substantially different from those used in India, potentially reducing the drug’s threat to scavenging birds, the researchers remain concerned about its potential impact in Spain, which is home to an estimated 95% of Europe’s wild vultures.

The drug was approved by the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS) in March 2013. It is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug currently approved in many countries for both human and veterinary use. It reduces pain and inflammation caused by a variety of conditions, such as arthritis, kidney stones, and endometriosis. It is the active ingredient in more than 100 trade named medications, some of which are available over the counter. In veterinary application, diclofenac is most often used to treat joint pain and swelling.

In 2003, researchers fingered diclofenac as the cause of the sudden and widespread disappearance of three of India’s most common vultures: the white-backed, the slender-billed, and the Indian vulture. Diclofenac “cause[s] deposition of uric acid crystals in the visceral organs, and kidneys in particular, and it is kidney failure that actually kills the birds,” says Chris Bowden of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Saving Asia's Vultures from Extinction (SAVE) program in Bedfordshire, U.K. It took less than 20 years for the drug to wipe out most of India’s vultures, and all three species are now listed as either endangered or critically endangered. The missing vultures have left an ecological hole that is being filled by a burgeoning feral dog population, which have helped spread rabies.

Since its dangers were revealed, the drug has been banned for veterinary use in India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and vulture numbers have shown small signs of rebounding. Efforts to ban its use in Africa are under way, and SAVE is pushing the European Union to ban the drug across the continent.

In Spain, the authors of today’s letter are urging the Spanish government to rescind diclofenac’s approval for veterinary use under “the precautionary principle, which was recognized as a fundamental element of environmental policy at the Rio Conference of 1992.” Four species of European vulture are at risk, they note: the griffon, bearded, cinereous, and Egyptian. The cinereous and Egyptian vultures are considered near threatened and endangered, respectively. Although bearded vultures are not considered endangered worldwide, they have been almost completely extirpated from their historic central European range—the 125 breeding pairs in Spain are the result of 30 years of concerted repopulation efforts.

Recent changes in Spain’s farm sanitation laws may put the vultures at greater risk of diclofenac poisoning, says one of the letter’s authors, conservation biologist Antoni Margalida, of the University of Bern in Switzerland and the University of Lleida in Spain. In 2011, regulators reopened the “muladares,” or farm carcass dumps, that had been shut down in the wake of concern about the spread of "mad cow disease" (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). The change was designed to help the vultures, as the muladares are an essential food source for many of the birds, and the closures had threatened vulture numbers. But the introduction of diclofenac could turn the dumps into a threat, Margalida notes.

Spain’s move to approve the drug flouts the spirit of E.U. environmental law, Bowden says, and “sets a bad precedent for Africa and Asia where systems are less controlled.” Spanish supplies could also be exported to other countries, he worries.

José Tavares of the Vulture Conservation Foundation in Switzerland says that advocates have already sent formal requests to address the issue to the Spanish government, the European Commission, and eight other E.U. governments. Additionally, the Convention on Migratory Species (Bonn Convention) has also requested that the Spanish government ban the drug. So far, there has been no government response, but ecologists and conservation groups are hoping today’s letter adds to the pressure.