Apparently, over the course of the show, Tennant scribbled his own phone messages whenever his character, Carver, would receive a “call.” Keeping in mind that Tennant is the ultimate Doctor Who fanboy, the messages read as follows:
From: Martha Jones
Message: Has information about Sally Sparrow
From: D. Noble
Message: Information regarding the library
From: R. Tyler
Message: Something regarding a wolf?
New video has surfaced showing an NYPD officer beating a young black man who, according to bystanders is just 12. The clip was uploaded to Facebook on Wednesday by actress Sarah Doneghy. In it, three uniformed officers are seen holding the child against a squad car when a fourth officer runs up and punches him repeatedly. It takes place in broad daylight, and the officer is not wearing a uniform.
According to reports, the boy was accused of "pushing down one of his classmates," which he denies.
Minnesota health officials have determined that two people died and two others were sickened after eating contaminated prepackaged caramel apples, according to the Associated Press. The four were between 59 and 90 years old.
The CDC said nine of the illnesses across the nation occurred in pregnant women or newborns. The disease particularly affects older adults, pregnant women, newborns and people with weakened immune systems. Three people have come down with meningitis.
Guy Fieri receives the key to the City of Ferndale from the Ferndale City Council: L-R John Maxwell, Ken Mierzwa, Mayor Jeff Farley, Vice-mayor Stuart Titus at Ferndale City Hall at a special council meeting, 23 November 2012.
remember when Andy scored among the highest ever on the aptitude test for becoming a police officer but then was denied because the interview showed that he was too kind and trusting and empathetic to be a cop
The tough duty of defending the editing of Gamergate Wiki entries for accuracy has fallen to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and he’s handling it admirably.
The flak Wales is currently taking from Gamergate supporters is in regards to a deleted Wiki page. Gamegaters want to know why a list of people who made anti-Gamergate statements was considered unfit for the Wiki, and Wales has answers:
. @musashitomoe Wikia doesn’t allow attack pages. If you care to make sure gg is an ethical movement for journalism you should agree.
Then there’s the email he supposedly sent in response to Gamergate emails threatening not to donate to Wikipedia because of a perceived lack of impartiality over the incident, which is pretty perfect. The only thing I’d add would be “You shouldn’t append ‘gate’ to the end of anything you want taken seriously. ‘Gate’ suffixes are only for sarcastic derision at this point.”
I emailed as well.
Hello Jimmy,
I’ll keep this concise. I’m a computer science student, and Wikipedia has gotten me through just about all of my undergrad schooling. I am immensely grateful for it, and as such I donate a meager amount of money at every donation drive. It’s the least I can do. I’m very near graduation, and will soon be living off of a software engineer’s salary, not student loans. I’d like to start giving substantially to Wikipedia in order to pay that knowledge forward.
Here’s the problem: Wikipedia’s complete lack of any sort of attempt at neutrality regarding Gamergate is giving me serious ethical qualms about doing so. I don’t want to financially support an organization that claims to be a neutral, impartial source of information on all things that then goes on to try to push an agenda and spin a narrative of an author’s choosing. And then after the deletion of the Wikia page documenting editor abuse and corruption, I CERTAINLY don’t feel comfortable giving money when the founder of the site publicly condones such actions.
I’ll still use your site to look up mathematical formulas and listings of TV episodes, but you’ve lost respect and credibility with me. I won’t be donating again until/unless Wikipedia starts to address glaring issues.
Sincerely, [name]
[Purported response from Wales]
Hi [name],
I’m happy to inform you that our current fundraiser is the most successful in our entire history.
But there’s something deeper that is wrong with your argument – Wikipedia is not for sale, not to any donors, so even if donations were dropping, that would not mean to me that we should compromise on our principles of quality and neutrality in response to a pressure group.
My point here is not to say that there is nothing wrong with the article – I actually think it needs a fair amount of work. But I want you and others to understand that threatening people is not helpful.
I’ve recently seen web pages in which people who are – and I don’t know how else to put it – vicious assholes – are gathering data to attack the personal lives of volunteers. It is very difficult for me to buy into the notion that gamergate is “really about ethics in journalism” when every single experience I have personally had with it involved pro-gg people insulting, threatening, doxxing, etc.
No, not all pro-gg people. But there’s a huge contingent to the extent that for good people – and I respect your letter and assume good faith that you are a good person – the name “gamer gate” is toxic.
Even if 90% of the supporters are good and 10% are bad, the bad are poisoning the message for everyone. That’s not an evaluation of right and wrong, just an observation of a clear fact.
You see, a big part of the problem is that #gamergate is not a movement, but a hashtag. And so there is literally no way to have any quality control of any kind. There is no way to see what is or is not a position of gamergate.
I have had several people over the past weeks say to me “It is not about mysogyny.” I was prepared to believe that. But discussions usually very quickly move to attacking a female game developer for events surrounding her personal life. That’s sick.
The contingent of people who are interested in putting pressure on institutions within game journalism to expose corruption need an actual organization – with a mission statement, with a board of directors, with elected people who represent the movement. Barring that, you should very much expect the media to continue to accurately report that the Gamergate community is associated with online harassment and misogyny. But actually, in fact, it is.
I know that may pain you to hear. You thought you were taking part in a movement that would be about ethics in journalism. A movement that would stand for the rights of all gamers. That would welcome women into the world of gaming and would shame those who would engage in personal attacks on the basis of gender. I admire all of those things.
But #gamergate has been permanently tarnished and highjacked by a handful of people who are not what you would hope.
You might not be the person to lead it. I don’t know who is. But I strongly recommend that someone organize a “gamer’s union” of sorts, with a real mission statement, with real rules, with real organization and leadership.
Bitching and moaning on a twitter hashtag is getting you nowhere, particularly for the reasons I have outlined in this note.
–Jimmy Wales
As further evidence that Ryan Adams is very, very slowly working his way through hobbies he missed out on as a high school sophomore, the singer-songwriter will follow 2010’s science-fiction-themed heavy metal concept album with a new one that ties into a comic book he’s also writing and drawing. Adams, currently touring on his latest, self-titled album, revealed the news on Marvel’s This Week In Marvel podcast, saying he’s roughly “halfway to three-quarters of the way done” with the comics he’s been working on during his downtime.
As the books near completion, Adams said he intends to make soundtracks for them with his new backing band, The Shining, or he may just let keyboardist Daniel Clarke take the lead on writing the music. He also said he hopes to do the coloring using old-fashioned screenprinting, “like an ’80s comic book where you could tell it ...
Rosetta has beamed back a bunch of great images of Comet 67P, but it's hard to get a handle on what this thing actually looks like. To help, the ESO has stitched together 24 montages based on NAVCAM images taken over the past two months to create this cool visualization.
Jason Koebler writes: If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won't look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It's likely they won't be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper "Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.
If you're a Nine Inch Nails fan and want to get your hands on nearly every bit of music Trent Reznor has ever performed, look no further: NIN fan site / archive Reflecting in the Chrome has just released a 527GB Torrent file that has essentially every single NIN concert that has been recorded, from the Pretty Hate Machine days through the present. That isn't everything the band has done, but a quick perusal of the archive shows that it is incredibly comprehensive.
The site's founder Ryan J. has been searching out and organizing the shows for a good six years and now feels the collection is complete enough to put out there. Nearly everything is sourced from an audience recording, which means the audio quality isn't going to match that of a traditional, band-sourced live recording, but the upside is that fans can probably find any show they've attended over the years — or find some classic performances they may have missed. Each source is clearly labeled, graded, and includes audio samples so you know what you're getting into. Most files are in FLAC for the best quality, and the mastermind behind the project says he's actively looking to upgrade the shows that are only available in MP3.
This really is for hardcore completionists only, though — NIN typically keeps its setlists similar on most dates of a tour, meaning that you'll only hear minute variations from show to show. A big exception to that is probably NIN's 2009 "farewell" tour, in which the band constantly changed up performances and even played the entirety of The Downward Spiral in order at several shows — those are the first recordings I'm looking to get my hands on. Of course, it's going to take a while to download all 527GB. If you don't feel like maxing out your connection or are hurting on hard drive space, though, there's another option — you can ship a hard drive to Ryan J. and he'll fill it up and mail it back, so long as you pay for the postage.
NASA took the first major step in re-establishing its manned space program two weeks ago when the Orion spacecraft made its initial test flight. Today, the space agency released this 10-minute video that shows the craft's reentry from the moment it began to burn through the Earth's atmosphere to its eventual splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
Along the way, the video shows a number of things happening. First, the craft encounters friction from the atmosphere as it descends at 20,000 mph, creating a plasma trail of ionized gas behind it:
Once Orion's reaction control system gets the ship on the correct path toward its landing target, the various parachutes begin to deploy. Before that, though, the forward bay cover is jettisoned:
Then comes the the first set of parachutes:
Those are then cut away before the main parachutes deploy:
From there, it's a smooth three-minute ride at about 20 miles per hour before splashdown:
There's still a long wait until Orion will carry actual humans into space — that's not supposed to happen until sometime around 2021. Even the next test flight is still two years away. So until then all we have is have this beautiful astronaut's-eye-video to watch over and over.
When we have a headache or painful joints, the first thing that many of us reach for is ibuprofen, the common, over-the-counter painkiller that’s probably in your medicine cabinet. But it turns out that ibuprofen could have benefits far greater than curing your hangover: it could increase longevity. As described in PLOS Genetics, researchers found that regular doses of the drug extended the lifespan of yeast, worms and fruit flies in the lab. No, none of those are humans, or even mammals, but the fact that we see the same thing in different kingdoms of life raises the possibility that the same could be true for us.
Aging is the biggest risk factor for numerous serious diseases, such as cancer and dementia, so it’s no wonder that researchers are keen to delay it for the benefit of our health. Testing out drugs for their ability to increase lifespan is actually relatively easy, thanks to model organisms such as yeast and worms which are quick and simple to grow. But screening thousands of potential compounds is an arduous task, to say the least, and the results would be meaningless if candidates turn out to be toxic to humans. This is why scientists have started to focus their attention on drugs that are already used on humans.
One group of drugs that has piqued the interest of researchers recently is nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), which are used to treat pain, fever and inflammation. That’s because aging and inflammation are tightly integrated, although cause and effect are unclear at the moment. And it seems that scientists may be onto something as studies have already shown that aspirin is capable of extending the lifespan of worms in the lab. Another NSAID that researchers thought might be worth investigating is ibuprofen, which has already been shown to lower the risk of developing certain age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.
To find out more, scientists from the Buck Institute and Texas A&M University administered doses of ibuprofen comparable to those used in humans to three diverse model organisms: yeast, worms and flies. They found that the drug increased the lifespan of all three species, indicating a conserved longevity effect. Yeast given the anti-inflammatory lived around 17% longer compared to controls, and the other two had their lifespans increased by around 10%. Furthermore, the organisms also appeared healthier.
Further examination in yeast also hinted at the likely mechanism behind the increase in longevity. They found that ibuprofen decreased the uptake of an amino acid—the building blocks of proteins—called tryptophan. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid, meaning it is essential for our life but cannot be synthesized by the body, and therefore must be obtained from our diet. The researchers discovered that ibuprofen destabilizes the membrane protein involved in transporting this amino acid into the cell, resulting in around a 15% decrease in tryptophan levels.
Of course, the work is proof of principle, so it doesn’t necessarily mean we will see the same in humans. However, the researchers think it’s worth pursuing more animal studies, starting off with mice. “We are not sure why this works,” lead scientist Michael Polymenis said in a news release, “but it’s worth exploring further.”
Nonprofit hospitals provide assistance to poor patients in exchange for tax breaks. But some still seize wages of poor patients with unpaid bills — even those who qualify for free or reduced care.
The small town of Somerville, Massachusetts is deeply concerned about the safety hazard posed by unshoveled sidewalks. So concerned, in fact, that city officials are unironically reverting back to some tried-and-true methods of public shaming! According to the Somerville Journal,
With the changes, property owners or tenants have until 10 a.m. to clear snow and ice from the sidewalk in front of their home if the snow stops before sunrise – or 10 p.m. if the snow stops before sunset. Another change will double fines for the first offense from $25 to $50 for owners of single, two, or three-family homes. Fines for second offenses are being raised from $50 to $100 and third offense fines are increasing from $100 to $200.
[Mary Jo Rossetti] said at the meeting inspectional services will put “large, strikingly colored door markers on the properties of offenders,” she said. “[The markers] will not only bring attention to the property owner but will make the neighbors aware of the citation that are being serviced to such properties.”
Alderman At Large Jack Connolly told the Journal Friday marking the doors is “The Scarlet Letter approach to let people know the property has been tagged.”
The city promises it will hire teens to help shovel the properties of residents with mobility issues (see, high schoolers! That mad boring book you’re probably suffering through in English right now is still sorta relevant!).
Should the “Scarlet Letter” approach fail to deliver optimate ostracization, perhaps residents should be encouraged to report offenders? I saw Goody Osburn failing in her civic duty*!
If you need yet another sign that the game industry is a serious business force and that game creators are the new entertainment moguls, look no further than the newest purchase by Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson. The Mojang cofounder, who cashed out of the company after a $2.5 billion Microsoft buyout in September, just set a record for a Beverly Hills real estate purchase by laying down $70 million on a mansion in the Trousdale Estates neighborhood.
As reported by Curbed LA, the 23,000-square-foot residence features "a candy room, a car showroom, vodka and tequila bars, a 54-foot curved glass door that opens onto the pool, eight bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, apartment-sized closets, and a movie theater." Oh, and let's not forget the "three high-definition 90-inch television screens [that] bring panoramic views of Los Angeles from the roof into the down stairs lounge." the $5,600 toilets in each bathroom, and the cases of Dom Perignon that were reportedly part of the deal. There are tons of pictures and video of the ridiculous residence over at its official listing website.
“[Persson] fell in love with the house, its sleek contemporary design, and its spectacular panoramic views that sweep from downtown LA to the Pacific Ocean,” Aaroe Group agent Katia De Los Reyes, who helped represent Persson in the sale, said in a statement. “The fact that the house also was completely furnished in such great style was another major selling point for him.”
Yes, vampires are often used as a metaphor for rape. This is not a metaphor and it’s not seduction. Nocturna didn’t talk Batwoman into bed with charm. This wasn’t a character having a moment of weakness or a lapse in judgment because they felt vulnerable. Kate had her will and senses disabled by someone who then had sex with her and erased memory of the incident. Issue #36 also mentions that Kate’s been has had repeated blackouts recently, which means she’s likely been raped repeatedly.
Yes, it’s in character for some villains and vampires to rape. That’s not the point. Is this really a more interesting story to tell than Maggie and Kate getting married?
'Serial found a particularly fertile fanbase in Reddit ... Redditors are nothing if not obsessive-perfect targets for the minute-by-minute discrepancies, countless characters, the theories, counter-theories, and conspiracies of Serial'
harshest damning praise
Early yesterday morning — Thursday, December 18th, 3:21 AM ET — a corner of the internet exploded. Reddit's /r/serialpodcast, created to serve the fanatical following of one of the most successful podcasts of all time, had already been named subreddit of the day, and by mid-afternoon, the listing and comment pages were pulling in over 80,000 page views every hour. Most redditors were pleasantly surprised by the show's last episode ("Fucking *fantastic*"), others grieved for the end of a show they'd grown to embrace. ("It has been one hell of a ride. I am going to miss it dearly.") In all, the subreddit got more than a million page views on the day of the finale. But now that the first season of Serial is in the can, will the Reddit devotees stay on the case, or will they dissolve into the ether of the web, and move on to the next obsession?
The debut season of Serial — which chronicles the journalist Sarah Koenig's tireless, personal, nit-picky yet captivating investigation into the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed — is arguably the first podcast blockbuster. It not only draws an average estimated 2.2 million listeners per episode, but has inspired at least one so-so Miley Cyrus mash up, one slightly more respectable Biggie remix, a Funny or Die parody, and a spot for Koenig on our very own 2014 Verge 50 list. Koenig even landed a coveted spot on one of The Colbert Report's last episodes.
Serial found a particularly fertile fanbase in Reddit, where the Serial subreddit just hit 30,000 members yesterday (compare that to This American Life, with just over 2,000 subscribers). Redditors are nothing if not obsessive-perfect targets for the minute-by-minute discrepancies, countless characters, the theories, counter-theories, and conspiracies of Serial. So they threw themselves into Hae Min Lee's case wholeheartedly; one user admitted to developing a Pavlovian reaction to hearing the first notes of the podcast's theme song.
Redditors are nothing if not obsessive
Some Redditors took it upon themselves to crack the case, going to incredible lengths to uncover some piece of evidence that Koenig hadn't, searching for proof of Adnan's innocence or else a clue that would condemn him beyond a reasonable doubt. Visit the subreddit and you'll find, among other things, a transcript of each episode, cell phone records of calls made by Adnan, a list of everyone ever mentioned in the podcast, at least 19 different maps (including a global map of all Serial subreddit subscribers), homemade "guided tour" videos of the areas featured in the podcast, polls, photos, related links, and more.
"I had never really seen a community like this one," says Jacob White, 34. When White isn't moderating the Serial subreddit, he works as a Broadway stagehand in New York City. Before stumbling onto Serial he says he had no interest in true crime, and only visited Reddit from time to time.
But as he sank into the details of the case, he needed a space to organize his thoughts. He was one of the first to join the Serial subreddit and compiled the page's character list. "It was useful for me to visually keep track of names and places," he told me over the phone. Unlike other podcasts, Serial had countless documents to pore over and obsess, scrutinize and argue over. "What made this one different,' he says, "was that people felt a connection and ability to interact with the story more than just be a passive listener."
"People felt a connection and ability to interact with the story more than just be a passive listener."
White became a moderator, and at first took the time to read and vet every post. He and the other moderators tried to keep a handle on the conversation: "We wanted to make sure that the privacy of people involved were maintained so that Redditors weren't blaming innocent people," he says. The memory of the Boston Bombings fiasco, in which Redditors quickly, and incorrectly, identified a suspect, was still fresh in everyone's mind. The community made a concerted effort to police itself, protecting identities and not offering any personal details beyond what Koenig revealed in the podcast itself. But as the number of subscribers grew, moderators lost the ability to monitor each and every conversation.
Addresses slipped out, as did last names and Facebook pages. A couple weeks ago, one Redditor admitted toThe Guardian's Michelle Dean that they'd located one of the characters in the show and driven by their home. "I was just curious like everybody else," he told Dean. In the age of Google, it's not hard to become an amateur sleuth, and some couldn't resist the opportunity to launch miniature investigations of their own.
"There are users that are going to post the phone numbers and the addresses and the email addresses of anybody real connected to this case if we let them," White told me. "It's a real-life case and people can go and they can play internet detective, for good or bad."
"Investigation is like tennis," says Richard Plansky, the Executive Managing Director and head of operations in the Americas of K2 Intelligence, an international investigations outfit. "Everyone can pick up a tennis racket and hit a tennis ball. But very few people can be Roger Federer."
As a prosecutor at the Manhattan's DA office during the '90s (when New York, he says, "was a much different city"), Plansky worked on homicides and sex crimes-cases not unlike the murder of Hae Min Lee.
Plansky says that amateurs can, on the occasion, be helpful to an investigation. But they can also do more harm than good, and sometimes that harm is irreparable.
"There's a lot of trade craft here that, typically, amateur detectives don't understand," he said. "And there are also ethical and legal restrictions that amateur detectives aren't even aware of." In states like New York, conducting an unlicensed private investigation is a criminal offense. If one doesn't follow the law, any evidence gathered may be inadmissible, or else tainted.
"This is why we have the police, this is why we have federal law enforcement authorities, this is why we have federal and state prosecutors," Plansky said. "This is what they do; this is what they're trained to do. They have the tools to do it that the average person does not have. While I think it's important for everybody as citizens to do their job - meaning if they're witnesses to crime, to assist the authorities in any way they can — I don't think it's their jobs to actually conduct the investigations."
Another Serial moderator I spoke with, PowerOfYes (as a working lawyer in Australia, she asked not to be identified), told me that for the most part, Redditors weren't actually bringing much new evidence to the table. But the way she sees it, the debates and arguments of the subreddit weren't just a matter of idle curiosity, but an act of civic engagement.
"A murder is a crime against a state, not a crime against person," she said. "That's the basis on which we prosecute people. And if you are a prosecutor, you appear on behalf of the state, and that means you appear on behalf of us." To PowerOfYes, the idea that the Reddit discussions didn't have legitimacy because they involved amateurs, or that the debate over the particularities of the case somehow diminishes the memory of Hae Min Lee, is wrong. "I don't think it's right to turn away from it when you have a chance to scrutinize how the system works. It's like voting. You shouldn't vote if you don't take even a little bit of interest in what you're voting for."
"I don't think it's right to turn away when you have a chance to scrutinize how the system works."
As for whether she expects the same level of civic engagement (or plain old obsession) to persist now that the show's first season has come to a close, she's doubtful. Though she'll be monitoring the subreddit — as a lawyer, she's interested in the legal and systemic issues in play — she says she'd be surprised if by January there was much activity on the site at all. Even though Adnan still sits in a Maryland prison, there's no reason for anyone except the hardcore to come back to the subreddit. "Now that the show's over," she said, "there's nothing new to discover."
Not that there haven't been efforts made to create a more lasting legacy. A few days before the podcast's final episode, moderators on the subreddit launched the Woodlawn High School Scholarship Fund, which would provide academic funding to students currently attending Lee's school. It's an attempt by an ephemeral community to make a lasting impact. Or as White told me, "There was an outcry from people that wanted to do something positive — people wanted to counteract the distastefulness of consuming other people's tragedies for their own entertainment." To date, the fund has drawn just $3,200 in donations, or 12 percent of its $25,000 goal.
For many, the intrigue was as much about Koenig's telling of the case as it was about the crime itself. Without the podcast, interest is bound to drop off. "I'm sure we'll see a lot of our regular users move on," White told me. "I could see people hanging out for about a week."
"No one was happy when Breaking Bad ended, but it just has to happen," White said. "Maybe it's a little distasteful to compare true crime to a piece of entertainment fiction. But podcasts, to be honest, are a combination of a news venue and an entertainment medium. And people consume this podcast in particular the same way they consume entertainment."
White said he didn't have very strong convictions about the nature of the case, and wasn't terribly invested in finding out whether Syed was innocent or guilty. While he likes the idea of a wrongfully convicted murderer finally finding justice, he's not certain whether that's the case here, or whether it was just a good narrative. Still, even before this season of Serial wrapped up, he was already looking forward to the next one.
"I'm a listener of a podcast," he told me. "That's all there is. I'm not an investigator. I'm not Sarah Koenig."
Developers who use the official Git client and related software are being urged to install a security update that kills a bug that could allow attackers to hijack end-user computers.
The critical vulnerability affects all Windows- and Mac-based versions of the official Git client and related software that interacts with Git repositories, according to an advisory published Thursday. The bug can be exploited to give remote code execution when the client software accesses booby-trapped Git repositories.
"An attacker can craft a malicious Git tree that will cause Git to overwrite its own .git/config file when cloning or checking out a repository, leading to arbitrary command execution in the client machine," Thursday's advisory warned. "Git clients running on OS X (HFS+) or any version of Microsoft Windows (NTFS, FAT) are exploitable through this vulnerability. Linux clients are not affected if they run in a case-sensitive filesystem."
"a user named chiragchirag78 who plumetted from more than 3 million followers to exactly eight. Chiragchirag78's Instagram account no longer exists."
A crackdown on spam Instagram accounts has triggered a cataclysm in the world of low-grade social media celebrities. The event began today as the photo-sharing service made good on its promise to start deleting millions of fake accounts. The "Instagram Rapture," as it's come to be hashtagged, has seen the follower counts of apparently popular Instagrammers ravaged. Jenni Farley, maybe better known as Jersey Shore's JWoww, saw her followers drop from 2.6 million to 115,000, while rapper Ma$e committed Instagram's version of seppuku, deleting his account after freefalling from 1.6 million followers to around 100,000.
Some users have revelled in the spam massacre, suggesting that those who have seen the biggest drops are guilty of having purchased fake followers to boost their numbers, while others have railed against the crackdown, begging Instagram to bring the spam accounts back to reinflate their follower counts. Instagram told Business Insider that the users it was removing were either already deactivated spam accounts, or violated the service's guidelines.
Web developer Zach Allia has collated the figures into a handy graph, showing the number of followers Instagram's top 100 accounts lost in a single day. Major celebrities like Beyoncé had their follower counts dented in the cull — poor Justin Bieber's figure dropped by 3,538,228 — but the process hit some less well-known names harder. "Smack That" singer Akon shed some 56 percent of his followers in the space of a few hours, while Allia's figures show a user named chiragchirag78 who plumetted from more than 3 million followers to exactly eight. Chiragchirag78's Instagram account no longer exists.
Ironically, it was Instagram itself that lost the most followers in the "Rapture." The photo service, owned by Facebook, has lost almost a third of its followers, dropping 18 million users in a single day. The vast majority of the missing likely never existed, but given how vociferously users are venting their annoyance at losing their imaginary fans, it's safe to bet that real people are behind a good proportion of the unfollows
When International Space Station Commander Barry Wilmore needed a wrench, NASA knew just what to do. They "e-mailed" him one. This is the first time an object has been designed on Earth and then transmitted to space for manufacture.
Made In Space, the California company that designed the 3D printer aboard the ISS, overheard Wilmore mentioning the need for a ratcheting socket wrench and decided to create one. Previously, if an astronaut needed a specific tool it would have to be flown up on the next mission to the ISS, which could take months.
This isn't the first 3D-printed object made in space, but it is the first created to meet the needs of an astronaut. In November astronauts aboard the ISS printed a replacement part for the recently installed 3D printer. A total of 21 objects have now been printed in space, all of which will be brought back to Earth for testing.
