Sreys Blog Posts

Not a day goes by without someone, somewhere on the internet, feeling the need to express how they’ve been personally harmed by a news site focused on genre entertainment that committed the unforgivable sin of running headlines that very vaguely allude to the interesting parts of films and shows. “I have been slain by spoilers,” these people cry. “Why have you slain me?” To be fair, there are certainly people (and publications) that revel in talking about (and running) information that would be considered spoilery literally hours after a particular piece of work has become consumable to the public—that can be a feature film or a streaming TV series. But at the same time, there’s a very particular way in which many fandoms have become excessively hostile towards the concept of being spoiled, so much so that they swarm on anything they perceive as being a spoiler, which becomes an issue when it comes to the business of discussing things in public spaces.   This, one imagines, is par

Even Zune-clutching Windows loyalists have to admit that Mac owners have it pretty great—at least, they do now. Apple hasn’t charged for macOS, nor macOS updates, for years. Of course, you need to buy your computer from Apple to use macOS ( pretty much ), but at least the operating system is free. Windows … not so much. While your new desktop or laptop computer is almost guaranteed to come with a copy of Windows 10, the price for the OS is probably factored into whatever you paid for your system. Build your own PC, and you’ll have to pay for a copy of Windows 10 yourself. And if you’re upgrading from an older operating system, the issue of whether you have to pay for a newer version of Windows gets confusing. To ease your financial burden, here’s a roundup of all the best methods you can use to get a free or discounted version of Windows 10. Free: Run Windows 10 without activating it Yes, you can install and run Windows 10 without activating it. Your system won’t shut down after 3

These species went extinct in 2018. More may be doomed to follow in 2019 Doyle Rice USA TODAY Published 8:06 AM EDT Aug 13, 2019 They’d been on our planet for millions of years, but 2018 was the year several species officially vanished forever.  Three bird species went extinct last year, scientists said, two of which are songbirds from northeastern Brazil: The Cryptic Treehunter (Cichlocolaptes mazarbarnetti) and Alagoas Foliage-gleaner (Philydor novaesi), according to a report from the conservation group BirdLife International.  According to BirdLife, the other extinct bird is Hawaii’s Po’ouli (Melamprosops phaeosoma), which has not been seen in the wild since 2004 (the same year the last captive bird died).  A disturbing trend is that mainland species are starting to go extinct, rather than island species: “Ninety percent of bird extinctions in recent centuries have been of species on islands,” said Stuart Butchart, BirdLife’s chief scientist and lead author on the paper. Cri

Very frequent use of social media may compromise teen girls’ mental health by increasing exposure to cyberbullying and reducing sleep and physical exercise, according to a new study. In a report published by British medical journal The Lancet , researchers concluded that regular use of social networks such as Facebook and Instagram may disrupt sleep and exercise as well as increase the risk of online bullying. “Our results suggest that social media itself doesn’t cause harm, but that frequent use may disrupt activities that have a positive impact on mental health such as sleeping and exercising, while increasing exposure of young people to harmful content, particularly the negative experience of cyber-bullying,” according to Professor Russell Viner from University College London’s Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, who led the research. The report authors tracked almost 10,000 adolescents, aged 13-16, over three years in England between 2013 and 2015. Each year the youn

You never want to wonder what’s eating a black hole. In fact, moodiness is the last thing you want from a light-bending, time-sucking void. But something seems to have gotten Sagittarius A* all fired up. And, since it’s the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, it’s a little hard to ignore. Their research, revealed in Cornell University’s arXiv , suggests Sagittarius A* is flashing 75 times brighter than it has since monitoring began more than 20 years ago. Back in May, astronomer Tuan Do from the University of California just happened to be peering at the heart of the galaxy from Hawaii’s Keck Observatory, according to New Scientist . He spotted something particularly bright. At first, Do assumed it was a star. Then he realized he was being flashed by the Milky Way’s supermassive black-hole-in-residence. “It was strange because I had never seen the black hole that bright before,” Do tells New Scientist. And how, you may ask, does something called a black hole

“The study revealed a new connection between particle physics and astronomy. If dark matter consists of new particles that were born before the Big Bang, they affect the way galaxies are distributed in the sky in a unique way. This connection may be used to reveal their identity and make conclusions about the times before the Big Bang too,” said Tommi Tenkanen, a postdoctoral fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and the study’s author. Dark matter is difficult to grasp as its not directly observable. Rather its presence is known by its gravitation effects on how visible matter moves and is distributed in space. Now, the new findings are in direct opposition to a long-held belief that dark matter must be a leftover substance from the Big Bang.  “If dark matter were truly a remnant of the Big Bang, then in many cases researchers should have seen a direct signal of dark matter in different particle physics experiments already,” said Tenkanen. A simple mathem

Anime, despite being one of the now-most ubiquitous cultural properties of the 21st century, is especially difficult to define, owed to over a century’s worth of the medium’s evolution and reinvention. From the five-minute shorts of Oten Shimokawa in 1917, to the feature-length animations produced during World War II, to the pioneering production cycles of Tezuka in the ’60s and the auteurist innovations of the likes of Miyazaki and many others towards the latter half of the last century. Anime has morphed through countless phases—from amateur efforts, to nationalist propaganda fodder, to niche cultural export turned eventual global phenomenon—each iteration conforming to the shape of the times in which it was produced. Television expanded the medium during the 1960s, birthing many of the essential genres and subgenres that we know today and forming the impetus for the anime industry’s inextricable relationship to advertising and merchandising from the 1970s onward. The arrival of home

Astronomers just recently discovered that there are millions of undiscovered black holes residing across the milky way. We’re already aware that the gravitational acceleration in the black hole is so strong that not even light can escape it. And now scientists have found a gargantuan black hole, sized at about 40 billion times the mass of the Sun. The black hole, named Holmberg 15A, is a supergiant elliptical galaxy which is around 700 million light-years away from Earth and resides right at the centre of the Abell 85 galaxy cluster. Holmberg 15A is one of the biggest black holes that’s ever been spotted by keeping track on the movement of stars around it. Researchers state that the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) of the cool-core cluster Abell 85, consists of an ultra-diffuse central region, which is 2 mag fainter than the faintest depleted core of any early-type galaxy (ETG) dynamically modelled. Researchers also collected new photometric data at the Wendelstein observatory which c

A dog owner has been left distraught after her beloved pet Chihuahua was grabbed by a seagull and taken away. Gizmo had been enjoying the weather in the back garden of Becca Hill’s house in Devon when it was snatched by the seagull. The bird swooped down and grabbed the tiny four-year-old pooch in its beak according to Ms Hill. The 24-year-old has now issued a social media appeal after both her and her partner witnessed the horrifying incident this afternoon. Gizmo the Chihuahua was taken earlier today from a garden in Devon. His owner Becca Hill (pictured above with the pooch) has been left distraught The four-year-old dog (pictured) was carried away by the seagull and has not been seen since Becca and her partner saw the seagull swoop down into their garden before it carried the helpless pooch away (stock image of a seagull) Gizmo is still missing and the couple have no idea where he is, or if he has been harmed by the seagull. Speaking to Devon Live earlier today, Ms Hill s

Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were wading in an industrial canal, reminiscent of a subway, as thousands of hatchery-raised fish were being released into it. The fish crowded, slimy, around our legs, and I knew (in the way that one knows in a dream) that they thought, as they hit the water, that they were drowning—that they had to experience death before entering adulthood. The next day, I told my father about the dream. He revealed that, when I was three, when we were living in Pittsburgh, he took me to see a truckful of catfish being pumped into an artificial pond. I was too young to remember this. But somewhere in my mind the vision of fish being spewed into water had lodged itself, resurfacing more than twenty-five years later. These days, it’s common to find an image emerging, unbeckoned, from the reservoir of the past. We spend hours wading through streams of photos, many of which document, in unprecedented ways, our daily lives. Facebook was invented in 2004.

The planets, which have been stripped to their cores by the stars they orbit, can form a circuit with the star that has destroyed them, creating radio waves that can be picked up on Earth, new research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society explains .  In an incredibly violent process, when some stars reach the end of their lifespan, they can expand and burn all nearby planets, leaving them as orbiting metallic cores, before shedding their own outer layers and turning into a white dwarf.  The white dwarf and the remaining cores of its surrounding planets can form a circuit and start emitting radio waves, as radiation emitted from the circuit can be picked up by radio telescopes on Earth.  Scientists now plan to find these communicating dead planets by detecting their zombie signals, which would be an exciting breakthrough, as no one has found a major planet or its core just by monitoring magnetic signatures.  “We think that our chances for exciting disco

Police are currently investigating a popular YouTuber who appeared to abuse her dog in an online video. American YouTuber Brooke Houts uploaded the wrong video file to her channel, which showed her abusing her doberman puppy. The content creator, who has over 330,000 subscribers, insists she’s not a dog abuser. What happened? The 20 year old YouTuber uploaded a video to her channel which showed her hitting and pushing around her dog, Sphinx, which in a video released a week earlier she called a puppy. The video opens with Houts animatedly saying that she’s going to prank her dog by wrapping plastic wrap on the entrance to a door and then calling him through. The video then cuts to Houts standing in the doorway. As the doberman jumps up on her, she appears to smack him on the nose. It then cuts to footage of her grabbing the dog roughly and pinning him to the ground and shouting, “Stop”. While out of frame of the camera, Houts appears to spit on the dog. In the last shot of the v

Fortnite Season X is now officially in its second week of operation and so far, its time-bending shenanigans appear to have gone down a treat with Battle Island regulars. Beginning with the celebrated return of fan favourite location Dusty Divot a fortnight ago, Epic has steadily continued to reveal its game plan for Season 9’s successor in subsequent patch updates. The latest of those, released just a few days ago, brought unexpected changes in the form of a new Rift Zone . This time around, it’s Neo Tilted that’s been affected by their time-altering properties, whisking players who venture too close away to an Old West version of the city from the past. In this particular instance, the usual rules of engagement change drastically, forcing players to adapt and strategize anew. Perhaps best of all, however, is the prohibition of a certain vehicle from crossing through time. As it turns out, Season X’s B.R.U.T.E. mech has ruffled more than a few feathers since its introduction and,

Microsoft recently put their streaming service Mixer back in the spotlight by securing exclusive rights to Tyler “Ninja” Blevins , who had been one of the top streamers on Twitch. Exclusive streamers aside, there are several compelling reasons to stream and watch streams on Microsoft’s platform instead of Amazon-owned Twitch. Mixer started life as Beam, an independent streaming service launched in January 2016. Microsoft purchased Beam in August of 2016 and announced integration with Windows 10 that October . By spring of 2017 the Beam service was integrated into both the Windows operating system and Xbox One. In May of 2017 the service was renamed Mixer due to the name Beam not being available for international use. Mixer’s basic functionality is the same as Twitch. Players use the service to stream their gameplay over the internet, either directly from PC or Xbox One or from other consoles using capture hardware connected to a PC. Streamers on Mixer earn money by soliciting donati