The new Google app called Duo is considered a response to other similar apps like Apple’s FaceTime, Microsoft’s Skype and Facebook’s Messenger app.

After hitting it big with Gmail in 2004 which is now the number one form of electronic correspondence in U.S, Google has endlessly tried to make relevant messaging tools that can resonate with young users.

Google’s Duo works with mobile devices running Google’s Android operating system and Apple Inc.’s iOS. It works on Wi-Fi and cellular networks, and can automatically switch types and speeds of connection and adjust video quality.

Because it also works with phone numbers and not just with Google accounts or Gmail addresses like expected, it makes it easier to call friends and family already store on the contact lists. In order to activate your account, Duo sends an SMS so you would only need a valid phone number.

If a user has multiple devices, the tie-up to the phone number will allow him to utilize the same number on different Duo installs.

Many other services require both participants to have accounts to use the video calling options. Moreover, the already existing video calling and messaging app from Google, Hangouts, restricts its use by requiring a Google account.

Duo’s Knock-Knock feature will give you a live video preview of the caller before you pick up. This app will remember people’s choices or type of message and will apply what it learns in future conversations. Most of the existing similar apps just show the caller’s generic profile picture.

Moreover, the users will have more time to answer the call because it will ring for more than a minute. You will have the ability to block individuals or numbers and the app also comes with end-to-end encryption.

After Google has enrolled its Duo app in the UAE app stores, many people believe that it’s only a matter of time before being banned as the UAE policy blocked the video calling over mobile network.

The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has already banned video and voice calling features from WhatsApp, BlackBerry, Viber, Snapchat and Skype. According to TRA, only licensed telecom operators can offer VoIP (voice over internet protocol) in the UAE.

Image source: Pixabay

Did you ever wonder what happens to goldfish after they’re tossed in a lake by owners who can’t bother to care for them anymore? Surprisingly enough, they don’t die, rather the opposite, they thrive and usually end up taking over their new environment.

When placed in a round bowl with a miniature castle a goldfish looks like the cutest, most harmless pet in the world. However, the seemingly helpless creature can grow up to be a fierce invader capable of wreaking havoc in a new ecosystem.

Last year in April the Parks and Wildlife officials from Colorado were forced to handle an infestation of over 4,000 goldfish in a Boulder County after an unknown individual dumped a bowl of goldfish in the same waters.

In 2013, California officials had to deal with a similar problem after Lake Tahoe was invaded by the former pets.

The biggest problem registered so far is in southwestern Australia on the Vasse River. Researchers declared that the disposal practice, while well-intentioned, is not humane for the other creatures living in the local waters.

According to a Murdoch University professor, Stephen Batty, the problem with the goldfish dumped in Australian waters is bigger than initially thought.

Not only do goldfish reproduce in mass, taking over the space of native species, but they also reach gargantuan sizes (researchers found specimens as big as 4 pounds).

In US’ Lake Tahoe, the US Forest Service found goldfish weighing an average of three pounds and measuring between 6 and 8 inches.

In each case, the invading species were introduced to the new environment via dumping.

Researchers believe that the fish were dumped by families with small children when moving from one town to another. Another possibility may be that some people who got them as pets grew tired of them and decided to dump them in the lake rather than flushing them down the toilet.

“They’ll start eating up everything that the native fish and the amphibians and the birds are here to eat, and so that can have a really negative effect down the road – and this can kill this fishery in a few years.”

A study published in the Ecology of Freshwater Fish Journal on August 12^th found that the common pet fish is capable of traveling long distances in search of food. Moreover, the scientists discovered that goldfish seek wetlands to reproduce, the habit helping them increase their population.

Image source: Flickr

A team of scientists has just unlocked many secrets of insect biology by sequencing the genome of a green caterpillar also known as the Manduca sexta.

Before the larva of this green caterpillar pupates, it goes through a stage called the pre-pupa, where it shrinks considerably and prepares to pupate. Often people mistake this stage for a dead or dying caterpillar. This pupal stage lasts approximately 18 days. During the pupal stage, structures of the adult moth form within the pupal case, which is shed during eclosion (adult emergence).

This large caterpillar turns into the Carolina sphinx moth and is considered one of the biggest agricultural pests that damage eggplants, potato, and tomato plants.

This plant family usually creates chemicals that prevent most insects from feeding on them, but this is not the case with this green caterpillar. The scientists have become very interested in its physiology.

The researchers have first decided to sequence the tobacco hornworm’s genome about seven years ago. Scientists can easily gather tissue samples from the caterpillar because of its large size. It is known to stretch up to 10 centimeters long and weighs more than 10 grams.

They wanted to analyze the insect’s protein found in its blood to discover how it protects them against infections. The team managed to purify the caterpillar’s DNA and sent it to the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center for the genome sequencing.

The sequencing of the green caterpillar’s genome can lead to a better understanding of its biology and behavior. Moreover, the study can reveal the similarities and differences between humans and caterpillars, thus evaluating the way the immune system works. This could also help the evolution of the insect pest management.

This green caterpillar could help us understand many biological processes such as animal development and insect metamorphosis. Also, the way the immune system operates and the caterpillar’s role in interactions with pathogens, the mystery behind the wars waged between pest insects and the plants on which they feed.

Manduca which comes from the Latin “glutton” underlines how the green caterpillar can easily consume multiple plants to reach its size and sexta comes from the six orange spots on the moth’s abdomen.

Image source:Wikipedia

Scientists in California have encountered a weird googly-eyed squid that they first believed to be fake because of its appearance. The adorable creature was first seen at 2,950 feet deep off the coast of California by the team of scientists that identified it as being a Stubby squid (Rossia pacifica).

It is usually found in the Northern Pacific from Japan to Southern California. This cephalopod belongs to the sepiolid family, researchers noted.

One of the scientists that have seen the googly-eyed squid said it looks like a kid dropped his toy. Two others commented that the creature’s eyes look painted on, while another mentioned that the cephalopod was freaking him out, so, we could say that the opinions are divided.

The purple squid has eight suckered arms and two tentacles and unlike other squids, do not have a quill or cuttlebone. They are known to live at the bottom of the ocean and just like cuttlefish they have the habit of burying themselves in the sand.

They bury themselves in the mud or sand during the day to avoid danger or being detected. The googly-eyed creature leaves only its eyes out to spot prey like shrimp and small fish. They appear during the night when they get easily attracted by the diver’s light. If scared, the googly-eyed squid distracts its predator by emitting a blob of black ink.

These tiny creatures can grow up to six centimeters and move around by using their fins as jet propulsion. These suck in the water and then spurt it out to propel their bodies in different directions.
Researchers mentioned that the purple creature looks like a cross between an octopus and squid, but is more closely related to cuttlefish.

The purple googly-eyed creature has a harsh reproduction process. Usually, after mating, the cephalopod dies. The female lays its eggs that are frequently around 25 to 50 on rocks, sponge, and clam shells before dying. The eggs are thought to last four to nine months before hatching.

According to researchers, this cephalopod species spends its life on the seafloor, activating a sticky mucus jacket and burrowing into the sediment for camouflage.

Image source:Wikipedia

The data beamed back by NASA’s Cassini probe in May 2013 enabled scientists solve another puzzle linked to Saturn’s largest moon Titan. Researchers believe that they know what the mystery ‘dark material’ in the canyons may be.

Previous imagery has revealed that the moon’s canyons contain a dark liquid that in some places sits at sea level while in others is hundreds of feet higher. A recent study suggests that the web of canyons that branches out from Ligeia Mare is filled with liquid methane. Ligeia Mare is a liquid methane lake located in the northern polar region of Titan.

The imagery is the first evidence of methane rivers in the moon’s dark canyons and the first view of thousands of feet deep channels. For instance, one web of canyons called Vid Flumina is up to 1,870 foot deep.

Cassini images were taken by the probe during its 2013 flyby. Back then, the tiny spacecraft focused its scientific instruments on Titan’s vast network of channels that stems from the moon’s second largest methane lake, Ligeia Mare.

Prior to this analysis, scientists have thought that the darkish regions in the moon’s canyons were either a mystery liquid or frozen sediment. But during the 2013 flyby, Cassini analyzed the canyons with microwaves, which indicated that the dark areas were incredibly smooth just like the methane lakes.

Additionally, radar-based technology helped Cassini mission scientists approximate the depth of the moon’s canyons.

Nevertheless, the team cannot yet tell how these steep canyons emerged. Researchers only know that it either took a lot of time for the channels to form or the erosion processes were accelerated in channels’ area.

Other hypotheses include a sudden raising in the altitude of the moon’s surface or shifts in methane lake’s levels. Yet, both scenarios might have happened simultaneously too. On Earth, for example, the Grand Canyon appeared in the wake of a terrain uplift which forced water to cut deeper into the rock.

Lead author of the study Valerio Poggiali who is an associate radar expert involved in the mission explained that there was a “combination of forces” that created the channels, but his team cannot tell how much each force has contributed.

Poggialy’s team now expects that future theories on the moon’s geological history will also explain its canyons’ formation.

Image Source: Wikimedia

Lift announced on Monday that it would soon introduce the new multi-stop feature. This new option will give users the possibility of adding multiple stops during their trip.

The novelty of the feature is that users can inform their driver of the multiple stops they want to make before being picked up. Whether they want to give a lift to another friend or stop for a cup of coffee, for example, on the way to their destination they can now inform their driver in advance. If the friend they were supposed to pick up cancels the meeting, Lift allows them to modify the trip and remove the pick-up destination at any time.

Adding this new feature is just another move to encourage people to carpool and to make the journey more convenient for the users.

Previously, if more customers wanted to share the same ride and had distinct drop-off destinations, they’d have to inform the driver ahead of time or modify the final destination once they arrived at their first destination. The multi-stop feature simplifies this process.

Hundreds of thousands of customers are manually modifying their final destination after their first step, a Lift spokesman admitted, and this might be an inconvenient for the users.

The San Francisco-based company announced that this new feature would be available soon but did not give any exact indications of when this new command will be rolled out.

Asked whether Lift can survive the global dominance of Uber, a source close to the company said that customers want diversion and choice.They want to be able to open both apps and decide which alternative is cheaper or closer. Many experts also agreed to this opinion and said that they played the two services against each other themselves.

Both companies seriously spend on incentives to attract drivers and riders. The network effect which is familiar to both companies is two-sided: the more drivers the company has, the faster they can pick-up passengers; the faster they can pick-up passengers, the more drivers they will need to hire.

Lyft is known to have paid more attention to collaborating with public transit while Uber’s ubiquity creates comfort for far-flung customers who do not have to worry how they will travel from the airport to their hotel.

Image source:Flickr

A new Mesoblast stem cell therapy is proved to work against rheumatoid arthritis.

The word arthritis means joint inflammation but is used to describe around 200 rheumatic diseases and conditions that affect joints and other connective tissue. Rheumatic conditions are typically characterized by pain, aching, stiffness and swelling in and around one or more joints.

Certain rheumatic conditions can also involve the immune system and various internal organs of the body. Some forms of arthritis, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, can affect multiple organs and cause widespread symptoms.

According to data from a mid-stage trial, Mesoblast Ltd stated that its experimental stem cell approach towards patients with rheumatoid arthritis had improved the symptoms of the disease. This new stem cell therapy has been tried on patients whose arthritis couldn’t be held under control by widely used biotech medicines.

During its 12 week phase, the trial was conducted on 48 patients with active rheumatoid arthritis who were given an infusion of stem cell treatment promoted by the Australian biotech company.
To conclude that the treatment was efficient it had to carry through a 20 percent relief of signs and symptoms among patients. This measure is called ACR20.

Among patients treated with the stem cell infusion, 55 percent of them achieved ACR20. The treatment received by the patients contained 2 million cells per kilogram of body weight. Moreover, 33 percent of the patients in the placebo group also achieved the ACR20.

70 percent improvement, also called ACR70, was achieved by 36 percent of patients after the stem cell infusion, compared with no patients in the group given a placebo treatment.

Overall, physical functions and disease activity were improved during the cell treatment. The innovative treatment can fill the significant unmet medical need for patients that are unable to follow the biologic therapies. This much-needed remedy comes at a time when one-third of patients either cannot tolerate the biologic treatment or do not respond sufficiently.

Its safety and efficacy results are encouraging, but in order to compete with the general remedies, new therapies must approach both pain and disease progression.

The stem cell treatment has also been proved to work on chronic heart failure, inflammatory bowel diseases, cancers and bone marrow transplants.

Image source:Pixabay

According to the nonprofit organization Orca Network, a killer whale which is presumably as old as the Titanic has been spotted last week off the coast of Washington state.

The killer whale which is known by the scientists as J12 but nicknamed Granny is considered to be 105 years old and has been photographed while swimming and jumping with other orcas.

Granny, which according to a news station was alive one year before the Titanic took its trip across the Atlantic is supposed to be born in 1911. According to these findings, Granny is the oldest living killer whale.

When the killer whale was spotted, she was jumping in and out of the water. This behavior is usually a sign of playfulness and is considered a directive towards high health status. Orcas are extremely fast swimmers and have been recorded at speeds of up to 54km/h.

Female orcas usually don’t exceed the limit of fifty years old, and only a few of them overcome the age of a hundred. Scientists started to follow Granny in 1971 when she was already sixty years old and surpassed her age limit.

The Orca Network says that the margin of error on appraising the killer whale’s age is 12 years.

Due to their similarity, there are some ways to tell orcas apart. Among these, we must mention their scars or margins. Granny, for example, has a half-moon shaped notch and a marking on her dorsal fin.

The killer whale or orca belongs to the oceanic dolphin family, of which it is the largest member. Some feed exclusively on fish, while others hunt marine mammals such as seals and dolphins. Their sophisticated hunting techniques and vocal behaviors are often specific to a particular group and passed across generations.

At up to nearly 10 meters long, male orcas are larger than females and have a tall dorsal fin that can go up to 2 meters height. Female length is about 20% less, and the curved dorsal fin is less than half the height of the males.

Granny is generally seen in waters around Canada and Washington.

Unfortunately, the orca populations in the US and Canadian Pacific Northwest, Iceland and Japan were negatively impacted from the 1960s to the 1980s by the live capture industry.

Image source: Wikipedia

A new study has examined the probability of slow motion videos being more misleading than helpful when it comes to analyzing footage from incidents.

A surveillance camera and a personal recording device are very likely to capture a violent act or a crime being committed and can provide useful evidence when analyzing the case.

According to Slow Motion Increases Perceived Intent newspaper, the action seen in slow motion rather than at regular speed can cause the viewers to find the activity more intentional. The main reason for this impression when seeing a slow motion video of a crime is that the audience lives under the false sensation that the actor had more time to think before acting.

The professor of behavioral science at the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business highlighted that, in a criminal attempt, seeing intention in a person’s activity can sometimes make the difference between life and death.

Multiple experiments involving real surveillance footage from a murder scene have been conducted to prove if slow motion videos made people see the crime as intentional. One analysis revealed that the juries that have watched the slow motion video of the murder were four times more likely to unanimously vote first-degree murder than those who watched the video at regular speed.

Moreover, in another experiment, participants were shown the same video in slow motion and in real-time, and the slow motion video still gave them the impression of intentional acts. Even when the members knew exactly how much time passed while the crime took place, they still lived under the false impression that things unfolded more slowly and tended to find the action more intentional.

Another experiment tried to see if this slow motion intentionality bias applies to more common actions. They conducted the same test on a sports video of a prohibited helmet-to-helmet tackle from an NFL game, and the result was the same. The participants that analyzed the slow motion video decided that the offending tackler was trying harder to hit the other member’s helmet.

Although slow motion can provide a better look at the real time events that instantly happen, the researchers admitted that it could distort perception.

Image source: Pexels